To Christian men:
I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me. The life I now live in the flesh, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me, and gave Himself up for me. (Galatians 2:20)
There is nothing in your life here which owns you. It’s all forfeit from the day you realize you cannot avoid following Christ. You need not mimic every action He took, only absorb the level of commitment characterized by His teaching and conduct.
Let’s take the most powerful element of human existence to clarify this: sex. You already know Jesus forbids sex outside the lifelong commitment to a Christian spouse. That has nothing to do with a marriage license or even a ceremony in front of other Christians. It’s what is inside you, and presumably your spouse. You already know you do not seek a spouse on the open market of this world, but must work from within the closed market of Christians. You weren’t supposed to seek happiness, but a partner who contributed to your calling willfully.
Yeah, you have a mission, a calling which holds you and won’t let you go. Nothing else matters.
So let’s assume the worst. One: She dies. Yeah, it hurts. You’ll miss her terribly, and feel lonely. If you weren’t already prepared to face those things, you’ll be in bad shape quite often, never mind if she dies on you. That means somehow you must nail all that to the Cross before it happens, find some way to experience that death while still living. Then you are ready to take her death as the best opportunity for her, because going home to be with Jesus means she’ll be far better off than she was here with you. You’ll get over it.
Two: You discover she’s been unfaithful. This assumes established fact, not paranoid fears. Killer blow. Same issue, though. When I counsel folks going through divorce or similar relational turmoil, I tell them it’s the same as bereavement. You face it pretty much as you do their death. The person you loved died, despite their body still running around. Again, if you didn’t already nail it to the Cross, you did it wrong, and weren’t ready to marry in the first place.
So you shut off those emotions for a time, and you ask her what’s next. What are her plans? There’s only one answer you really want to hear, that she plans to break that crap off right now and straighten up. Any other answer means she isn’t ready to stay in your life. Let her go. Kindly and with good grace. Have pity on her, but cut her off from your life, because you can’t afford any further distraction from your mission. If she wants to work her way back, consider whether you should work with her, for whatever reason.
Three: You’re the one who screws up and is less than faithful. Ready for that? Not in the sense of looking forward to the sin, but someone who realizes he is always capable of failure. In many ways, your next step is in the hands of the victims. Your mistake surrendered your freedom to choose a lot of options. This is likely to seriously interfere with your mission, so back off and spend some time with yourself in as much isolation as you can get. Worst of all, you’ve stepped on God’s heart, and that’s a big mess to clean up. He’s better equipped to handle it than any human, but His pound of flesh comes first. What does He demand of you?
Yes, the children will suffer. You do remember this world is fallen, right? You knew bad stuff could happen with your kids and to your kids before you knew they were coming. It’s painful, but you can’t get perfection on this plane of existence. Your hopes and dreams should have been nailed to that cross already.
The problem is most of us utterly fail to produce that hammer and nails at any point before these things happen to us. Get it right. Not only do you use them, but you keep them handy, ready for daily — hourly — use. Every time something comes at you, the proper response is drag them back out and nail some fresh piece of you up there. It won’t matter if its something less traumatic than romantic heartbreak; the basic principle is the same. If your whole world comes tumbling down when your romance fails, you were all wrong in the first place, and you deserve the sorrow. It’s not you shouldn’t invest yourself in the welfare of another, but your sense of dependence which made that thing your god. Never let anything steal your soul, most of all not romantic entanglements. If she’s that intoxicating, she’s probably wrong for you.
Take up that cross, and never be satisfied with what’s nailed to it.
