Marital Conflicts
So broken expectations lead to anger which leads to resentment, bitterness and vengeance, which leads to ingratitude and depression which takes someone away from the presence of God. This of course is not always a direct line from one to another, some may skip from the top to the bottom at times but all of these sinful responses are possible and unfortunately many marriages are plagued with them in one form or another. The answer to every issue we see here is forgiveness.
Most people try to forgive in one of two ineffective ways. Some try logical forgiveness, this is when you try to reason out why you should forgive someone. This doesn’t work because if a person continues to do what offended you in the first place and you haven’t changed they are just going to do it again. Eventually it doesn’t make sense to forgive someone who continues to offend you. Others try emotional forgiveness, this is where you say, “I don’t feel like being angry or bitter any more so I am going to forgive so that I feel better.” Emotions are always changing though, it is like the man who said in marriage counseling, “When my wife gets angry she gets historical, she brings up everything I have ever done!” Logical and emotional forgiveness are just band aids, they do not resolve the issue, they just cover it for a while. When they fail people get divorced or relationships get utterly broken.
The Bible talks about a very different kind of forgiveness. We will call this spiritual forgiveness for the sake of our article. Spiritual forgiveness is based on Ephesians 4:31-32 where it says, “Let all bitterness, and wrath, and anger, and clamour, and evil speaking, be put away from you, with all malice: And be ye kind one to another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, even as God for Christ’s sake hath forgiven you.” Bitterness, wrath and anger are easily understood, clamour means repeated loud outbursts, evil speaking is having wrong communication with someone, talking bad about them or talking in anger with them, and malice is to have evil intentions toward someone else. God says that the answer for all of these things is to practice spiritual forgiveness. This spiritual forgiveness is not based upon how we think or feel but upon the choice that God made concerning forgiveness. It says that God made the choice to forgive based upon Christ. God does not forgive you because He feels like it, or even because He thinks it is a good idea, He determined to forgive you because of the actions of Christ Jesus. The cross is the fixed point of forgiveness. Feelings and thinking changes but what Jesus did on the cross will never change. Paul says that you and I are to forgive in the same way that God forgives, we are to forgive for Christ’s sake.
