What God Has Done

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Created on Friday, 01 October 2010 16:00

Published on Thursday, 14 October 2010 14:18

What do a backslidden Christian and a nonbeliever have in common? A need to repent and, in our case, a wedding date. Twenty-five years ago, we were married in the Catholic Church. Susan was the backslidden Christian, whose sister tried to tell her the night before the wedding that the Bible says not to be unequally yoked (2 Corinthians 6:14). Susan thought Laura’s timing was rather poor and made some excuse to justify this union even though she knew it wasn’t right. Vince was not a believer.

We would not recommend Christians, even backslidden ones, marrying this way. Defiance of God’s Word is never a good foundation for a strong marriage. Certainly in our case, it only compounded the sins that lead Susan to be backslidden. And, as Psalm 139:7-8 tells us, there is nowhere we can go to hide from God’s presence… not even an unequally yoked marriage.

Our first year of marriage was pretty hard. Actually it was awful. Susan kept thinking, “Well, people always say that the first year of marriage is the hardest.” So, she dutifully waited out that year, hoping things would get better the next. Unfortunately, it seemed that those other folks who say, “The first TWO years of marriage are the hardest,” were more on target, as their first anniversary came and went and things did not improve.

Little did either of us know that what Satan meant for evil, God was using for good. How could we? We weren’t attending even the Catholic Church, let alone reading the Bible or fellowshipping with believers. But, about 18 months into our sorry marriage, the Lord started to get through to Susan. She finally realized that the only thing running from God did was make her miserable. She was living proof of 2nd Peter 2:20: “If they have escaped the corruption of the world by knowing our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ and are again entangled in it and overcome, they are worse off at the end than they were at the beginning.”

One day in desperation during a major fight, Vince asked, “What can I do to help you?” Susan said the only One who could help her was the Lord, that she needed to get back into a right relationship with Him, and needed to go to a Bible-preaching church to do it. Vince said, “We’ll go on Sunday.”

Susan eventually rededicated her life to the Lord, having come to understand through the preaching that knowing Jesus as her Savior was not the same as making Him the Lord of her life. In April 1987, she asked Him to be the Lord of her life. Praise the Lord! Of course, that didn’t instantly change much in our marriage, except that now Susan was back to reading her Bible and was able to memorize the Scriptures on divorce.

By September of that year Vince had noticed changes in Susan and asked her about them. She explained that they were the result of her being in a right relationship with the Lord. And, after a lengthy discussion on salvation and Lordship, Vince asked if he could have this same relationship.  Susan was not too eager to lead him to the Lord knowing full well that, short of death, there were only two ways out of this marriage—one of them being if Vince chose to leave her because of her faith. She reluctantly mumbled, “I guess so.”

Praise the Lord that Susan was obedient unto what felt like death that night, because Vince asked Jesus to be his Savior and Lord! Susan forgot that she had prayed just weeks before, “Lord, if You are not going to let me out of this marriage, then please make my husband a Christian.”

The following year of two sinners, saved by grace and learning to walk with the Lord, was not as smooth sailing as you might expect. Susan had brought a lot of baggage into the marriage and God was determined to use Vince to get rid of it. By that we mean that God used Vince’s idiosyncrasies as goads to move Susan in the direction she needed to move. It was a long and painful process, but one we wouldn’t change.

Mercifully, we were given an earthly “shepherd” to guide us through our journey. To the glory of God, Vince lost his job during that year. (We can say that now, of course.) Vince spent most of his time with this shepherd learning how to grow in grace and in the knowledge of THE Shepherd. God was able to lay a firm foundation on which to build His house.

Over the next eight years, the Lord guided us along the brink of divorce. We were able to move farther away with each “bag” God extricated from Susan’s heart and hand. Let’s face it, she’d carried some of those bags around with her since childhood and giving them to the Lord was like giving away a part of her. It wasn’t easy. As Vince grew in his faith, he was able to seek the help of the Holy Spirit to persevere and pitch a few bags of his own.  Praise God!

Both of us would say that it took ten years for the Lord to get our marriage righted around. Not that He was incompetent to get it done sooner, but we needed to go through the trials we went through in order to be molded into a husband and a wife after God’s own heart. We needed to learn that God is the Master Builder. Vince couldn’t “fix” Susan and she couldn’t “remodel” him. Those weren’t OUR jobs, anyway. Those were, and remain, HIS jobs.

God even brought us to Koinonia Fellowship to show us how to communicate more effectively in marriage. We would have preferred a church around the corner, or at least one closer than 20 miles away, but our God is an awesome Builder! He knows where the best tools are for getting His jobs done.

The past fifteen years have been spent honing what the Lord has taught us. We have been so blessed by the godly couples, the Biblical teachers, the Christian speakers, and the Scripture He used, and still uses today, to grow our understanding of what a godly marriage should look like.

Psalm 116:1-2 says, “I love the LORD, because He has heard my voice and my supplications. Because He has inclined His ear to me, therefore I will call upon Him as long as I live.” We do love Him for all He did for us, and we know we can count on Him. But, as believers having God’s truth in common now, we truly love Him because He first loved us and He never gave up on us. For this, we join the psalmist in singing Psalm 146:1-2: “Praise the LORD! Praise the LORD, O my soul! While I live I will praise the LORD; I will sing praises to my God while I have my being.”