If you have read last week’s post, you will definitely know what is coming this week, the topic of communication in a one man and one woman marriage.
As we said last week, good communication can only be built on three equally important pillars: Honesty, respect and love. If one of these three pillars is missing, a couple cannot build a healthy communication. Lack of communication or presence of unhealthy communication can kill and destroy a marriage. Yes, healthy communication is that important ingredient of a good and healthy marriage.
And we started talking about honesty last week, how it affects our communication in a marriage and we will continue today where we left off.
Sometimes married couples, consciously or unconsciously, hide “truth” from each other in the name of “I am protecting my marriage from divorce.”
Well, when we hear that statement, we should ask, “Yes, it is good for all us married people to protect our marriages from divorce. But what is the issue you’re hiding from your spouse so you will be able to keep your marriage from crumbling down?”
This is a very critical question, not that there is any particular issue that is worthy of hiding in a marriage. Rather, this question may help the person to re-evaluate their decision to hide a secret from their spouse.
Let’s say a husband says, “My wife and I have a very good and healthy marriage of 13 years and we have beautiful children. However in the first year of our marriage, I made a mistake and went to another woman and the woman got pregnant and gave birth to a child. My wife has no way of knowing this. For the sake of our marriage and our children, I decided to hide this from my wife. Other than that one mistake, I haven’t been guilty of the same or similar mistakes in my marriage.”
Hmm!
Another question we need to kindly ask this man is this: What marriage are you trying to protect? The marriage covenant has been broken and there hasn’t been any restitution since then. So, what marriage are you referring to?
If this man is hiding this truth from his wife, how can this couple have a healthy communication? They can’t! Honesty, one of the three most important pillars of a healthy communication, has been breached. So, the man lives in a lie with his wife. When he says this to his wife, “I love you, Honey,” his consciousness, the God given part of a human being that the Spirit of God mostly speaks to us through, says to him, “No, you don’t love her. If you love her, you tell her the truth.”
Can a person silence his conscience?
Not only his conscience but a man or a woman can silence the voice of the Holy Spirit which speaks through their conscience by repeatedly ignoring it. His ignorance turns his consciousness into callousness. Then slowly but surely he starts saying to his wife, “I love you, Honey” without feeling any guilt or shame. Why? The consciousness is callous. The Spirit of God that dwells in a Christian life, that convicts a Christian of his/her sin, as blood lives in a human body, gets blocked. And the man starts to live a marriage of “his own making.”
This is just one simple example of how honesty can, in a major way, be removed from a marriage in the name of “I am protecting my marriage” and so the marriage gets saline on the altar.
But this kind of issue is not the issue of most marriages but all the daily “lies” and “covering up the truth” that is going on between a husband and a wife. As King Solomon said,
“Catch for us the foxes, the little foxes that ruin the vineyards, our vineyards that are in bloom.” Song of Solomon 2:15 NIV
For example, while the wife was on the phone with one of her friends and running late to get home from work, she said to her husband, “My boss gave me a last minute task and I got caught up with it. That is why I ran late.”
This may look very innocent, “one of those little foxes,” but it has a potential to “ruin” a marriage, even a marriage that is “in bloom.”
Lying is not a strange sin that only some of us are guilty of. We all are guilty of it in one way or in many ways. The solution is to come back and say, “Sorry! I lied to you because I was scared of your reaction.” However if a couple doesn’t adapt such experience in their marriage, they feel comfortable keeping the truth to themselves, hiding it from their spouse, one little lie at a time.
How can a married couple develop openness in their marriage? As we said last week, this is, in short, biblically called, “nakedness.”
“Adam and his wife were both naked, and they felt no shame.” Genesis 2:25 NIV
Hmm!
Adam and Eve were living naked before God and each other because they had nothing to hide from God and one another. After the fall (Genesis 3), every one of us came to this world “being professional liars.”
So, even a two-year old girl doesn’t need anybody’s training to know how to lie and cover up the truth. We all come as professional liars!
God sent His Son, Jesus Christ, to save us all from our sickness – our sickness being sin:
““He [Jesus Christ] himself bore our sins” in his body on the cross, so that we might die to sins and live for righteousness; “by his wounds you have been healed.”” 1 Peter 2:24 NIV
Praise God!
So, one of the marks of a Christian is a person who fights against sin. How can Christians fight against sin? By confessing their sins to God and turning away from their sin. John writes to us:
“This is the message we have heard from him and proclaim to you, that God is light, and in him is no darkness at all. If we say we have fellowship with him while we walk in darkness, we lie and do not practice the truth. But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin. If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. If we say we have not sinned, we make him a liar, and his word is not in us.” 1 John 1:5-10 ESV
John continues writing,
“My little children, I am writing these things to you so that you may not sin. But if anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous. He is the propitiation for our sins” 1 John 2:1-2a ESV
Just focusing on the context of marriage, the first thing we, Christians, should know is this: When we hide the truth, we are choosing darkness and as the Bible says, “there is no darkness with God.” While we are choosing darkness, we cannot have any healthy relationship with God or one another in our marriages because for healthy communication to thrive, it demands from us to “live in the light.”
When we live in the light, we know how to come to God in prayer and confess our sins and denounce our sin (which is called repentance). A Christian who lives naked before God, who lives in the light as God is in the light, cannot turn around to his wife/her husband and decide to live in darkness or live in a lie. This is something some people call “double life” or “two-facedness.” There is no double life before God, only life and light. Double life thrives in dead marriages, not in marriages which are alive before God.
May God help us all, either married or unmarried, to embrace honesty at any cost so we live in a light and so we can have a marriage where “healthy communication,” with all its equally important pillars -honesty, respect and love- thrives and flourishes! ///