Trina’s day began like most normal days for an active mom of three. Get the kids to school in the morning, a quick shower, and a cup of coffee while mapping out her schedule for the day. The errands took longer than expected—they usually do—and she really didn’t have time to go home for lunch before her dental appointment. So Trina decided to stop in and surprise Mike at the office by taking him his favorite Chinese takeout—Mongolian beef.
As she pulled into the office parking lot, she saw Mike leaving the building and heading for his car with his administrative assistant, Vicki. Trina felt her stomach tighten. Mike had told her that morning that he would be working through lunch to meet a pressing deadline.
Trina watched as Mike and Vicki brushed against each other as they walked. They hardly took their eyes off each other! In fact, they seemed so engrossed with each other that they didn’t notice much else.
When they got to the car, Mike opened the door for Vicki—like he used to for Trina. She tossed her curly auburn hair over one shoulder, slid onto the leather seats, and drew her slender legs into the car. Mike’s smile transported Trina back to their dating days. “That’s the smile he used to give me!” she thought. “That’s my husband!”
Trina stared in disbelief. “They’re lovers!” she silently screamed. “That’s how Mike and I were when we were dating.” Watching the soap opera playing out before her, she wanted to throw up.
She followed them as they left the parking lot. Mike drove to an apartment building, and the two disappeared inside. Trina thought her heart would explode. Just a few minutes earlier, her life had been so good, so normal. Now, she felt like the victim of a hit-and-run accident: dazed, bleeding—abandoned.
“This can’t be happening!” she half-screamed, half-sobbed.
Many spouses, like Trina, are blindsided by the blow of betrayal that comes from discovering their mate’s affair. Even if we haven’t experienced it firsthand, all of us know someone who has suffered the painful wounds inflicted by an unfaithful spouse.
The purpose of this booklet is to provide understanding and hope for a spouse whose marriage has been shattered by an affair. We will identify varying levels of unfaithfulness and walk through the healing process necessary after unfaithfulness is discovered. Our desire is to help betrayed partners consider how to engage a situation that feels overwhelming and hopeless and find guidance that can help them deal with one of the most painful of human experiences. In the midst of the searing pain of betrayal and loss, there is hope. Life, even though it will be forever different, can be good again.
The Makeup of an Affair
All affairs violate trust and involve different levels of unfaithfulness between a married person and someone other than their spouse. They fall into two major categories.
Physical Affairs. These are the most common and easiest to interpret. They are mostly about a strong physical attraction that almost always leads to some level of inappropriate physical interaction. The unfaithfulness may involve sexual intercourse, but complete sexual union is not necessary for it to be considered an illicit affair. Such affairs can be more subtle, but an affair of the body might only involve a touch on the arm or leg, lingering hugs that breach healthy boundaries, or brushing against each other in playful ways.
While most physical affairs can instantly feel intense, they are also the fastest to flame out. The initial excitement quickly begins to fade and hidden, unaddressed emotional issues (that the affair initially masked) bubble to the surface.
While a physical affair may not last beyond more than a one-night-stand, some may become part of a long-term emotional entanglement. These affairs often pose the greatest threat to a marriage as the partners experience much more than physical connection. They also find themselves bonding emotionally, intellectually, and even spiritually. As one unfaithful spouse put it, “I never thought a relationship could feel so close in so many ways.”
Emotional Affairs. These affairs of the heart also violate the exclusivity of the relational bond of marriage. They usually start small, almost unnoticeable—whether it’s returning a flirtatious remark, holding eye contact a moment too long, or talking after hours at work when everyone else has gone home. When married people invest time, money, conversation, and emotional energy that should be reserved for their mates, when they emotionally and exclusively lean on someone who is not their spouse, when they look forward to experiencing something with someone else that is missing in their marriage, they are guilty of breaking the union with their spouses that God intended (genesis 2:24).
This may include sending flowers, letters, or cards to a non-spouse. Intimate dinners alone, private conversations, phone calls, e-mails, or text messages involving personal and emotionally sensitive content while under the guise of “friendship” can also be included. A wise guideline is that any emotional attachment to someone else that is normally reserved for one’s spouse breaches the exclusivity of the marital bond.
Emotional affairs may actually be easier to detect than physical affairs because usually these inappropriate interactions
take place in plain sight. But they can be more difficult to prove because hearts and motives are hidden.
Some may question whether an emotional affair is adulterous. Jesus made it clear, however, that adultery is as much a betrayal of the heart as of the body (matthew 5:27–28). He taught that anyone who looks lustfully at another person is guilty of adultery in their heart, even if the act is not consummated with sexual behavior.
On the other hand, while not minimizing an emotional affair, Jesus said that when a spouse steps over the line and turns adulterous thoughts into a physical affair, the betrayal is so grievous that it gives the wounded spouse legitimate grounds for divorce (matthew 5:31–32). Paul made it equally plain that sexual immorality is a unique kind of sin that carries with it severe consequences (1 corinthians 6:18). Although God’s original intent was for permanency in marriage, the hardheartedness and sexual betrayal of an unfaithful spouse is so traumatizing that it moves the heart of a wise and loving God to allow an offended spouse the protection of a divorce (matthew 19:8–9).
When a physical or emotional affair is exposed, both spouses must embark on a perilous journey. Trina’s journey began when she refused to suffer alone. She immediately called a trusted friend. They called their small-group leader from church. He contacted another elder, and the two men were waiting with Trina for Mike when he came home after work. The journey had begun.
The Healing Journey
In working through the chaos of an affair, wounded people must travel through several stages in their healing journey.
STAGE 1: A Time for Suffering and Sorrow. No words adequately describe the trauma a person suffers when a spouse’s affair is exposed. Many report that it is the most dreadful thing they have ever faced—more excruciating than losing a parent, being diagnosed with cancer, or being fired. An affair inflicts a vicious blow to the heart and body of a faithful spouse. Wounded spouses often experience nausea and body aches. Most lose sleep and temporarily lose the desire to eat. One man told me he would have rather taken a bullet and been paralyzed than to experience his wife’s affair.
At the same time, the unfaithful spouse is forced to deal with unaddressed emotions that will shape the future of their relationship.
Wounded Spouses. A slew of intense emotions well up inside a betrayed spouse that they didn’t know were possible to feel. Anger is often the first, followed soon by a deep sense of panic—“What am I going to do now?”
Eventually feelings of profound sadness and loss set in. Almost all feel a deep level of betrayal that can strip the heart of any sense of stability, security, and meaning. Feelings of abandonment and rejection by the one they thought they could count on replace feelings of being chosen, special, and valued. Their ability to trust is undermined. Everyone, not just the unfaithful spouse, is now suspect. Even God’s goodness and protection are questioned.
Many go through a period of feeling numb. This is a natural coping mechanism that kicks in when we experience a highly disturbing event. It helps to protect the injured spouse from experiencing a massive overload of emotion that could result in total collapse and the inability to function. The numbness, however, usually passes in time.
Most eventually feel a host of competing emotions all screaming for attention: shame and contempt, joy and sorrow, pain and vengefulness, fear and relief. A wife will miss her husband and yet feel glad that he’s gone. She will fluctuate between wanting to hug him and wanting to beat him, wanting to forgive him and wanting to make him pay. This is partly why many spouses feel as if they are going crazy. Throughout the healing process they ask, “Am I going crazy?” My response is always the same: “No, you’re not going crazy. The array of emotions you’re feeling is normal for the kind of awful experience you’re going through.” This reassurance doesn’t stop the emotional roller coaster, but it does confirm that their feelings are normal.
If you’re a betrayed spouse, give yourself permission to feel the emotional waves crashing over you. Don’t try to shake off the emotions when they hit. Name them, so you can begin to express and process your emotions with safe, caring people who will help you weather the storm.
Unfaithful Spouses. The emotional response of the one who is unfaithful can vary, depending on whether they feel guilty over the affair or justified in having it. If they feel justified and are upset about having been caught, they will be belligerent. If they feel guilty and are willing to give up the affair and restore the marital relationship, their response will indicate brokenness and humility.
Janis Abrahms Spring provides a list of intense and contradictory feelings that describes the ambivalence of the unfaithful spouse:
- Relief—“I’m tired of lying about all this and wondering when I’d be discovered.”
- Impatience—“I said I was sorry and gave her up; what more do you want from me?”
- Chronic Anxiety—“If I just keep busy I’ll be okay.”
- Justified Anger—“I’m doing what I want to do, and it feels right.”
- Absence of Guilt—“I did what I did and that’s that.”
- Isolation—“No one’s there for me.”
- Hopelessness—“There’s no way this relationship will ever work.”
- Paralysis—“I feel torn. I don’t know what to do.”
- Self-disgust [Shame]—“I’m such a fool. Why did I jeopardize all that I love?”1
The unfaithful spouse may also experience guilt over hurting the children and grief over the loss of a lover.
After an affair is exposed, marital partners need to take responsibility for seeking help to wade through the quagmire of feelings and difficult decisions that must be made. This will help them make progress in their healing journey. It is virtually impossible for individuals to work through all these issues on their own. They need a counselor or pastor with training and experience to help them sort through and resolve these issues. They desperately need the emotional support and prayerful involvement of friends, family, and the church community if they are going to take on the task of rebuilding.
STAGE 2: A Time for Complete Disclosure. This is the first of many hurdles in a long and difficult journey. It is painful for both partners, but essential. There can be no possibility of moving forward until this hurdle is traversed.
What needs to be disclosed? Many unfaithful spouses wonder how much they should share. The wounded spouse wonders how much they need to know. What happened? With whom? When did it begin? How far did it go? How long did it last? Is it over? An unfaithful husband or wife must demonstrate a willingness to be totally honest and tell the wounded spouse anything they want to know about the extent and duration of the affair—without going into graphic detail.
Sometimes the offended spouse believes that knowledge of the sordid details will provide the control needed to prevent an affair from recurring. It won’t. Knowing all the details will most likely inflame the wound, filling the mind with graphic images that will make it even more difficult to overcome. This is where a seasoned counselor can help an unfaithful spouse be specific and not get bogged down in explicit details that serve no good purpose.
Who needs to be told? Not everyone needs to know. Certainly those directly affected by the affair—one’s family. One’s pastor, small group, and some trusted friends need to know so they can help in the rebuilding process. Whoever is told, no one should ever be told to get even.
If a parent needs to leave the home for a while, the children should be told in general terms, but not in the specifics. While teenagers may already have figured it out, don’t assume that they know. If there is evidence that they know, parents should tell them together and prepare them for the changes that may be ahead, but avoid revealing unnecessary details.
STAGE 3: A Time To Decide. After an affair, many couples quickly try to restore their broken relationship for a variety of reasons—some good and some bad. Well-intentioned friends, family, and church leaders often unwittingly pressure a spouse to quickly reconcile with an unfaithful partner. This push for a quick decision is a mistake. A faithful spouse will probably feel chided or coerced into reconciling quickly, especially if the unfaithful spouse has not been required to take sufficient time to demonstrate sorrow and repentance that is trustworthy.
Time is needed for both partners to sort through the issues and put words to the struggles within their own hearts. Both will question if restoration is even possible or worth it. A quick decision either way minimizes both the gravity of what has happened and the necessity of a process of confrontation, confession, repentance, and forgiveness, which may or may not lead to reconciliation in the marriage. Deciding if one should quit or recommit is a monumental decision that should never be made lightly.
It is best to seek wise counsel at this stage. Take all the time necessary to sort through the countless questions and ramifications of this life-altering decision. Don’t decide quickly in either direction. Be devoted to prayer (colossians 4:2) and solicit the prayers of others (1 thessalonians 5:25). Take your time and reflect on what God is doing in your own heart as well as the direction your unfaithful spouse appears to be heading in the relationship.
As a way of facilitating your journey, sorting through some of the following questions may help you decide which path reflects the faith, hope, and love of God’s kingdom. The choice to divorce or rebuild after an affair will not be easy for either spouse. Important choices never are. But you can still honor God in your the choice you make.
Can there be restoration if the affair is still going on? Absolutely not! It’s absurd to think that any genuine progress could be made in healing the wounds in a marriage if the weapon that inflicted the wound is still in the assailant’s hand. Restoring the exclusiveness of marriage demands a severing of all connection and communication with the affair partner. Divided loyalty is no loyalty at all.
How will you know if your unfaithful partner is genuinely attempting to rebuild the marriage? Unfortunately, nothing can provide the kind of reassurance that will allay the fears of a betrayed spouse. The decision to rebuild is risky. However, a deciding factor is the attitude of the unfaithful spouse. It’s impossible to move towards genuine restoration when the unfaithful spouse continues to make a bigger deal out their spouse’s faults (perceived or real) than they do of their own choice to have an affair. It would be foolish unwise even to consider reconciliation if there is a demanding spirit that pushes for a quick resolution or uses the deficiencies of the faithful spouse to justify the affair. An unfaithful husband or wife must accept the fact that they have lost any claim to a restored relationship or setting the time-frame for when that could happen.
An unfaithful spouse must be willing to go to extraordinary lengths to demonstrate the genuineness of their intentions to rebuild the marriage, first and foremost according to what their spouse needs. . Consistency and diligence in the following areas are what will make or break reconciliation. The offended spouse, counselor, and church community must all work together to hold the unfaithful spouse accountable in these areas. They must do the following:
- This can’t be stressed enough. Give up the affair by cutting off all contact and communication with the affair partner. This can be done either by a certified letter approved by the spouse or in a phone call monitored by the spouse and counselor. Gifts or mementos exchanged during the affair must be returned or destroyed.
- Seek individual and marital counseling to identify the personal reasons for the affair and to expose the relational dynamics needing to be addressed in order to pave the way for reconciliation.
- If requested by the injured spouse, the offending partner must move out of the home while still maintaining the financial provisions for the family. This move should in no way allow for re-contacting the affair partner, but it does provide a buffer zone for the wounded spouse to begin to heal.
- Work at being patient with the slowness of forgiveness from the offended individual. The goal is to arrive at a place where there are no demands to “just get over it and move on. Any attempts to put such pressure on the faithful spouse to hurry up the process needs to be specifically owned, apologized for and immediately ceased.”
- Focus on what the offended spouse needs. Do whatever it takes to help the wounded spouse begin to trust again. This includes, but is not limited to, blocking the affair partner on social media, changing e-mail addresses, relocating, switching jobs if the affair happened at work, quitting a job that requires overnight travel, and relinquishing control of the finances.
- Be accountable to several trusted individuals and couples who know the whole story and who have access to both partners.
- Refuse to recruit church leaders or others to help pressure the faithful spouse for quick forgiveness and restoration.
What if the unfaithful spouse becomes uncooperative? The faithful spouse needs to continue in personal and spiritual growth, but may need to take appropriate steps to separate from the spouse who is still emotionally dangerous. The commitment to love the unfaithful spouse is always required, even if that means loving them as an enemy (luke 6:27, 35).
Does the Bible require the injured spouse to take back the unfaithful partner? This question is often asked after an unfaithful partner has made a public confession of a sexual affair and has asked for forgiveness, but the wounded spouse is reluctant to forgive or reconcile. The key is in the word require. The Bible does not require a spouse to restore the relationship after an affair, nor does it require a divorce. The issue is far too sensitive and complicated to be settled with a black or white answer. Although Jesus taught that divorce in the case of adultery is permissible (matthew 19:9), the decision to divorce or reconcile is given exclusively to the wounded spouse. The unfaithful spouse, by reason of their unfaithfulness, has breached the marriage covenant and has forfeited all rights to the decision to divorce or reconcile.
If an offending spouse refuses to give up the illicit lover or becomes belligerent, physically threatening, abusive, or withholds financial support from the family, the most loving response to such ongoing cruelty and hardheartedness may be to divorce. This prevents the unfaithful spouse from continuing their active defiance of the marriage covenant and limits the opportunity for abuse. Choosing to divorce is one of the most dreaded decisions a spouse will ever make, but in circumstances like these, divorce is not only permissible, it may also be advisable.
A wounded spouse should not be made to feel guilty for exercising the God-given option of a divorce. In that case, a wounded spouse still has the opportunity to demonstrate Christlikeness throughout the divorce proceedings. They can still continue to pray for an unrepentant spouse who behaves like an enemy (matthew 5:43–44). The terms of the divorce should be fair and firm, not vengeful. Revenge is something that God reserves for himself (romans 12:17–21).
Can a marriage survive an affair? Ironically, some relationships not only survive but flourish after an affair. Why? The discovery of an affair can be a powerful wake-up call. It has the potential to strip away all the hiding and denial that may have aided the development of the affair. Both partners are now willing to view each other more honestly than they did prior to the affair and gain motivation to openly address unhealthy dynamics in the relationship.
This is not an endorsement for the foolish notion that “affairs are good for a marriage,” but it is a reflection of God’s redemptive plan to use things originally intended for evil to accomplish his good purposes in the hearts of his people (genesis 50:20). It is highly unlikely, however, that lasting change will take root and grow without both partners looking at their own contributions to the troubled relationship.
This by no means implies that the faithful spouse is responsible for their mate’s choice to have an affair. Nor does it allow the betrayer to justify the affair on the grounds of their mate’s deficiencies. No one is ever responsible for the choices of another. But both partners must be willing to look at their individual and mutual histories, styles of relating, and contributions to the problems in their relationship.
While great care must be taken not to minimize or excuse the unfaithful partner’s betrayal, it is likely that unhealthy patterns of relating existed in the marriage before the affair. Dan Allender, in his book The Healing Path, notes, “No failure of a wife or husband ever causes or excuses an affair; nonetheless, the downward spiral that leads to an affair usually involves mutual failure.”2 The issue of mutual failure must be carefully defined and explored if there is to be mutual confession and forgiveness that produces a renewed oneness.
STAGE 4: A Time To Rebuild. Building a healthy marriage is an uphill battle even when there hasn’t been an affair. It requires diligence, sacrifice, humility, confession, forgiveness, understanding, and love. Couples who make the courageous choice to rebuild their relationship after an affair find that the unhealthy core issues that existed before the affair continue to need attention. But the added issue of betrayal also needs to be carefully addressed. Betrayal crushes the trust between a husband and wife. Without trust, a relationship can’t heal and grow. Thus, the major work in healing a marriage broken by an affair is rebuilding trust and restoring friendship.
Rebuilding Trust Through Telling the Truth. Truth-telling begins with a spouse coming clean about the affair. In order to rebuild trust the unfaithful spouse must keep telling the truth about ongoing struggles and temptations. They will work at identifying and being honest about what triggers them to think about reestablishing contact with the affair partner.
Telling the truth also means no more pretending from either spouse. While the power of an affair may be in its secrecy, the weakness of a marriage may be in its avoidance of issues.3 The unfaithful spouse’s issues may be more easily seen, but both individuals have been guilty of hiding from each other in a bizarre dance of deception. One lied; the other looked the other way. One got angry and indignant; the other backed off. One withdrew; the other didn’t pursue. One ignored; the other avoided. “Speaking the truth in love” for a couple reeling from an extramarital affair means admitting the unhealthy dance and the part each took in it.
The purpose of truth-telling is to put the issues out on the table where they can be safely and respectfully dealt with. It means becoming aware of one’s own emotional state and a willingness on both sides to take turns sharing, listening and caring for all that is going on inside of their spouse.
At some point, the wounded spouse must honestly share how much pain the affair has caused, and how it may have triggered deep emotional wounds from their past. The unfaithful spouse should not be defensive or try to explain but truly absorb,
understand and empathize with the other’s suffering.
Both spouses need to talk honestly about the way they relate to each other, how they trigger one another, and how that has affected their relationship in all areas. They need the help of wise counsel to make the connection between their past and current struggles, and how each of them can do or say things that flare up old, uncared-for pain.
Telling the truth at this level opens to the door to greater levels of confession that is cleansing and care that his healing.
Rebuilding Trust Through Confession. It isn’t enough to say “I’m sorry I had an affair. Will you forgive me?” It’s to acknowledge as fully as you can that the affair was wrong, unbearably painful, and without excuse. When a spouse confesses to God (psalm 51) and to their mate the guilt over the individual wounds that have been inflicted, it paves the way for a deepening sorrow that leads to repentance and change (2 corinthians 7:10). Confession is necessary for the healing of body, soul, and relationships (james 5:16). It also brings hope because God assures that “whoever conceals his sins does not prosper, but the one who confesses and renounces them finds mercy” (proverbs 28:13).
Rebuilding Trust Through Repentance. One of the best descriptions of repentance comes from the lips of the ancient king of Israel whose adulterous affair rocked the nation: My sacrifice, O God, is a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart you, God, will not despise (psalm 51:17).
A sign of a repentant heart is a humble attitude that is neither demanding nor defensive when questioned. There’s an openness that replaces deceit; the willingness to be accountable for time, money, and whereabouts. Truly repentant people don’t blame or make excuses for failures. They quietly accept consequences, even when it is inconvenient or costs them personally.
A betrayer’s humble repentance in word and deed will pave the way for the betrayed to again risk opening their heart and offering the sweet fruit of forgiveness that can lead to joy of restoration.
Rebuilding Relationship Through Forgiveness. The sin is always before those who have had an affair (psalm 51:3), but it is ever before their spouse as well. It created a debt that remains outstanding, and it demands a response.
The natural response would be bitterness and revenge—to nurse a grudge and make the betrayer suffer. But the way to shed the light of God’s Kingdom into the darkness of an affair is through a love that advocates mercy, not revenge (romans 12:17–21). The way of the kingdom of God is to “be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving each other, just as in Christ God forgave you” (ephesians 4:32). This may not seem fair, especially when the wound has cut so deep. It can seem as if it’s minimizing our pain and letting the offender off the hook. But that’s not what forgiveness is.
Jesus taught that forgiveness is the loving, voluntary cancelation of a debt (luke 7:36–48). It doesn’t mean that the pain and anger miraculously vanish or that the consequences of sinful choices evaporate. It means that a wounded spouse will choose to no longer view their mate exclusively through the lens of the betrayal.
Once As the betrayed sees signs of genuine repentance (Luke 17:3-4), forgiveness opens the heart to reconciliation based on mutual respect, mercy, gratefulness, and love.
Rebuilding Relationship Through Reinitiating Physical Intimacy. After an affair is revealed, both spouses should get tested for AIDS and STDs. This is a humbling but necessary experience. In most cases, a minimum of six months’ abstinence from any sexual relations is necessary to protect the health of the faithful spouse. If the test results come back positive, the couple will have to grieve and accept the loss of certain forms of sexual intimacy so as not to endanger the non-infected partner.
A good guideline for reinitiating sexual intimacy after an affair is to go slow. Returning to the home after a time of separation doesn’t automatically mean returning to the bedroom and sexual intimacy. A spouse whose mate has had an affair may want to try to satisfy all the mate’s sexual needs for fear they may go looking elsewhere. The unfaithful partner will need to reassure the wounded spouse that they will not go looking and will be patient.
Trying to prevent a relapse by using sexual intimacy is unwise and is not a celebration of love the way God intends sex to be enjoyed. In a way, resuming sexual relations too soon would echo the shallowness of the extramarital affair. The couple will also need to have some extensive conversations about the fear, meaning, use, and expression of sexual intimacy in their relationship prior to reengaging in sexual relations.
Rebuilding Friendship by Caring for Broken Places. Authors Milan and Kay Yerkovich point out in their helpful book, How We Love, the profound healing that can occur when couples do the work of understanding how each spouse was imprinted by experiences in their early years and how those imprints affect their marriage. Throughout the book they show how these imprints often lead to “dark places” in the heart that produce “thoughts, behaviors, attitudes that are not lovely.”4
The authors go on to state that couples begin to “turn a corner” when they “identify with the pain, the suffering, and the struggles” their mates “have encountered along life’s journey—and then work to love them in the places they are most damaged.” When a couple does this, “love has a chance to do its deep work of healing and restoration.”5
The Heart of the Matter
Extramarital affairs are primarily matters of the heart. While external factors do tempt, entice and entrap, in the end it is the motivation of the heart that determines the path one chooses. The biblical story of Potiphar’s wife tempting Joseph to engage in an extramarital affair illustrates this (see genesis 39). That is why the writer of Proverbs warned his young apprentice in wisdom, “Above all else, guard your heart, for everything you do flows from it” (proverbs 4:23).
Centuries later, Jesus echoed the timeless wisdom of the Proverbs when he stressed that sinful thoughts and deeds like sexual immorality, adultery, greed, or deceit stem from motivations deep within us (see mark 7:21–23). According to Jesus, the remedy for the poisoned well of human motivation is the good news of God’s Kingdom being established on earth as it is in heaven (see matthew 6:10). This began when he died and rose from the dead.
Accepting the gospel of Jesus Christ and dedicating our lives to God’s new creation is the best way to rid our hearts of ungodly motives that can lead to adultery. There is no better protection against an affair of the mind or body than to enter each day with the growing mindset and motive that our lives are destined to part of something much greater. The Maker of heaven and earth who created and forgives us also destines us to play a role in declaring and advancing the greatest story of all time—the story of his promise to rescue us from sin and make all things new.
A young Joseph resisted Potiphar’s wife’s persistent sexual advances not merely because he had to. The temptation he faced was real, yet he
was motivated by a purpose that ran far deeper than the shallow pleasures of sexual indulgence. Somehow by the grace of God, one who had been secretly sold into slavery years earlier by his jealous brothers still believed his life was destined to be part of something much greater. He understood that to give into the sexual propositions of his boss’s wife would not only disappoint others and violate the trust they had placed in him, but jeopardize what God promised do in and through his family one day (see genesis 12:3; 39:9).
Because the New Testament of the Scriptures go on to tell us how God ultimately fulfilled that great promise in and through the person of Jesus Christ, this too can be the story that rules and motives any of us today, married or single. Treating people as people and not as sexual feel good objects, honoring our marriages and the marriages of others, and choosing to avoid “even a hint of sexual immorality” (ephesians 5:3) is not merely a duty we must perform. It’s our destiny! These are examples of the countless ways that forgiven, humble people can fulfill their God-given mission to offer meaningful tastes of the God’s wisdom and restoration into the foolish, broken world of today.
This is precisely what Joseph did years later as he was able to look back on some difficult years. After rising to a position of great power, the very brothers who once betrayed him now desperately needed his help. It was at this moment that he calmly spoke these words to them, “‘Don’t be afraid. Am I in the place of God? You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good to accomplish what is now being done, the saving of many lives. So then, don’t be afraid. I will provide for you and your children.’ And he reassured them and spoke kindly to them” (genesis 50:19–21).
Outside of the biblical story itself, few things carry the power to capture our hearts for God’s kingdom more than the stories of God’s work in the lives of his people. Our stories of tragedy and triumph, suffering and celebration are powerful witnesses that point us to God’s ultimate story of rescue and renewal. We can humbly and gratefully share your personal stories of God kingdom breaking into our world—stories of betrayal and loss, redemption and healing.
