Topic: The Gift of Prayer

Happy Cyber Monday Friends,

I hope you’re not getting too stressed out already. The saddest thing about this wonderful season is that most of us don’t really enjoy it. We’re so busy trying to make it perfect for everyone else, that we are stressed out and crabby. Please don’t do that to yourself. You know you do have a choice.

I’ve been blogging about the gifts of love that we can give someone, especially when we don’t feel all warm and fuzzy toward him or her. In fact, we often feel the opposite. Jesus tells us to love our enemies, but actually doing it is a challenge.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve blogged about the different gifts of love that we can choose to give even when we don’t have any loving feelings. I’ve covered the gift of acceptance, the gift of truth, the gift of consequences, the gift of kindness and the gift of forgiveness.

Today I want to talk about the most powerful gift we can give someone who feels like an enemy. It’s the gift of prayer.

The bible tells us that Jesus continually intercedes for us. To be more like him, we must also learn to intercede for others. To intercede means to speak on another’s behalf or to plead his case.

Moses did this in Exodus 33 when God was about to destroy the Israelites for worshipping the golden calf. Interceding for someone who has hurt us is not easy. Much like an injured animal often attacks others, hurt people often hurt other people.

If your spouse or someone else is hurting you, I’m not suggesting that you continue to offer yourself to be bitten, but I am suggesting that you ask God to help you have his perspective and his compassion toward this individual, thereby empowering you to intercede on his or her behalf.

Prayer is one of the toughest disciplines, especially intercessory prayer, because it is so other-focused. Richard Foster, in his book Prayer, Finding the Heart’s True Home, writes, “By means of intercessory prayer God extends to each of us a personalized, hand-engraved invitation to become intimately involved in laboring for the well-being of others.” What better gift of love. We often pray about our enemy, but do we pray for our enemy?

I’m reminded of Samuel the prophet. After Saul had just made some pretty big mistakes, Samuel replies, “As for me, far be it from me that I should sin against the Lord by failing to pray for you” (1 Samuel 12:23).

In my life, at times I have been so focused on praying for my own needs—whether material, physical or spiritual—that intercessory prayer gets tacked on at the end—if I have time. Yet, Jesus continually prays for us, and we are to be like him. We can give someone the gift of love by praying for him or her in the following ways:

•We can pray for his or her salvation.
•We can pray for his or her growth and spiritual maturity.
•We can pray that he or she gains wisdom and forsakes foolishness.
•We can pray for the conviction of God and the moral pressure of the Holy Spirit.
•We can pray for his or her eyes to be opened and to see the truth.
•We can pray that those who interact with our spouse (or other person) would speak truth to him or her.
•We can pray that our spouse (or other person) would desire to know God or know him better.
•We can pray that he or she would desire to be a better husband (wife) or father(mother).

Leanne Payne, in her book Restoring the Christian Soul, describes a process of praying for our enemies. In it, she concludes with instructions she received from the Lord regarding this matter. He told her to:

“Pray for the health, the wholeness, of your enemies. Pray for the salvaging of all that is good, beautiful, and true within them. I do a great work, one that will amaze you. Be at rest now from all that besets, offends, attacks—love, write, pray, live in peace in My Presence. Enter the timelessness of My joy and peace.”

James encourages us to stick with praying for our spouse or other person by reminding us that “the prayer of a righteous man is powerful and effective” (James 4:16).

So friends, when you are at your wits end and you have no idea how to love this person, pray. That is the greatest gift you could give.

*Portions of this blog were from Chapter 9 of How to Act Right When Your Spouse Acts Wrong.

Topic: The Gift of Forgiveness

I am so thankful for you. I want to ask you to do something for me. Pray. I am beginning to write my new book, The Emotionally Destructive Marriage and I am tempted to be overwhelmed and scared (as I always am when God takes me way out of my comfort zone).

It will take me most of 2012 to write, although I’m hoping to get it done before September. Pray that I make the time to write, that God gives me fresh insights and that I accurately discern his Word as I tackle some touchy and controversial topics (in the Christian world).

I want to “test drive” many of my ideas in this blog, and would love to hear from you. Please let me know if they are they helpful, does it meet a felt need, is it biblical and what are your most important questions that you want answered in this book?

Over the past few blogs, I’ve been writing about the gifts of love. So far we’ve talked about the gift of acceptance, the gift of truth, the gift of consequences, the gift of kindness and this week we’re going to talk about the gift of forgiveness.

Forgiveness is the oil that smoothes over the rough spots as two people struggle to love when it’s hard and become what God calls them to be. When we keep score on marital wrongs, love is impossible. Although some excellent books have been written on the subject of forgiveness, I still find in my counseling practice a common misunderstanding of what it is. When I asked one client how she will know she has forgiven her husband for his adultery she replied, “When I don’t hurt anymore.”

Getting past the emotional pain caused by someone who has hurt you is a reasonable goal, but not a prerequisite for forgiveness. In fact, it was while Jesus was in pain he forgave those who abused him saying, “Father, forgive them for they do not know what they are doing” (Luke 23:34). Forgiveness doesn’t remove the hurt or the consequences that sin has inflicted upon the victim. Sometimes the life-long consequences are worse than the original sin.

For example. Susan wasn’t honest with her husband about how much debt they were in. She had started her own business just a few years earlier and the expenses were much greater than she had ever anticipated. Instead of sharing that burden with her husband, Susan kept it to herself and tried to resolve the household cash flow problems by taking cash advances on all the new credit card offers she received.

When the creditors finally started calling the house because of unpaid bills, Danny hit the roof. Although it wasn’t easy, eventually Danny decided to forgive Susan for her deceit and pride even though he still felt hurt and angry. They had to file for bankruptcy. They lost their home and Susan’s business. If Danny waited until he felt no more anger or pain before he forgave Susan, their marriage may not have survived. The consequences of Susan’s deceit was devastating and would impact their lives for years.

Extending the gift of forgiveness doesn’t guarantee an absence of pain. Neither does it imply an automatic restoration of the relationship. Sometimes we confuse forgiveness and reconciliation. Forgiveness is something we can choose to offer because of who we are. God tells us we are required and empowered to forgive because we have been forgiven, not because the other person deserves our forgiveness or has even asked for it. In fact, it is often the person who has hurt us the most that never asks us for forgiveness. They are not sorry, or they simply don’t care.

Forgiveness is choosing not to hold onto our right for justice or vengeance. We cancel the debt they owe us. In order to be able to do this we must free our heart from the bitterness and resentment we often feel when someone has wounded us. Although love covers a multitude of sins (1 Peter 3:8), there are times that reconciliation of the relationship depends upon the genuine repentance of the one who has sinned.

When we sin, God eagerly desires to forgive us, but our relationship with him is broken until we repent. In order to move back into right relationship with God, we must acknowledge our sin, turn away from it and seek his forgiveness. Like God, we too must extend the gift of forgiveness to those who have hurt us, but for true reconciliation to take place, repentance and forgiveness must work together.

Part of Susan’s repentance involved cutting up all credit cards, allowing Danny to handle the checkbook and being accountable for all expenditures. The restoration of their marriage relationship involved both Danny’s decision to forgive and Susan’s repentant heart and behaviors, leading to their eventual reconciliation.

As fallen human beings, forgiving someone is not something akin to our nature. Justice and revenge come more naturally. We can only truly forgive someone if we learn how to do it from the great forgiver himself—Jesus. Part of seeing what God is up to when our spouse acts wrong is understanding that God teaches us how to become more like Jesus through this process. For how do we ever learn how to forgive if no one ever hurts us?

There is wonderful freedom in knowing we do not have to react to a painful wrong either by shutting down or retaliating. As we grow in our relationship with Christ, we become a reflection of who he is in us rather than a reflection of what others have done to us. Gary Thomas author of Sacred Marriage writes, “We will be sinned against and we will be hurt. When that happens, we will have a choice to make: We can give in to our hurt, resentment, and bitterness, or we can grow as a Christian and learn yet another important lesson on how to forgive.”

**The gift of forgiveness as well as the other gifts are from chapter 9 of How to Act Right When Your Spouse Acts Wrong (WaterBrook, 2001).

Topic: The Gift of Kindness

Good morning friends,

What a beautiful weekend we had here. As I left church yesterday, my heart sang praise as I watched all the trees stretching out their arms with their fire engine red leaves to the glory of their creator.

I love beauty. Don’t you? My soul thrives on it. Ugly and shabby things drag me down. This weekend I finally got my front door painted. It’s been faded and chipped for over a year. It feels so good to have transformed this tiny bit of ugly into something beautiful.

Did you know we all NEED beauty in our lives? It revives our spirit. It refreshes our soul. It points us to God. In his excellent book, The Evidential Power of Beauty, Thomas Dubay writes,

You and I, each and every one of us without exception, can be defined as an aching need for the infinite. Some people realize this; some do not. But even the latter illustrate this inner ache when, not having God deeply, they incessantly spill themselves out into excitements and experiences, licit or illicit. They are trying to fill their inner emptiness, but they never succeed, which is why the search is incessant. Through worldly pleasure seeking never fulfills and satisfies in a continuing way, it may tend momentarily to distract and to dull the profound pain of the inner void. If these people allow themselves a moment of reflective silence (which they seldom do), they notice a still, small voice whispering, “is this all there is? They begin to sense a thirst to love with abandon, without limit, without end, without lingering aftertastes of bitterness. In other words, their inner spirit is clamoring, even if confusedly, for unending beauty. How they and we respond to this inner outreach rooted in our deep spiritual soul is the most basic set of decisions we can make: they have eternal consequences.

There is a lot of ugliness in our world, in our nation, in our communities, in our churches and in our families and relationships. Have you ever asked yourself what you can do to create more beauty? What can we do to stir someone toward goodness, toward thankfulness, toward love, toward God?

I’ve been blogging over the last few weeks about the gifts of love that we can give people. We’ve talked about the gift of acceptance, the gift of truth and the gift of consequences. Today I want to talk about the gift of kindness. Kindness, especially when unexpected and undeserved, is a potent demonstration of love and beauty. It can wake someone up as powerfully as the gift of truth.

There are lots of movies and books that illustrate this concept. Les Miserable’s is probably the best known, Play it Forward is one of the most recent. When we give the gift of kindness to someone who least expects it, it often motivates them to kindness as well. On the other hand, when we get caught in repaying evil for evil, the only result we get is more evil and more ugliness.

It is clear from the scriptures that one of the fruits of the spirit is kindness (Gal. 5:20), and that being kind is one of the very definitions of love (1 Cor. 13:4). Yet, as with the other gifts, we struggle with giving the gift of kindness when we don’t feel kind or our mate has hurt us.

Most often our first reaction when our spouse is acting in a way we don’t like is to treat him or her with contempt. However, contempt is the acid that will erode feelings of goodwill in a marriage quicker than bad behavior. Is that what you want to happen? Remember, God tells us to “not to be overcome with evil, but overcome evil with good” (Romans 12:21). Through acts of kindness we are empowered, not overcome.

The last thing that we feel like doing is to be gracious to someone who has hurt us. For example, Joan’s husband, Adam, was an alcoholic and drug abuser. He spent more money on his habit then he did for food and clothes for their kids. His drug use was so out of control that Joan finally asked him to move out until he could get help for his problem (Gift of consequences).

He continued careening out of control and sent less and less money for the family. One day Joan heard through mutual friends that Adam was sick with a bad flu bug. Joan went home and cooked up a big pot of soup and delivered it to his apartment. Joan gave the gift of kindness to her selfish and irresponsible husband. She was not overcome by Adam’s evil; she was learning to overcome it with good. The kinder Joan was to Adam, the more obvious was Adam’s selfishness.

God speaks of kindness as a means of shaming our enemy (Romans 12:20) which may lead to their repentance. In the Scriptures, Joseph was kind and gracious to his brothers in spite of their cruelty toward him (see Genesis 37-50). Being kind and gracious doesn’t mean you ignore the wrongdoing or pretend it didn’t happen. That’s like putting your head back into the lion’s mouth after he has already bitten you. Being kind toward your enemy means that whatever happens to you doesn’t define you. It doesn’t shape you or turn you into something evil. Satan’s intention is to not only injure you but infect you with evil’s poison. It was by Joseph’s response to his brother’s injustice, deceit and treachery that good won out. He reminded his brothers, “You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good...” (Genesis 50:20).

Jesus tells us “Love your enemies, do good to them, and lend to them without expecting to get anything back. Then your reward will be great, and you will be sons of the Most High, because he is kind to the ungrateful and wicked. Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful” (Luke 6:35).

Friends, we should be kind toward others because we want to be like Jesus, not because someone necessarily deserves our kindness. We are a representative of the King of Kings and Lord of lords. Therefore, our desire is to treat others with kindness and mercy because we are God’s ambassadors and his image bearers. Our kindness and mercy doesn’t depend upon whether the other person has been good or bad, wrong or right. They are gifts of love, not rewards for good behavior.

Now it’s your turn. Please share with the rest of our blog community ways you have given the gift of kindness or ways that you’ve received the gift of kindness and how it impacted you.

Some of this blog is taken from Chapter 9 from my book, How to Act Right When Your Spouse Acts Wrong.

Topic: The Gift of Truth

Good Monday Friends,

Today is your last opportunity to sign up for a free 1 year subscription to WHOA, a new Christian women’s magazine that is filled with great stories of real women who listened to God, featured articles on living a godly life in a secular world, and lots of great tips from cooking delicious meals to what not to wear. To receive your free subscription, please contact our office at leslie@leslievernick.com and leave your full name and snail mail address. We promise, we won’t use it for any other purposes. If you've already signed up for WHOA, there is no need to send your information again.

Since we are entering into the holiday season, I want to talk about love as a gift instead of something we always feel. We love a person because we choose to. Genuine love can’t be earned, deserved, bought, or demanded. True love is always a gift.

God demonstrates this by loving us just as we are. More accurately, he loves us in spite of who we are. And he calls us to love one another just like that. He knows it’s easy to feel love for the "perfectly put together" people, but he also calls us to love the unlovely and the broken and even our enemy.

How do we do that especially when that unlovely and broken person happens to be our spouse? We know we promised to love him or her in our vows, but it feels impossible and we don’t always do it very well.

Last week I blogged about giving the gift of acceptance when our spouse is doing something we don’t like, don’t understand, or don’t approve of. Acceptance of one another and our differences, and yes sometimes even our sins, is an important part of learning to love a real person who is yet to become all God intended him or her to become. The gift of acceptance can be a wonderful blessing for a spouse who is struggling with something that he/she isn’t quite able or ready to tackle yet in his or her personal life. We can allow them to be who they are and where they are right now and love them without bitterness or resentment or making it our mission to change him/her.

However, the gift of acceptance isn’t the wisest way to love a spouse that is acting abusively toward you.

Today I want to talk about giving other gifts of love such as the gift of truth and perhaps the gift of consequences.

Today’s Question: How do you acknowledge the truth of what someone is doing to you and emotionally accept it when you are in a destructive relationship? Getting banged on the leg over and over is exhausting and painful. I acknowledge that I am being banged on the leg and that the banging is causing me to go limp and that pain is excruciating to my heart and soul. Now what do I do?

I have acknowledged the truth, emotionally accepted that I can have no expectations at all from the other person. This process has yielded a destruction of my personhood. How do you apply these concepts in a destructive relationship? My main goal is to gain wisdom and understand, so that one day when I sit before God he will say well done good and faithful servant. I don’t want to disappoint God because my heart and mind did what they wanted instead of what God wanted. Help?

Answer: I’m not sure if you’re using a metaphor when you describe being banged on the leg or you are actually being banged on the leg, but acknowledging the truth of someone’s abusive behavior toward you and also accepting that they aren’t willing to change (yet) is an important part of your own emotional and mental health. Healthy people live in reality, not in fantasy. They acknowledge what is, not what they wish it would be.

That being the case, what do you do when your spouse is hurting you and won’t stop? That is the reality you live with day after day and you’re right, it is intolerable, excruciating painful and destructive to both you, him and your marriage.

I think as Christians we have often misunderstood Biblical love to mean that when someone treats us abusively, we quietly suffer without protest or consequence, and simply turn the other cheek over and over again. But when Jesus taught us to turn the other cheek (Matthew 5:39), he never said we shouldn’t avoid mistreatment, but simply that we were not to retaliate against it. He didn’t want us to become abusive in return. But Jesus did leave situations when he knew people were trying to harm him.

Allowing someone who we are in an intimate relationship with to continue to hurt and mistreat us isn’t biblical love, but fear and foolishness. We’re afraid to stand up to it because we don’t want to make things worse. We’re afraid that God will be displeased with us or we don’t have a good plan on what to do next if the abuse escalates. So we suffer silently and think that is God’s will. However, I think God and biblical love call us to do something far more courageous. But just as Jesus warned, that kind of love often involves suffering and sacrifice.

To love our spouse in these kinds of situations, we must be willing to boldly (not disrespectfully) speak the truth to him about the sinfulness of his behavior and the effects on you, your marriage and even on him.

You indicated that the abuse is destroying your personhood and you’re right, but it’s also destroying his. This is not who God made him to be and no human being can feel good about themselves when they abuse, degrade and mistreat other people.

If you choose to give this gift of truth to your husband, he may retaliate with more abuse. When you love him enough to seek his true good it may cost you. Much like jumping into an icy pond to save a drowning child, God calls us to lay down ourselves for another person’s welfare (John 15:13). But the bible doesn’t ask us to lay ourselves down to enable someone to continue in sin. That wouldn’t be good for them or for us.

If your husband is unresponsive and unrepentant to your gift of loving truth, I would also be prepared to give the gift of consequences. Consequences (not punishment) can be a powerful teacher of life’s truths. If you plant weeds, don’t expect roses (Galatians 6:7). In other words, when you are abusive toward people, don’t expect a happy and loving marriage to result.

So let me map out how this might look like for you. You need to ask God to give you the courage to love your husband enough to speak the truth to him about what his attitudes and behaviors are doing to you, to him and to your marriage. You also need to have a plan in place of how you will be safe if he retaliates against your gift of truth with more abuse. (For free help implementing a safety plan, you can call the Domestic Abuse hotline at 1-800-799-7233.)

But know this: God hates abuse and will empower you with the right words and right spirit to deliver them. We all know that the Bible says God hates divorce but we forget God also hates a man covering himself with violence (Malachi 2:13-16). God has a tender heart for those who are oppressed by bullies.

When you take this step, if your husband refuses to hear you and repent and get help to change his behavior, then I would encourage you to take the next step and give him the gift of consequences. In other words, your message is this,

“Our marriage is so destructive to you, to me and to our children, I cannot continue to live this way or provide the benefits of married life without significant change."

Separation will be necessary so he experiences the pain of his sin by losing his family life. Sometimes painful consequences are the only thing that wakes us up enough to put in the hard work necessary to change our destructive ways.

You asked God for wisdom. You want what God wants. God says he generously gives his wisdom to anyone who asks for it (James 1:5). Hear me. God wants you to honor your commitment to him and your husband by loving well. God wants your husband to repent, to change, and to learn to love also. God isn’t asking you to be a peace at any price woman. As a wife, you have a unique opportunity to partner with God to be an extraordinary helpmate to your husband so that he will see his sin, repent, change and grow into the man God made him to be. If he does, you have rescued your husband from the brink of death (James 5:20).

If he hardens his heart and refuses to listen, please know that God understands your disappointment and pain. Much of the Old Testament is that very story of God implementing tough love with Israel and Israel refusing to repent.

God calls us to unconditional love, unconditional forgiveness and unconditional kindness, but he never asks us to have unconditional relationship or unconditional reconciliation with someone, especially when they are abusive and unrepentant toward us.