When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.
– I Corinthians 13:11, KJV
It is past time the pastors and church leaders wake up and grow up. We live in a world where real evil exists.
And adultery is certainly evil according to God (e.g. Deut. 22:22).
When I went through my marriage dissolution and discovery of my former spouse’s adultery, I was ill-equipped to deal with the spiritual reality of this situation.
To be blunt: I was childishly naive.
So, I write this blog today to articulate and share lessons learned from those experiences for other Christians dealing with the evil of infidelity.
Spouses exist who will lie with ice in their veins when confronted with their infidelity by the spouse of their youth.
Spouses exist who will try to triangulate well-meaning pastors and church leaders into their “justification” game in beating up the faithful spouse.
I know because I was one of those faithful spouses who experienced this first hand. If I had not experienced these things, I might have continued in my blissful, naive Christian ignorance about the existence of such people.
But that didn’t happen.
I went through hell.
And God is redeeming those experiences here on this blog.
So, today’s post is about putting away childish notions about the world. It is a wake up call to leaders to recognize evil exists and people exist who willfully choose to live for evil. This is a call to arms–so to speak–for one cannot reason with evil.
One must confront it!
To such ends, I am passing along the following resource from a Christian Christian counselor, Leslie Vernick, on these matters. An alert reader sent it to me, and I agree it is an excellent resource full of Biblical wisdom. It helps in grasping the gravity and severity of the problem confronting a faithful spouse and any helping professional post-discovering infidelity has ravaged the marriage (click on the article title below to read it):
“5 Indicators of An Evil and Wicked Heart”
*A version of this post appeared previously.
Thank you for this. Very powerful – both what Leslie wrote and what you wrote. I was also naive, but I now know from experience this is true.