Straight Talk on Marriage, Family, and Christian Living

And I would even think down the road, whether he initiates a divorce, you are not bound under all circumstances to stay with an unbeliever who has literally violated the intent of that marriage, but hasn't physically left, but he has violated the marriage to that degree. Near the end of his life, Martin Luther proclaimed there is no more lovely, friendly, or charming relationship, communion, or company than a good marriage. Now, that's a beautiful sentiment, but perhaps it's one you can't relate to. Maybe you feel lonely in your marriage, or your spouse is an unbeliever, or your spouse is not living in the way God intends.

In those tough situations, what do you do? John MacArthur has helpful answers today on Grace to You, so stay here for a special interview that we call Straight Talk on Marriage, Family, and Christian Living. But before we get to the interview, there is a brand new resource that we've put together, and there's a timely reason that you need to know about it now, especially if you're new to Grace to You. So John, what can you tell us about the latest addition to our study guides?

Well, this one is really, really strategic. The title is Complete in Christ. Over the years, we have produced about 150 study guides, and these are very comprehensive study guides. They aren't just outlines. These are a volume of 250 pages of in-depth Bible study. But over the years, we've produced about 150 study guides, and they're actually soft-cover books that correspond to our sermon series, and they follow the flow of the sermons and add helpful questions to reinforce the teaching. They were designed for that very purpose so that people could have the study guide while they were listening to the sermon series on radio.

Obviously, they transcend that specific use. They are great for Sunday school curriculum, in-home Bible studies, discipleship groups. We've relaunched the study guides for this new generation, and this is the third volume. It is now available, and I especially love this one titled Complete in Christ.

It's based on Colossians 1 and 2, and it looks at Paul's great love for the believers he ministered to and his desire that they would live and thrive in the knowledge of the spiritual blessings that are complete in Christ. By requesting the study guide now, you can receive it in time to use it as you listen to the radio series on that subject next month. The study guide will give you an outline of every message with detailed explanation, helping you understand and apply the truth from Colossians.

And then, as I mentioned earlier, there are helpful questions for every message to reinforce what you learn. And again, the study guide is yours free if you've never contacted our ministry before. Ask for your complimentary copy when you call or email us today. Yes, this study guide pairs perfectly with John's radio series.

You are going to want to get a copy. I'll talk more about how to get it after the lesson. But right now, stay here for the conversation I had with John titled Straight Talk on Marriage, Family, and Christian Living, and the first voice you hear will be, well, mine. John, you know, we get lots of questions about doctrine and hard Bible verses and some of the standard questions that you often answer about predestination and Bible prophecy, questions about assurance and eternal security. But today, I want to sort of take a different direction and single out for you some of the practical questions that people ask, hard questions about marriage and divorce, family issues, and other matters that are related to practical Christian living. So, we'll start with some questions about marriage and divorce. You know, we get more hard questions dealing with marital problems and divorce than, I think, on any other subject because it's a hard subject.

So, here's one that came into us. A listener writes, I was listening to your sermon, How to Win Your Unbelieving Spouse. I truly want to learn and do all the Lord wants me to do. I do try to practice serving him no matter what my husband has said or done to me.

So, there are things I need advice on. We've been married 20 years, and as soon as we got married, he abandoned me. He spends all his free time with his brother. He says the wife's duty to him is only to cook and clean and be a submissive slave to all his needs.

He's never said, Thank you, and never said, I'm sorry. Anything I may need his help with produces fear in me because I know he'll blow up. So, how do I deal with the fear and loneliness and rejection in a way that pleases God? I think the starting point for that would be that the Lord doesn't promise us a trouble-free life. You know, in this world you'll have tribulation, but the Lord does promise this, that the trying of your faith, suffering, has a perfecting work. And I think even beyond that in life, not only does God produce a perfecting work in us, shaping us, sort of like Paul saying, Lord, please take this thorn of the flesh away. Please take it away.

Please take it away. And the Lord's saying, No, I'm not going to do that, because when you're weak, then you're strong. This is a perfecting work. And Paul responds by saying, So I rejoice in that. So I think you have to find the path of joy in the middle of it and realize that God has chosen you for difficulty, chosen you for suffering, for his own glory, and that there will be a kind of spiritual development, a kind of spiritual growth and maturity that will come in your life that will make you valuable if you rejoice in this.

And that, in eternity someday, you will probably be shocked at the grand reward that the Lord provides for you eternally. Now, she doesn't expressly say that her husband is an unbeliever, but she's responding to the series How to Win Your Unbelieving Spouse, and the way she describes this man doesn't sound like a believer. So she also needs to pray for his salvation. Absolutely. And, you know, you're not guaranteed that he's going to be saved, but we do know the Bible tells us how to go about reaching out to him with the gospel by how a woman lives.

And, yeah, I don't know what the end of that will be, but I know the responsibility that she has is to live a life that puts Christ on display and makes the gospel believable. Here's another question from a woman who says, My soon-to-be ex-spouse has been served with an order of protection. He told me beautiful lies that led me to make a decision to leave everyone and everything, and as soon as I moved there, I found out that I was in an abusive situation. He would hit me, kick me, slap me, lock me in the basement or in the bedroom, oversee every little thing I did with the aim of getting into arguments so that they would lead to this abuse. He threatened to divorce me over every small issue. She says, Well, I would answer firstly by saying you should not remain in an abusive relationship in the place where that abuse takes place.

Let's not talk about divorce initially. Let's just talk about safety. I mean, we have mechanisms in our physical bodies to deflect things that are dangerous. I mean, that's a mechanism that's built into everybody. You're not going to stay there and say, Well, I have to be married to this guy, so I've got to be here, and, you know, he can kick me around like a punching bag if he wants.

No, you need to get out of that place and get to a place of safety, and if you have children, you need to get those children to a place of safety. This is just obvious stuff. Secondly, this is clearly a non-believer. I don't know what he professes or what he confesses, but that is not the behavior of a Christian. If a person is a Christian, he loves his brother, and the most intimate expression of that is to a spouse.

This is a non-Christian. And I would even think down the road, whether he initiates a divorce, you are not bound under all circumstances to stay with an unbeliever who has literally violated the intent of that marriage but hasn't physically left, but he has violated the marriage to that degree. All right, here's a third question from a woman who writes, Our marriage of 40 years ended when my husband started having an affair with someone he met online. They lived together for two years before he decided to divorce me and marry her. She says, I'm having a hard time getting beyond the pain and the loss of my marriage. My hopes and my dreams all shattered. How do I forgive that person who has hurt and destroyed my future? First of all, God hates divorce, God hates sin, and there's divorce everywhere and sin everywhere all the time. The fact that God hates it doesn't mean it's not a reality, it's not present.

Secondly, I would say this. Your life is not in shambles. Your husband's life is in shambles. Your life is not in shambles.

You have the Lord who will never leave you or forsake you. You've got to change your perspective. Your husband is a train wreck. You're not. Your husband is a disaster.

You're not. You have done everything you could do to be obedient and faithful and loyal to your husband. The short term, on the surface, your husband has received what he wants. Long term, nobody gets what he wants by disobeying God, by being an adulterer, by violating a marriage. The one to be pitied is your husband and not you. God's accounts are long term accounts.

They're even eternal accounts. You need to rejoice that the Lord has protected you from something worse. You need to embrace all the opportunities for friendship, fellowship, love, joy, usefulness that are available to you in the church, and the Lord will honor all of that. All right, here's one more question about marriage. This listener writes, I recently listened to one of your sermons from 1 Peter 3 about wives submitting to their husbands and by their chaste behavior drawing them nearer to the Lord without a word. I understand this applies to an unbelieving husband.

However, could these principles be applied to a situation where the husband is a believer, yet does not seem to be growing much in the faith? First thing I would say is, rejoice always, and again I say rejoice. Rejoice always. The Lord is at hand.

The Lord is near. You're not forsaken. Rejoice. Rejoice. Rejoice in your salvation. Rejoice in God's grace. Rejoice that his mercies are new every morning.

Great is his faithfulness. Your marriage isn't everything you'd want it to be. Your husband isn't coming down the path the way you'd want him to. Maybe he's a believer.

Maybe he's not. You shouldn't beat yourself up for that. You should, I mean, what does Peter say? Casting your care on him because he cares for you. So you give it to the Lord, you give your husband to the Lord, and then you rejoice. You turn it over to the Lord and rejoice.

And be grateful and joyful. Otherwise what's going to happen is, what's wrong in your marriage defines your home. It defines your relationships. It defines how you deal with the kids. It defines how you deal with your sisters and brothers and family members. And it defines how you deal with friends at church.

And all of a sudden this thing that's wrong becomes the defining element of your life. And then your life is defined by that rather than by joy and confidence and trust in the Lord. Cultivate joy. Cultivate joy. Cultivate joy that you're loved by God, you're loved infinitely, you're loved eternally, you're loved personally, and all spiritual blessings are yours in Christ. Cultivate that and take whatever life brings. Don't invest more anguish in this life than you need to because we're headed for heaven and joy forever.

Good answer. Here's another question from a listener who says, They're also considering including Hindu and Indian cultural elements in the ceremony. I'm very concerned about how best to glorify God in this event. I don't want to pray to the one true God when I'll be preceded or followed by a Hindu prayer or ritual.

Any advice you can provide is very much appreciated. First of all, look, be honest. Your daughter is not a Christian. Not a Christian. The only way you know a Christian is not by some profession or some event in the past, but by a changed life.

And how has that life changed? It has changed in that they desire to honor God. They love His word. They love His church.

They love His people. They love righteousness. This is not a Christian girl. This is a non-Christian girl. And I think for you to go into a service like that and inject any piece of Christianity would be to aid and to bet her illegitimate claim to be a Christian. I think you need to not be a part of that at all. I wouldn't even go to an event like that.

I wouldn't even go, let alone participate. She has to understand that this is sheer paganism by a professing Christian. That's not what Christians do.

So I think I would lovingly say to her, you're not a Christian, and I can't inject any form of Christianity into a pagan event. It's interesting, isn't it? It's a common thread in many of these questions, the assumption that because a person claims to be a Christian or says he is a Christian or had some sort of experience when he was 12 years old, we're obliged to take that profession of faith at face value.

That's a major fallacy, isn't it? Yeah, you know, Phil, it's interesting to go back in history. This first dawned on me when I was preaching many, many years ago back in Grand Rapids. And somebody came up to me and started telling me a story about the son they had, and they said, but I know he's a Christian because he was baptized.

What? You know he's a Christian because he was baptized as a baby? What have I spent my whole life trying to do and been, you know, basically criticized pretty consistently for doing it to try to help people understand what true salvation is? People sometimes say, why are you on this hobby horse? Because there are lots of things that don't determine your eternal destiny.

This happens to, right? So if you're going to be right about something, please let it be salvation. Yeah, amazing how persistent this fallacy is.

It shows up in every form imaginable. It just keeps coming at us, coming at us. You know, we argued with it theologically years ago. We were battling a theology that was coming out of God all over everywhere in the book The Gospel According to Jesus.

Then we answered all their arguments in The Gospel According to the Apostles. Now the non-lordship, easy-believism is everywhere in evangelicalism, but nobody talks about the theology of it. They don't even want to argue about theology. It's all pragmatic methodology, emotion, sentimentalism. So we have it in forms where it doesn't even carry a theology.

It isn't even defended. If anything, I think things are worse in the church today than they were when you were younger. I think probably one of the most controversial things you can do is challenge the profession of faith of someone who claims to be a Christian, no matter if he lives like the devil. Well, look at the questions you've been asking me, the last series of questions. Well, this person says he's a Christian or this person came to Christ.

We give way too much assumption to that claim. That's exactly what Matthew 7 says. Many will say, Lord, Lord, we've done this, we've done that in your name.

I don't know you. You workers of iniquity. So if you're a worker of iniquity, your claim is false.

So one thing parents have to do, friends have to do, we have to take away the legitimacy of those claims. We have to be as bold as to say, there is absolutely no reason that I would believe for a moment that you are a Christian. I love you, and I'm telling you, you're on your way to hell. All right, one more question on the family, and this is a hard one.

I really want to see your answer on this one. The listener says, in order to be a Christian living in a Muslim family, I have to lie. If I don't, my son will be taken from me by my husband. As I write this, I'm listening to your radio program about principles and lying with tears in my eyes.

What do I do? I don't fear for my own life. Death is welcomed, but then my son will not come to saving faith.

Yes, I live in the U.S., but that doesn't stop my angry husband or his family. I'm afraid. Courts don't favor Christians, and there's nothing I can legally prove my husband has said that would give me full custody.

Please give me an answer on what I should do. I love your program. It has helped bring me to Christ. My situation is unfortunately more common than you might know.

Well, first of all, I would say this country is getting more favorable to Muslims than it is to Christians. It's a strange twist. First of all, you have to believe that if you do what is right, the outcome is in the hands of God. The outcome for your son is in the hands of God, the outcome for your own life is in the hands of God, the disposition of your husband is in the hands of God.

You have to believe that. You cannot believe that your own preservation and the salvation of your son is in your hands. It's not in your hands.

It's in God's hands. So you can't overestimate your own necessity and what God may choose to do in the life of your son. Secondly, I believe that you don't have to say everything that is true. You don't have to purposely say everything that is true. There are things that can be true that you believe, and you do not have to profess them or confess them in every environment. If I am called into some threatening situation and somebody asks me if I'm a Christian, even Jesus did not answer on one occasion in his trial. I don't think you have to say everything, but to lie, that's different.

Now you've stepped over a line. So I think first is a trust in the Lord. Secondly is a quiet willingness not to necessarily say everything. You remember, of course, that even in the Gospel of John, it talks about Nicodemus being a secret disciple for fear of the Jews.

That's interesting. And yet he was honored. He was honored by God. He was there to anoint the body of Christ. He isn't really condemned for keeping that.

He was in an environment of the Sanhedrin and hostility, and his life would have been threatened. Finding that balance at some point, my heart goes out. Grace to you, of course, along with the livestream of every Sunday service at Grace Church goes into the Middle East. We livestream every Sunday in the Arabic language to the Middle East, and we're starting to get more and more of this kind of feedback. But it's not just the Middle East.

This is coming from America. There is this kind of hostility. I just think you have to trust the Lord, be a dutiful wife. Maybe you don't have to say everything, but don't be put in a position to lie.

And I would just go one step beyond that. I think if you can be faithful to your husband and be a faithful wife and a faithful mother and maintain your joy and a measure of sweetness in that relationship, even though it's hard, that may mitigate the hostility or the anger to some degree. I think if you become a haranguing Christian in that environment, a threatening Christian in that environment, you may make it more difficult. So just to be clear, because I think people sometimes confuse these concepts, you're saying there are times when it's okay to conceal the truth. It's never okay to deny the truth. Well, Jesus said, if you deny me, I'll deny you. Yeah, and God cannot deny himself.

But he does sometimes conceal the truth. This listener says, I teach seventh grade math in a public school. We just found out that one of our female students has decided she wants to be a boy. Her mother, who's a single mother, and the school psychologists are going along with it.

She's only 12. Anyway, the school may want us to talk to our homeroom kids about this girl's transitioning. I don't know what to do. They'll probably tell us what to say, but I may not want to say it because I won't agree. So I have a couple of questions. One, should I refer to this student as him like they want us to?

I haven't been told to do that yet, but eventually they will. And she says, number two, I feel very uncomfortable talking to kids about it when I know God disapproves of this kind of behavior. Is there anything you would suggest I say or do? I want to honor God in my actions.

Do you have any advice for me? First of all, whenever the initial announcement is made, you don't need to be the one that made it. I'm not making that announcement.

I'm not making it. Secondly, if you had to refer to the student, I'd refer to that student as that student. Yes, that student over there, that student over there. I just think this is so devastating and deadly to kids. A 12-year-old going through this, this is not his will.

This is his parents playing games with him. This is tragic. This is the path to terrible personal chaos and destruction. So I just don't think you can—and I understand you're in a public school, and that's a great place to be and that's a great place to minister. Yeah, and you know, it's becoming so common.

I think the time is coming when there will be Christians who actually lose their jobs over things like this. Oh, there's no question about that. So prepare for that. But look, again, trust yourself to the Lord. The Lord knows your needs and you're in His care. Yeah.

All right, one more question, and this is a hard one. This listener says, I'm 34 years old. Ten years ago I was part of an online scam, defrauding people and taking their money. I don't have the money to pay back all I've stolen from people, and I don't have most of their contact information, even if I could repay it all. Your sermons have stripped me naked and convicted me.

What should I do next? Well, if you can't make right what you did wrong, admit it to God. You've done that. And now spend the rest of your life sacrificially giving, serving, benefiting. Pour your life into other people. Be selfless. I mean, selfless in a radical way. You were selfish in a radical way. You cost people a lot.

You can't go back and pay back those people that you divested in a criminal way. But I don't think—you can't go back and fix that, but you can say, you know, confess it to the Lord, repent of it to the Lord. I think the fact that you're guilt-ridden and full of this kind of angst is good.

It's good. I mean, that's a Christian response. Or if you weren't a Christian, you'd still be figuring out how to do this again because it was successful. Good advice. These have been really hard questions, and thanks for the answers, Jon. It's a reminder that a lot of our listeners struggle with lots of pain and deep problems and a need for encouragement. Give us a few words of encouragement in these final minutes. I just keep thinking of John 16, 33, in this world you will have tribulation, but be of good courage. I've overcome the world. Cheer up.

Cheer up. You are an overcomer. And what is that by which we overcome? John says our faith. If you have faith in Christ, you're an overcomer. This is Grace to You with Jon MacArthur.

Thanks for being with us. That special interview you heard today is titled Straight Talk on Marriage, Family, and Christian Living. Now, as Jon mentioned earlier, next month we're going to air his series titled Complete in Christ. And to help you get all you can out of those broadcasts, we've produced a brand new study guide, over 250 pages, with detailed explanations plus helpful questions throughout to help reinforce what you learn.

And if you've never contacted us before, we want to send you a free copy so that you have it in time before the series airs. So ask for the Complete in Christ study guide when you contact us today. Our number here, 800-55-GRACE, and our website, gty.org. Again, the Complete in Christ study guide includes a question-and-answer session with each chapter, and it's great material to go through with someone you're discipling or with your Bible study group. And remember, the study guide is our gift to you if you've never contacted us before.

If you've already gotten in touch, it's available for a reasonable price. To pick up your copy of the Complete in Christ study guide, call us at 800-55-GRACE, or go to our website, gty.org. And while you're at gty.org, make sure to take advantage of the thousands of free resources you'll find there. That includes daily devotionals written by John and 3500 sermons that cover crucial topics like how to pray, the Lord's Supper, facing trials, overcoming temptation, and so many others. Again, go to gty.org. Now for John MacArthur and the entire Grace to You staff, I'm Phil Johnson, encouraging you to watch Grace to You television this Sunday, and then be here Monday when John looks at how to help your church shine biblical light in a dark world and how to grow in spiritual harmony. Tune in for the study titled, A Plea for Unity, with another half hour of unleashing God's truth, one verse at a time, on Grace to You.