Jared Longshore's Blog, page 12

Marriage Restoration 101: Apologies and Forgiveness

One of the problems you will find a few days into marriage, if not a few days into the engagement, is that your spouse is not Jesus. This revelation can put one into the slough of despond. Many a wife has been tempted by the fainting couch upon realizing that her husband is not the Lion of the Tribe of Judah. And many a husband has sat befuddled that his wife has not come down out of heaven like the New Jerusalem, a spotless bride adorned for her husband. But, be not afraid, as the angel Gabriel once said. There’s a way to patch up the cracks.

A key component of any marriage restoration project is the ability to apologize and forgive. Christians have every right to this manner of dealing with sin and that’s a good thing, too. It beats having to cut yourself and cry out like the prophets of Baal on Mount Carmel, asking your spouse to look with mercy upon this third week running in which you forgot to schedule the kids’ dentist appointments. Lo, there is a more excellent way.

The key to a good apology is that you cut it straight. And think this through for a moment, you want to deliver a good apology. You’ve already done something bad, no reason to layer fault upon fault by apologizing like the third grade mean girl forced to tell her classmate she’s sorry while smacking her gum, arms crossed, with a knee pop that could make the girls over at Chi Omega jealous.

So here are the basics:

First, do not say you are sorry. The statement “I’m sorry” is an expression of your sorrow, which is fine enough as far as it goes. But given our times, it doesn’t go very far and likely gums things up. We live in times in which everyone wants to emote. Everyone wants to share his or her inner feelings. We think this is the very hallmark of human identity. Well, you are apologizing because you fumbled the football. Now is not the time for you tell everyone how you feel. You did not just win a grammy. Moreover, many people assume that the key to forgiveness is to make sure that the penitent expresses sorrow equivalent to the offense. While such sorrow is certainly fitting, it is not the standard which must be met in order to forgive another when you have been wronged. That standard is an admonition of wrong and a request for forgiveness. When those two standards have been met, then you must forgive. All of the “I’m sorry” stuff indicates that the offended party should examine the penitent with a sorrow-meter to determine if forgiveness should be rendered.

Second, in place of “I’m sorry” put an “I was wrong when I called your mother a donkey. Please forgive me.” Note, if said mother-in-law is indeed a donkey, you must not apologize for hitting the bull’s eye. You might soften the prophetic word by reminding your spouse that God did a mighty work through Balaam’s ass. But no apologizing when you have not erred. If, however, this mother-in-law is not a donkey, you must apologize for missing the mark and you should keep it plain and simple. Unlike “I’m sorry,” “I was wrong” is a humbling thing to say. It knocks one down a couple of pegs, which is good for the soul. The LORD, after all, looks upon the humble. The request for forgiveness reminds all parties that this marriage is a covenantal affair, involving two parties. You were not very thoughtful of your spouse when you went off calling mom a long eared mule. So the request for forgiveness is a fitting acknowledgement of your spouse. This request for forgiveness is not a demand for forgiveness. “But, doesn’t my wife have to forgive me?” Well, yes she does. But that truth doesn’t give you the right to demand it.

Third, for the offended party, when it comes to forgiveness, you hand that over right away. You must be eager to deliver that particular package upon request. In marriages that have become terribly tangled, and there are certainly a few of those, delivering forgiveness is not the same thing as trusting. Forgiveness must be delivered immediately and upon request. Our Lord made that necessity very clear, “For if ye forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you: But if ye forgive not men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses” (Matthew 6:14-15). At the same time, trust must be built over time. Both parties should understand this, with the offender not requiring high trust levels and the offended not pretending that bitterness rotting in the soul is simply low trust levels.

Fourth, while the Puritans were known to say that confessing sin was akin to vomiting, it is worth noting that confession is also like a day out quail hunting. The dogs flush the birds from their spot in the bush and you get the chance to unload on them with a shotgun. Anyone who has had the privilege of a little upland bird hunting knows how satisfying this can be. Those sins were bedded down in your flesh, after all. They just needed a little marital agitation in order to show themselves so you could blow them away with a good confession. Now they’re hanging there limp in the mouth of the German Short Hair like Goliath’s head hung in the hand of Jesse’s son. Plus, you and the spouse are now good, what with the apology and forgiveness rendered, so the day is looking up come to think of it.

Fifth, one common snag that routinely arises is your inability to get on the same page regarding the offense or alleged offense. This trouble comes when you are not clear about the traffic laws, or you are clear enough about the traffic laws but have a wonky speedometer. He asks if you know why he pulled you over and the only thing that comes to mind is that he is a heavy-handed gorilla. Or you’re flummoxed on the witness stand, saying you want the truth only to be reminded by her in the cross-examination that you can’t handle the truth. It really is important to have agreement on the standards. This agreement comes by the renewal of your mind according to Scripture, along with reading other good books on marriage. 

If you can’t get on the same page after discussing it, don’t fall into a big spat about it. Remember that love indeed covers a multitude of sins. If it is small, then cover it in love and move on. If it is big, or if you are in a rut on not being on the same page, then call for a pastoral referee to help you review the game film. And no feeling bad about calling for a pastor. That’s what pastors are for.

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Washed White

We take great comfort in the fact that God is more determined than we are. We fall asleep praying like the disciples and Christ presses on through the night. In baptism, we have a sign from God, which is to say, God does the signing and sealing. We believe Him. We respond in faith, knowing that He will be faithful to His covenant promise. And what is that promise? He has told us through the prophet Isaiah, “As for me, this is my covenant with them, saith the Lord; My spirit that is upon thee, And my words which I have put in thy mouth, Shall not depart out of thy mouth, Nor out of the mouth of thy seed, Nor out of the mouth of thy seed’s seed, saith the Lord, From henceforth and for ever” (Isaiah 59:21).

The water of baptism does not itself wash away sin. We need something far more potent to cleanse us of our transgressions. The blood of Christ and that alone washes us white. And God has determined to signal such a cleansing to us. In the Old Testament, that sign was circumcision which Abraham received as a seal of the righteousness he had by faith. In the New Covenant, that sign is baptism, which likewise is a sign and seal of the forgiveness of sins which comes about through faith alone. We behold the sign of baptism and rejoice for it is a sign from God. And we put our hope in what the sign points to: the blood of the Lord Jesus Christ. No sin can withstand its cleansing power.

 

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A Loaded Gun

It is remarkable that God gave you a tongue. You are a loaded gun. You will fire bullets. The command is that you be slow to fire that weapon. But speak you will. The critical thing is that when you speak you must speak true things, not corrupt, hollow words. If you buy into the modern zeitgeist that you are a rugged individual going at it alone in the wilderness, then you may not see the big problem with shooting blanks. In that set up, why not fire off a few duds? Nobody is looking. Nobody needs you to bring home a buffalo for dinner. But, the modern zeitgeist is wrong. It is the great nothing that many have swallowed. They remain hungry.

You, however, are members of one body, a new humanity that Christ has established. He is the head and we are growing up into Him, one day to be a perfect man (Ephesians 4:13). Speaking the truth is essential to the growth of this body. Sleight of hand, cunning craftiness, and deceit are the ways our adversary keeps the church weak and immature. When you kneel to confess your sins, you speak the truth about them. This truth declaration matures you and it matures the bride of Christ.

Make excuses for your sins, and you will remain weak. Exaggerate your sins, emoting about being the scum on the bottom of the gum on the bottom of the plumber’s shoe in a South Georgia summer, and your words will be hollow. The confession you are soon to speak, you speak from your knees. Because from there it can be simple, straight-forward, and humble. “I missed, Lord. I was wrong. Please forgive me.” Speak that truth in covenant love and we will grow to a perfect man.

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It Is Easy to Be a Heretic

It is easy to be a madman: it is easy to be a heretic. It is always easy to let the age have its head; the difficult thing is to keep one’s own.

G. K. Chesterton

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Filled

The weekly repetition of this meal is a reminder that there is no shortage of the Lord’s grace. He blesses you like He blessed Adam and Eve in the beginning before He commissioned them to be fruitful, fill the earth, and have dominion. When He blesses, He presses those blessings down, shakes them together, and causes them to flow over the top. When the apostles prayed, the very place in which they were assembled was shaken. They were all filled with the Holy Ghost and they spoke the word of God with boldness.

As you come to this table today, come in faith seeking to be filled. Are you short on energy? Find it here. Short on patience? Find it here. Short on love toward others? Find it here. Short on faith? Here before you is the Word from which faith comes. This table is a testimony to your hunger. Of course you’re hungry. That’s why the Lord has prepared a table for you. Your hunger pains are nothing to be ashamed of. The LORD knows your weakness and remembers that you are dust.

So this table is a testimony to your hunger and, likewise, it is a testimony to bottomless provision of God. How much of His Spirit can He supply to you? Well, how much can you eat? No one expected the apostles to turn the world upside down. They were uneducated men who had a knack for losing the plot as they followed Jesus. But their own insufficiencies were no obstable to the shocking work Christ did through them when they humbled themselves and prayed. Then, came a filling of the Spirit. Then, the things that could be shaken were shaken. Then, came boldness. So come and be filled. Come in faith and welcome to Jesus Christ.

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Marriage Restoration 101: Low and Slow

One of the problems that frequently comes up in marriage is that burning desire to patch up all of your problems with a flick of the wrist. The same problem arises in any restoration project. We’d like to have the basement patched back up in a moment, which leads us to grow a bit hasty with the drywall job, which leads to removing all of the drywall after the first install because we put it in cockeyed. Christians can double down on this haste, lining up a string of Bible verses in the wrong place and at the wrong time. One of the chief being, “Do not let the sun go down on your anger.” And someone gets the idea that this means you should argue until 5am in the morning. The trouble is, come sunrise, you’re still in a spat and it’s a Sunday. Now you’ve got something about leaving your offering at the altar and being reconciled to your brother running through the mind. 

Here’s a simple principle for restoring the marriage: Go at it slow and steady like the tortoise. I understand that this bit of advice is not as snazzy as the marriage love cruise, where you will get to eat lobster and sunbathe in the Caribbean. But it is a time-tested and proven bit of counsel for seeing your marriage move in the right direction. But, I warn you. Good, conservative, and reformed Christians are a bit suspicious about this advice. It sounds like it might run roughshod over Owen’s point that we must be killing sin or sin will be killing you. I do believe that Owen was on the money, but I would add that if you don’t let that woman sleep, not only will sin be killing you but the sleep-deprived beauty might well do so.

I recall being in a community of Christians where it became somewhat popular to pray that the Lord would rob people of sleep until they repent. It does have a nice ring to it. And maybe one sleepless night could do some sinners good. But people do have a knack for making better decisions after a good night’s sleep. So we might pray that the Lord would give the poor buggers some good and deep sleep so that they would repent. Basically, all of the haste, masquerading as zeal and piety, can often be a facade covering anxiety and pride. In darker corners, this kind of haste smells of some twisted manipulation. There’s the arrogant husband, asking the our thrice holy God to keep his wife tossing and turning until she discovers how deceived she is in her disrespect toward her husband. Maybe he will throw in a fast for her, even. This is the kind of thing that makes one ask for the vomit bag.

Here are three texts to remind you to take a deep breath, remember who is on the throne, and take your marriage reno project slow and steady.

Three texts:

1 Peter 4:8 says,  “And above all things have fervent charity among yourselves: for charity shall cover the multitude of sins.” While there is a place for confrontation, and it can take some work to get on the same page, do remember that love not only exposes sins but covers them. I have seen more than a few spouses justify themselves in the hunt for their significant other’s sin because we serve a precise God and must be perfect as He is perfect. But maybe your spouse would be far closer to perfect if you wouldn’t nag about every little thing. Better yet, maybe you would be far closer to perfect if you would give it a rest.

Exodus 23:29-30 says, “I will not drive them out from before thee in one year; lest the land become desolate, and the beast of the field multiply against thee. By little and little I will drive them out from before thee, until thou be increased, and inherit the land.” God’s plan for your marriage maps on to His plans for His people Israel. If you tried to drive out every character flaw in a week’s time, those tigers and panthers would be on you in no time. You want to drive out the demons and clean the place up. But you have to be in the business of cultivating good things in your marriage and home, or else you’re just sweeping the place up for seven more demons far nastier than the first to make your house their home.  

Ephesians 5:25-27 says, “Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the church, and gave himself for it; That he might sanctify and cleanse it with the washing of water by the word, That he might present it to himself a glorious church, not having spot, or wrinkle, or any such thing; but that it should be holy and without blemish.” Consider how patient Christ is with His own bride. He’s been sanctifying her for two thousand years and the work is not done. His sacrifice is the origin of this sanctification process and so it must be with a husband toward his own wife. There’s truth here for a wife as well. She can win her husband without a word. She can and does sanctify him. And the process is plenty long, just ask Heather Longshore.

Your marriage is something of a long cook. You need to keep an eye on that pork shoulder. And you’ll have plenty of work to do seasoning, wrapping, and checking the temp. But cook that thing low and slow. It will fall off the bone.

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Children’s Children

God’s kindness to families and children’s children is something He readily displays in His Word. He brought Israel out of Egypt with their children. He fed them with bread from heaven in the wilderness and their children. We are not surprised then to see God’s covenants with Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, and David all involving them and their children. Baptism is a sign of the new covenant, and when God announces this covenant, He promises blessing on our children. He says through Jeremiah, “They shall be my people, and I will be their God: And I will give them one heart, and one way, that they may fear me for ever, for the good of them, and of their children after them” (Jeremiah 32:38-39).

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Decree and Covenant

If you would walk in maturity, then you must grasp the distinction between God’s decree and His covenant. A hallmark of the Reformed tradition is to place an emphasis on God’s decree, and rightly so. God has decreed everything that comes to pass. Whatever the matter, it really is settled. The temperature outside of City Hall this afternoon at 3 pm has been determined. The day of your death. The number of your grandchildren. And every other possible fact. God has declared these things to be so before the foundation of the world. 

While this is a remarkable and stabilizing truth, if it is not paired with God’s covenant errors abound. After all, you have no idea what the termperature will be this afternoon, even though God has decreed it. He has decreed how many grandchildren you will have, but He has not revealed that to you. Should you pray with confidence that you will have seventeen? Of course, not. But should you pray with confidence about anything? Certainly.

God’s covenant involves His many promises to be God to you and to bless you. He has sworn an oath that no weapon formed against you shall prosper. He has covenanted to be your shiled and your great reward, to sanctify you and mature you. He has sworn by covenant to forgive you when you confess your sin and prune you so that you bear more fruit. All of these promises are guaranteed to you in the blood of Christ and you have a right and responsibility to seek them, claim them, and ask your Father to manifest them in your life and the life of your people without wavering. Your duty is to rest in the truth that God has decreed all things that come to pass, while robustly trusting Him for the covenant promises He has revealed to you.

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Knits Up the Raveled Sleeve of Care

If things are getting sticky, they tend to seem less glutinous after you’ve had your eight hours.

P. G. Wodehouse, Jeeves in the Offing

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By Faith, We Minister

[Below is a recent exhortation I gave to Knox Presbytery of the CREC].

I should start this exhortation with a bit of honesty about my own ministerial foibles. As some of you know, I was a Reformed Baptist minister. And while I have no intention of dunking on Baptists, there is an important point to be made about how I personally fumbled the ministerial football and how I believe we might fumble it in the season to come.

I was a Reformed Baptist, and a good one. Perhaps too good. I was quite convinced that my 17th century English Baptist heritage meant we were sons of the Separatist Puritans, and in that I was right. The English Puritans wanted to clean up the Church of England and the Separatist Puritans wanted to clean it up so bad they decided to leave it altogether. The Particular Baptists grew out of those Separatist Puritans, realizing that if they continued to baptize the little ones, who showed no signs of being regenerate, then they might grow up to pollute the church. So, they had to separate from the separatists.

At the heart of my error was a lack of faith. And I filled up whatever was lacking with well-intentioned precision and order. I didn’t think that was what I was doing at the time. And my heart was full of faith, but I was in need of an enlarged heart so that I could sprint in the way of God’s commandments rather than just make sure I was mindful of them. I wanted to grow the church, but not too fast. I wanted revival. But I didn’t want James Davenport stripping down in public and throwing his pants in the fire, or Russell Brand baptizing new converts as a new convert, and in his skivvies. But, while the dead of winter might be clean and crisp, the growth of Spring is untoward and messy.

So what does this have to do with us, Knox Presbytery and the CREC, today? Well, we have quite a communion of churches now. We have a history to preserve. We have distinctives, particulars, a culture, and sacraments to maintain. And we have to honor the ways of our fathers in a time when statues are falling on the right hand and on the left. We have a little tiny foothold in the grand scheme of things and the last thing we want to do is lose that distinctive foothold in a sea of Reformed Evangelicalism gone mad. I suspect our own denomination will face the same challenges present in the broader conservative movement in our nation, with the new right coming up with some ideas that would wind up some trickle-down conservatives. So, which way forward?

The key text is Hebrews 11:1-2, “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. For by it the elders obtained a good report.” What made the patriarchs remarkable was not circumcision. It was not the golden cherubim over the ark or Aaron’s robes. It was their faith. By it they obtained a good report. By faith, they built arks. And by faith they refused to be called sons of Pharaoh. And the best way to honor them is to live by that same faith and to minister in that same faith.

Faith is the condition through which the promises are realized. And in this vein, faith is called the substance of things hoped for and the evidence of things not seen. If anything marks the ministry of the CREC, it is a faith large enough to actuate the unseen things. It is a heart so enlarged with faith that the things hoped for are nearly materialized. In this faith, we have embodied what Chesterton called that orthodoxy with “the equilibrium of a man behind madly rushing horses.” He continues, “The orthodox Church never took the tame course or accepted the conventions; the orthodox Church was never respectable… It is always easy to be a modernist; as it is easy to be a snob. [Orthodoxy, however,] has been one whirling adventure; [in which] the heavenly chariot flies thundering through the ages, the dull heresies sprawling and prostrate, the wild truth reeling but erect.”

So the exhortation is to minister by faith while resisting the temptation to manufacture the works which flow from that faith. The truth is that the good works we want to preserve quite simply cannot be preserved. They are like manna and will grow sour if you try to store up more than a day’s worth. However, that fruit is promised to us afresh out there in the future if we humble ourselves and walk in the faith of our fathers. That faith has loved orthodoxy without being persnickety. And it has routinely attracted some interesting characters who may not know how many spokes are on the chariot, but sure do want to ride it. That faith has regularly laid hold of God’s covenant promises to see saints strengthened who were very much in need of strengthening. 

It appears to me that we are in a season like that of Elisha when he was surrounded by the forces of Syria. And there are many like Elisha’s servants who are more than a little bit shaken by the sight. We should strive to be like Elisha with our eyes opened to the unseen things, assuring our people and the many lost sheep strung about that there are more with us than are with them, and praying, “Lord, open their eyes.”

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