The truth is that every married couple has enough problems to break up a marriage if they allow it. Satan would love to get you to throw in the towel. He would love to destroy your marriage by urging you to compare yourself to someone else. Every couple has their moments of happiness and every couple has their moments of pain. The truth is that no one has it all. The truth is that there is a built-in law of compensation. What looks good and attractive has its flip side of pain-producing potential. How much better it is to work with what we have, however limited that may appear, than to dream about having what someone else seems to have, only to discover that they don't really have it.
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Myth #4 is the Religious myth.
There are variations to this myth.
One is that whether you marry a Christian or not doesn't really make any difference. It will all work out OK. How many young persons get burned in the process of buying into this myth!
We preachers hesitate to speak on this because we don't want to be judgmental. We know what the Bible teaches, that we are not to be "unequally yoked together with unbelievers." It seems, though, to be such a hard teaching. Does it mean that one should never date a nonbeliever? So, we back off at that point, forgetting that seldom does a person marry a person that they have not dated. We then try to give the warning to the two who are in love. But then it is too late. The Christian partner kids oneself into thinking that it really doesn't make any difference: "I'll lead my partner to faith in Jesus Christ after we get married." Sometimes that does happen. Those of us who are parents of children who make such a decision dare not be, by our judgmentalism and insensitivity, obstacles to this happening. But often it doesn't. I could give you case history after case history of Christians married to nonbelievers, some wonderful and some not-so-wonderful, who yearn for that oneness that could have been theirs in a truly Christian marriage.
Another variation on this religious myth is that all you need to do is to ask Jesus and your problems will disappear. How much blame Jesus has received from people who somehow think that He runs around with a magic wand, instantly healing everything He touches, without us respecting certain emotional, spiritual and physical laws that have direct consequences attached to our breaking of them. Granted, Jesus does, in supernatural ways, on occasion intervene, bringing miraculous healings to bodies, emotions and relationships. However, I have discovered in the majority of situations, He works in quiet, gentle, gracious ways, according to the teachings of His Word, making available to us the resources of His power through that sanctifying process of gradual growth towards wholeness in Christ.
The truth is that coming to Jesus isn't going to automatically solve your marital problems. Don't blame Him for them. Don't blame Him for not taking them away. The truth is that you and I are privileged to appropriate His power to solve those problems over which we have control and to live with those over which we have no control.
