Rebuilding a Marriage Better Than New (Part 3) - Chris and Cindy Beall

Rebuilding a Marriage Better Than New (Part 1) - Chris and Cindy Beall
Rebuilding a Marriage Better Than New (Part 2) - Chris and Cindy Beall
Rebuilding a Marriage Better Than New (Part 3) - Chris and Cindy Beall

FamilyLife Today® Radio Transcript  

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Embracing Hope

 

Guest:                        Chris and Cindy Beall                                 

From the series:       Rebuilding a Marriage Better Than New                 

 

 

Bob: Rebuilding a broken marriage is not a simple process; it’s not a painless process. But Chris Beall—who is doing it—says it is a worthwhile process to go through.

 

Chris: You’re walking through a betrayal—you don’t know the where to go. The best thing you can do for other people is not tell a story but live a story. It’s not time for you to focus on helping other people. Every day you’re going to choose to forgive the other person, you are writing a sentence in a paragraph of a story that years from now will be worth telling—and we do that by submitting to God at every moment of this process of healing.

 

Bob: This is FamilyLife Today for Wednesday, August 30th. Our host is the President of FamilyLife®, Dennis Rainey, and I'm Bob Lepine. If there has been damage done to your marriage, there is a path forward—and it’s a path worth walking. Stay with us.

 

1:00

 

And welcome to FamilyLife Today. Thanks for joining us. 

 

I sent out a tweet a while back and I got a response to it. I’m thinking maybe our guests could help—knowing how I should respond to the response. The tweet I sent out said—it was from when Gary Thomas was here and we were talking about cherishing and what it means to cherish one another in marriage. I said, “Cherishing another person means I’m going to look out for your interests as more important than my own.” 

 

The tweet I got back was from somebody who said, “How do you get there with a lying, betraying husband who has no idea what passion or intimacy is?” I don’t know how to answer that in 140 characters—I don’t think you can answer that in 140 characters—but it’s a very real issue for a lot of people thinking, “How do I fulfill my vows? How do I love and trust and cherish another person when they are a lying, betraying individual?”

 

2:00

 

Dennis: That really is a good question—and I’m glad we have the guests that we have on FamilyLife Today. 

 

Bob: So we’re off the hook! 

 

Dennis: Chris—

 

Bob: So, we’ll let them answer it!

 

Dennis: Chris and Cindy Beall join us again on the broadcast. Welcome back.

 

Chris and Cindy: Thank you!

 

Dennis: Chris is a pastor at Life Church in Oklahoma City. Cindy is an author of a book called, Rebuilding a Marriage Better Than New—and Cindy, you’re the expert on this because this is what you’ve done. 

 

Cindy: One of the things that people often say is, “Well, I’m going to do this to them because they are doing this to me”—so through revenge they are getting back at someone. I believe that when we get back at someone, the first person that we’re hurting is God. If Chris sins against me and then I then turn around and say, “I’m going to go cheat on him.” I’ve wounded the heart of God first—I have broken covenant with Him first—and then I might hurt my husband. 

 

For me, I would say to that woman—or to anyone—you’ve got to do the right thing regardless of someone else’s actions. 

 

3:00

 

That’s it. Someone else’s sinful life does not give me the right to sin against my God. That’s where I lived. It’s not easy. It’s very challenging, and I can’t say I did it 100% perfect all the time—but I don’t want to break my God’s heart—I don’t want to do that.

 

Bob: You’ve had the opportunity, over that last half dozen years, to sit down with lots of couples who have gone through what you lived through. What you lived through was years of your husband looking at pornography—ultimately that lead to affairs outside of marriage—he fathered a son. You didn’t know any of this. He finally comes clean. You have to decide—“Am I going to stay with him? Am I going to try to rebuild this marriage? Can I ever trust him again?”—all of these things facing you. 

 

When you sit down with these couples today, they are at a place that you were at, where there is a road in front of them. 

 

4:00

 

You can pick one path and that’s a path that can feel like it will cause the pain to stop right away—or you can pick the other path which feels like this is going to take me right into the pain. What kind of hope do you give them and how do you point them in a God-ward direction?

 

Cindy: The first thing, I think— just the fact that maybe it’s the four of us—maybe it’s a couple and Chris and me. I think the fact just seeing us brings them some hope—just the fact that we’ve lived through it. So when I’m faced with that question a lot of women will say, “What should I do?” Honestly, I cannot make that decision for them. I tell them, “You don’t you have to decide the rest of your life today.” I steal that little phrase from my friend Kevin. 

 

5:00

 

But I also just encourage them, “Look, whatever path you take is going to hurt. Where is God leading you? Let the peace of God be your guide.” If you’ve got a spouse that is willing to do whatever it takes—you’re willing to lay your life down and rebuild this. Consider this path. If you’ve got a spouse that’s still with someone else, or is acting like all this is your fault. Then you might have to play some hardball there, and show some tough love. 

 

Dennis: I’m just thinking of the command in Genesis 2, that says, “for this cause a man shall leave his father and mother, shall cleave to one another, and the two shall become one.” If you had not made a covenant between three—a man, and a woman, and their God—there’s no way this marriage would be standing today. 

 

Chris: Right!

 

Dennis: There wouldn’t be a title of a book, Rebuilding a Marriag...