Free Will and Healing
My wife and I talk to a lot of people in broken relationships. We have seen amazing miracles, including in our own relationship. We have seen horrible marriages become healthy, and parent-child relationships restored. God can, has, and will do amazing things.
So the most painful thing we do is talk with husbands or wives whose marriages are not being healed. They beg God to restore their marriage and it doesn't happen. They are willing to change. They are willing to forgive. And they still end up in divorce court, because God will not fix their marriage.
As leaders in our communities of faith, we have to help people process this. Sometimes relationships are not going to be repaired. That is not God’s will, but it is real life. Because this is the hard truth about sin and marriage. It takes three to fix it.
God always wants to heal and restore, but if one spouse does not want to heal things, God will not force anyone to follow him. He gives us all free will. And God does not seem to grant us free will only to remove it when we do not choose the right path.
So a husband begs his wife to return to him and the children. She chooses not to and decides that that marriage is not going to be healed. A wife cries for God to make her husband love her. The husband does not, and God will not force him. The marriage is lost.
You can pray for their heart to change. You can pray for God to put things in their life to perhaps make them look to him. But ultimately it is a choice. And it is one you cannot make for them. It takes three: God, husband, and wife. Two out of three will not restore anything. And you cannot force anyone to do what they don’t want to do.
Free will. We are free to make the wrong choice with unfathomable consequences. Consequences we choose, that are sometimes eternal consequences.
So give them a chance to repent and change. Cry when they will not choose the spiritual path. But recognize when you need to accept the truth and move on, knowing it will be the most painful thing ever.
But that is the reality of free will. Human choice.
Even if it is wrong.
