My Favorite Scripture

Hello friends!

My church has been doing a series called “My Favorite Scripture”. Some of the elders and deacons have been doing the sermon not just as a way to get them preaching, but also as a way for the folks in our church to get to know them better.

That’s inspired me to do my own.

But rather than pick a parable or a psalm or something, I want to share a story about a time my wife and I really needed help and a story from the Bible that helped me.

There is some personal stuff in here that may be hard for some, so consider this a ‘trigger warning’.

This story is “my side”.  I cannot speak about the “other” side as that is not my story to tell.

So here goes.

This story starts more than 25 years ago. My wife and I were young, married only a short time. Some would argue we married too young, and maybe that’s true, but as most who marry young will tell you, it didn’t matter, we were in love. Crazy in love.

And we started a family right away. Also crazy, also worth it. But when you’re young and married with children you struggle. And we struggled financially. The twists and turns of our attempts to hold jobs start a business (which failed miserably, leading to bankruptcy) and live on our own with our baby brought us to a point where we were desperate. So we did a desperate thing.

Leaving my wife and baby daughter, I got on a bus and set off from Nebraska to Arizona. My wife’s best friend from high school had married her high school sweetheart and they lived near Phoenix working as co-managers of an apartment complex with his mother. They needed a handyman. Or so they said. And since we were all close friends they said “hey! Can you turn a wrench? Come on down, we’ll set you up.”

Now at the time I didn’t know a wrench from a hammer, but they were willing to help, and we needed help.

So I’m on a bus, leaving everything except a gym bag full of clothes and a walkman behind with my dear wife and 2-year-old daughter to take on a new job and set us up in  a new home.

Fast forward a few months.

The handy-man job our friends offered didn’t exist. I take a job as a shift manager for a Pizza Hut delivery shop (no sit-down dining room, just delivery). I’m still living with our friends and their 2-year-old son, sharing a room with him. I’m sending as much as is needed to my wife and scrimping every other penny to set up our own home in our new town. I hate it. I’m bad at my job, my boss is harsh, and in spite of living with friends, I am lonely. Extremely.

Now I’m not making any excuses. The point of this story is not to let myself off the hook. In a lot of ways, I will always be “on the hook”. But when you’re young, stupid, lonely, broke, depressed, and generally a self-centered butthead, you do stupid things.

And I did a really stupid thing. Shockingly stupid.

I had an affair. With the female friend I was living with.

 

Fast forward 10 years. Yes, 10 whole years.

The twists and turns of our life have led us to better times and now we’re living near Denver. I finished college and I have a good job with the phone company, who moved us, now the 7 of us (soon to be 8) to our newest home.

It’s 1999. The Internet is connecting us more and more with people. And one of those people is the (now separated) couple I had lived with in Phoenix.

The affair I had pretty much forgotten. Chalking it up to a stupid lonely mistake. But I had also never admitted it to my wife. I had kept it secret for 10 years. Or so I told myself. She suspected. She had always suspected. And now that we’re chatting on the Internet with these old friends, the suspicion arises anew.

And it comes to a head. And as always happens, the truth comes out. In a messy horrible episode it all came out.

My dear wife had every right to leave me. She had every right to take those kids and go back home to Iowa.

But she made a choice that I will always love her for, that I will always cherish her for, that I will always owe her everything for.

She chose to stay with me. For reasons that I can’t ever comprehend or repay, she chose to keep our family together.

But it wasn’t easy.

As I said before, I can’t tell her side of the story. It’s not my story to tell. But I can tell my side and that’s what this is about.

So we set about doing the work of keeping us together. We spoke with the senior pastor at our church and he helped us find a marriage counselor. A great Christian counselor that worked within our budget.

In the process of talking and working, all those years, the 10 years of guilting myself, of trying to keep things secret, something inside me broke. And I crashed. Hard.

My experience with sin, especially when that sin seriously hurts another person, is that it eats you. From the inside out. Unless you deal with it, unless you confess it and work at it and make amends, it will kill you. Literally. And that’s what had been happening for 10 years and I didn’t know it.

And then it was broken open, and 10 years of all that splattered all over.

During this time of counseling and talking and begging forgiveness, I got it. I got forgiveness from my wife. At least she said she did. Again, I can’t tell her story. But her actions, her love, her devotion to  me since then, has proven I was forgiven.

But there I was, splattered open. I had no right to feel anything, but there I was, hurting and bleeding, from the damage I had done to myself.

Please don’t take me wrong. I know many of you out there are saying “you were a selfish prick! You deserve all the hurt and pain! You deserve to die!”

Believe me, I know. And that was what I was telling myself.

And it got to the point there our counseling had stalled. My wife was ready to move on and do the work of rebuilding our relationship. But I was still wallowing.

Our counselor suggested I needed to do something that didn’t make sense. I needed to forgive myself.

God had forgiven me, she said. And my wife had forgiven me. I needed to accept that forgiveness and ‘get over myself’ and get to work fixing my marriage.

And that’s where my favorite scripture comes in. God had forgiven me. But how? How could I know? How could I accept that and move on?

I was a relatively new Christian (my conversion story is intertwined with this story – but that’s for another time) and I hadn’t studied the Bible much. And rather than point out me to verses to read, our counselor made me do the work. If I was going to work out my relationship with my wife, I had to start by getting off my butt and doing the work of exploring God’s word. Because only by doing it myself would I find the meaning God has for me.

So I did. I read. Really read. Not just in a “gotta get my chapters in for the day” kind of way, but actually taking every grain of meaning I could, to try to find a way to move forward. Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus. On and on. Some of these stories were familiar,  from way back in Sunday School, but most weren’t. Adam and Eve, Noah and the Ark, Parting the Red Sea, The Walls of Jerico….. great stories, but so far not very helpful.

Then I go to the story of David. King Saul, Goliath, David becoming King. And then there is a story that I don’t remember hearing in Sunday School. Probably because it isn’t a story we tell kids.

Starting in 2 Samuel, chapter 11.

The kingdom is at war. In that ageof history, you expanded or your kingdom was taken. So when winter was over, the armies went out to do their thing. Kings were supposed to lead their armies, but David stayed behind. Why? We’re not really told why. But he did. And a lot of the men were gone from the city.

And so it reads:

It happened, late one afternoon, when David arose from his couch and was walking on the roof of the king’s house, that he saw from the roof a woman bathing; and the woman was very beautiful. And David sent and inquired about the woman. And one said, “Is not this Bathsheba, the daughter of Eliam, the wife of Uriah the Hittite?”  So David sent messengers and took her, and she came to him, and he lay with her. (Now she had been purifying herself from her uncleanness.) Then she returned to her house. – Verses 2-4

So here’s David, the lazy king, loafing around, sees a woman bathing and decides to just take her. There are many layers to this story, some saying she knew she was in view of the king’s house and she willingly entered into the affair. But that’s not the point. The point is, like David, I had screwed up. So here’s David, anointed by God as King, doing the same stupid crap I had done.

You might now where the story goes from here. Bathsheba became pregnant, David has her husband killed after trying to get him to spend a night with his wife to cover up the pregnancy (and the affair), Bathsheba becomes a wife of David. David thinks he’s gotten away with it. That all is good.

Then along comes Nathan, a prophet in the court of king David. And Nathan tells a great parable.

…“There were two men in a certain city, the one rich and the other poor.  The rich man had very many flocks and herds, but the poor man had nothing but one little ewe lamb, which he had bought. And he brought it up, and it grew up with him and with his children. It used to eat of his morsel and drink from his cup and lie in his arms, and it was like a daughter to him. Now there came a traveler to the rich man, and he was unwilling to take one of his own flock or herd to prepare for the guest who had come to him, but he took the poor man’s lamb and prepared it for the man who had come to him.” – 2 Samuel 12:1-4

David thinks this story is the real deal. He gets angry.

“As the Lord lives, the man who has done this deserves to die,  and he shall restore the lamb fourfold, because he did this thing, and because he had no pity.” – Verses 5,6

David’s ready to have this guy executed. Then make him pay. He’s really angry, he’s ready to kill the guy THEN make him repay from the afterlife. That’s seriously angry.

So Nathan drops the bomb.

You are the man!

Boom. David’s been found out. His affair, that he even had a guy killed over trying to keep secret, is out in the open.  He gets the message. “I have sinned against the Lord”, he finally admits. But Nathan has more to his message. “The Lord also has put away your sin; you shall not die.”

Did you catch that? “The Lord also has put away your sin; you shall not die.”

And there it is. God, in spite of whatever I’ve done, once I acknowledge and confess my sin, He will put it away.

Now there is more to the story of David. Confession and forgiveness do not mean there are no consequences. The baby Bathsheba is carrying is going to die. We’re not told why the child dies, whether it was premature or what, just that it was afflicted and was very sick. And while it is sick, David wallows. He’s made a mess of things, and this poor child is paying the price for his sin. Even though God has said he’s “put the sin away”, David isn’t ready to move forward.

This is the place I was in when I found this story. I had confessed the sin, I knew that God had forgiven me, I knew my wife had forgiven me, but I was wallowing.

Now to be clear, the consequences of my sin did not involve a baby. If we’re drawing an exact metaphor from David to me, the consequences of my sin were my marriage and my relationship with my wife. While not “killed” exactly, it wouldn’t be the same. We’re still together, but things were different after it all came to light from where they were before.

In David’s story, the baby dies. The consequences are done. David gets up, cleans up, and moves forward.

Now maybe it’s a little weird that he did that right after the baby dies. Even his servants think David is being a little heartless in moving on so soon after the baby died.

But here’s how I see it.

David messed up, he confessed, he accepted the consequences of his sin – as cruel as they may seem – and he moved forward.

And we know from the rest of the story that God did indeed put away David’s sin. Bathsheba gets pregnant again, this time with the future king. Solomon.

So if David, king of Israel, can mess up so big, yet be forgiven and blessed again by God, why not me?

Like David I confesssed, I accepted the consequences, I cleaned up, and moved forward.

Long story short, my wife and I are still together. 28 years of marriage. We had two more kids, for a total of 8. We were extremely blessed and continue to be so.

The message I want you to take away from this story is the one I learned.

There isn’t a sin so terrible, so horrible, that God cannot or will not forgive. God forgave David. He forgave me. He will forgive you if you repent. Forgiveness does not mean you’re free of consequences, but those consequences – even if they seem terrible – are better than being stuck in the muck and mire of your sin.

If you’re struggling with something in your life, please, find help. Talk to someone. Share your difficulties. And be willing to do the work of moving ahead. You’ll be blessed for it.

Thank you for letting me share.