Unfaithful

Every person has their list of deal-breakers in their relationship. There are some things that people just aren’t willing to deal with; no matter how much they love the other person. We’ve been taught that you have to protect your heart, even from the person we have vowed to spend the rest of our lives with. For some people that deal-breaker is when our husband/wife is unfaithful. That’s the thing that most people say they just can’t deal with because it is a betrayal of our trust. Being cheated on is the worst we think about when we say we’re going to stick around for “better or for worse” but we really have no intention of doing that.

This past week, we started the Wives in Waiting Journal Challenge and the first book of the Bible we are studying is Hosea. As soon as the book starts, we’re thrown into a strange relationship that God has called Hosea into. God told him to marry a woman that was a prostitute and that He knew would be unfaithful to her husband. She not only abandoned her husband, but she also left her children behind to pursue what she called “her lovers”.

Hosea 1:2 When the Lord began to speak through Hosea, the Lord said to him, “Go, marry a promiscuous woman and have children with her, for like an adulterous wife this land is guilty of unfaithfulness to the Lord.

What if you married a person just like this without knowing it? A person who didn’t realize how much they deserved to be loved so they went from person to person looking for something they already had at home. Everyone who is unfaithful isn’t a terrible person; some of them are just broken. They are so broken that even pure love isn’t enough to heal them. Gomer, Hosea’s wife, sold her body to try to get what she already had. If you continue to read through this book, you find that everything she thinks she’s getting from her “lovers” she already has that and more at home. She didn’t even value herself to know that she deserved to be unconditionally loved and that she didn’t have to put a price on what God has called priceless.

What would you do if you promised forever to someone who didn’t know their own worth? Someone who jumped from bed to bed and person to person to get something that you were willing and capable to do? By no means should you make infidelity okay in your relationship but you need to look past the surface of the person’s behavior and see your heart. When you promised to stick around for better or for worse and to forsake all others, you promised to stay with someone who would do exactly what Gomer did.

You may be reading this is and shaking your head but I ask you to think about how unfaithful you’ve been to God. When you’ve been unfaithful, how did God love you? How long has God pursued you with his perfect love while you went from person to person, place to place, and habit to habit trying to find something that He is willing and able to give? What have you sold your soul for when God already paid the price for your life? Your inability to understand how someone could stay in a marriage when their spouse has been unfaithful reflects your inability to truly accept God’s love for you when you have too. You should never allow anyone to disrespect you or place your life in danger .This is not an endorsement for cheating but a reflection on love and compassion.

Before you walk down the aisle to marry someone, replay this store of God’s instructions. Could you love them when they don’t understand how to be faithful? It may not be cheating, but it could be drugs, pornography, gambling, alcoholism, depression…anything that they run to instead of you and God. Your worse is going to take everything you have and some of what you don’t have to maintain what God has told you to build.

With All My Love,
Mrs. Truscott