Your response to life each day determines what kind of days you have. Bad days are simply days in which you are responding to life wrongly. The power of choice is yours!
As long as you are focused upon the faults and behavior of your spouse, “You Will Remain the Problem.” Marriage counseling will always fail when the couple is out to change each other.
God will never talk to you about your spouse without first talking to you about YOU. Jesus actually implied this when He explained that if we have a problem with someone else (such as our spouse) in whom we see a spake in their eye that needs removing, first, before you address your spouse’s spake, seek to remove the log in your own eye.
Biblical counsel sounds like this… “you” pray and “you” bless those who despitefully use you… “you” love your enemies… “you” do good to those who hurt you… “you” turn the other cheek. In other words, godly counseling addresses your response to being wronged before it ever considers the person who has wronged you.
Godly and wise marriage counseling is always about improving and correcting your own behavior and your own actions – not your spouse. Until you set out to change you, “you” will remain the problem. If “you” do not change, the problem will resurface again and again.
By default, we are born into this world crying about our needs and wants. Many are well into their adult years and are still crying about their own rights, needs, wants, and feelings. The whole world to them revolves around them. But the joy of marriage will never be realized until you learn to love your spouse more than you love yourself.
But what if my spouse really is the problem? Remember, your spouse cannot be a problem to you if you are responding in Agape Love, compassion, and empathy. A wrong response to any issue with your spouse makes you the problem. Problems are created by wrong responses to issues or circumstances that arise within marriage. My favorite quote from Bud Cassidy, “A problem is not a problem. But your reaction to the problem is the problem”.
Allow me to say once again, when you respond to an issue or negative circumstance the wrong way, you become the problem, not the issue or circumstance. Any response from you to an issue in your marriage where your response includes anger, cursing, belittling, mocking, judging, and defensiveness makes YOU the problem.
In troubled and failing marriages, you will discover a spouse that only sees and focuses upon the splinter in their mate’s eye. This is all they talk about. The splinter is all they see. The log in their own eye is rarely, if ever, considered. Without even knowing it, they become the problem.
