In like fashion, repentance is also an active choice of the will. There are times, many times, when it feels easy to love. By contrast, we never feel like repenting. If we waited for our feelings to align in order to repent of sin in our marriage against God and our spouse, I fear we would never be moved sufficiently to do so.

Anytime I’m asked about my wife—whether at work, at school, or elsewhere—and what she does, I always excitedly reply, “Well, she’s a counselor; a Biblical counselor.” I labor to make the point—so as to ensure no one is left confused or misinformed—that all her work as a counselor must be understood within an explicitly Biblical worldview. This conversation starter typically makes for an easier transition into further conversations with the individual about God, the Bible, and the Gospel. They might not like it (hint: they seldom do), but at the very least this clarification sets the tone for the rest of the dialogue.

By emphasizing the Biblical counselor’s emphasis on sin, the need for repentance, and the hope of the Gospel through faith in Jesus Christ, it becomes somewhat more natural in conversation to then turn the focus back onto the individual I’m speaking with and emphasize their own need for reconciliation with the Lord. Although, as you can imagine, folks tend to tune out or have mysterious appointments to keep—“Oh look at the time, I have to go!”—the moment words like “sin” and “repent” are introduced into a conversation. Indeed, people perk up when they hear my wife is a counselor because they are eager to talk about themselves and their feelings, only to withdraw the moment the focus is drawn away from their emotions and onto their own sin. People love to recount their lives in these sorts of conversations, but shut down all dialogue out of hatred for the very thought that they will have to one day give an account for the way in which they lived their lives before the Lord Jesus Christ.

Elaina, my wife, has been in the counseling world for a number of years now, though it’s been only over the past year that she’s begun counseling in an official capacity. However, it took no time at all to discover that, as a woman who only counsels other women, the majority of her counseling sessions were going to be with women who were struggling in their marriages. These marital struggles come about for a myriad of reasons and are often times exceedingly complex to tease out—we are, after all, selfish sinners who are boundless in our capacity to destroy ourselves and others outside of the grace of God. But, setting aside all these nuances, permit me to speak absolutely plainly for a moment when I say that most of these marital issues, as seemingly complex as they may at first appear, are in reality far more simple than we’d like to admit: namely, it really all comes down to a failure and refusal to repent.

Marriages grow cold not because husband and wife begin falling out of love, but because they begin falling out of repentance. The failure to repent is the failure to love; and the failure to love is, you guessed it, tied to the failure to repent of sin in your marriage. The sin-swept wane of many years and the hardening effects of bitterness left unchecked and unrepented of render many husbands and wives cold and callous, unable and unwilling to turn from sin.

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