We get a lot of very heavy marriage questions like this one today asking the following,

how do you care for marriages after the pain of adultery? An anonymous woman writes

in to ask it. Dear Pastor John, thank you for your podcast. My husband and I have been married

for several years and are walking alongside several other couples who are struggling.

We pray for them often and do the best we can to encourage them to seek the Holy Spirit's

leading in their lives while also keeping healthy boundaries in what we can give.

Specifically, do you have any advice for couples impacted by adultery?

These are the hardest questions for us to handle. How can trust be rebuilt?

From your pastoral experience, what are some biblical realities and hopes that we could use to

serve couples whose marriages are falling apart due to the devastating sin of infidelity?

Two things about this question make me especially thankful and it's not the pain of the adultery

being addressed. First, it's that this couple has enough courage and compassion to lean in to

other people's sorrow rather than leaning away, which is the easy thing to do. And second,

they're not assuming that divorce is the right counsel. We live in a day where people are trying,

it seems to me, to see divorce as more legitimate rather than less legitimate and I am thankful

that's not the way this couple is leaning. Some would say that adultery has been committed and

that's a pass for divorce. So there you go. Take your biblical pass and leave.

I don't think adultery is a biblical pass for divorce. I think our counsel should always be

to encourage the highest level of faithfulness according to Jesus' words to Peter

when he asked, Lord, how often will my brother sin against me and I forgive him as many as seven

and Jesus said to him, I do not say he used seven times, but 77 times, Matthew 1821.

77 is not meant to be a limit. It's meant to say more often than you think, Peter.

...