An anonymous woman writes to ask, quote,

My life as a Christian seems to be causing a greater and greater divide with my unsaved husband and young adult children.

How do I say faithful to God and live peacefully with my family?

I've been praying for their salvation for years.

Pastor John, what would you say?

Well, there are underneath pains in life greater than the pain of family pain and children pain and marriage pain.

I've often said in the ministry to know, well, you know, if you're happy at home, know, well, I can do anything at church.

And I think that's the way a lot of spouses feel like if work is bringing their misery or if society is bringing the misery.

And they have a place to go at home where there's peace and harmony.

They can almost stand anything, but if the home is broken, then where do you turn?

So I totally resonate with the urgency and the pain of these kinds of situations.

So the first thing that comes to my mind is that Jesus said it's going to be this way for some of us in Matthew 10.

I did not come, do not think I came to bring peace on the earth.

I came to bring a sword and then he illustrated that by saying a man is going to be turned against his son and a daughter against her mother and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law.

Your enemies will be those of your own household.

So what this woman is experiencing was totally foreseen by Jesus and he says it's just going to happen.

As the gospel enters into the world, it doesn't always neatly save couples.

It saves one half of the couple.

It saves a son or it saves an uncle and then there's pain and there's division.

As tension begins to happen, the text that addresses her situation most clearly, of course, is for Speeder 3,

where you have Peter very concerned to help a wife who's been saved and her husband is not with her in this.

And as I've reflected on that text, the center of it seems to tell her that the holy women of old, giving her an example, hoped in God.

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