(PART 2)
If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through his Spirit who dwells in you.
ROMANS 8:11
In the previous devotion we began the story of Hans and Star Molegraff, a couple seemingly without hope in their marriage. But one thing we’ve seen countless times over our lifetime is that nothing is hopeless when Jesus Christ shows up. If Christ can overcome death, He can defeat any problem you two are facing.
After Hans was confronted with his sin while meeting with a counselor, his life began to change. And Star didn’t know how to respond. She was enjoying her new life separate from Hans, and she was dating another man. But she couldn’t help noticing the transformation in Hans. “He was becoming the man I always dreamed he would be, but there was such severe brokenness in our relationship that I wasn’t certain I could ever have an intimate relationship with him again.”
Surely, Star thought, this change wasn’t real. She tried to provoke Hans’s anger, anticipating he would respond as he had in the past. She wanted everyone to see he had not changed. “I can remember throwing everything that he had ever done into his face. . . . He would just say, ‘I know. I know. I am so sorry.’”
Star decided to see the same counselor that Hans was meeting with, figuring it was a necessary step toward getting the divorce she wanted. “I vented to him everything that Hans had ever done to me and just every reason why there was no way this could work.” Her thinking was, Certainly God would not want me in a marriage where I am miserable.
Finally the counselor said, “Star, I need to ask you something.”
“Okay, what?”
“I need to ask you if you believe that Jesus Christ was raised from the dead.”
“Yes, I believe that.”
“You don’t hear what I am asking you,” the counselor said. “Do you believe it? Do you believe that God took that dead man out of the grave, raised Him to life so that He could save you?”
“Yes! I believe that.”
“You think God can take a dead man—raise Him to life again to save you—but you don’t think that same God can heal your marriage?”
That was the moment everything changed. “Part of my heart was opened up in a way that it had never been opened up before,” she recalls. “I remember wondering, What if God could do it? What if He could give me what I had always wanted in our marriage?”
Hans and Star began to connect with each other—love each other, enjoy each other. She confessed her affair and was astonished to see Hans forgive her instead of exploding in jealousy and anger. “I realized that she is responsible for her actions, but in my mind, I really saw it as my fault,” Hans explains. “I had seen the way that I had treated her for the first 18 months of our marriage. I didn’t blame her for having an affair. I was not a loveable man.”
Hans was applying the truth of Ephesians 4:32, which commands: “Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you.” As Hans says, “How could I have not forgiven her? In this stage of my life, my sin was so exposed in my life, and I saw and was receiving God’s forgiveness for everything that I had done. . . . How could I not give that same forgiveness away?”
From that point on, Hans and Star were, in Hans’s words, “on fire for the Lord” and “on fire for each other.” They went through counseling together, and they attended a Weekend to Remember marriage getaway sponsored by FamilyLife. “It totally blew me away that God really had a plan for marriage,” Star says, “that we could do it His way and that it could work—that I didn’t just have to survive—that I didn’t just have to stay with this man because it was the right thing to do but that we could have something beautiful.”
Hans and Star were part of a group of friends from high school who all married at about the same time. Today they are the only couple of the group still married. A marriage without hope—a marriage that, humanly speaking, should have broken apart—is thriving because two people turned from their selfishness and believed that God could work in their lives and resurrect their marriage. Two broken people surrendered to Christ.
If God has the power to raise His Son from the dead, is there any problem in your life and in your relationship that He cannot heal?
Discuss