Our Real Problem in Marriage...and Most Everything Else

Allow me to riff off of something that my former pastor, Steve Shelby, used to say. When marriages are struggling, conventional wisdom tends to point to one issue--communication.

But here's the deal: communication is not your main problem in your marriage. Your main problem is that your both sinners. You could communicate perfectly and it still wouldn't fix your marriage. You'd still be broken, messy people with messed up motives, hard-wired with the desire to manipulate the other, full of pride, anxiety, fear, and selfishness that wrecks marriage...and all the rest of our relationships.

Ergo, apart from repentance, there is no healing in marriage.

This mis-diagnosis plays out not only in marriage. "Mis-communication" gets blamed for all sorts of things in our culture as we gave done away with any cultural concept of sin. Sometimes with results that would be hilarious if it weren't all so tragic.

Last spring, for example, on campus at UNC one student group brought in an extremely conservative speaker who was speaking against immigration. Another group (made up of some students, some townies) protested and ended up disrupting the event--calling the speaker (and the sponsoring student organization) racist. A couple of folks got arrested.

In the paper the next day, one student leader was quoted as saying, "I think that we've got a good bit of mis-communication."

Uh, no we don't. I think we're communicating loud and clear.

But without a category for sin, we're stuck--with the only correct diagnosis not available to us ("sin" has been taken off the table by our own cultural volition), we're stuck with options that are weak and, put bluntly, wrong.

Incorrect diagnosis, of course, means that we can't cure the real problem--as anyone who plays a doctor on t.v. could tell you. Without recognition of sin, we cannot repent. No repentance, no peace.

So as Christians, we must not be shy of calling sin what it is--sin. This is a good gift for our culture. And we must be equally eager to invite people into the offer on the table for healing and right relationship. That is, we are to call sin sin, and we are to speak the good news: the invitation to everyone to repent, be reconciled to God and serve and love one another--even in the context of legitimate disagreement.

True, this diagnosis (calling something "sin") has been mis-handled at times--there is such a thing as mis-communication, for example, and it does cause problems. But the abuse of something should not therefore eliminate it's availability for proper use.