The great commandment is to love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength (Mark 12:30). In other words, let nothing come between you and God. Remove all that separates.
At the very beginning of creation, in the garden, we find separation occurring. Adam and Eve doubt the goodness of God and believe a lie that separates them in heart, soul, mind, and strength from God. Like them, when our actions have led us away from what’s right and good, we make “loincloths,” constructions of our own wisdom and strength, to cover ourselves. Perhaps we blame, rationalize, or deflect. But in the end all our efforts to cover ourselves only serve to further separate us from ourselves, from others, and ultimately from God. (Genesis 3:1-10)
So, like Adam and Eve, also, the only way to deal with our shame and guilt is to come out of hiding and to bring it into the light. “Where are you?,” Love asks and seeks. Not to condemn, but to forgive.
To love my spouse is to learn to come out hiding and to live in the light. To uncover rather than to cover. To let nothing separate us.
Our first reaction and tendency when we do something wrong is to run for cover and into the dark. But God will not dwell in the dark. He dwells in the light. So He calls us out of the dark. Why? God can only cover what we uncover.
For intimacy to grow in marriage, we must learn to “turn the light on”. There are physical blemishes we must learn to accept and personality blemishes we must seek to understand. But it’s the moral blemishes that we want to hide that we must make visible in order for forgiveness to do what only forgiveness can do. There are treasures in our marriage that only forgiveness can discover.
In forgiveness, we are committed to the other. We put them first, so that, as a result, we let down our guard, we put off our “loincloths”. In confession, we come into the light and in the light we see clearly where we’ve been, where we are, and where we need to go. We can repent or turn around in the right direction.
Paul writes that nothing can separate us from the love of God. Nothing external can tear us out of God’s hand and heart, because we are in Christ. We stand forgiven, no longer condemned (Romans 8:31-39). In our marriages, we can survive the external challenges and threats we face together, IF TOGETHER we refuse to hide in our hearts from each other and seek to walk in the light of Christ as He is in the light (1 John 1:7).
Let nothing separate you. Let nothing stand between you but love. Let nothing come between you but light.