Grace Begins at Home, and So Does Safety

Bearing the cross doesn’t mean bearing the bruises

Recently, there was a sermon at a church I won’t name, given by a pastor I won’t publicly call out, because that’s not really what this blog is for. But the sermon was really something. It covered the topic of abuse in the home, and our pastor friend started out with a declaration that “abuse is terrible,” and made clear he wasn’t endorsing it (and thank God for that). He then went on to talk about what Jesus had to say about loving our enemies. In his view, when Jesus said to love your enemy, He meant that if they are abusing you, you should just take it.

Insofar as a wife is suffering abuse from her husband, whether physical or emotional, she is called to “love” her husband by remaining with him and suffering at his hands. This is, in his words, a way of behaving as Christ would, since He suffered at the hands of His enemies, bearing horrific abuse through scourging and beatings, and then finally being crucified, and He took it all without protest or resistance. Therefore, we should not seek to escape our marriages if our partner is abusing us. “You’ll notice that Jesus didn’t say love your enemies unless, of course, they abuse you, and then all bets are off,” is one notable excerpt from this very notable sermon.

He makes the point (well, more accurately, he makes the argument) that abuse is a “trigger” word that gets tossed around far too easily and broadly, and strongly implies that when women complain of being abused by their husbands, they’re often being too quick to call it abuse. He then drops this bombshell of a statement: “As a pastor, if I had a dollar for every time somebody asked me about divorce and whether or not abuse was biblical grounds for divorce, I would be a very wealthy man. And it’s interesting that they don’t ask about other possible grounds for divorce, but abuse is the number one question that I get.”

The implication here is that the fact that these women are seeking an escape from the abuse through divorce reveals a lot more about their weakness of character than their husband’s behavior. He goes on to add that abuse is not, in his view, biblical grounds for divorce, so sorry, abused wife, you are stuck with this man until he either stops abusing you or you die, because God will be unhappy with you if you leave him for using you as a punching bag. The takeaway is that “grace begins in the home,” and therefore, the abused wife must extend this grace to her abusive husband.

Defend the poor and fatherless; do justice to the afflicted and needy. Deliver the poor and needy; free them from the hand of the wicked.

Psalm 82:3-4 NKJV

I wasn’t originally going to write this post because I didn’t feel I had much to add to what has already been said about this sermon, this pastor, and this church, whose leadership has apparently not voiced any disagreement or even concern about what was preached in this sermon. So, I guess that means they stand behind these words, and if you are suffering marital abuse, and you are a member of this church, you’d better look elsewhere if you want support. Much has been said about this already. I feel woefully unqualified to add to it.

Except that I have been a member of this church, and I have been present for this sermon. Not this specific church, or this specific sermon, or this specific pastor, but it’s really the same church culture, the same views, the same messaging that God elevates marriage over our mental, emotional, and spiritual health, and our safety. This sermon was preached decades ago when I was a teenager, sitting on one of many folding chairs in the school gym our church met in because we didn’t have our own building yet. My pastor was someone I looked up to and admired greatly, and up to this point, if he preached it, I believed it was true without question. He was giving a sermon about this very topic in which he explained that a wife enduring abuse from her husband was called to remain with him and “suffer for Jesus”. If he ultimately killed her, well, then she was a “martyr for Jesus”.

Even at such a tender age as 16, naively absorbing all the teachings of my church without comparing them to Scripture, I could still sense alarm bells going off in my head hearing this message being preached. As much as I admired my pastor, I still couldn’t bring myself to agree with what he was saying right in front of me, in front of the two hundred or so people in the audience. And no one, not the church elders, not anyone in the congregation, spoke up to say they had a problem with any of it. Listening to the excerpts from this other sermon so many years later felt like being in that room again, listening to my pastor say without a trace of irony that a woman had no right to leave her husband if he was beating her because God hates divorce more than He hates seeing an abuser hurting His children.

The truth is that this is a message that has been making the rounds for a very long time. It evolves and takes on new arguments. Sometimes it gets tied to “woke” culture as if there was something woke about saying that years of letting your partner physically and verbally harm you are finally enough and you aren’t taking any more of it. Given how many Christian conservatives are calling into Fox and Friends about their voices being silenced in public forums online and how they feel abused by the mainstream media and the justice system, I am not sure that the idea of silently taking abuse without complaint or opposition is something that has taken hold in a broader context within this community, but I digress.

Let me stop here and address something before I go further. I am going to use language that involves male-on-female violence because there is a wealth of data that shows that this is by far the most common form of domestic violence. I’m also doing this because the majority of the messaging on this topic in the church has to do with this type of domestic violence. That choice of language is not meant to avoid or refuse to acknowledge that wives do sometimes abuse their husbands, even physically, nor to downplay such abuse. So I’ll just make my position clear: Abuse, regardless of who is perpetrating it on whom, is wrong, period. You can take anything I write in this piece and apply it to both types of abuse. But the fact is that when we talk about it, we usually talk about the abuse a wife suffers at the hands of her husband, and that is how I’m going to refer to it here on out.

Here is a hypothetical situation I’d like those to offer those who take this view, that a battered or emotionally abused wife should show “grace” to her husband by not seeking to flee his abuse. A random stranger kicks your door down and starts beating you up. What do you do? If we are to follow the example of how to respond to abuse with grace as given in this sermon, what can we do to show grace to our abuser in this context? Allow him to keep on hitting and kicking you? Cry out and call for help? If we are supposed to endure abuse without complaint, can we even do that much? Perhaps there is some allowance for getting away from our attacker in this scenario. AFter all, you’re not married to the guy, he’s just some random, violent psychopath who broke into your home. What if your family is also there? What if, dare I go there, you own a gun? Do you get to use that gun to put two rounds in the attacker’s chest to protect yourself and your family from harm?

Let’s get real. The Venn diagram of gun owners and those who consider themselves Evangelical Christians has a huge amount of overlap. It stands to reason that many of the people who preach or agree with this teaching are themselves gun owners. If you were to ask them why they own a gun, most, if not all, would respond that they own it for self-defense. Why would they think they have the right to defend themselves in this context when a wife has no right to even leave her husband who is hitting her? The same people who will cheer them for using lethal force to defend themselves and their family would then turn around and argue that a wife shouldn’t leave her husband for doing the same thing to her.

Another question for the pastor who gave this sermon. If you have had so many women come to you for counsel about what to do about the domestic abuse happening to them in their home, should your first response be to think, “This woman is just looking to get out of her marriage, and I need to talk her out of it?” If I may be so bold, perhaps your mind should instead be going to wondering how this became such a widespread problem in your church and what you are going to do about it. Perhaps there should be some thought to what she has endured, what her children (if she has them) might have witnessed, and how that’s affecting their mental, physical, and emotional health, not to mention their perception of God’s heart for their well-being. Maybe, dare I say, your initial response should be “What would make you you feel safe?”

To be sure, loving our enemies does not include seeking to punish them, or act in a way motivated by spite. We show grace to our enemies by refusing to bow to our desire to inflict pain on them as they did to us. We show them mercy and grace by continuing to be kind toward them and doing for them as we would want done to us. But relationships are not immune from abuse, and Jesus Himself instructed that when wronged by someone we give them a chance to repent and change their ways, and if they refuse that chance, then they are to be treated as we would an unbeliever (Matthew 18:17). That doesn’t mean we hate them or act hostile toward them, but we do change our relationship with them. When a friend betrays you, you can forgive them, but are you likely to trust them again? We’re not called to be friends with our enemies, and we’re certainly not called to live with them or sleep with them. I should add that I strongly do not endorse the idea that you should “Matthew 18” your abuser by confronting them alone.

But if he refuses even to hear the church, let him be to you like a heathen and a tax collector.

Matthew 18:17 NKJV

When Jesus speaks about loving your enemies, He doesn’t mean that we are to enable them to continue to sin. When an employee of a business steals from that business, no one suggests the business owner do nothing and let the employee keep stealing from them, and keep that employee on payroll as if nothing was going on. If the business owner separates him or herself from that employee by terminating their employment, it’s seen as a rational decision. Many would point out that that former employee may gain insight from that outcome that they need to behave honestly in the future. It might even be described as an act of love toward this person to have fired him.

Yet, if a wife who has endured physical beatings or emotional abuse from her husband separates from her husband, in these churches she has is seen as having committed a grave sin by endangering or ending the marriage. Is it really showing love to such a husband for his wife to remain at home providing companionship and sexual intimacy to the one who is daily abusing her? Leaving this man is not a spiteful thing to do that serves to punish him. It sends him a message that his actions have consequences, and separates the object of his abuse from him so he cannot continue in his sin. It forces him to see the results of his abusive behavior.

Abusers almost always deny they are even abusing anyone. The thing that really gets their attention and drives them toward change (if anything) is when the person they are abusing says “No more” and walks out of their life. Maybe there is room for genuine repentance and even reconciliation after this, but only after a real heart change has occurred. The really crucial relationship that needs restoring in the abuser’s case is between him and God. If his wife simply silently endures his abusive behavior toward her, that spiritual relationship with his Father remains broken. We can actually stand in the way of God’s will that the relationship with Him be repaired when we enable the wrongdoer to continue in his sin unopposed.

A man of great wrath will suffer punishment; for if you rescue him, you will have to do it again.

Proverbs 19:19 NKJV

Do not be deceived, God is not mocked; for whatever a man sows, that he will also reap.

Galatians 6:7 NKJV

I would be remiss to not point out that often there are children in these homes as well. It’s naive to suggest that if a man is abusing his wife, the person he made a lifetime commitment to love and cherish and protect, that he’s going to hold himself back from harming his children also. If it hasn’t happened yet, it will. Oddly, when I hear these kinds of sermons, I never seem to hear how children come into it. The wife has to suffer her husband’s fists and words, but conveniently the children appear to be unaffected by all this taking place in their home, right in front of them. Or to them.

One thing that anyone who works with admitted abusers will tell you is that most of them have a back story that involves them being abused by their parents during their childhood. Or watching their mothers be abused by their fathers or stepfathers or her partner. It leaves a lasting impression on them that women and children need to be managed with a heavy hand, because that is the baseline model they learned from. When we protect family abusers like these from accountability, we are helping to raise the next generation of abusers downstream of them. Another notch on the church’s belt to take pride in.

Grace does begin at home. I hope that someone reading this who has endured this teaching while simultaneously being abused in their home will come to understand that the greatest grace they can show their partner is to run, not walk, to a safe place. I hope and pray that they don’t confuse the kind of cheap, false grace that lacks accountability for the abuser and enables them to continue in their sin, for the very real grace that God gives to us to remove the opportunity for sin and be safe. I hope and pray they give their abusers grace by forcing them to confront their terrible sin by leaving, or at least forcing them to do without them as a target.

The thief does not come except to steal, and to kill, and to destroy. I have come that they may have life, and that they may have it more abundantly.

John 10:10 NKJV

I said earlier I felt unqualified to say much about the topic of domestic abuse itself. I can’t say what it feels like to be abused by my spouse, and I haven’t served as a counsellor to those who have. But I can say what it feels like to be in the room when a sermon like this one is being preached because I’ve been in that room, and I can say what it feels like to be in a church that preaches this message without opposition because I have been a part of that church. What it feels like is that the community that is supposed to protect you from those who hurt you doesn’t know the difference between the wolf and the sheep. You don’t have to be the one being abused to recognize that if you ever were, this church family is not going to have your back. And that is one reason I stopped attending church regularly for decades.

I’m not that kid any more. Today, I am back in a church, and that other church, that pastor and that sermon are a distant memory. But I can also say what it feels like to hear this same message still being taught, so many years later. It feels like wanting to throw up.

God, give us the grace to discern evil from good, and understand You and Your heart well enough to know You desire to protect the oppressed and abused, and to deliver them, and their abusers, from their situation. Help us to understand the grace You offer to us is designed to heal and restore us, in relationship, in body, mind and soul.