Husband,
will you save your wife?
By Chris Wagner
I grew up in the Roman Catholic Church, regularly
attending Mass on Sundays and going to confession. However I never
read the Scripture and I was never exposed to the truth of the
Gospel of Jesus Christ.
I was searching. Oftentimes I looked up to the
sky after hearing on the news about different things going on in the
world. “Lord, what’s going on? This is nuts.” I called Him
Lord even before I knew Him personally as my Lord and Savior. I had
no idea what was really happening in the world. I was as lost as I
could possibly be even though I was a religious person. Eventually I
stopped attending church altogether.
The Lord worked in me through the witness of a
dear brother in Christ who would come to my home to share Christ and
my need for Him. I listened, yet I just wasn’t ready to surrender
myself to Him. I remember traveling the hour to and from school in
the evenings and listening to the news and thinking to myself, “I
just don’t understand.”
Then 9/11 happened and my world as I knew it was
shaken. Suddenly my mortality looked at me face to face and I was
petrified. I didn’t know what to do and I walked around my office
thinking much the same as before – “This is nuts! What’s going
on?” I didn’t have any answers, but thanks be to God, there was
a woman in my office who always been very cordial and nice to me.
She kept walking around, saying, “I’m so glad I’m saved.”
She said the same words repeatedly. I was so curious and intrigued
that I felt compelled to ask what she meant. I will always remember
her answer: “Chris, I’m going to tell you the same thing someone
told me once – do you think that that Man came down here from
heaven and hung on that cross so that you could do it yourself?”
I was floored. I’d never been convicted in that
way about Christ, and for the first time in my life, I
actually understood the sacrifice Christ made for me and the manner
of grace God had shown me in sending His Son to die in my place for
my sins. I remember thinking in my heart that I needed to get right
with God – right now. I went upstairs in my office. There
was a gentleman in the office directly across from me who had the
door open, but at that point I just couldn’t care whether he was
looking at me or not. I needed to talk to God!
I bowed my head, with eyes closed, and confessed
my sins to God and placed my faith in Jesus Christ alone that very
moment. I felt like such a weight had been removed from my
shoulders, and the Lord had truly taken the scales off my eyes. I
immediately began to understand spiritual things that I had never
understood before. I couldn’t get enough of God’s Word. I
studied everything I could get my hands on.
If I believed in coincidence, I would have used
that word. But I don’t. As I learned what the Scriptures said and
taught, I knew in my heart of hearts that I could not stay in
the Roman Catholic Church. So, fearfully but obediently, I left my
wife, to whom I had been married for a short time, at the Catholic
church there, and started attending a Bible church in my area.
In all honesty I admit that it was one of the
hardest things I ever did. I was miserable. I was in such agony over
her soul and the fact that I couldn’t seem to get her to respond
to reason from the Scripture. But then I received some very good
counsel about letting God handle the situation. So I entrusted her
to God.
God did one of the most amazing things. I had the
privilege of leading my two eldest children to Christ. But God had
more blessings in store for me. My wife came to my baptismal service
even though at that time she did not understand its meaning of
believers’ baptism. Yet something began to happen. God was making
her heart tender to the Gospel, and she began to come with me to
church more often. As she attended more and more, she seemed to
worry less and less about attending the Catholic Church, until at
one point, she just stopped going there altogether.
As I prepared with our pastor to have the
children baptized as well, he came to consult with them about their
salvation experience and to orient them to believer’s baptism.
After he finished talking to the children (we were all seated at our
home), the pastor asked my wife if there was ever a time when she
had trusted Christ as her Lord and Savior. The answer was the one I
had been waiting for a long time. She explained that it had been
several weeks before that she trusted completely in Christ. The
pastor then asked what helped her make that decision. She answered
plainly, “It came down to a choice for me – was I going to
believe what the Catechism taught or the Word of God? I chose the
Word of God.” Praise be to God for His goodness to us!
Our family has been attending a Bible church ever
since. If you have an unbelieving spouse, or you are struggling with
an issue of separation of churches in your home, please take heart
in these words – God can change your spouse, especially
when we can’t see the end of it. He did mine. Take to heart what
the apostle Paul says in 1 Corinthians 7:12-16, especially verse 16:
“If any brother has a wife who does not
believe, and she is willing to live with him, let him not divorce
her. And a woman who has a husband who does not believe, if he is
willing to live with her, let her not divorce him. For the
unbelieving husband is sanctified by the wife, and the unbelieving
wife is sanctified by the husband; otherwise your children would be
unclean, but now they are holy. But if the unbeliever departs, let
him depart; a brother or a sister is not under bondage in such
cases. But God has called us to peace. For how do you know, O
wife, whether you will save your husband? Or how do you know, O
husband, whether you will save your wife?”
We may not see the impact that our witness has on
others, especially those we live with since we see them each and
every day. But through godly living and a faithful personal
testimony, who knows what the Lord will do?
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