Speaker 1: Hey, Jimmy here, just wanting to remind everyone that despite the fact that I love giving out relationship advice, I am not a counselor. I give out relationship advice because I simply care about your relationships. I'm not selling anything. I just don't want you to make the same mistakes I did. I don't want you to hurt your spouse like I did when I cheated on her a few years ago. I don't give you advice because I think I'm better than you. I know I'm the chief sinner in the room and we were very close to divorce and she gave me a chance to rebuild trust and to heal this marriage, an opportunity that I didn't deserve. And the smartest thing that someone told me was that I was incapable of pulling that off. Didn't matter how many chances I was given, I wasn't capable of getting it right because I was unaware of what I was doing wrong. I was unaware of the underlying destructive behaviors and toxic habits that I was practicing in my marriage that will always block intimacy and friendship and trust and vulnerability and healthy communication from developing. That's the problem with self-awareness, isn't it? You can't see your issues if you have no self-awareness. Thankfully, God let me fall flat on my back so that I had nowhere to look but up. So instead of thinking that I knew everything, instead of defaulting to blaming someone else, I surrendered and started on a journey of repentance and rebuilding trust and healing this marriage and understanding how much I had hurt my wife. And along that journey, I went to counseling and I read books and for some reason, God placed a desire in my heart to learn about what actually makes relationships work in general and what makes them fail. And I finally began to see how my behaviors and my reactions and my patterns of either defensiveness or criticism or passive aggressiveness or avoidance of true vulnerability and intimacy were destroying my marriage even before I killed it with my affair. And I began to learn what love requires of all of us in a marriage. I learned what a marriage needs in order to survive. Things like respect and kindness and empathy and selflessness. And even though I'm the chief sinner in the room, I also want to be the chief repenter in the room. I want to be a leader worth following to my family. And I want to warn people that divorce is preventable and predictable. I want to warn people not to ignore the warning signs like I did. I want people to become aware of and avoid the destructive behaviors in themselves and in their spouses. But our goal isn't just to avoid them. Simply avoiding divorce or affairs doesn't actually lead to a healthy, mutually fulfilling marriage, does it? Instead, our goal is to practice healthy patterns that grow trust and grow intimacy and friendship and connection and closeness together because that's the most effective way to divorce-proof or affair-proof your marriage, isn't it? I want to warn men of the dangers of emotional avoidance and neglecting vulnerability and closeness because it will destroy your marriage whether you realize you're doing it or not. And understanding your feelings and fears and seeking to understand your wife's isn't weakness, it's strength. And you can find that out now, or you can wait until your second divorce. It's up to you. And I want my subscribers to know that I'm not a counselor. I'm not a therapist. I don't have a degree in relationships. I'm simply a failure and a sinner who is repentant and now devoted and committed towards health and growth in myself and in my marriage. And hopefully I'm pointing you towards that as well. And you don't have to take advice from sinners like me, but I beg you to take advice from someone because selfishness and arrogance and neglect and pride ruin thousands of marriages every single day. The only problem, they're subjective. And I've never met a single person who seems to struggle with any one of them. Have you? And the truth is, I can't say that I care about your relationships without first caring about your relationship with God. And it's easy to look at me and say, well, of course he needs to repent. I mean, he's a cheater. He's a sinner. But be careful because the Bible says, if you've broken one of God's laws, you've broken all of them. There aren't bad sins and less bad sins. Every sin, even the seemingly small ones fully condemn you and separate you from God for eternity. The fact that you haven't had an affair doesn't mean you aren't currently sinning or betraying your wife in the way that you talk to them or don't talk to them. You may have never cheated on them with a person, but the odds are you've cheated on them with work or your hobbies or yourself. Listen to how leading marriage psychologist, John Gottman describes betrayal in marriage. These are his examples. Putting your career ahead of your wife, coldness, selfishness, unfairness, lying, conditional love, emotional avoidance, disrespect are all examples of disloyalty and quote can lead to consequences as equally devastating as adultery. He goes on to say, quote, betrayal is a long, slow process built on secrets, unexpressed feelings and needs and moments of disconnection, even if they are unintentional because marriages die in the conversations that never happen. End quote. And we wonder why there are so many divorces. And I'm not trying to put us on level ground and say, you're just as bad as me. Absolutely not. What I did was horrible and selfish and unthinkable when it comes to loving your wife. And no, not every sin has the same consequence. And I will deal with mine in a unique way for the rest of my life. But it's also very dangerous to think to yourself, I don't have work to do because I haven't committed that sin or things are fine in my marriage because I haven't committed that sin because that's called self-righteousness and pride. And Romans eight four tells us that there is a righteous requirement for you to be made right with God and go to heaven. The only problem is the standard is perfection. The requirement is perfection, something you can never achieve regardless of how good you are from here on out. So God put on flesh in the person of Jesus and lived the perfect life that we could never live and then chose to die the death that you and I deserved. And on the cross, he cried out, it is finished, which meant that the debt that you and I owed God was paid so that anyone who looks to him, anyone who believes in him, anyone who puts their faith and their hope and their trust in Jesus alone and not their good works or their own obedience or suffering will be saved. They will be made right with God. The Bible calls that being justified before God. For we maintain that a person is justified by faith apart from the works of the law. And absolutely we are called and commanded to obey and do good works. But we do that from a right standing with God through faith, never trying to earn one. Your behavior doesn't cause your faith or salvation. It is the result of your faith and salvation. And of course it would be easier for me to just leave my faith out of all of this and just give you relationship advice. But that's not who I am. I want to be someone who points people to Jesus. I want to remind people that we're all sinners, but we have a savior who loves us. That's why the Bible says God demonstrated his love for us in this, that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. There's no sin that Jesus didn't pay for on the cross. And despite what I've done, I know I'm forgiven and loved and accepted by my heavenly father, not based on my behavior going forward, not based on my performance, but based on my faith in Jesus's life, death, and resurrection on the cross on my behalf. Thank you so much for watching, and I can't wait to see you in the next one.