If you cheated and can't forgive yourself, guilt is making you sabotage the relationship. Three steps: treat forgiveness as medicine, dig into why you did it, and rebuild trust by refusing to quit on the marriage.
So here you are, you were unfaithful. You're unfaithful and now you can't forgive yourself for what you've done. You can't forgive yourself. You don't realize that that whole process of not forgiving yourself has caused you to sabotage the relationship. You feel so guilty and so ashamed about what you did that you can't let it go. And so now you just think to yourself, well, I'm mad, it might as well just throw it down the drain. So what do you do? You start to throw away a good thing. Let me ask you, when you want to throw away something that you still know holds weight and value in your life, that you still know that you need, you still know that you want, you still are connected to, and there's this part of you that just can't let it go, but you watch yourself slowly destroy that very thing that you love, that you care about, that you invested in, that you put everything into. And as you watch yourself start to destroy this very thing, you start to become somebody that you don't respect. You know, you start to become somebody that you can't even look in the mirror, you can't even look into their eyes with the same fondness, the same level of respect Because you're watching that person destroy something that you sacrificed your whole life for. How would you feel if a stranger did that to your relationships? And now here you are, and you're the culprit. You're the perpetrator. So you can't let it go. So you can't put the cart before the horse. What's the process? The first— the process is you have to learn to work through that stuff and learn to forgive yourself. And I didn't say accept what you did or be okay with it. I said forgive it. And what's the process of forgiveness? Is it's literally realizing it's like holy medicine. It's dialysis for your soul and spirit, and you deserve that. But you need to first understand why it happened in the first place? Why are you going outside of a dynamic to get your needs met? Maybe it's because the fracture that took place in the beginning, you were partly responsible for. And 9 times out of 10, that, that's the case. And then you come back into this dynamic and you want to make it work, but there's so many trust issues that you just doubt whether or not it can. Your marriage isn't dead yet, and neither are you. And if you're not dead, then God's not done. And if you believe in restoration, if you believe in redemption in your relationships, then I want to tell you today that it is possible. That's not a figment of your imagination. That's not some grandiose idea. That's not some fantasy world that you live in. You can correct it. But see, you were called to be a strong leader. You were called to not surrender. You were called to not throw in the towel on the very thing in your life that you dreamed of as a young man. You're not a quitter. So why are you giving up?
