Therapy and Theology

Shae Hill: Hi friends, thanks for tuning in to the Therapy & Theology Podcast brought to you by Proverbs 31 Ministries, where we help you work through what you walk through. I'm your host, Shae Hill, and I'm so grateful that you're tuning in today.

Friends, this is our very first episode of season 10, where all season long, you're going to hear conversations discussing the dynamics surrounding the heartbreaking reality of divorce. These conversations have been inspired by the very first ever therapy and theology book that will release this November, 2025. And it's called, Surviving an Unwanted Divorce, a biblical practical guide to letting go while holding yourself together, co-written by your friends on the podcast, Lysa, Dr. Joel, and Jim. Whether you've personally experienced the death of own marriage, been affected by divorce through your family of origin, or walking closely with loved ones who may be in their own devastating season, or you're a Christian who has a lot of questions around this topic. I want you to know that you're welcome here and these conversations are gonna give you a lot to think about.

Before we jump in, want to make sure you know about a new opportunity that I can't let you pass up on, and that is that you can now subscribe to new therapy and theology episodes. There's a link in our show notes below where you can enter your email address and you'll be notified as soon as a new episode is available, which is so exciting. And by doing this, we'll deliver those episodes straight to your inbox. So make sure you subscribe and stay connected with us. And this is a great time to do it since we're releasing a new season and those episodes will be dropping every week.

Okay, without further ado, let's hear from Lysa, Jim, and Joel.

Lysa TerKeurst: Today's topic is a very challenging one, but a necessary one, divorce. You know, divorce is the deepest hurt I have ever, ever known. And yet sometimes it feels like the hurt of divorce is not always tolerated, certainly not understood.

But I'll say, I've started to see a shift. One of those shifts happened when I was speaking at a church in Dallas and the pastor said to me, after asking me, we were doing a Q and A, after asking me several questions, he asked me, Lysa, what do you wish the church knew about divorce? And that meant so much to me. I literally had tears in my eyes because no one had ever asked me that question before.

You know, there's so much hurt out there around this topic and I wish with all my heart that I did not have any kind of experiential wisdom to offer, but I do. And so together, Jim, Dr. Joel, together, we wanna be a source of connection for you. And especially if you find yourself in this place or you know someone who is walking through an unwanted divorce.

Right from the beginning of this new season of episodes, I want to make sure that it's not our words, but God's words that are starting place. As we look at God's truth, we don't want to use his truth to be the proof of some kind of agenda that we bring to the topic of divorce. Instead, we want to take an honest look at what the Bible says and does not say about this very delicate topic. Like we always say on therapy and theology, we don't want to tell you what to think.

We wanna give you a lot to think about. And even beyond that, we wanna give you things to talk about less from an opinionated point of view and much more from an informed point of view. So can we all just agree right now that we are gonna set aside our agenda that maybe we brought to this episode and we're gonna try to go straight to the text, not to prove or disprove anything, but just to find out what does God's Word actually say about this topic. Okay, so let's dive right in and Joel, we're first gonna turn to you.

Joel Muddamalle: All right, well, we've got kind of a very important and somewhat of a heavy topic today. We're gonna ask this question, does God actually hate divorce? And I know when I say that, for some of you, you're like panicking maybe a little bit because either this is a phrase that you've heard, it might even been a phrase that you've said because it's been taught to you. And so I just want to start by saying that this conversation requires such immense amount of humility. And in fact, any conversation that comes to the Scriptures and come to the people of God require humility. But this specifically, and this is why, just as Lysa, you said, we're going to start with the text.

Before we get into the question of divorce, I want to just give a very important disclaimer from Jim's heart, from Lysa's heart, and my own. We both, all three of us, co-authored a book, Surviving an Unwanted Divorce, and there was a real intentionality in how we approached it, and I want to communicate that with you as well. We believe in God's ideal for marriage. Absolutely. We are people that love marriage. We believe that God has given that to us as an image to point to Jesus, and Jesus' self-sacrificial love for his bride, the church. And so, we are pro-marriage, and we also truly believe that there are situations and circumstances where that ideal of marriage has been not only compromised, but it's actually destructive and is now in a series and situation of chaos. And the good news is that the Scriptures give us a navigation point to unpack that, and that's what we want to do today. And so, in light of that, I actually want us to start all the way in the beginning of Genesis chapter one. And Genesis one starts with this incredible creation story, creation narrative. And it's really interesting that seven times in Genesis chapter one, we've got the phrase that it was good. And so here are all these things that God is creating. It was good, it was good, it was good. And then what I find fascinating, it's almost like y'all, you know, at Christmas, what is the last ornament that you put on your Christmas tree?

Jim Cress: Baby's first Christmas. The last one that I put on. I have more grandchildren coming. So if I were to give them that, I can.

Joel Muddamalle: Sometimes I can't with you.

Lysa TerKeurst: The last one I put on, this is not part of the script, so I might give you the wrong answer too. But the last one I put on is the star on the top.

Joel Muddamalle: That's right. The star on –

Jim Cress: That's not an ornament though.

Joel Muddamalle: Jim, are actually derailing me right now. No, like if you're 90 % of the people that live in the United States that celebrate Christmas maybe, you're doing what Lysa and I do, which is put the star on the top. And the reason why we put the star on the top, it's to be like, we're done. Like this is the thing that is the most glorious. And then you turn on the, it's like, wow, this is awesome. I just want to point out that this is somewhat of the methodology that God actually gives us with creation. He creates all of these things and they're all so good. but the cherry on top, the star on top is actually the creation of man and woman. And we know this because at the very end in verses 26 through 27, Genesis 1, it says, according to our likeness. And these are two very important words that I want you guys to highlight or underline in your Bibles. It's image and likeness. m In Hebrew, those words are shelem and demut. And yes, Lysa, I can hear you in the back of...

Lysa TerKeurst: Can you please spell it for our note takers?

Joel Muddamalle: Absolutely. In fact, I'm going to spell it myself so that I know how to do it. So it's a T-S-E-L-E-M, shelem and demut. D-E-M-U-T. And these two words... image and likeness were so important in the ancient Near Eastern world, which is the context of the Old Testament. These were two words that were used specifically to identify royal children of the king. I want y'all to just sit with that for a second. That the creation story starts with your creation, Adam and Eve, our four parents, our, you know, the origin story of all of humanity.
And it starts with telling us something about ourselves. ah That humanity was created in the likeness and image that we are royal children of the King of heaven and earth. Now here's something that can happen though. You can read this and you can be like, well, God created man in this image. That's kind of our modern vernacular, right? God created man in our image. And in our understanding, we can be tempted to think, well, God created male in his image as if man. Now the Hebrew word man, Adam, it's actually a reference to humanity.

But what I love about the Scriptures is the details. Look at 27. It says, So God created man in his own image. He created him in the image of God. He created them, male and female. And this lets us know right from the get that both man and both woman, they have the image and the likeness of God, that there is dignity and there is worth and there is honor. And this is something that a good father bestows on them.

Lysa TerKeurst: I think that's so important, Joel, because otherwise, if we don't understand this, it can feel like we are just subjects, you know, subjects of a distant God. That's right. But that's not at all. The text is inviting us to understand not only that we are made male and female in the likeness and image of God, but that we are actually his children. And that's such an important distinctive.

Joel Muddamalle: It's really important. And then, you know, again, for the creation story, the familiar understanding is that woman came from Adam. Y'all remember, Jim, do not derail me. Y'all remember what part of the body that we would normally understand that Eve came from? The?

Lysa TerKeurst: The side or the rib?

Jim Cress: The back, rib. The rib. Or side.

Joel Muddamalle: Yeah, okay.

Jim Cress: Back on track.

Joel Muddamalle: Most of us would say, the rib. Now, I don't know if any of you have ever hurt your rib before? of you? Yes. Yes? Painful? Very. Okay. But you can live? Yep. And you're breathing?

Lysa TerKeurst: Yes, not coughing. Not able to cough.

Jim Cress: Or laugh.

Joel Muddamalle: Okay. So this is one of those things where our modern understandings can sometimes mess with our biblical understanding of the context. So we could think of a rib, which in Hebrew is shalaw, so it's kind of like shalem, but it's with an a-h at the end, that that word, fascinating detail is never used throughout the rest of the Old Testament to describe a rip. Fascinating. we have to ask the question, why in Genesis 1 do we have a modern app? It's not that it's an inappropriate translation. It can have a nuance of that. But every time else that we see this, it's referring to the side of a structure or to the pillars of stability of the temple. Right? Now think about this. What does this tell us? It tells us that the man in some way serves as a structure.

But the woman serves in some way as the pillar, the foundation. And so right now, y'all, so if the pillars of stability of this entire building were to collapse, what would happen?

Lysa TerKeurst: The building would

Jim Cress: Yeah, we'd be in trouble.

Joel Muddamalle: Right? Now, if we had pillars of stability but no structure, and all of a sudden a tornado comes through, what would happen?

Lysa TerKeurst: We would have no protection.

Joel Muddamalle: Exactly. Look at the beauty and the brilliance of God. That He would create...complementary relationships between man and woman where they have a purpose and a function. And this is how we should understand the ideal. Now, it's these two individuals who come together to form a husband and a wife, what we would call marriage. they're given the theological term is they're given the image of God, that they both possess the image of God, likeness and image, before they come to the marriage. Lysa, I remember we were talking about this and you kind of had an interesting observation about that specific detail.

Lysa TerKeurst: Yeah, so I think sometimes we can get into a marriage and the title of husband or the title of wife ah carries more importance than the title of children of God made in the likeness and image of God that we're image bearers of God. And so I think it's very important when we get married and like for me when I got married and I assumed the role of a wife that did not negate that first and foremost I am a child of God made in the likeness and image. I'm an image bearer of God.

Joel Muddamalle: Yeah, that's so good. And so there's an incredible theologian and he's actually a biologist. His name is Dr. John Kilner and he wrote a really great book.

And so I'm pulling from some of his research, but he makes this observation that after the fall, his view, and I agree with it, that the image of God is not broken. Now something is broken. What is that thing that is broken? Humanity is broken. The you and I are broken. And so I love the way that Dr. Kilner gives us kind of this imagery, and he separates the image of God into two kind of categories, status and standard.

So the image of God is a status that is freely given to all of humanity. All of humankind is given that status. Now that status requires a standard. The word to live up to that status and that is the standard by which we're to –

Lysa TerKeurst: Like the requirements.

Joel Muddamalle: The requirements, exactly. This is what it looks like, you know? When humanity breaks because of the fall, we're no longer able to live up to that standard. This is the necessity for Jesus.

This is why the Holy Spirit now equips us when we've bent knee to King Jesus. And so, you have the image of God, which is both a status and a standard, and it's because humanity is broken that two image-bearers can come into a marriage relationship and there is work to be done. There's responsibility on both sides in order to live up to the expectations of a marriage and ultimately to honor God in that marriage.

There's certain things you guys that are said sometimes that I kind of chuckle at because it's like, man, I've always just thought this was what it was until you start to read the scriptures. Like, wait a minute, I think there might be something interesting. So in preparation, one of those phrases, like we started with is God hates divorce. Where does this come from?

Lysa TerKerust: Malachi.

Joel Muddamalle: Right, Malachi 2:16. Now, before we get to that, have you ever heard the phrase, well, don't you know that when you got married, you got married like that was your covenant with God?

Jim Cress: Sure, all the time.

Joel Muddamalle: Right? So I want us to be precise. Part of my kind of weight of responsibility that I can feel at times is to just bring some precision to our language. And what we want positioned here is that the covenant that you make in a marriage is actually not with God. It's actually much more significant. You see, God is the judge who is the witness of the covenant. And the covenant that you make, the Hebrew word there is berith, B-E-R-I-T-H, it is a contract. And that contract, that covenant relationship is between a man and a woman. And they both have responsibilities to come and this is what's so weighty about it, is you've now made this covenant in front of a holy and righteous God. So think about that. Now think about God and uh His emotional, this is kind of an odd thing, but least this is one of things that you taught me so early on when we started to do ministry together and work together. You always say to me, Joel, don't forget the --

Lysa TerKeurst: humanity –

Joel Muddamalle: of the text. And so I want us to just for a second, think of God in anthropomorphic language, it's human-like um emotions and language, which actually the scriptures give to us is like, how would you feel if the very people that you loved and that you cherish, that you gave your own image to, nothing else has that image?

Animals don't have that image, the trees, the plants, nothing else have the image and likeness. Only humanity has the image and likeness of God. And here's this great gift that you give them and you want them to love and cherish each other. And then they don't. And maybe one partner starts to act in destructive ways. There is alcoholism, there's pornography addiction, there's unfaithfulness and adultery, there's physical abuse. mean, as God is a good father, how would he respond?

How would he think? How would he feel? How would he act? I want us to have that in the back of our minds as we step into a passage like Malachi 2:16.

Lysa TerKeurst: And I want to draw a distinction here too. We're not talking about someone making a mistake. So we're not talking about an isolated incident where, you know, something happens and then that person is very, very repentant and they agree that it was wrong and they kneel before the Lord in great humility. They ask for forgiveness both from the Lord, but also from their wife or husband, whichever one is the one that was hurt in the dynamic. So, I'm not talking about like one time having, you know, maybe your husband, you catch your husband watching pornography or whatever, or you know, that he was, he drank too much alcohol one time or something like that. There's other issues that are attached to both of those for sure. But I just want to be careful to say, we're not saying like, caught you now writing it before.

Jim Cress: Exactly right. You know?

Joel Muddamalle: Yeah. And I think it's our friend Leslie Vernick who says that there is a difference between a difficult marriage and a destructive marriage.

Lysa TerKeurst: I think a real secret is, are they repentant? And not like fake repentance, like, OK, I'm sorry, you know? But are they willing to understand that there's not only the fact of how they hurt their spouse there was an impact to their spouse. And one thing you taught me, is that every rip in a relationship requires a repair. So, you know, there has to be humility. There has to be repentance before the Lord. There has to be some of these indicators that they're not just sorry they got caught, but they're sorry and deeply repentant for the action that they took.

Joel Muddamalle: I think it's worth our time, Jim, for you to, before we jump into Malachi 2:16, because we're going to talk about like, the worst case scenario, right? I think it would be helpful for us to, from your perspective, give us what does true repentance look like? When you have a couple that comes in, or an intensive, where are you like, oh man, this is really hopeful? But then where are you like, whoo, this is gonna be really difficult?

Jim Cress: Well, on the biblical and practical level, I'm always gonna look through the lens of Psalm 51, starting off to get the vertical clear against you and you only if I send and then what God wants is a broken and contrite heart and spirit. So I'm looking, is there a true brokenness? We're not talking about damage there, but a brokenness and ownership metanoia as we all know in the New Testament for repentance being stopped this 180 and begin to go back the other way. On the practical level, what I listen for is the damning word, the destructive word called but.

Yeah, I did this, but or worse, but you quid pro quo. So if I'm listening, because I want Rowan's really implies that our sin should shut our mouths. So there should there's a sense of this is what I did. And I'll say in therapy a lot, selah, meditate a stop. And I see a person taking ownership and it's really good if I hear them dare they look at their spouse or another person and say, tell me more fact. This is what I did impact. What did it do to you?

But then the person may say, I think it really did this. I know when a person says, tell me more about that. Or if I say, we not go any further? Why don't you ask him, is there more they wanna say? Kind of, excuse me, but drain the pus out of the wound. And if a person gets defensive back at me, there's a lot of people I find admit their sin, but they've not confessed homo legale. They're not saying the same thing, and they certainly have not repented. They're just kind of naming it.

Joel Muddamalle: Yeah, that's so good.

I know as we step into Malachi 2:16, I want to start from an experiential standpoint. oh At Proverbs 31 Ministries, Lysa, where you and I work, and Jim, you're such a faithful ministry partner for the work that we do here through Therapy & Theology and uh in the ministry in general, we have access to and personal witness of hundreds if not thousands of women that are walking through really hard and difficult things. Lysa, you and I have been on tour before, and so we get to have personal encounters with these women. They come to us and they share their stories. I had an instance the other day where I'm speaking at a conference for high school students in the Convention Center in Indianapolis, and um there's this line of kids that are kind of talking, and I see an adult leader to the side just drop off a little paper plate on the side and just walked away.

And so it takes me 45 minutes to kind of clear the area. I go back and pack up my stuff. see a paper plate and I'll summarize it. But basically the gal says, you know, we listened to therapy and theology and I went through a marriage that almost killed me, like literally almost killed me. And I'm just so grateful for uh the biblical truth that you guys have been able to communicate. And one of the things that has happened is you hear a phrase, like God hates divorce and we hear it and receive it in a specific way. And so, some might make the argument that, Joel, what you're about to teach is a difference without a distinction. And so, I want to start by just acknowledging that I understand why somebody might say that. And I want to just humbly present to you that I truly do believe, and I think Lysa and Jim will agree, that this is actually a difference with a distinction. Because when you take a phrase like, God hates divorce, is a flat statement the way that it is received, especially for a woman who has done everything in her power to remain faithful to the Lord, to love Jesus, to be faithful to her husband. And yet there is unrepentant sin, there's destructive behavior, all the things that we had just talked about, not a difficult marriage, a destructive marriage. And divorce does happen. She's left hearing, well, God hates me.

Because if God hates divorce and I'm a participant of that divorce, then clearly God's displeasure is with me.

Lysa TerKeurst: And I think the other thing that can happen is you hear a statement like God hates divorce, um but it's in the context of someone saying, you should stay or you should have stayed no matter what. No matter what. You made a covenant. You should stay no matter what And then their reason, they take this verse and they weaponize it because you know God hates divorce.

Jim Cress: That's convenient for people not in it to say as well.

Joel Muddamalle: So I'm gonna make a joke and it's kind of a joke, but it's not a joke. You guys do know that the Bible was not written in English, right?

Lysa TerKeurst:

Yes.

Joel Muddamalle: So just as a disclaimer, the Bible was not written in English. The Old Testament was written in Hebrew. Parts of the book of Daniel were written in Aramaic.

The New Testament was written in Koine Greek and this actually really matters. Here's the second joke that's not really a joke. You guys know I'm Indian, right?

Lysa TerKeurst: Let me think about this. Yes.

Joel Muddamalle: So I'm Indian, my wife is white, I grew up, like literally my family just went to India just a couple of weeks ago. It was amazing Indian food, masala chai. It was so good. And one of the things that we love...

Lysa TerKeurst: What is masala chai?

Joel Muddamalle: It's like, do know what chai tea is?

Lysa TerKeurst: Yes.

Joel Muddamalle: Okay, so just to know that's redundant. Chai means tea. So when...Everybody else outside of India says chai tea. It's like you're saying TT chai chai. It makes no sense –

Lysa TerKeurst: Okay, okay.

Joel Muddamalle: So chai is like like your Starbucks drink.

Lysa TerKeurst: Okay.

Joel Muddamalle: Yeah, iced chai latte.

Lysa TerKeurst: Yes. Yeah, it's just chai Okay, got it.

Joel Muddamalle: All right linguistic lesson for today.

Jim Cress: Today's therapy and theology is brought to you by Tai Tai -- Something like that.

Joel Muddamalle: So when we're in India, we're really fascinating thing is you were watching Bollywood movies, right and my Britt, who doesn't speak Telugu, will be laughing at a joke, hysterically. And she'll be like, baby, can you translate it to me? And I'm laughing so hard, like my side is hurting. Maybe it's my rib is broken, right? Like it's just real bad. I'm like, yeah, could have, you're gonna die when I tell you. And I try to translate a joke from one language to another. Y'all know what happens when that happens?

Lysa TerKeurst: It falls flat. It doesn't work.

Joel Muddamalle: Doesn’t work. It's no longer funny. Right?

Lysa TerKeurst: what makes it funny is the context.

Joel Muddamalle: The context. It's the rhythm of the word. You're a words gal. It's the way that you place them together. It's the poetry. It's the literature of it. And we have an innate challenge when we come to the scriptures in the sense that we are reading a translation. Our translations are faithful. I don't want us to have any doubt about the translations, but I do want us to know that there are areas of nuance that for the sake of efficiency and for a lot of different reasons, it can be translated in a way that we receive it in a way that's incongruent with the intent of the actual text. And the way that we get there is through the original meaning, the original languages. And so we're gonna get into a little bit of uh Bible study here, but you might wonder, well, Joel, where does that phrase that God hates divorce, where does it come from? And we've told you already, Malachi 2:16, but it comes from a very specific translation of the Bible, the King James Version. Now I just want to, on the outset, just say,I have a very warm uh love for the King James Version. Jim, I know you do as well.

Jim Cress: I grew up on it.

Joel Muddamalle: Yeah, absolutely. And it is beautiful that today you and I have different Bible translations because it gives us different vantage points of the original text. So I want to read the new King James Version, which picks up on the King James Version, Malachi 2:16. It says this, For the Lord God of Israel says that he hates divorce, for it covers one's garment with violence, says the Lord of hosts.

Therefore, take heed to your spirit that you do not deal treacherously." Malachi 2:16. If you were to ask any Hebrew scholar and put the Hebrew of Malachi 2:16 in front of them and say, translate this, they're going to go for the... They're going to think for a second because it's an incredibly complicated series of Hebrew words that are put together that require a little bit of...not just translation, but interpretation. Yeah. Okay. And so, it's really fascinating if you look at different Bible translations. I'm going to read a couple here. If you look at the ESV, Malachi 2:16 says, And then you have Malachi 2:16 in the CSB translation, which is what I'm going to be reading from says the Lord God of Israel, He covers His garment with injustice.

Lysa TerKeurst: And the He there is very important.

Joel Muddamalle: The He there is very important. The King James Version suggests that the He is connected to Yahweh, to God, but our modern translations now, they actually identify the He not as God, who is the one who hates, but the He as being that partner who is unfaithful and is unjust and has broken that covenant relationship.

Lysa TerKeurst: And I'm glad you said partner here because I do want to very much acknowledge we're talking about there's a wife partner and there's a husband partner inside the context of marriage. Sometimes it's the husband that gets his heart broken because the wife wasn't faithful or the wife was bringing destruction into the marriage. So this really does go both ways. Just for the sake of streamlining the podcast today, we're going to refer a lot to women in the context of the one that got hurt.

Joel Muddamalle: Yeah, so some of you might be wondering Joel. Well, how can you come to that conclusion? Is that a fair way? I want to just bring us to a little bit of translation history here, which I think is important. And at least I know at this point like, whoo, this is a lot, but this is also why we wrote Surviving an Unwanted Divorce. And so all the footnotes and all the scholarship is actually in there if you want to dig a little bit deeper. But when the Bible is translated, you have the Old Testament Hebrew Bible that around the time of Alexander the Great, actually one of his generals, takes the Old Testament and actually translates it into Greek. This is referred to as the?

Lysa TerKeurst: Septuagint.

Joel Muddamalle: Let's go! Man, I can retire now. We have won.

Lysa TerKeurst: You really caught me off guard with that one, too. I was not expecting it.

Joel Muddamalle: I know. There we go. The Septuagint. And the Septuagint was a work of some 72 Jewish scribes well versed in the language that took the original Hebrew and translated into Greek. So one of the translation philosophies that we would have, you I learned this during my PhD work, is when you have a difficult Hebrew translation, sometimes what helps clarify it is the Septuagint, because that is almost like the first commentary of the Hebrew Bible and areas of confusion can be cleared up. Well, that's actually what happens with the Septuagint, the Greek phrase, I'm not going to say it because it's not going to help anybody, but this is the grammatical part. It's constructed as a participle and a subjunctive. What that basically means is that the phrase should be translating, should be translated, if hating you divorce or if you divorce out of hatred. So that Hebrew word shana for hatred in this verse, it's actually connected to the manner in which the man is seeking out the divorce from his wife. So once again, the subject of the hatred is not connected to God, the subject of the hatred is connected to the actions of the unfaithful partner, in this case the husband, and in so doing it creates a response from God. And the response from God is he's displeased. He is brokenhearted, I think, in almost a literal way. And the reason is, is because one of his image bearers, think about this, we just talked about it, one of his image bearers is now holding something that she probably never wanted to hold, not probably, something she never wanted to hold in her life. Such heartache. And simultaneously there's another image bearer that has acted in a way that is unbecoming of the image that they bear.

Lysa TerKeurst: That's right.

Joel Muddamalle: Right? And so when we take a look at a passage like Malachi: 2:16, uh it's really important that we get the context to it and that we understand what this is saying and what it is not saying. Another little detail, the end of this, it says, covers his garments with injustice or violence. It refers to the man who's being unjust and cruel to his wife. So I just want to kind of close with this thing, uh the statement. I hope this serves for you as a comfort for the countless women that have been the victims of an unwanted divorce. Sister, God does not hate you.

He is not displeased with you. He truly, truly loves you. He cherishes you. And I truly believe that he's so proud of the courage that you put on display by walking through something you never wanted to, and yet you have done. And you're honoring him with your life and with your words and with all of your actions.

Lysa TerKeurst: Yeah, I want to just end by just very vulnerably saying it was so hard for me to be a Christian woman who was now faced with divorce. I was so troubled over it. I felt like I had almost sole anxiety because the last thing I ever wanted to do was displease God with any action that I took, especially an action as big as a divorce. And in my situation, it wasn't that I gave up or walked away from my marriage um And I suspect that's a lot of our listeners here. It's not that you walked away, but you were almost forced to accept a very painful reality. And I was so troubled when I had to, you know, finally come to grips with the fact that I am going to be a Christian woman who the word divorce is attached to there was so much confusion and I didn't know how to unpack the scriptures for myself. I didn't know how to dig deep like you were digging deep today. And so, because I had access to you and because I had access to Jim, who's a therapist but who also has a seminary degree, ah I became very, very fortunate in my healing journey that you both could give me the truth and you both could help me dig deep and better understand what the Bible does and does not say about divorce. And so, I realized when I was at a certain point in my healing journey, I couldn't keep this to myself.

It's so crucial, because if a person who's walking through an unwanted divorce, if they don't have a proper understanding of Scriptures, they will carry an unnecessary spiritual burden that actually can become a lie that they believe that then becomes a label they put on themselves that then becomes a liability for the rest of their life. And so that's why it's so important that I wanted a podcast like Therapy and Theology. And so today is such an important episode. I know we're gonna continue in our next episode, this conversation, but for today, thank you so much, Joel, for taking the time to really unpack and unearth the truth of God's Word.

Shae Hill: Thanks for tuning in to today's conversation. Here's a few things I don't want you to miss. First, we want to hear from you and would be so honored if you took the survey you can find by accessing the link in our show notes. Your feedback is crucial for shaping future therapy and theology conversations and experiences. Also, make sure you secure your copy of Surviving an Unwanted Divorce, co-written by Lysa, Dr. Joel and Jim. You can find that link by visiting the show notes as well.

Therapy and Theology is brought to you by Proverbs 31 Ministries, where we believe if you know the truth and live the truth, it changes everything. We'll see you next time.