The Societal Cost of Broken Marriages

Relational Wisdom Website 

Kymberli Cook: 

Welcome to The Table podcast where we discuss issues of God and culture. My name is Kymberli Cook and I'm the Assistant Director here at the Hendricks Center at DTS. Today, we are going to be discussing the ways that broken marriages impact our society every day and we probably have no idea that we are experiencing their impact. We are joined by Ken Sande, who is the founder of Peacemaker Ministries and Relational Wisdom 360, so two different ministries, and the author of the very popular book, the Peacemaker. Ken, thank you so much for joining us today. 

Ken Sande: 

It's great to be here, Kymberli. Thank you so much. 

Kymberli Cook: 

Absolutely. Let's just introduce you a bit to everybody it. You've been on the podcast one time before, but in case somebody hasn't heard that one, do you want to just share with us a little bit, how did you come to regularly deal with helping other people address their relationships and, particularly, conflicts in their life? 

Ken Sande: 

Well, I'm an engineer and an attorney, so I'm a problem solver by nature and training. In 1982, founded Peacemaker Ministries and our goal was to help Christians resolve conflicts outside of the civil court system. And so, a lot of the work we did and the people we trained were doing was broken marriages or marriages around the brink of a divorce. 

I personally handled about 600 divorce mediations myself, over half of which reconciled thanks be to God. Some of them came to me, literally, 24 hours before the final divorce decree, so people were right on the brink. I've been involved in a lot of divorces over the years. I've seen the impact, but I've also seen what God can do to turn those things around as well. This is something I care very deeply about. 

I've sat in my office with seven year old young girl just weeping over her parents' impending divorce. I've seen firsthand what is accepted, pretty commonly, is that children at that age think the divorce is their fault. No matter what you say, they still think. I've seen little girls beg daddy, "I'll wear my pretty dress, daddy. I'll be really nice, daddy. Please don't leave." I've seen the pain and I've seen how God can intervene so this is a subject that's very, very significant to me. 

Kymberli Cook: 

Yeah, yeah. I mean, we're talking about family and we're talking about parents. And so, whenever a broken marriage is in view and is in the conversation, we're talking about things that are just so deeply felt and not just the… We'll get to the impact of it on our lives and on our society, but just the emotional impact and the personal investment in the conversation is you just almost can't even communicate how deep it is. 

For about half of the people who are listening, potentially, you'll hopefully be able to share a few statistics with us later on, but about half of the people listening might actually be a part of a broken marriage themselves. Many, many more will be in families that have been impacted by broken marriages, directly impacted. It's in their family. And so, for those of you who are listening and might be in that situation yourself, and you actually were brave enough to click on this podcast and to say, " Okay, well, I want to hear what they have to say about broken marriages," we first just want to let you know that you are loved and you are valued. This episode and everything Ken and I are about to talk about is not an indictment against you or against your life. 

It's more of an exploration of the unseen and the underappreciated consequences of broken marriages within our society. That's more what we're talking about. We're not trying to talk about your specific situation and, really, hopefully, we're trying to better understand your world and your pain and how we've all actually been impacted by it and we might not even know it. Ken, do you have any thoughts on that, on what you would like to say to people ahead of time as far as what they might hear and making sure that they hear our heart behind this conversation? 

Ken Sande: 

Well, really to echo what you said, Kymberli, in some churches, we unconsciously send the message that divorce is somehow the unforgivable sin. That's not true. There's no sin that Christ cannot forgive, and there's all sorts of things that are listed in the Bible as very serious in God's eyes. We know that a lot of divorces, people don't choose. Someone else divorces them and they've been unable to stop it. They still feel, in many cases, I mean, the pain is inevitable, but sometimes they also feel a lot of guilt and shame, which should not be on their shoulders. 

But I also want to speak to those who have divorced, even divorced for unbiblical grounds. The gospel is there for them and there can be healing, there can be forgiveness, even if it's beyond the point where the marriage can be restored, there can still be personal reconciliation. I've been part of many of those things. There's always hope in Christ, no matter what we've done, no matter what we've experienced, no matter what others have done to us, God is still there with his arms open wide for us. The gospel is there too. Whatever your situation is, and also I would just say to people that may be concerned about a child or a friend or a coworker heading toward a broken marriage, you can play a huge role, often, to be a channel of God's grace in a situation. Almost every person in our country is, one way or the other, directly indirectly, impacted by this very relevant topic. 

Kymberli Cook: 

Yes. I want to quickly just say we are also, in no way, advocating that people stay in abusive situations. If you are in a broken marriage or a problematic marriage because of abuse, God very clearly condemns oppression and calls on believers to move to react to that. We, in no way, when we're talking about broken marriages, we are not speaking about abusive marriages in this specific episode. I just want to make that very clear as well. And so, now that we have that and, hopefully, everybody can hear where we're coming from, again, just because it is such a heartfelt topic, we just want to be sensitive to anybody who's listening because everybody, like we said, is impacted by this. 

Just to settle a little bit into the topic, what do we have in view when we are talking about broken marriages? Ken, what do you think is at the core of most struggling non-abusive marriages? What do you think is the problem? 

Ken Sande: 

Well, if you use the broad term broken marriages, there's a lot of people who are still legally married who are in a broken marriage. And then, there are people who are legally divorced. But even there, if they've got children, they have an ongoing relationship for the rest of their lives. There's any number of arrangements that fall under that heading, Kymberli. 

What I say when I speak on this topic is God's design for marriage in the beginning, according to Jesus himself, was one man, one woman together for life. That's the ideal. But when Jesus was challenged on some marital issues, he said, but it was because of the hardness of your heart that God allowed divorce. And so, sin is the ultimate cause of any broken relation. That's whether it's a friendship, parent, child, or a marriage relationship being broken. Sin, selfishness, lust, craving, anger, unresolved issues like that, those are the things that is a sin that gets into the gears of a marriage and eventually wears it down to the point where it'll be broken. 

But what I found, and this is significant, is even though the ultimate cause of a broken marriage or divorce is sin, the precipitating or triggering cause is hopelessness. People can stay in a difficult relationship for a long time if they have hope that things would get better. A very common situation is a husband's going back to school for an advanced degree. He is pursuing his Master's or doctor degree, spending long hours at work and at school, doesn't have time with the kids. His marriage is not as deep as it used to be, but the wife will hang in there, in most cases. He's going to graduate in June. It'll be over with. If there's some reason for hope, people will often hang in there, and especially if there's hope that's generated by people starting to address their sin, go to counseling and those things. 

But once hope is gone, in our day and age, even where a couple generations ago, you just stayed in there for life no matter what, that was what society told you to do. But today, when hope is gone, that's when people pull the trigger and move toward divorce. What's interesting is women in the United States, 66% of the people who file for divorce are women, and that has actually ratcheted up as high as 75% at times. It's when they just give up hope that that relationship is ever going to get any better. One of the first things we do when we get involved in conciliation is how do we inject hope? We can't cure all the problems, change all the behavior instantly, but what can we do to bring hope back to that situation as quickly as possible? 

Kymberli Cook: 

What are some of those things that you do or suggest? How do you inject hope? 

Ken Sande: 

Well, the single greatest way to inject hope is to see the Holy Spirit work in at least one party's heart, to bring about sincere, heartfelt, broken repentance. Now, even that is not always a guarantee because I've seen some people who've hardened their heart so much, no matter what the other spouse says or does, their heart is just dead. But I've also seen hope visibly come back into the eyes of a party when one spouse gives a humble, authentic, deep confession. And so, we spend a lot of time helping people really look to God and ask for the Holy Spirit to give them the gift of repentance. That is a gift of the Holy Spirit to come to that brokenness. 

I'm working in a case right now where the husband's heart is so hard. I mean, he's destroying his marriage by his own actions, and yet he just refuses to see it. He's unable to see the harm he's doing to his wife and his children, which is heartbreaking. But I've also been in situations where, through counseling, being in God's word, praying for the Holy Spirit, I've seen people just completely crumble under the realization of how much they have hurt other people. When that happens, and then somebody can make a credible, authentic, sincere confession, very often the other spouse will go, "Whoa, I've never heard this before. This is different. This is different." 

At those times, we'll often say, "Can we just put the divorce proceeding on hold. Talk to your attorney, just put it on hold for three months. Let's see what can happen." And so, you turn it around. Authentic repentance and confession followed up by sincere efforts in counseling and discipleship to change and grow, that's the single best way to put hope back in a situation. 

Kymberli Cook: 

Fascinating. Sorry, that was just an aside. I'm like, "Well, how do you inject hope?" But again, this specific conversation is hoping to talk about the societal impact of these broken marriages, particularly divorce. For those who that isn't possible and they're remaining in that hopeless situation, what are some of the statistics that we should be aware of? You just said 66 to 75% of all divorces are filed by women. What other statistics should we be aware of? 

Ken Sande: 

Well, the United States has the highest divorce rate in the world today. We're higher than Russia. Societally, we're not able to hold our marriages together in this country. On average, we're seeing about 750,000 divorces a year in the United States. You can break that down by the day, by the minute, by the second. It's just, it's huge. The way I would liken the cost of divorce, Kymberli, it's like the bomb we dropped on Hiroshima, and there's intense damage. I mean, just they obliterated everything right in the center of that blast. And then, there was a place that was affected by heat that went out and wind that went out. And then even further than that was radiation. And so divorce has a intense impact on certain people, but it radiates out and it affects me. My taxes are affected by the high divorce rate in my state. 

Just for example, just talk about the epicenter here. The people going through a divorce, there's very few things in life that are more emotionally traumatizing than to have another person who you bound yourself to for life, who knows you better than anyone else, say, "I reject you. I no longer want to be with you." It's devastating emotionally and psychologically to experience that, and many people never recover from that. The rest of their life, their relationships are guarded. They're tentative. They're afraid to remarry. There's all sorts of ways that the person who's being divorced is impacted directly. Financial impact to divorce. Suddenly you've got, in many cases, a family that had an income that was supporting one household and now they have two households. The cost of that now of having either rent or mortgage for another household, that money is taken away from all sorts of things. The food and groceries they can have, the special activities the kids can do. Divorce tends to move women and children into poverty, especially women and children. In spite of all the other things that have changed in recent years, women are still impacted the most financially. 

There's a loss of friendships. People who used to be around. People used to do things with as a couple, you're no longer a couple. Many people lose their church over divorce. It just, the strain in relationship with your children that goes on. Children are often caught in between. They're the conduit of unresolved conflict. Just that person going through the divorce. And then, there's a person who may be divorcing the other one, maybe legitimately, maybe there is unrepentant abuse and we've been unable to deal with it through either civil… I mean, I've called the sheriff on people. I was the one that called them. Or church discipline, some kind of pressure, and it was unable to do it. You might have a legitimate reason for the divorce. You made every effort to save it and it was unsuccessful. 

But I would say that even if someone pursues an unbiblical divorce, has an affair, for example, breaks off, they also pay a price. Sin exacts a toll on us, our conscience, our closeness to God, the emptiness in our life, the guilt and shame, estrangement from our children. It has huge impact. You move out the next circle, the children. The financial loss they have of having united household. Parents who are distracted, angry, bitter, sad, depressed, are no longer able to parent adequately. There's all sorts of statistics indicating that children in divorced families increased risk of leaving the church, dropping out of school, alcohol and drug abuse, sexual activity, criminal activity. Some of those increase by a factor of three or four. That's not inevitable, but the exposure and the odds of those things happening in children go up significantly. 

Kymberli Cook: 

Well, sorry, real quick on that. I actually, in preparing for this conversation, I ran across there's a Finnish study, so from Finland, that found that adult children of divorced parents actually experience more job loss, more conflict with their teachers and their supervisors and more interpersonal conflict. It's not even just when they're young and they're trying to navigate all of that and it's a tough childhood. It again, societally, even as they grow and they become contributing members of society, there's still this residue that can't be cleaned off. 

If you think of a whole generation of people or multiple generations of that, sorry. I'm getting in on what you're saying too, but I couldn't believe that, because I didn't see who sponsored that, but it wasn't a faith-based institution that sponsored it and they're finding these things about that. Sorry, go ahead. 

Ken Sande: 

Absolutely. No, you're absolutely right. 

Kymberli Cook: 

It was about the children. Tell us about the children. 

Ken Sande: 

The impact of divorce on, say a seven year old, can follow that person to the day he dies. Because the chances, especially for girls, of getting into high-risk marriages when they first start to marry. There's going to be a reactive attachment disorder that was triggered through the divorce. Their ability to identify healthy relationships, find healthy partners, have healthy marriages, is diminished. Their likelihood of going through difficult marriages, and that can then attract them all the way to the day they die, because if they're in broken marriages, they lose retirement access, their ability to get an edge. I mean, the ripples are all over the place on those people, but it doesn't stop there. 

The employers. When an employer has a worker, an employee goes through divorce, on average, the employer loses 25% of that employee's productivity for two years. That's about $8,000 per year hit to the employer because the employee is distracted. He's irritable. He's less engaged with his staff. He's gone at court hearings all the time. He has to pick up his kids because there's all these visitation issues. Employers are impacted. It often takes about five years for people to recover from a divorce, to the point where their behavior in the workplace is, again, back to normal. Employers pay a price for this. There's more depression. There's more alcohol use. There's more health issues for employees going through divorce. Employers pay a price. 

Then you move out to society at large. All sorts of implications because families are the nucleus of society. In every society since the foundation of the world, the family, the man and woman coming together, having children, raising children to be responsible, contributing parts of a tribe, of a nation, of a community in the city. You can think of a family like a brick. I was in Africa one time and they told me that they made bricks with straw. In fact, we've seen the Bible, they were making bricks for Pharaoh with straw. The trouble in Africa is termites, and the termites will actually get in there and eat right up through that straw and just go right in the brick eating the straw. Pretty soon you've got a brick with no straw. That's what holds it together and the bricks crumble. 

When you've got families crumbling, I mean, I saw all these buildings, as in Uganda, the building is tipping over because the bricks are falling apart. When families fall apart, society pays a huge role. We talk about all these issues about children with drug and alcohol abuse, not doing as well in school, dropping out. Society pays a price of that. Social services, counselors, criminal juvenile behavior, incarceration. You look at the statistics on the number of people who are in our prisons. 70% of the people who are in prison come from broken homes, 70%. 

Now, many of those probably could end up with criminal behavior even if the divorce had not occurred. But if just a portion of those families had stayed together and helped deal with that young person when he was starting to get into some destructive habits, it could reduce substantially likelihood of later criminal behavior. Well, America, just in our state prison systems, I didn't find the figures on federal, but our state prisons spend $43 billion a year incarcerating people. We have the highest prison population per capita in the world. That's a price that I pay every time I get a paycheck and I see what's deducted from my paycheck. Part of that money is going to support the prison system, the police, the everything else in my state, not to mention federal. Those implications go out. 

Just the brokenness, the hostility, our inability to deal with other issues in a united way. Poverty, broken homes, et cetera, trafficking, we're distracted. The money is going elsewhere. The ripple effects even diminish our ability to deal with other issues in society that get worse as well, that aren't directly caused by the divorce but our ability to deal with those is actually diminished because of the price we're paying for divorce. It's huge. It's absolutely huge. Now, I want to quickly say though, I want to put a caveat. I do not want to put pressure on somebody who's listening to this broadcast who's going, "Oh-" 

Kymberli Cook: 

That's what I was about to say. 

Ken Sande: 

"I'm in this horrible marriage and I better not do it." Well, I don't want to send that message. What I do say to people who come to me, "Let's just make sure we leave no reasonable stone unturned to try to save your marriage. If it's going to fail, I want you to walk away with a clear conscience that you made every effort to understand and deal with your contribution to the breakdown of the family, that you're growing through this thing. You've made every opportunity for the other person to change and grow. If that person refuses, continues with destructive behavior, then you can leave that marriage. It'll still be difficult. But the benefit of having your clear conscience is huge." 

And so, I've walked with people through that process where they got the divorce legitimately, biblical grounds, clear conscience. They still had a lot of challenges to be sure, but the value of a clear conscience is incredible. 

Kymberli Cook: 

Yeah, yeah. I was going to say, if those who are in broken marriages, it's not like they're fully responsible for all of society's problems. 

Ken Sande: 

No. 

Kymberli Cook: 

Again, it is something that I had never really thought about until I actually heard you speak on it, of just all of these different ways that society is impacted. Even if right now, Lord willing, for the rest of my life, I'm in a very lovely marriage. I love my husband and we're in a great situation, but the reality that I am impacted by other people's broken relationships, and more than just a loss of communal cohesion, which is something. Bad friendships and that kind of thing, because friends get split like you were talking about earlier. But the money that I pay and the future workers that I will employ. Not just because of the divorce that they might go through, but if they were children of divorces, then all of a sudden, I'm the supervisor that they're having conflict with. There's all of these different tentacles around it that I had never really thought about. 

One other thing that I that occurred to me was, have you heard of the book or the idea of inherited trauma? Inherited generational trauma. There's a book called, It Didn't Start With You, and it's in the same vein, I think, as the, oh, what's the other book about it? Your body. 

Ken Sande: 

Oh, The Body Remembers. Keeps Score. Keeps Score. 

Kymberli Cook: 

Body Keeps the Score. It's that same idea, but essentially that trauma, and even this kind of thing that happens, the emotional trauma and everything that we've been talking about, gets passed on even through essentially the DNA. And so, even future generations are dealing with the physical impact of that. And so, not even just is it our society and the kids that go through it and any consequence that it has in their life, but potentially it's even passed on to future generations and it affects who they will even be. It's just startling. 

Ken Sande: 

Well, as the Bible says, the sins of the fathers, and there's a lot of ways the sins of fathers are passed on to children by our example, by undermining their stability. Is there sometimes a spiritual, what you would even call a curse, that's visited? We see in the Bible, whole nations being cursed for generations. It's very sobering. Very sobering. 

But the good news is, what I love is, through the power of the gospel, those chains and those cycles can be broken. That's what's so beautiful. I've worked with people who went through difficult divorce or their parents went through a difficult divorce, and yet to see how Christ can redeem in those situations and make that part of people's life testimony is that even coming from that difficult background that here's what Jesus has done in my life and here's how he's changed me. Here's the grace and the redemption, the forgiveness I've experienced. No matter what the situation is, what was it? There's no problem so great that Christ is not greater still. 

Kymberli Cook: 

Well, it's almost, and for the sake with regard to society, but even what you're saying, Jesus becomes the straw that stabilizes our own individual lives and our own individual families, even if they are broken and cracked. But he also, in doing that, he helps stabilize our societies even. We can have faith and not despair. Like you said, the core is hopelessness. We don't want to leave people hopeless. 

Ken Sande: 

Right. 

Kymberli Cook: 

With regard to this wound essentially in our society. Making that turn even for people who might be listening and they find themselves in bad marriages or they're friends of people who find themselves in bad marriages. I know we're not saying this, but I'm just going to ask. Are we saying that people should just stay in bad marriages so that society can be a full building and it's not tilting over? What do we say and how do we address the reality that there are bad marriages out there? 

Ken Sande: 

Again, going back to what I said earlier, is just make sure that you've not walked away prematurely when there was still some chance. Now, that's a subjective issue, and I find most of us are unable to deal with a really hard subjective question on our own. That's where you need your pastor. You need close friends. When you're having a difficult marriage, one thing for sure is you don't want friends who are just going to tell you what you want to hear. You want friends who love you enough to tell you what you need to hear, which may be distance yourself from this abusive spouse, or it may be don't give up, I think there's still some hope here. We need objective godly people who have courage and wisdom and everything else. No, we're not saying just stay in a difficult marriage. 

In fact, one of the things that I'm convinced of is churches need to do a better job of advertising to their congregations their positions on grounds for divorce. Because, historically, a lot of evangelical churches have only held to two grounds, unrepentant adultery by a spouse or abandonment by a non-believing spouse. Those are sort of the two that many evangelical churches would take. Some more conservative, some less, but that's sort of the norm. I used to be in that camp, Kymberli. But over time, as I study the Bible more, as I observed people and marriages breaking down, I'm convinced there's a very solid biblical argument that unrepentant prolonged abuse or neglect also constitute grounds for divorce. Now, some people may disagree. We've got some articles on our website giving both sides of those things, but I think there's a very strong argument. 

Now, I emphasize the modifiers, prolonged unrepentant, because I've seen people who neglected families who turned around, learned to love families. I've seen people who were abusive, who learned how to manage their emotions, their own inner trauma, and figure out how that was impacting how they treated others. They learned to love their spouse, love their children. Those things can be turned around. 

But it breaks my heart to think of, on every Sunday, there may be a family sitting there in church that has smiles on their face but, at home, one of those spouses, and it's quite often the man if we're talking about a physical type of abuse, is overbearing, oppressive, emotionally oppressive, and nobody knows about it. Often the wife, if she's in an evangelical church, has somehow picked up the idea, I just need to bear this. 

Our church, for example, adopted a document called Relational Commitments where we advertise this to the congregation. One statement we have in there is we believe it is a responsibility of the church to become involved in situations where there's tensions or difficulties in marriage ranging from some minor differences on parenting or finances all the way up to significant abuse or neglect. If you have such a situation, we actually, how do we put it? We say we exhort you to come to the elders and seek our assistance. 

Our hope is if a couple in our church is going through that and that woman picks up that booklet and sees that, she goes, "Oh, I'm actually supposed to come to the pastor. I don't have to just suffer in silence the rest of my life." That gives us the chance to intervene before things are damaged so much they can't be repaired. There's a lot of proactive things I think churches can do much more aggressively than this and just being much clearer on their theological positions on divorce, marriage and remarriage, for example. 

Kymberli Cook: 

There's also, I mean, because you've done a lot of marital conciliation as well, correct? 

Ken Sande: 

Yes. 

Kymberli Cook: 

You want to talk a little bit about that? Because before I became familiar with you and your work, I had never really heard of marital conciliation before. Maybe some people listening haven't either. 

Ken Sande: 

When people come to me, over the years, they're usually Christians. Most people I've worked with are professing Christians. They will either come to me because they sincerely are looking for help in either trying to save their marriage or at least go through a divorce with as little trauma and expense as possible, sort of thing we can help. Sometimes they come to me because they want some accredited Christian to give the stamp of approval to their divorce. Their motive is not really the best motive, but I don't care what their motive is. I want them to walk through my door because then I can start to engage them and I'll hear their story, hear what's going on. Whatever I assess their motivation would be, I'll lay out basically the three things that we make clear. 

Number one, we believe it's your church's responsibility to guide you on the theological legitimacy of your divorce. We're not here to impose our theology. I may share my thoughts and views on it, but it's your pastor and your elders who need to help you make that theological decision. Secondly, we will help you deal with the legal issues attendant to a divorce, but only after you've made a good faith effort to, number one, understand your own contribution to the breakdown of your marriage. Because if you don't understand that, you'll carry those relational deficits in the future. Most people acknowledge that's true. Yeah, I probably should learn. 

Secondly, we want to make sure that we've made every reasonable effort to reconcile the marriage. We can't force it. It has to be a united decision, but we want to give you every opportunity to do that. If you will deal with those things in good faith and one of you still decides to pursue a divorce, then we will work on child custody, property settlement, visitation and those things. They may just be wanting the fast, easy, and expensive divorce, but we put them through a process of first understanding the relationship, and that's often what turns people around. That's when we get into basic peacemaking principles, relational wisdom. We start giving people tools to deal with the things that have caused so much damage. There are many people, Kymberli, particularly I would say men, who've never seen an example of a father admitting he was wrong. 

If you cannot, in a marriage where two sinners come together, learn how to say, "Oh, honey, I'm so sorry. I lost my temper. I spoke sharply. It was wrong. Please forgive." If you can't do that, there's just a steady accumulation of offenses and hurts. What confession does is it empties that. Learning confession, repentance, forgiveness, negotiation skills, managing emotions, preventing emotional hijacking. When people start to get these skills, they start saying, "Hey, we can start to deal with this conflict. I can learn how not to lose my temper all the time, and if I don't lose my temper, there's a better chance my spouse won't be triggered either." And so, they start learning tools, they finally say, "Let's give this a try. Let's turn it around." 

Kymberli Cook: 

Well, all of a sudden, and that's just another way, going back to even kind of how we started the conversation, that you can infuse hope. That's another. Repentance and the spiritual work being done, and also the really relational skills. Like you said, all of a sudden, there's still a spiritual dimension there, their willingness to engage that, but, all of a sudden, there's a glimmer of light saying, "Oh, well, we're communicating in a way that we never have before. Maybe we can make this." 

Ken Sande: 

That's right. 

Kymberli Cook: 

Maybe we can make this work. 

Ken Sande: 

I love to hold out to people a possibility, you could be a living testimony of how a marriage that was almost completely on the rocks turned around into a beautiful, loving, intimate, joy-filled relationship. This could become your major ministry the rest of your life, is helping other couples who were where you were when you came in. Give them something to aspire to. I've seen it. I've seen people with a horrible marriage, and they become a testimony to redeeming grace of Jesus Christ. 

Kymberli Cook: 

One last fairly quick question because it may be the exact same, but I do want to explore it. We've been talking about that largely in the context of the church and with professing believers. In your opinion, is there, apart from from Jesus, and I don't say that in a way that diminishes, I obviously believe he's the straw that holds everything together, but apart from their turning to the Lord, do you think that there's a way that the church can help essentially this wound in society in a non-judgmental way that doesn't necessarily mandate that they accept Jesus? Or I don't know, what are your thoughts on that? 

Ken Sande: 

Well, I'm a huge, huge believer in the concept of common grace and that God pours out grace through general revelation and common grace. God gives people in society who don't acknowledge his existence at all, don't even believe there's a God, and yet he pours his grace into their lives where they get up in the morning and they say, "Good morning." They smile at their spouse and they go to work and they obey the traffic. I mean, those are all manifestations of God holding society together, preventing chaos, just as he brings some measure of decency, civility, moral understanding. 

I mean, my father wasn't a Christian until about an hour before he died. He was one of the most empathetic, compassionate, kind, gentle, generous people I knew my entire life, even before he acknowledged Jesus Christ and put his trust in Jesus. Yes, I believe that non-Christians can. I think there should be a huge marked difference between someone who is filled with the Holy Spirit and forgiven in Christ. There should be such a difference between our behavior and, tragically, there isn't always. I know non-Christians who are more humble, more kind, more reasonable than some Christians are. Just because you're a Christian, even genuinely regenerate, doesn't mean your behavior changes. 

But yes, to go to your question directly. I think non-Christians can benefit from the biblical wisdom God gives to us in his word. I mean, just something as simple as, first, get the log out of your own eye before you get the speck out. That simple principle is one of the most important relational principles in the world. Just take responsibility. Once I do that, it's amazing how often the other person responds the same way. I do training in secular venues. We're working in the military, businesses, schools, police departments, teaching just relational principles from God's word. They're all biblically grounded because God designed human nature and his principles of humility, kindness, gentleness for responsibility are good for society. But we will teach those without an explicit religious framework. 

Now, what I will often do though, I'll ask questions of an audience that are specifically designed to give the Christians in the audience the opportunity to voice, "Yes, I struggled with confession for many years, but when a friend told me about Jesus, I put my trust in him. He gave me humility." There's people in the audience that are bringing Christ into it, but I'll be up there just teaching some of the basic relational conflict resolution principles from a secular perspective. I think they could be beneficial. I mean, I want my non-Christian neighbors to obey the traffic signs in Billings, Montana. It's to everyone's benefit. And so, yes, I think they can benefit. 

The other thing I think we can do is that our marriages, as Christians, should be an enticement, a fragrance to non-Christians. In fact, that's what really brought me to Christ. I had a roommate in graduate school and then two people when I was working as an engineer that were Christian marriages. I watched how they related to their wives, and I thought, "I want that," and that's what drew me to the church. I saw these Christian marriages. 

The analogy I would use, if I walk into a mall, Kymberli, and there's a Cinnabon store there, you go, "Mm, something smells good here. Where's the Cinnabon store?" That's what Christian marriages should be. There should be a fragrance about us, and not one that's perfect, everything's easy. We should be open about our testimony. We should talk about our struggles, and yet how we had to work it through. Then people say, "Oh, I can relate to you. Yeah, I've got a temper too," or, "I can be very bitter," or, "I can fall into self pity. How did you do that? How did you overcome that?" Let's be transparent about our weaknesses, that His grace might be magnified. 

Kymberli Cook: 

I really love that. I love the idea of the fragrant marriages. Like you said, especially not in the sense that they look at it and it just looks like the Cleavers from Leave it to Beaver. 

Ken Sande: 

Right. Yeah, the Cleavers. Yeah. 

Kymberli Cook: 

Look at that. I'm not a completely young millennial. But it doesn't have to look picture perfect. It's actually more powerful if it says, "Yeah, we went through a horrible spell of," this spouse had awful anxiety, "and we really struggled." This is how the other spouse really showed love in a way that they had never experienced before and, unpacking all of that, all of a sudden gives the fragrance. I love that. Obviously, it spreads the gospel in a really meaningful and, potentially, a new and different way than the pamphlets and the tracts and that kind of thing necessarily. 

Ken Sande: 

If I could put in just one little pitch, if I might, Kymberli? 

Kymberli Cook: 

Sure, go for it. 

Ken Sande: 

An ounce of prevention is worth $50,000 worth of attorney's fees. And so, the more that we, in the church and even individually, as Christians can help people develop healthier relational skills before there's a crisis, the better. And so, that's what our educational materials are designed for, Sunday school classes, small group studies on conflict resolution and a concept we call relational wisdom, which is basically biblical emotional intelligence. 

The more people can develop those good skills, even starting very young. We've got material for first graders. But the more we can learn those things, especially if we model them for the young children, they see that, teach those things in our churches. Learn how to say, "I'm sorry I was wrong." I don't know if you're old enough to remember Happy Days with Fonzie. One of the most popular clips in that movie was Fonzie trying to admit he was wrong. He couldn't say it, "I was wr, wr, wr." 

Kymberli Cook: 

Yeah. 

Ken Sande: 

We, as Christian parents, should make sure our kids see, yes, this is part of reality. We have to sometimes say, I was wrong. I'm so sorry. As we adults learn these concepts from God's word, as we model them to our children, as we invite… I mean, you could have a Christian in a secular workplace who would use our values-based material, secular material, invite coworkers, brown bag lunch once a week. Let's discover this concept of relational wisdom. It's enhanced emotional intelligence. That's a way for you, as a Christian, to bring wisdom principles to your coworkers and it might actually open the door at some point. 

The typical thing is, or people say, "This is all sounds good, but I just can't change." You, as a Christian, could say, "I can't either. In my own strength, impossible, but what changed for me was Jesus Christ." And so, it's even a way to witness. I would just put in a pitch for prevention is so much more valuable than an agonizing divorce mediation. 

Kymberli Cook: 

I'm a huge believer in it, obviously. Ken, our time is up, and I just want to thank you so much for your time in being with us and really appreciate the wisdom and unpacking of so many years of practice with helping people manage this as well as thinking through it and writing and that kind of thing. Thank you so much for joining us today. 

Ken Sande: 

Thank you, Kymberli. It's always a privilege to work with you. 

Kymberli Cook: 

Thank you. We also want to thank those of you who are listening for being with us and hanging with us all the way through the conversation, if you're here. We just ask that you be sure to join us next time when we discuss issues of God and culture.