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The Pain of Marital (and Spiritual) Infidelity

Elizabeth Edwards, the former wife of vice presidential candidate Senator John Edwards, described the agony she experienced when she learned of her husband's infidelities:

After I cried, and screamed, I went to the bathroom and threw up. And the next day John and I spoke. He wasn't coy, but it turned out he wasn't forthright either I felt that the ground underneath me had been pulled away.
I spent months learning to live with a single incidence of infidelity. And I would like to say that a single incidence is easy to overcome, but it is not. I am who I am. I am imperfect in a million ways, but I always thought I was the kind of woman, the kind of wife to whom a husband would be faithful. I had asked for fidelity, begged for it, really, when we married. I never need flowers or jewelry. I don't care about vacations or a nice car. But I need you to be faithful. Leave me, if you must, but be faithful to me if you are with me.

Possible Preaching Angles: (1) Marriage—of course the pain of infidelity applies to both men and women; (2) Spiritual Unfaithfulness—It's no coincidence that God often uses the analogy of marital infidelity to describe our unfaithfulness. God doesn't react exactly like Elizabeth Edwards, but Scriptures does reveal God's intense anger and even grief when we are unfaithful and idolatrous.

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