TODAY IN THE WORD
Authors Harold and Bette Gillogly say that keeping a clear conscience is vital to a healthy marriage. “You need to start by clearing your conscience before God. . . . Then you need to clear your conscience before others. This may mean humbly seeking someone’s forgiveness. And the 'someone’ on the top of your list should be your mate. We have learned as a couple that to keep our consciences clear before each other, we need to pray together regularly. When we are sharing together honestly with God, we are, at the same time, sharing honestly with each other. . . . When we share our failures with each other, we unmask them and defeat their power over us.”

That’s a powerful argument for the importance of spiritual openness and honesty in marriage. In Psalm 139, David expressed his desire to be transparent before God. Honesty has to start here because “he who conceals his sins does not prosper, but whoever confesses and renounces them finds mercy” (Prov. 28:13). This is the Old Testament equivalent of the promise in today’s verse.

The apostle James added the importance of including others in our confession and repentance when it’s appropriate and necessary for spiritual healing. This commitment to spiritual honesty is one of the elements that can help a marriage thrive. Besides being deceptive, trying to hide our faults and failures from our mates is often useless.

As the Gilloglys suggest, this quality of spiritual honesty includes more than just owning up to our sins. Being open before our mates also involves letting them into our world by sharing our feelings, concerns, and even “anxious thoughts” with them. Even as David prayed that God would search him, he acknowledged that God had already searched him and knew him thoroughly (v. 1).

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TODAY ALONG THE WAY
By its very nature, marriage demands openness. Marriage also rewards us when we open our hearts to our partners. We encourage you to have a “confession session” with your spouse.

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