I heard a priceless story about revenge one time. A woman asked her husband one morning to zip up the back of her dress. He began to play around with the zipper in a flirtatious way—zipping it up and down, up and down—and in the process, the zipper broke. She had just had the dress dry-cleaned and was late for a meeting, and there she stood with a “broken” dress. She was furious.

About 5:30 that evening, she returned home, still angry over her husband’s behavior that morning. She found her husband working on his car, lying underneath the car from his waist up, the lower part of his body sticking out and temptingly accessible. He didn’t seem to hear her as she approached, so she reached down and grabbed the zipper on the front of his jeans and began to zip it up and down just as he had done with her dress that morning. Then she walked into the house.

To her astonishment, her husband was standing in the kitchen. She said, “What are you doing in here?” He said, “What do you mean? It’s our kitchen.”

She said, “You were under the car just two seconds ago.”

“No,” he said, “I haven’t been under the car at all.”

“Well, who is out there in our garage working under your car?”

“It’s the next-door neighbor,” he said. “The muffler was coming off and he volunteered to fix it, so I told him I’d really appreciate his help and I came in here to fix a glass of tea for him when he’s finished.”

His wife went pale as a white sheet. She admitted to her husband what she had done, and they both hurried out to apologize to the man. They found the guy lying totally still. He didn’t respond to their calls, so they pulled him out from under the car by his legs. When he came to, they discovered that he had done what any man would have done if someone suddenly grabbed the zipper to his pants. He sat straight up, and bam, he hit his head on the underside of the car with such force that he knocked himself out!

All acts of revenge need to be left to God. Strange and terrible things can happen when you take retaliation and vengeance into your hands, and none of them are good.

My Question For You: Do you ever want to exact revenge on your spouse for their actions? Has it ever gotten you into trouble?

My Challenge For You: Don’t let revenge even cross your mind when it comes to your spouse.

There was no manipulation whatsoever in the scene in Song of Solomon 5:6-8.  There was no bargaining—“you do this for me and I’ll do that for you.”  Bargaining results in manipulation, not ministry.

A woman asked me after I had presented the information in this chapter, “If I can’t leave him, can I kill him?  No, you can’t do that either!

But you can continue to love your spouse and to pray for your spouse.  Ask God to do what you cannot do, and that is to change the human heart and transform the human mind.

State what you feel you must state, make whatever requests you believe are right to make, put forth your case as best you can make it, but don’t attempt to force a change in your mate.  Leave that up to God.

My Question For You: Is there something that you want to change in your spouse (or maybe something your spouse wants to change in you)?

My Challenge For You: Leave the changing part up to God.

Want to watch the SOS Tommy Nelson Study? You can buy the DVD Series here or Rent one Session at a Time here.