Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: For 14 years, Satan relentlessly targeted me, enraged by the freedom I was advocating for those trapped in spiritually lifeless marriages.
Thousands merely observing the surface reacted with judgmental screams. However, after years of confusion among the people, reminiscent of the days of BAAL worship during Elijah's time, God responded with a celestial fire, unveiling his extraordinary power and the divine design of time. And through my testimony and ministry, if you wish to join the end of a 14 year long list of thousands who came before you, our only response is our Lord's words in John 5:36 the Father gave me these works to accomplish and they serve as evidence that he sent me. If anyone has ears to hear, let them hear for the rest. Welcome to from the Ruins A Divorce Sanctuary.
Since 2016, when Donald Trump was first elected President of the United States of America, there has been an increasing political strain placed on marriages and relationships. Today, statistics actually show there's an increasing number of MAGA marriages ending in divorce due to conflicting beliefs about Donald Trump.
If you or any Christian you know is contemplating divorce for any reason, going through divorce, or has come through a divorce, please consider sending them this video and link to our new YouTube channel created to be a sanctuary of Biblical truth and healing. When Christian marriages fail, please see the link in description and may God bless you as you listen.
Perhaps, like us, you prayed your heart out for your marriage to be saved.
You begged God to step in and fix it.
Perhaps you even felt you had a promise that he would, but in the end he didn't.
Now you're sitting alone in the darkness, facing the possibility of divorce, or having already been through it, feeling a terrifying mix of betrayal, heartbreak and crushing guilt.
[00:02:17] Speaker B: Why the guilt?
Not only because you're a Christian who is now looked down on by others because your marriage has failed, but because deep down you may be furious at God.
[00:02:30] Speaker A: I'm a spiritual widow. I have lost two wives because of my love for Jesus Christ.
No other reason.
I love my wife. She is this.
If you ever wanted to see the definition of an amazing wife. I've had two spouses. I've had one wife.
This is a wife.
She has blessed me so much. As you can see, Terry and I are doing pretty good. We're doing actually really well. Jobs have been working out really well
[00:03:02] Speaker C: and because I'd come from a loving Christian family, I thought that my family and I would be able to help him and and give him the love that he needed and basically fix him. I saw him like a wounded bird that I could help heal.
And man was I Badly mistaken.
[00:03:24] Speaker A: Kerry's been working for a gentleman named Paul Cummings who was a motivational speaker and she's got to go to England a couple of times and two week periods and she's done some good traveling.
And he writes, dad, I have some bad news. Mom found out that I know about the affair.
[00:03:42] Speaker C: We got married at the age of 21. He had been taking drugs I think the whole time that we had been together. And he had managed to hide it behind my back.
[00:03:53] Speaker A: I'm just feeling so broken and I'm feeling so sad and I'm missing my wife and I'm just yelling out, she threw me away. She threw me away.
[00:04:03] Speaker C: He got a lot more angry while we were married and he became verbally, emotionally and sometimes physically abusive.
[00:04:15] Speaker A: Carrie, I'm going to allow God to judge between you and I and if I've done anything to deserve the treatment that I'm getting, may God judge me ever so severely.
But if I have not, may God have mercy upon you for the way you have been treating me.
I was accused of having been bipolar for the past 17 years. I was accused of verbally abusing the family, physically abusing my children. I was accused of having an affair.
I was accused of kidnapping or desiring to kidnap my children.
I was accused of hiding money, I was accused of stealing the kids savings bonds.
[00:05:04] Speaker C: He became a lot more abusive and was taking a lot more drugs and I just had to get out because with our two year old daughter at the time, it just wasn't the type of environment that I wanted for her. And so I had to make the decision to leave and, and my daughter and I moved back in with my parents.
[00:05:26] Speaker A: Was the worst parental alienation he had ever seen in 35 years of practice. These are the last images I have of myself with my five beautiful children in over 10 years.
[00:05:38] Speaker C: And I was going to church at the time and the church I was going to was a prosperity church and very much into prophetic words and I was sort of hanging off the next print prophetic word.
I became addicted to these words because I struggled to hear from God myself. Initially when I moved in with my parents, I felt that God had told me that he would restore my husband and restore our marriage.
So I held onto this promise.
[00:06:09] Speaker A: I will have fought for my wife's testimony, but this is just incredible, this battle that just, I mean, I received divorce papers today from my wife.
In 2016, I flew to Hyderabad, India to marry my second spouse after waiting for five and a half years for his promise. It might not be too much of a stretch to say that God had similar plans for my ministry that he did for the prophets in the Bible known as Hosea and Ezekiel, where he used either their wife's infidelity or their death to show the Israelites how wicked they had become.
I've had the very painful experience as a full time minister for the Lord Jesus Christ of having been married three times after losing my first two wives to infidelity, hypocrisy and apostasy.
So right now it is April 23, 2020. It is 406p.
Tyler and I have been in this house for 10 minutes and we came here and Persis is gone.
The combined total of both of those relationships was exactly 21 years to the day.
[00:07:27] Speaker C: But wait a minute, Stuart, I've got a question.
If God knew that Gomorrah was going to be unfaithful, then why would he have Hosea marry her?
Especially because you said that he was a good man.
[00:07:36] Speaker A: God wanted Hosea to understand Him. I mean that's the key here.
He wanted Hosea to love so deeply, knowing that it would never be returned.
[00:07:46] Speaker C: Why?
[00:07:46] Speaker A: Why?
Why?
[00:07:48] Speaker B: Why?
[00:07:49] Speaker A: Why? Why Lord? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why?
If you've been ago, why did God let my marriage fail? We need you to hear this right now.
[00:08:06] Speaker B: We too have experienced the pain of betrayal, the uncertainty and fear about whether or not we could divorce in God's eyes, the fear of how our broken marriage was impacting our children, the shame of finally being a divorced Christian, and the painful persecution of those who called us adulterers when God led us to remarry.
[00:08:30] Speaker A: Despite all that, and in direct contradiction to the totally out of balance God hates divorce message we had heard pounded in the churches.
We have seen the greatest redemption, the most amazing blessings,
[00:08:51] Speaker B: the most remarkable answers
[00:08:53] Speaker A: to prayer, the highest levels of faith, hope, character and love, the greatest fruitfulness
[00:09:02] Speaker B: for the kingdom of God in Christ,
[00:09:05] Speaker A: the highest manifestations of God's glory, and the most fulfillment we've ever had in our Christian walk.
We have experienced all of this and so much more on the other side of not one, not two, but three failed marriages between us where others wanted to condemn us became just the place God has richly blessed us through the obedience that comes by faith. We finally found a real, living, breathing, interactive relationship with God through Jesus Christ.
And we left behind the empty, powerless profession of faith we previously had.
[00:09:50] Speaker B: We are Michael and Lisa Criswell and we welcome you to from the ruins where we will be sharing the unfiltered and raw journey we Both have taken with the Lord through the valley of the shadow of death by divorce to find his resurrection, life and peace on the other side.
[00:10:10] Speaker A: Just as the greatest tragedy in the world, the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, became the very best thing that has ever happened in the world, we see that divorce has been both the greatest tragedy and the greatest blessing of our lives.
The death you may be feeling now can be transformed into the most glorious life through Jesus Christ who said, whoever loses his life for my sake will find it. In 2012, after a hellish fight from Satan to stop me, I publicly shared the raw story of my first marriage which lasted nearly 15 years and ended in a miraculous 777 day divorce that was heard around the world.
By the time it had been watched over a million and a half times, I had received tens of thousands of emails from around the world and heard every kind of divorce or remarriage story you could think of. For several years I made thousands of personal messages to the people who reached out to me and their darkest pain and desperate hope to find God's help and answers.
On this channel we are going to be sharing the invaluable biblical insights the Lord taught us by through our own journeys, along with all the insights that he gave me as I personally ministered to those thousands about their issues surrounding divorce and remarriage.
Sixteen years ago in 2010, shortly after being served divorce papers in my nearly 15 year marriage with five children, I found myself standing in front of the Christian Book section at my local Barnes and Noble.
I was standing there, still numb from the shock, frantically scanning the books and their subtitles back and forth, desperately hoping to find someone who had been through exactly what I was now about to go through. I didn't want a book with general divorce tips, psychological principles, or even just a few scriptures or anecdotes thrown at me. I wanted to hear real and and transparent personal stories and experiences of it. I wanted to know how and why it fell apart, how they felt when it did, how it impacted their faith in God, how they made sense of the senseless, how they found pain relief, how they forgave, how they trusted again, how they prayed and how and when God answered, how it impacted their relationship with their family and children.
When did God finally bring pain relief? How did they recover financially?
Did they ever remarry and find happiness again?
And when did they finally get past the shame and failure of it all?
I never found that book and I never found a ministry like the one God has now led. You to Lisa and I both would have given anything to find what the Lord has led us to now share with you.
Perhaps you can identify with God's way with Israel in Ezekiel 16:6 where he stated, but I came by and saw you there helplessly kicking about in your own blood.
As you lay there, I said live.
The Lord found both Lisa and I helplessly kicking about in our own blood. And perhaps that is where you are right now, kicking about in your own blood, just waiting to die.
However, if you can believe it, with a mustard seed of fish faith, the Lord is speaking to you too right now and saying to you, live.
And if you will follow our humble example of finding his help in grace, my brother, my sister, you will indeed live and you will become another glorious testimony of Jesus Christ's amazing resurrection Power of Life over death I remember years ago a respected pastor who had been outspoken about the God hates divorce message and who had really looked down on those who had been divorced, easing up a bit on his harsh tone, humbly admitting that he himself had no real experience with it and therefore could only go so far in teaching on the subject.
I am thankful for his lack of experience with the subject, but I cannot personally say the same.
Not all Christian marriages and divorces are the same, and while we are very much for keeping marriages alive and for persevering through the typical troubles many face in marriage, I have directly seen in the tens of thousands of emails in my inbox that there is a growing epidemic of unequally yoked marriages all over the world where one Christian is trapped in bondage to a child of the devil, a spouse who is not willing to live with them in the peace that God commands, and as a result, that Christian is slowly dying a spiritual death inside the marriage. Now this should not be a surprise to us, knowing that we are in the terrible last days Paul describes in 2 Timothy 3:1:5 or that Paul also told us that before Christ could come back there must be a great falling away. And there is no doubt, starting in my own personal experience, that there is a great falling away that is resulting in a massive number of unequally yoked marriages.
God turned my two dreadful experiences with two unfaithful spouses and two subsequent divorces into deep wells of biblical understanding and prophetic messages and insights that we believe are much needed by the body of Christ in these dreadful days of testing and darkness that lay ahead until Christ comes back first in our own lives and then in our personal ministering to thousands, Lisa and I have seen up close and personal how Satan has used a totally out of balance and legalistic God hates divorce message in the modern church just as effectively as Pharaoh used chains in Egypt to keep God's children in spiritual bondage to death.
When God's children remain in bondage to an enemy of God, they are unable to worship him freely, to fulfill his purposes for their lives, or to fully grow and mature in his life and grace. They are going to be unable to enjoy God and to find the promised land of abundant life in Jesus Christ. And this is why God so often sees marriage and divorce very differently than many today interpret him to Once Lisa and I had independently cried out to God for truth and for freedom no matter the cost in our terrible marriage situations, he began to teach us his whole counsel and heart about divorce and remarriage, rooted in all the other teachings on the subject in the Bible that no one in the false modern church was teaching. We learned that while the Bible does in fact say in one single verse in Malachi 2:16 that God hates divorce, it also says in many other places and in far more than a single verse that there are many marriages which God hates even more than divorce, that not all marriages were put together by God to begin with. That God's definition of a Christian marriage or a Christian husband or wife is also very different from the modern church's definition of these things.
We learned that God cares far more about the eternal souls of his elect inside of a marriage than he does about the temporary earthly institution of marriage itself, which does not even exist in heaven. We learned the truth about how God feels about Christian marriages and spouses when there is unrepentant emotional abuse, physical abuse, sexual abuse, sin, infidelity, persecution, hypocrisy and apostasy that would seek to distract or to destroy the faith of the Christian spouse in that marriage.
We learn the truth about what the Holy Spirit meant when he said through Paul not to divorce your unbelieving spouses on the condition of them being being willing to live with you and what the Holy Spirit truly meant by willing.
Also, in contrast to the false teaching and totally misunderstood context of Romans 7:2, we learned the truth that in the New Covenant God now places the emphasis internally on spiritual death, such that your spouse may be very much walking around physically alive inside your own home or marriage, but according to the Bible, God may see them right now as spiritually dead.
We learned that just as sleeping with a dead body would cause you to catch the filth and disease of the dead body and soon to die, so too Christians who intentionally stay yoked to a spiritually dead, unrepentant spouse, they themselves are in danger of dying a spiritual death.
We learned that God's hatred burns deep against hypocrisy and that his heart grieves over apostasy, that God still separates light from the dark, wheat from Tares, Isaacs from Ishmael's, and children of God from the children of the devil. And we saw that all his commands to be set apart and holy unto him, to not be unequally yoked, or to separate from the disobedient, are nowhere made void in Scripture because of the condition of marriage.
We learned that God sees, especially in the terrible end times we are all now living in, that many people are married not just to a struggling believer who has yet to mature, but to the Apostle John's definition of a child of the devil.
And that is something God hates when it begins to pull the elect child into the darkness of death.
And nearly five years since God first put Lisa and I together, we can also now testify that J.R. miller was far more right when he wrote that God's design for every marriage is happiness than are the modern Christian writers in the false modern church who write about it practically relegating it to being nothing more than a very abrasive and rough piece of sandpaper in which God's only purpose is to sand and grind you down.
A tremendous amount of brainwashing has happened to the modern church on these subjects, and it's very hard to get free from that wrong thinking when it has been so widely accepted all around us.
In Exodus chapter 6, when God sent Moses with the beautiful news that he cared about his people and he was going to bring them out of Egypt and free them from their pharaoh and bring them into a good land, the scripture says, quote, they did not listen to him because of their discouragement and cruel bondage.
However, after they saw evidence of God's word and purpose for them through the miracles which God wrought through Moses, they began to believe again and they were eventually set free.
Maybe you too cannot yet hear this message of freedom because of the modern church's God hates divorce, brainwashing, or your own discouragement and cruel bondage to your current spouse.
Either way, all we ask is for you to please stick around and listen to a few of these messages.
Wisdom has been proven right in our remarriage and in God putting us together.
Despite what anyone else on the outside had to say about it, the journey has been no less difficult than Israel's escape from Egypt and through their dreadful wilderness. But God did has done many incredible miracles, signs and wonders along the way in our journey to freedom, showing he was the author of it all. And maybe as you listen and pray and wait upon God yourself, the light of hope and faith will again dawn in your heart.
God first rescued Lisa and I from our respective pharaohs and now at his lead, we are going back for a remnant of just a few others whom we believe God is calling out by sharing with them all the details of our journey as a sort of spiritual roadmap to finding freedom in Christ.
On this new channel, we're going to share the real time details that I recorded along the way of exactly how our lives were transformed after overcoming many challenges in our previous marriages, including persistent struggles and setbacks and wrestling with spiritual death all along the way and how faith played such a vital role.
We're also going to discuss key biblical lessons and prophetic moments that highlighted God's faithfulness and truth throughout our journey. We're also going to share the detailed story of watching my second spouse descend into spiritual darkness as Satan led her step by step away from her once pure and sincere devotion to Jesus Christ and into her own hybrid religion of Eastern mysticism and Buddhism.
Others who have heard that series said it put the fear of God in them like nothing else they've ever heard.
Listen. We realize that not everyone has the faith or the courage to be free of their Pharaoh or to leave behind all that they've ever known in Egypt. But for those that recognize their marriage is producing the fruit of death rather than life, and for those who will grab ahold of God and trust him all the way with us, the freedom and life and peace will be unlike anything they ever hoped for back in that dreadful Egypt. If anyone has ears to hear, let him hear.
May God richly bless you as you do
[00:26:38] Speaker B: so we now want to welcome you to from the Ruins a divorce sanctuary where you will find biblical truth and healing for Christians when marriage fails. May God bless you as you listen.
[00:26:57] Speaker A: I love my wife.
She is such a blessing to me.
Brothers and sisters, my heart is filled with so much joy. It's beyond joy. I still still feel surreal to know that God has given me my Lisa.
She almost likes me too. Yes, you should know that.
I'm working on her.
Please be happy for us. We both suffered a tremendous amount to get into something like this.
I can think of no better title for our series and our story than the Grace to Love Again now can you? God gave us the grace to Love again sweetheart. He did.
He did.
See link in description to this new YouTube channel on divorce at from the Ruins Ministry.
