The Difference Between an Abusive Husband and One that Makes Mistakes

The Difference Between a Textbook Abuser and a Jerk

To have authority and to be a fallen human being is to guarantee you're gonna misuse it, right? And so I've heard you, brother, share about this spectrum. Now, you did this in terms of like marriage, right, stuff, but I think it applies more generally.

What we're describing, what Darby spends her life working with is marriages where you have a textbook abuser, a guy who's a tyrant, controlling, manipulative. The wife lives under years of oppression.

She's, in every sense of what we're describing, a true victim under his abuse of tyranny. What I want to leave room for is a guy who I'm just going to call a jerk. He's immature. He's young in his faith.

He might have been a Christian for a while, but he just has not grown. And it's demonstrated in the way he lives. He screams. He does stupid things. He just does things that, unfortunately, many of us as young husbands have made mistakes and done.

But I don't want to quickly throw him in the bucket of abuse. And by abuse, I'm describing a Pharisee and a tyrant who, in using his authority, the wife, literally, her image-bearing qualities degrade in front of us over the course of years.

So she becomes a faint image of what she used to be. And the word picture that I use is if you picture that husband taking a sledgehammer to a car and beating the car, and eventually the frame of the car begins to break down.

It's a systematic breakdown of a person's personhood.

So in contrast to that, the jerk would be the guy who does some cosmetic damage to the car. Yeah.

Right? Well, it's a windshield off. Yeah. And he does stupid things. In our current climate, he can quickly be thrown into the bucket of abusive. Whereas if you've worked with these guys over years, what you see is I wasn't abusive, but I did a lot of dumb things my first few years of marriage.

I have no business of being self-righteous on these young guys. And that's what gives me a lot of mercy for them. I can tell the difference between a young guy because he's willing to follow my lead.

He is repentant. He's here regularly. He's in the word, but he's not a tyrant. I can take him under my wing and say, that was stupid. Why did you do that? I love you. And we're going to change this. And he's going to follow my lead.

And it may take some time and he may make mistakes and he might do it again, but a year or two years or three years from now, he's actually going to look different. Five and 10, 15 years from now, he might actually be an elder.

A Long Time Horizon for Counseling and Growth

That's a great time horizon. I think people expect like three counseling sessions. Yeah. If he's not changed. Yeah. Think in like five-year chunks. Yeah.