Faithfulness is the cornerstone upon which the other love agreements can be built and can thrive. Without the agreement of faithfulness, your marriage will suffer seasons of damage. In my seventeen years as a counselor, I have seen the ravages of unfaithfulness in various areas of many couples’ marriages.

For many Christians, faithfulness is considered to be almost a given. If a Christian couple walks down the aisle and makes a vow in the sight of God, church, and community, most believe, of course, that both individuals are going to keep their word.

I wish this was true. Yet, many Bible-believing, church-attending Christians fail to keep their vow of faithfulness. One day last year, Lisa was reading an issue of Charisma magazine. Lisa is a voracious reader of all kinds of material. As is her habit, she clips out and highlights anything she feels is important for me to know. On this day, she leaned over to me with her Charisma magazine and said, “Look at this; this is hard to believe.” She had my interest because her big, beautiful green eyes had just gotten a whole lot bigger. So I looked at what she was reading. The article was citing some research stating that Christians are out-divorcing the world by a couple of percentage points. It was hard to believe that 50 percent of all secular marriages end in divorce. Yet even harder to believe was the fact that Christian marriages were beating those numbers by a couple of percentage points. I put the Charisma magazine down in my lap and paused.

This truly is a sad statement. Christians today have the Spirit of God, the Word of God, great churches and pastors, marriage ministries, marriage conferences, marriage counselors, and more books on marriage than at any other time in the history of the church. Yet they are failing at marriage.

It’s even sadder when you look back fifty to one hundred years ago and see that more people in the church were staying married. Remember, that was before marriage ministries, in general, existed. Even though marriage counseling and conferences were scant in the Christian world, more people were staying married.

What is the reason? One reason is because the generations before us understood the agreement of faithfulness. They took the covenant of marriage very seriously. They were taught the biblical meaning of covenant. Today, many have lost sight of the simple meaning of covenant. In biblical times, when a couple was being married, as a part of the marriage ceremony they would cut an animal in half, allowing the blood and insides of the animal to scatter all over the place, exposed to both individuals. Then they would walk between the animal and make their agreement, saying to each other, “If I do not keep my agreement, may worse than what happened to this animal happen to me.” Now that’s an agreement to be faithful.

I remember when Lisa and I were engaged. We took our engagement very seriously. We read every book and listened to every tape on marriage preparation and marriage we could get our hands on. Lisa and I walked down the aisle and said our vows of “until death do us part.” We are absolutely serious about this. In our hearts, divorce is not an option. We are committed to going through the various stages of life, dealing with the issues, and feeling the pain and joys of a life together.

I often kid Lisa that I am asking Jesus to allow me to have her as my wife during those thousand years when Christ is on earth. I really love Lisa, and I am committed to her for life, and she is to me.