by Standerinfamilycourt

Dear Kim,

You don’t know me, but I have been praying for you during your incarceration, and I have been encouraging others in the covenant marriage community of “standers” to pray and write as well.   I hope many of them will.    Much as we all rejoice at your finding fellowship with Jesus Christ and taking a  stand for His kingdom to the point of enduring great hardship for the sake of conscience, you (or your official role at least) is very difficult for us to like.   Most of us do not live in Kentucky, but there’s a counterpart in our county and state whose “orders”, “decrees”, “certificates”, “licenses” and “judgments” on file in their office no longer match up with those in the Courthouse of Heaven.    You see, we also love Jesus, and we are comforted by His words that He is the Bridegroom, the one who will never leave or forsake us, and that where man’s law conflicts with God’s law, it is His law that prevails.  But, of  course, you’re in jail for also saying so.

Jesus says that the Father joined us supernaturally to the husband or wife of our youth, and despite the “dissolution of marriage” paperwork that it was your elective responsibility to maintain on file, paperwork that was created upon a unilateral petition we contested or refused to respond to, that violated our conscience and deepest convictions, and that we know broke the Father’s heart, we are comforted that that’s all it is – just paper.    You may not know it, but in your present trial, you are a very fortunate woman.   When we committed our private act of civil disobedience in “family court” as citizens first of the Kingdom of God, we too were stigmatized, vilified and publicly slandered for making ourselves obstructions to somebody’s new fundamental right of unfettered sexual autonomy.   Unlike you, however, there was no Liberty Counsel willing to admit we were being punished for our faith, or willing to invest any resources in taking up our case in resisting an immoral law that violated God’s law and threatened our family and society.    Instead, we were told that the burden of unilateral (no-fault) divorce provisions on our right-of-conscience and free religious exercise, not to even mention due process over our parental and property rights,  was “only incidental” when we testified under oath on the witness stand that this was how we had together raised our children, and when we were punished by the judge for quoting Luke 16:18 on the witness stand.

For Matthew 19:6 and Mark 10:9 both assure us that the one-flesh He joined cannot be made two again by any judge or other human, and the presumption that they can “dissolve” what the Most High God, the God of Angel Armies said could only be dissolved in His eyes by one of our deaths makes Him laugh at the confusion about ownership.    Of course, as you know all too well, the content of the law is not your fault, but as you have also learned, it shapes your responsibilities in ways that conflict with your faith walk and primary citizenship in the kingdom of God.

But, regardless of the Father’s assurances to us who want to obey Him perfectly with regard to His law and commandment of marriage, we bear a deep burden for our spouses who have walked away, not only from us but also from the Lord.   In the first place, it is not possible to break fellowship with a one-flesh covenant spouse and retain fullest fellowship with Jesus Christ or the Father.   We live with the somber knowledge that unless they repent and turn back to the Father, reconciling with the many they have harmed in addition to us, and as long as they remain in an immoral relationship with somebody other than us, they are headed to hell and taking their companion with them.    You see, the man-made legal fiction of divorce is only official-looking paperwork licensing a permanent state of hatred and unforgiveness, filed in your office or one of your counterparts around the nation.   However, the choice our spouse has made, and you have archived,  may or may not satisfy in this life, but  Jesus warned that it will surely cost them in the next life unless they turn back.   When we talk to the Father about that (and we must do this daily), He says, “do not be afraid – I will never replicate with a counterfeit replacement the supernatural joining that made the two of you permanently one-flesh.  I even gave that process a unique name in my Word that is only repeated where holy matrimony is involved.   Not every civil marriage is holy matrimony, in fact, if it is not holy matrimony, then in every such case it is adultery.   I, the Lord, remain in covenant with you, and I will pursue your one-flesh partner in the watches of the night and in the middle of their day.”

Why do you complain against Him
That He does not give an account of all His doings?
“Indeed God speaks once,
Or twice, yet no one notices it.
 “In a dream, a vision of the night,
When sound sleep falls on men,
While they slumber in their beds,
 Then He opens the ears of men,
And seals their instruction,
That He may turn man aside from his conduct,
And keep man from pride;
He keeps back his soul from the pit,
And his life from passing over into Sheol.     –  Job 33: 13-18

I am sorry to hear of the death threats you’ve endured , the jeering of the crowds and the catcalls of “hypocrite”!   A hypocrite is somebody who takes action or refuses something out of unrighteous judgment, without dealing with the issues of their own heart that may come out in a different way than the one being judged.   Many of these people are opening their bibles for the first time and reading the marriage scriptures to compare your life to.    Your bold protest has made that a reality by motivating them, so you should feel very proud.   You are showing people who would otherwise never accept any moral absolutes, that judgment is only possible if there is a fixed moral standard.

The reports are that you were born again only four years ago, after you had remarried your second husband.  I have tried to find out a bit more about the church you discovered and what it teaches about divorce and remarriage.  If you are a “hypocrite” as the crowds say,
I don’t think you are an intentional one.   The very nature of hypocrisy is that it hides so that we’re the last to see our own, and we have an exceedingly hard time recognizing it.    If I understand what the Apostolic Church explains online, the Statement of Faith expresses strong support for marriage permanence and doesn’t seek to partition off “biblical exceptions”.    It is very good that your church has not embraced the Reformation heresy of “Matthean Exception” for adultery.  I wish I could say the same about my pentecostal denomination, post-1973,   On the other hand, it appears that your church does not consider marriages valid that are not of “like mind, faith and fellowship”,  otherwise they consider all marriages to be for life according to the doctrine of your church.   This sounds a bit like the other Reformation heresy of “Pauline Privilege” which technically was applied by men (Erasmus, originally) beginning in the 16th century to abandonment.   I hope you have a bible with you, and that you’re able to spend some time reading and meditating on God’s word, so that you can compare it to all you’ve been taught.   Please don’t be alarmed when you can’t reconcile a “disconnect” between what you’ve been taught in church and what your bible actually says.   Many of us experience this at some point in our walk, so please don’t let it shake your faith.  That’s why the Apostle Paul urged us in Acts 17 to test what we are taught against what’s really between the front and back cover of that bible,  as a “Berean”.    You will find that the only piece of paper filed in your office that actually dissolves an original covenant marriage in God’s eyes is a death certificate, and Jesus added no faith qualifiers when He said so.

I have lived in the south, and to this day I have loved ones living in small towns just like yours.   Though it was an elective, government office, I know this 30-year enterprise that began with your mother and employed various family members felt very much like a family business to you.   Suddenly the Supreme Court comes along and takes away the constitutional right of the State of Kentucky to set marriage policy, and does not even wait for the legislature to convene and give you a new law to follow.   The oath of office you swore was to uphold the old law, and you were doing just that.   You also showed strongly that you knew your most important citizenship is in the Kingdom of God, and you were willing to go to jail for that principle.   But what is the Kingdom of God, anyway?    Is it not where the King is obeyed in all things?

Matthew 19:4-6 

And he answered and said unto them, Have ye not read, that he which made them at the beginning made them male and female,

And said, For this cause shall a man leave FATHER AND MOTHER, and shall cleave to his wife: and they twain shall be one flesh?

Wherefore they are no more twain, but one flesh. What therefore God hath joined together, let not MAN put asunder.

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Mark 10:7-9

For this cause shall a man leave his FATHER AND MOTHER, and cleave to his wife;

And they twain shall be one flesh: so then they are no more twain, but one flesh.

What therefore God hath joined together, let not MAN put asunder.

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Luke 16:18

Whosoever putteth away his wife, and marrieth another, committeth adultery: and whosoever marrieth her that is put away from her husband committeth adultery.

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Matthew 5:32

But I say unto you, That whosoever shall put away his wife, saving for the cause of fornication, causeth her to commit adultery: and whosoever shall marry her that is divorced committeth adultery.

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Matthew 19:9

And I say unto you, Whosoever shall put away his wife, except it be for fornication, and shall marry another, committeth adultery: and whoso marrieth her which is put away doth commit adultery.

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Romans 7:2-3

 For the woman which hath an husband is bound by the law to her husband so long as he liveth; but if the husband be dead, she is loosed from the law of her husband.

So then if, while her husband liveth, she be married to another man, she shall be called an adulteress: but if her husband be dead, she is free from that law; so that she is no adulteress, though she be married to another man.

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1 Corinthians 7:39

The wife is bound by the law as long as her husband liveth; but if her husband be dead, she is at liberty to be married to whom she will; only in the Lord.

(Here I use the King James Version, since contemporary translations are based on choice of a manuscript text that deceptively omits a very critical phrase from some verses, and they take carnal and unscholarly liberties with the key word “fornication”,  a premarital sin in the context that Jesus and Paul used it when addressing the permanence of the marriage covenant bond.)

What you may come to understand before this chapter in your life is fully written is that marriage was not, in its most profound sense, redefined by those lawless “black robes” in 2015.   Fundamentally, it was redefined to be at odds with God’s law when you were but a small child, and actually before your mother was elected to file those pretentious pieces of paper that purported to “dissolve” covenant marriage,  and to legalize subsequent or existing adultery.   It was at that point that God was truly offended, but nobody back then was courageous enough to take the stand that you have taken.   If they had, we would have a very different country today, and God’s blessing would have remained with us.

The community of covenant marriage standers commends you for considering the souls of homosexuals so important, and the symbolism of covenant marriage (in the incomplete sense that you understood it as a relatively new believer) so sacred that you would take the hard road of suffering for Christ as you have.   We pray that you will come to understand that the souls of adulterers are just as much at risk, and that the paperwork you have recorded that gives them a “fig leaf” of man-made “respectability” is a stumbling block to many in getting their lives right with God.   For this reason, we pray that the Holy Spirit will convict you not to return to your post so long as the underlying marriage law of the land is so profoundly immoral.   And since God gave us our Constitution, any law that is immoral is also inherently unconstitutional.   This was the case long before the Obergefell decision.     Not every occupation is suitable for a follower-of-Christ.    While it may or may not be true that believers who hold government offices “check their free speech and religious exercise rights at the door”,  Jesus made it plain that His followers have no rights per se, but His strength is made perfect in our weakness.

We are all praying for your soon release from wrongful imprisonment, and that your testimony will be profitable for the kingdom of God, Kim.    May you, like Paul and Silas, win your jailers over with a joy and song of worship that only comes from the Holy Spirit.   May you remain gentle in spirit, representing the King well.  God bless and keep you and your family.

In Christ,

“standerinfamilycourt”

7 Times Around the Jericho Wall  |  Let’s Repeal No-Fault Divorce!

www.standerinfamilycourt.com