“A friend of mine is a great example of someone who brought sin into his houseful of kids through his 40-year porn addiction and then had an encounter with God that empowered him to change.
…His wife is still playing the role of the punisher, and his children are still distant, regardless of his change of heart and full repentance.”
-Kris Vallotton in THE SUPERNATURAL POWER OF FORGIVENESS (Ventura, CA: Regal, 2011), pp172-173.
Can you fully repent of FORTY years of sinful harm in a moment?!
Vallotton is seriously naive, at best, here. He is carrying water for his “friend” while condemning his friend’s wife (and children). It is amazing how tone deaf this “pastoral” perspective is!
I question the true “repentance” of anyone who lacks compassion for their victims focusing on them “punishing” them as the problem since they have “changed.”
Part of repentance is seeing and acknowledging the damage your actions did to the other party. Forty years of damaging behavior is going to harm the trust of anyone. They have FORTY years of reasons not to believe that the change is real, and that is wisdom speaking on their side as the track record is that bad! A repentant person would acknowledge this and quietly work to SHOW the change.
My final point:
I am greatly troubled by a pastor centering his compassion on the perpetrator while not extending even similar compassion to his friend’s victims.
The priority of care ought to be reversed in my opinion. It is very natural to care more for our friends than others. However, we need to fight against that tendency when those friends have caused harm. It is not good for them to downplay their sins and their impacts as it seems to be happening here.
