I've been thinking about you. Her response about the email......you will have to be the one talking to her about it. She won't be the one. She moved out. You are the one fighting for the marriage and helping her see.
Your statement about "doing what you want". You thought about you lately and felt good. Sure, everyone feels good when they are working on pleasure principle.
Read this (Theoden pointed me here):
But that’s true only when, as in my case, I really like my wife. As long as I have blessings that I sincerely enjoy, then the moral path allows me to keep on enjoying those blessings. But notice, the joy is not the enjoyment of God. It is the enjoyment of blessings. Remove the blessings, give the man a wife that for whatever complex of reasons he does not enjoy, and the pleasures of sin may exceed the pleasures of holiness.
The old hymn says “There is joy in serving Jesus”. And there is. But if we are counting on an experience of soul satisfaction to reliably accompany obedience and if we expect that our felt pleasure in doing good will exceed the pleasure we could enjoy by indulging our favorite sin, then it won’t take long till sin will seem irresistible.
Here’s the point: if we live for an experience of joy, if we elevate desire to central status and live for nothing higher than its felt satisfaction, then we no longer are living by faith. We are idolaters worshipping desire. We are no longer living for God.
I agree with Jonathan Edwards that there is no incompatibility between our unquenchable longing for happiness and the command to worship God. But if God becomes the means and our happiness becomes the point, then we are self-obsessed pragmatists, not worshippers. When God is the point and obedience designed to bring him pleasure becomes the focus, then there will eventually be a fullness of joy that makes sin unthinkable and unappealing, thoroughly repulsive.
But that fullness of joy comes later, in heaven. In this life, it's more about hope than about joy. Joy now is wrapped up in communing with the Son in His delight in the Father, communing with the Father in his exaltation of the Son, and communing with the Spirit in His obsession with seeing the Father and the Son glorified. But that joy, though real and growing, will not be complete until we are literally in the presence of the Trinity, dancing forever in perfect rhythm and unspeakable ecstasy (See Eph. 3:19). In this life, now, it's by faith that we live, by faith that joy is in Jesus, even when following him yields suffering. Of course there are seasons of great joy, and there is an abiding sense that we belong to the most wonderful Person in the universe, that the privilege of knowing him really does exceed all other blessings whether we feel it or not, and that living for him is what we most want to do. But if we’re living for the maximum sense of pleasurable satisfaction now, we will obey God only if he provides blessings that obedience allows us to continue enjoying. Take away the blessings and live life to gain satisfaction of even the noblest human desires and eventually you’ll find yourself moving away from God. One prevailing heresy in evangelical culture is that living for Jesus reliably provides the soul with a depth of satisfaction that exceeds the satisfaction found in sin.
