Confronting broken trust, silent hurts and emotional distance — because the enemy is not after your marriage for its own sake. He is after the four generations behind it.
"Two are better than one, because they have a good reward for their labour… and a threefold cord is not quickly broken."
Ecclesiastes 4:9, 12
Pastor Tunde & Bridget Elesin
Team Elesin · Complete Family Club · certified marriage and family counsellors and Maxwell leadership coaches
Closing session · teaching portion
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Your Home Is the Target · Pastor Tunde & Bridget Elesin · 1 hr 25 min · MP3, 22 MB · includes the full question and answer session
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The video and audio for this session — including the full question and answer time — will appear here once published.
Two lives, one vision. Married for over two decades, Pastor Tunde and Bridget Elesin are certified marriage and family counsellors, mentors and trained Maxwell leadership coaches who have spent more than twelve years teaching couples together through their annual couples programme and the Complete Family Club. They had ministered at LIC the previous year and returned to a room that remembered it.
"This season is a destiny moment. He doesn't do things by chance — God is so intentional." They asked the room to pay attention and to take out of the session the one specific thing each person needed, rather than listening in general.
Their diagnosis is that homes rarely collapse from one dramatic blow. They erode through three quiet failures, each feeding the next.
When a spouse does not match their stated commitment with their actual presence — in moral betrayal, and in financial deception.
The pain nobody names. For some it is swallowed; for some it leads them to God; for many it simply sits there and festers.
"I can't trust you with my feelings. I can't trust you with my words." Two people sharing an address and nothing else.
Homes are under attack across the world, and the reason is not the marriage itself — it is the potential inside it. The enemy is not fighting what your home is; he is fighting what it can produce. If he gains access to your home, he has access to four generations — to your children and to your grandchildren. That is why the pressure is disproportionate to the household.
Broken trust happens when a spouse does not match his or her commitment with their presence. It shows up in two places above all: moral betrayal, and financial deception. On the second they were blunt — you can sleep beside someone every night and she has no idea what is in your bank account. Society, they noted, quietly benefits from exactly that kind of unaccountability.
Left unnamed, the hurt does not stay still. It becomes distrust, then bitterness — one of the illnesses we never treat — then resentment, which eats from the inside where no one can see it. When there is no joy and no peace left, bitterness fills the space. Some reach the point where the sight of their spouse is enough to set it off.
The distance never stays emotional. It hardens into the couple who live in the same house and are no longer in the same marriage — months, and in some cases years, with no intimacy at all. "You do your thing, I do my thing." And the children see the gap and learn to work it, playing one parent against the other.
What is lost is the bond of unity — and with it the capacity to achieve anything together. Picture two people standing back to back, one walking one way and one the other. There is a tearing point, and then you are simply walking away from each other, each doing their own thing and no longer even knowing what the other is doing. A divided home cannot resist a focused enemy.
Ecclesiastes 4:9–12Pastor Tunde described driving from Benin to Lagos on a road full of potholes — and barely noticing, because the car had good shock absorbers. Every home has a relationship strength, and you can measure it by one question: when something hits, do the two of you resolve it quickly, or does it sit? Dealing with broken trust, silent hurts and emotional distance is not navel-gazing; it is fitting the shock absorbers before the road gets bad.
When behaviour starts malfunctioning outwardly, something has already happened inwardly: a mindset formed, then thoughts, then conduct. Much of that mindset is imported. Family and friends arrive with their own scripts — "men from this tribe are like this", "women are like that" — and couples adopt expectations that were never theirs. Their answer was firm: "I will not use another person to define my marriage." Every family is different, and yours has to be run on what God has given you.
Three practical postures. Be a strength — you are there to strengthen and to stand behind, not to compete. Be compassionate and understanding — assume the best about what your spouse did not do, rather than the worst; when a woman is compassionate and understanding, Pastor Bridget said, everything else becomes easier. And be disciplined, because all of us need boundaries: live your life so that it can be seen, and make your spouse your accountability partner. If a friend calls and suggests a trip, your spouse hears about it from you. If your spouse calls and asks where you are, the answer should never be a problem. "You are stronger together — but the DNA of this oneness only works when both of you are accountable."
The counting in Matthew 18 was never about arithmetic. Their rule for repair is to separate the event from the individual: deal with the thing that happened without converting it into a verdict on the person. Which is why, in their home, name-calling has never been allowed — not between the two of them, not toward the children. "If you ask our children, I don't think we have ever said, 'you are mad', 'you are a big head', 'you are this.' We raised ourselves differently." And Pastor Tunde added the hardest example of forgiveness there is: the man beside Jesus on the cross, told that same day that he would be in paradise.
Matthew 18:21–22 · Luke 23:43Three things they would not leave the room without saying. Talk it through in advance: they have written down what they would do if a large sum came tomorrow, and where they would live, before either became an argument — "there are things you need to talk about now." Get a mentor: no one told them, and they had to learn it the hard way; a pilot chooses his co-pilot before he ever leaves the ground. And teach the generation behind you: Titus 2 charges the older men toward solid faith and the older women away from gossip and toward teaching beautiful things, so that the young women are taught to love their husbands and their children. They apply it literally — their children were brought into the family's financial reality, learning that "it is our money", so that when they marry and meet difficulty they are not shocked into leaving. They were equally direct about intimacy: the church teaches "keep yourself pure" and then teaches nothing at all for the marriage itself, and then expects a transformation on the wedding night that nobody was ever prepared for. It has to be taught, and taught well.
Titus 2:1–8"Your home is the target. Your home is precious."
"If he has access to your home, he has access to four generations."
"Broken trust happens when a spouse does not match their commitment with their presence."
"Emotional separation becomes physical separation."
"I will not use another person to define my marriage."
"Make your spouse your accountability partner."
"Most especially in the countries we live in, they have belittled the family union to rubbish — and why? Because it is the institution God empowered first. So fight for your home. Make sure there is no emotional distance. I am not lying to you: fight for your home."
After the teaching, Team Elesin took questions from the floor for around twenty-five minutes — including pastoral cases brought by ministers in the room. That portion is deliberately left out here, and is available in full in the video and audio recordings above.
Designed to be worked through by couples together, or in a small group. Try answering before you open the answer.