John couldn’t believe it happened to him. Neither could his wife. By all appearances John was a solid Christian family man. He’d been married for 19 years to a wonderful woman with whom he was raising three adorable children. Yet, here John sat weeping in my office, telling me he’d “fallen hopelessly in love” with a woman half his age named Sue.

Ironically, they had met while John was on a church mission trip to a third world village where Sue was a volunteer with a humanitarian organization. From the start, the trip turned John’s life upside down. For the first time in decades he remembered how he once dreamed of living a radical, counter-cultural life serving the poor. Once upon a time, he wanted his life to count.

It’s classic mid-life crisis lingo, but John sincerely felt like he’d found a “soul mate” in Sue. He had never connected with someone so easily and profoundly. In this light, he began to see the last 19 years as “not really him.” It was, rather, a mediocre life of insignificance—and his marriage was the ball and chain condemning him to it.

So here we were, seven months later. Every principle in his being told him he couldn’t leave his family, but all his emotions were screaming that he had to. Though he obviously brought all this pain upon himself, I cried with him and for him—and for his family.

What happened with John and his wife happens to all married couples to some degree. We compromise and settle. This isn’t itself a bad thing, for two people have to compromise on some things and settle into a somewhat predictable pattern of living just to do life together.

Problems arise, however, when one or both individuals in the marriage outgrow the compromises and patterns they initially settled into. If they don’t adjust these now and then, they will find that the pattern that used to help them stay together begins to tear them apart and it feels like a prison, at least to one of the partners. The pain of this imprisonment makes even the most stable people—people like John—emotionally vulnerable.

What John needed to realize was that patterns in life can change. The way John and his wife had done life the last 19 years didn’t have to be the same for the next 19 years. While his behavior was obviously sinful, something new and good could be birthed in John, and if he made the wise choice, it could result in something new and good in his relationship with his wife. It was good that John was getting in touch with the radical spirit of his youth and it was good that he once again wanted his life to count. What was tragically mistaken and sinful—indeed, demonic—was his assumption that he needed to leave his family in order for this good to be realized.

It was at this point that I reminded John about the Resurrection Principle. When God the Father raised Jesus from the dead, he didn’t do it by discarding Jesus’ body and supplying him with a completely different one! Rather, he transformed Jesus’ body, the same body he had on Good Friday.

God wanted to resurrect John’s marriage, but, as with everything else pertaining to the kingdom of God, the only way to experience the joy of new life is to crucify yourself. The only way to Easter is through Good Friday. To experience a resurrected marriage, John would first have to crucify the feelings and dreams he allowed to develop in his heart and mind about Sue. On top of that, both John and his wife would have to crucify the patterns of their old way of being married. It’s not that the old patterns were bad, they were just old.

Neither John nor his wife knew what “Easter morning” in their marriage would look like, and this was understandably scary. Even the most miserable of old patterns at least offer the comfort of familiarity.

John and his wife would undoubtedly have to spend a dark season in a cold tomb trying to figure this out, and there would probably be times when they’d face the despairing thought that they might never get out. But because they both trusted in a sovereign God who promises to work all things together for good (Romans 8:28), even in the darkest moments they could hold to the faith that Easter was coming. The stone would be rolled away.

The Resurrection Principle doesn’t just apply to marriages. When Jesus said that the only way to find life was by first dying (Luke 17:33), he was giving us a principle that applies to every area of our life. God is always seeking to birth new things out of the old, but every time we must first die to the old.

The “old” may be the way we’ve always related to our spouse, our kids, our friends or our enemies; it may be the way we’ve habitually thought about ourselves, or God; maybe it has to do with the way we view success or handle our money.

Whatever it is, we all have some pattern in our lives that God wants to transform by doing a new thing.

But whether we like it or not, that new, wonderful transformation can only come by dying to something old. The only way to Easter morning is through Good Friday.