Hey, thank you, how are you doing? I am honored to be a part of this. My wife and I appreciate being here. I especially appreciate an opportunity to talk about something that I think is very relevant to so many Christian couples, and that is how do you restore trust after trust has been broken in marriage? I have the pleasure of running a biblical counseling ministry back in Southern California. I work five days a week primarily with married Christian men who have broken trust within their marriages by engaging in some kind of sexual sin. So a lot of my work is spent helping couples learn not only to forgive but also to restore. But this is not just academic to me. I have no stones to throw on this issue because long before I met my beautiful wife, I had, as an 18-year-old, been married. I married very young. I was a new Christian. We believed in those days back in 1973 that the Lord was coming back Tuesday before lunch. So a lot of us jumped into things quickly. The things we jumped into were very, very good things. But for some of us, myself included, marriage at that age and full-time ministry at that age, which I also entered into, were things I was not prepared for. I knew that God had given me the gifting, but I had not yet been through the maturing. To put it plainly, I had not grown up enough to sustain the pressures and the responsibilities that went along both with married and ministerial life. And I had brought into my marriage an old struggle I had with homosexuality that went back to my childhood. And as a result, by the time I was 23, I began giving myself permission to give in to sexual temptations. I committed adultery numerous times. My wife rightfully asked for a separation, and then she, on very good biblical grounds, did file for a divorce. And there can be no argument that she was entitled to do so. For the next six years, I was a very committed gay activist. I was also a staff member with a pro-gay church. So as you can see, I devolved into a great deal of darkness until God graciously brought me to repentance. in early 1984. Now, time prohibits getting into all of that. If you know and love someone who was caught up into that particular sin, I've got a free e-book I'd love to send to you. Just go to my table out there, grab one of those coupons, fill it out, or scan it, and I'd be glad to give you more information on that. Point is, after my repentance, I did attempt to contact my former wife. She had remarried years before, did not want to have further communication, couldn't blame her for that. I began my own process of restoration, seeking God and being built up again in Him. In the process, I did meet the beautiful woman who's with me today, and three years after that, we were married, and we have been married for 37 years now. So obviously, this subject is not just a theoretical one to me. I know of no man Christian or otherwise, who has derailed his life as completely as I did. So all that I am about to say, I say from the perspective of a very guilty man who, as I said, has no stones to throw. Now, the commonest questions I get during the week when I'm working with people are from the husbands. How do I regain my wife's trust, and how do I prevent the sin I committed from happening again? And from the wife's perspective, the question so often is, how do I ever trust him again? I know I have a mandate to forgive. But I still don't trust him. What do we do with that? I wanna look at both of those challenges. I believe that those challenges begin long before the marriage. In most cases I've seen even long before the man came to Christ. And that is what comes up when the PowerPoint doesn't move for you. What am I doing wrong here? There we go. Now it's moving too fast. This is pretty much the story of my life. It starts with loving darkness, loving darkness. This is a sad and awful fact of life I think many of us have learned the hard way. You can know something is wrong and simultaneously you can love it. Jesus spoke of this when he said, here's the condemnation, light has come into the world and what's the problem? Men loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil. How does that happen? It begins with a process that is threefold. I call it discovery, repetition, and incorporation. Early in life, we learn, again for better or worse, that when we discover an experience that delivers impact, the brain records that experience for future reference. Is that always bad? No. If I discover that when I'm thirsty, I drink water and it works, my brain records that, well, duh, I guess that was a good discovery. Sometimes it might be more neutral. I remember when I was about 12, I discovered coffee. Not a bad discovery. I found that it delivered impact. Ooh, I'm awake, hey, ha ha, good morning. Okay, it helped get me through the day, made me a little more alert. It served a purpose. And when I discovered pornography, it delivered impact. I felt comforted, I felt exhilarated, I felt distracted, I felt a relief from the pain in my own soul, and my brain recorded that. for future reference as well. So in the future, when I felt unhappy, when I felt restless, when I felt angry, when I felt unable to do anything with my life, there was always pornography. That was my discovery. And discovery will normally lead to a repetition. After all, if a product works, you go back to it. Oftentimes, you go back to it in higher doses. You may have noticed this, your system will acclimate to what you have exposed it to. So for example, at first when I started drinking coffee, one cup did it because my goodness, a little bit of that, and hi, good morning, glad to see you again. Would you like to write an opera with me? I love Humphrey Bogart movies. Oh, am I talking too fast? It was just whoa! But after a while, no. My system acclimated to it. Now I'm 70 years old, I'm 69, pushing 70. I'm not even saved until I've had three cups of coffee. I mean, it takes a lot more than it used to take to get me going. And so it often is with sin, the impact it initially delivered. becomes muted with repetition, and so the system craves higher dosages of it, so a man starts doing it more frequently, and in more intense doxous repetition, which leads to incorporation. That sin becomes a predictable part of his life, and thereby, he experiences the coming years responding to a cycle, stimulation, entertainment, transgression. James spelled this out very nicely in James chapter 1, when he said, first off, don't lay this on God. If a man's tempted, don't let him say that it's God's fault. Because God cannot be tempted with sin, neither does He tempt any man, okay? But every man is, this is the stimulation phase, tempted when he is drawn away of his own lust and enticed. There is within all of us, unfortunately, even when we are born again, the old nature which we are to reckon dead, which we are to crucify, which we certainly are not to indulge, but there is an enticement factor. So stimulation happens when a person is drawn away of his own lust and enticed. Now this is the critical point that leads to a decision. Decision is a critical word anytime we talk about sexual purity because sexual impurity at the end of the day is the product of the wrong decision. Now I want to emphasize that because so often we talk about sexual sin almost like it's an accident. I slipped. I used very poor judgment. Or this is my favorite, I suddenly found myself You know, like I was just walking down the street and fornication mugged me. I mean, it wasn't my fault, for heaven's sake, no. A decision was made. We are posed with a decision whenever stimulation knocks. It's like, now, I, again, many of you won't even remember the concept of a door-to-door salesman because you're far too young, but once upon a time, salesmen went door-to-door knocking. If you don't want to buy and you don't want to be bothered, if you're smart, you don't answer the door. Just leave it. Because any good salesman knows the idea is get your foot in the door, start the conversation going, you know? So you make a decision, I will or I will not answer the door. We make a decision. I will or I will not answer when lust is beckoning. When one entertains, then James' words come to life. Lust, when it is conceived, brings forth sin. Now the man is taking a second look He's daydreaming, he's letting the system get heated up, and he can tell himself, well, I'm not really sinning per se, I'm not acting on it, but I'm enjoying the rush of the lust and the adrenaline that is pumping through me in that moment. He's entertaining, which so frequently leads right into transgression. That is transgression, a deliberate, willful act of sin. Now, when a man has learned to love his darkness, this is largely then a part of what he has incorporated into his life. Now, the good news in all of this is God knows. That is to say, and this is one of my favorite thoughts, Paul spelled this out beautifully to the Ephesians, Ephesians 1, for according as he has chosen us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and without blame before him and love, wow. There's a whole five-hour seminar right there. Before anything that was created was created, you were seen, you were assessed, you were chosen. And chosen with a very specific and a glorious purpose, to be holy and without blame before him in love. This is why I believe the deeper we come into holiness, the more we grow, the more spiritual we allow God to make us, it feels like coming home. There's an inevitable feeling to it because this is what we were created for, you see, to glorify God and to be holy and without blame before Him and love. So God sees the man who has gotten caught up into this even before the man is in Christ and has been born again. And there is a preparation going on. Now, certainly I don't believe we are born again primarily so that we get prepared for marriage. Of course not. We're born again because we are dead in sin. And we have no remedy at all other than to be born again if we want to enter into the kingdom of heaven. But that said, oh yeah, of course that helps prepare a man for marriage. He is first positioned in Christ. That's wonderful. And so he is, as Paul told the Ephesians, seated in heavenly places. Most believers get that, but there is also the salvation, well, there's the sanctification and restoration process that a lot of believers today are skipping over. That's why I so appreciated what Travis was saying earlier about denying ourselves and taking up our cross and following him as being basics to our mandate as believers. I see nothing in Scripture that tells me there should ever be a distinction between a believer and a disciple. But today, too often there is. Today, too often, there are those who are content to simply believe, to believe all the right things, but not to take up their cross, not to deny themselves, and certainly not to follow, you see? And so in the sanctification process, Why, oftentimes that will put its finger on parts of our lives that we incorporated before we came to Christ, we brought them with us. Sexual sin is a clear part of that. Paul knew that when he wrote to the Thessalonians. Now this scripture too, very relevant. 1 Thessalonians 4, three to four. For this is the will of God, even your sanctification, that you abstain from fornication and that each of you learn to possess your vessel with honor. Learn to possess your vessel with honor. What is God calling us to when he calls us to sexual purity or purity of any kind for that matter? Honorable stewardship. Very important concept. You remember the parable of the stewards. The owner had entrusted the stewards. And the owner called all of the stewards to account for what they had done with what he entrusted them with. So Paul rhetorically asked the Corinthians, hey, what do you have that you were not given? Your body, your gifting, your intelligence, your finances, your wife, your children, your job, your home, whatever you have, you were given. What does that mean? Whatever you have been given, you will give an account for when you stand before the judgment seat of Christ. That, of course, will include what you've done with this thing that people often call your sexuality, that mysterious set of responses you have that's wonderful and also at times very problematic to deal with. Side note, but something that's become precious to me, and I thought of it when we were worshiping earlier, you know, when we worship, what do we do? We yield, right? Notice how many of us were basically saying, I give up, I surrender. That's well, ah, you know, good. We yielded our minds, our hands, our voices, our whole bodies were yielded. Every temptation resisted is an act of worship. Every temptation resisted is a deliberate act whereby the man says, Lord, I may crave this, but I love you and thereby I yield to you. I worship you not only with my body, but, very important, with my obedience. I worship you as well. This is the will of God, your sanctification. Now, this is the part a lot of guys skipped over before they got married, much to the detriment of their marriage. Along with restoration, Psalm 23 three, the Lord, my shepherd, he what? Restores my soul. A lot of men and women, gosh, we picked up a lot of wounds along the way, didn't we? Can range from early molestation to different types of abuse to rejection to who knows what. A lot of old wounds that resulted in bitterness that needs to be healed and turned away from and a lot of misconceptions we have and a lot of work that needs to be done on the soul. Again, a lot of believers bypass that. I'm exhibit A, that's exactly what I did as a young man. I was filled with the Holy Spirit, I was born again, and I entered into ministry, and I used my gifts, but I never allowed God to refine me, to work in the soul, and to sanctify the person, you see? And so that means that oftentimes we enter into, well, the honorable covenant, of course, of marriage. Good. I mean, you find a wife, you found a good thing, right? Yes, of course. And marriage is honorable. Hebrews 13, four, the bed is undefiled. Unfortunately, there are many who brought unfinished business into their marriage bed. The private sexual sin they never fully renounced, never fully dealt with, never brought to the light. Now naively, many a Christian man has thought marriage will solve that. Once I have a legitimate outlet for my sexual desires, and goodness knows I love my wife, so the joy we will experience when we consummate our marriage will obliterate my desire for sexual sin of any kind. And that's not. Completely illogical. It's not realistic. But it's not completely illogical until you start really thinking about the human condition in general. Important question. Does having what is legitimate obliterate our desire for what is illegitimate? I think not. Think about food. If you've ever tried to diet, you know exactly what I'm talking about. Does having legitimate healthy food available to you obliterate your desire for cheesecake with hot fudge and whipped cream and walnuts and a milkshake? I don't believe in doing anything halfway. When I go to partition, I want to just go, man. Yeah, you know. So there, you know. No. And that's a sad fact of life in this fallen world, and with this old nature, there is what we truly, fervently want as new believers, and there is also what we crave. And they often coexist, which means frequently, if we are wise, we say no to what we crave, knowing that it is at odds with what means the most to us, you see? But that is where many a man began his marriage with a false assumption. Well, the porn problem I occasionally give into, my habit of sexually fantasizing, the ego benefit I get from flirting with women on the job, all of that's gonna go because I will have a legitimate outlet for my sexuality. It's not a statement of any deficit on his wife's part if he finds, via a rude awakening, that those sexual temptations are still there. I remember when I was 14, back in 1969, a notorious, awful murder, the Charles Manson murders, hit the news, and the actress Sharon Tate had been murdered. Now, it came to light her husband was the film director Roman Polanski. And any of you my age or around my age will remember Sharon Tate was easily one of the most beautiful actresses Hollywood ever produced, just a stunningly beautiful woman. Well, what came out during the trial was that Mr. Polanski, by his own admission, was frequently committing adultery. Now, my friends and I were going, are you kidding me? You had Sharon Tate for a wife, and you were committing adultery? What's the matter with you? Well, it had nothing to do with Miss Tate. It had everything to do with the nature of lust, and this again, important point. I firmly believe lust is never truly satisfied, it is only appeased. When I begin to lust for anything, power, sexual lust, greed, revenge, I may appease it by committing a singular sin, but I'm not gonna satisfy it. It's gonna rear its ugly head again, and it's probably gonna say, this time I want more. I hate to admit it, but I saw that cheesy film, Little Shop of Horrors, back in the mid-1980s, and there was this big plant that kept saying, feed me, feed me, and the more he fed it, yeah, feed me, feed me, it kept getting bigger and bigger, and I thought, that's lust. I know that monster. I have been that monster, you see? Now, once he starts, Once the married man is disillusioned by his own limitations. He is a Christian. He thought when he married he would no longer have these sexual temptations. They are there. Is that a tragedy? No. We all have temptations towards something, don't we? Sure. That's not the tragedy. The tragedy is when we decide to give in to them. He gets a little disappointed. Marriage isn't all he thought it was gonna be. She's not all he thought she was gonna be. Life isn't all he thought it was going to be. And he's tired, and he's grumpy, and he's restless, or he's, who knows what? I mean, any number of things could be happening. And he starts to leave her. Now, he doesn't necessarily pack his bags, I don't mean that. But there is something they have that he cannot have with anybody else, the sexual covenant, the marriage bed, that is only theirs. Every other part of his life he can share, but not that. They created that together. That's the beauty of the sexual union between man and wife. And by the way, one of the horrors of pornography is the lie it tells when it says this is what it's supposed to be like. Well, actually, your union is supposed to be unlike anybody else's. It's like your fingerprint. When you marry, you create a new fingerprint, and you create for the two of you what is uniquely your own marriage badge, you see? Nobody else is ever supposed to have access to that. But a man starts to leave her. I don't want to be intimate with you. You're starting to be a source of pain or of aggravation, or maybe I feel guilty because all of a sudden I don't feel good enough for you, or whatever, the list is endless. So he starts investing over here. Maybe his own private fantasy, maybe some pornography, maybe even an affair, maybe a prostitute, I don't know, but he invests over here. Now to live with that, he's got to do a couple of things. First, he's got to minimize it. He's got to basically tell himself it's not that bad. It's a guy thing. Every guy uses porn. Oh, every guy flirts. Oh, really? It's not natural for guys to be monogamous. I mean, who am I kidding, you know? And so on and so on. He starts minimizing the seriousness of it. I still love her. I still provide for her. I work my tail off to pay the bills. What more could you want? So if I need a little pleasure over here, she doesn't know. It's not hurting her. All of these minimizations. I was interested in something the late Corrie ten Boom wrote in her account of her years as a Holocaust survivor when she was in the Ravensbrück concentration camp for sheltering Jewish families and people. I mean, here she is, she's surrounded by gas chambers and execution and torture and just indescribable misery. And she started noticing her own attitude towards people was getting cynical, and she was getting selfish and hardened and bitter. And so she would start acting on it and refuse to help other prisoners who needed help. And in retrospect, she wrote about that and she said, and even if it wasn't right, it wasn't so terribly wrong, was it? Not wrong like sadism and murder and the other monstrous evils we saw every day. Oh, this was the great ploy of Satan in that kingdom of his. To display such blatant evil that one could almost believe one's own secret sins didn't matter. 2024, this is the age of child sex trafficking, human slavery. the butchering of bodies in the interest of becoming something they can never become. We don't even know what defines a man or a woman anymore. Now in that context, a Christian man looking at internet porn, that seems almost tame, you see? And this is where a lot of people today are comparing themselves to the display of evil all around us and saying, well, I'm not really that bad. And that leads to compartmentalization. Compartmentalization happens when a Christian man has his real life here. His wife, his children, his work, all that he as a godly man has responsibility for, this is Joe Dallas. Then he shuts the door on that and goes into his dark fantasy, whatever that may be. The affair, the porn, the who knows what, you know. And in that world, he's not Joe Dallas, he's Irving Finkelbaumbaum. Because Joe Dallas would never do a thing like that. Irving Finkelbaumbaum, oh yeah, he would. So Joe Dallas cuts himself off from an awareness of Irving Finkelbaumbaum when he stops sinning. I remember back in the mid-80s, A very famous evangelist was asked if he had ever committed sexual sin. He said, never, that's not a part of my life. Two weeks later, he was found to have had a decades-long problem with using prostitutes and pornography. Was he lying when he said that? Well, technically, yes, but I really think in some way, he had so compartmentalized, he really thought, no, I, me, could never do such a thing, this other guy, he would. See, compartmentalization. Remember what happened when Nathan confronted King David after his adultery in the murder of Uriah? He did something that my mother used to do to me. He told a story about the kid's guilt. My mother would say, Joey, don't leave the house. And as soon as she went, I'd leave the house. She'd come back home. I thought I'd gotten away with it. And she'd say, Joey, once upon a time, there was a boy who was told he must not leave. Do you know what happened to him? And I knew, I'm dead. Nathan says to David, there was a rich man who had lots of sheep and a poor man who had one little lamb he loved so much, the rich man wanted to feed his guests so he snatched up that poor lamb. That's so obvious. Not to David. David goes ballistic and says, well that man's gonna pay with his life, that's horrible, that's, wow. That to me is one of the most chilling lines in all of the Bible, thou art the man. You are everything you say you're against, wow. You see? But that's a funny thing, isn't it? Again, a side note, but my sin, if I see my sin on you, it looks awful. Oh, how could you? If I see my sin on me, oh, I don't know, it's kind of cute, it's no big deal, you know. That's the classic compartmentalization device. Well, all of that, something's got to give, right? Well, that leads to internal and external crisis. Internal and external crisis. Because what's gonna happen here? God is gonna interrupt, isn't he? I mean, when we are born again, we still belong to him. If we give ourselves to carnality, to lukewarmness, to backsliding, we still belong to him and he's going to work. There's the internal crisis of truth whereby God gives a man space to repent, space to repent. Jesus alluded to that in Revelation 2.21, giving space to repent. A lot of guys stupidly think because they're getting away with it, they will get away with it perpetually. What's really happening? God is saying, look, I don't want you humiliated. I don't want you to break your wife's heart. I don't want you to lose so much that you will lose if this comes to light, so I am wooing you now. Do something about this. But if a man ignores that internal crisis, he's gonna get an external crisis. He is going to be exposed. because God loves the man too much to allow this to continue. That's why oftentimes guys come into my office and say, oh, I can't believe God loves me. He allowed my wife to find out. I'm humiliated. I'm gonna lose my ministry. I might lose my marriage. My kids don't respect me anymore. God must have given up on me. And I point out, no, no, no, no. This is the proof of how much God does love you. Because the author of Hebrews said it very well. Hebrews 12, eight, if you are without chastening, You're illegitimate. I'm a dad, I mean, my sons are grown now, but when they were kids, I corrected them. Yeah, I saw other kids every day who I knew needed correcting, but they weren't my responsibility. A father corrects his own children. You see, if you are perpetually getting away with an unconfessed sin, I'd be scared if I was you. If you're not being corrected, Something's very wrong, you see? So that correction is what brings it to light. Now that, of course, leads to the great challenge. What do we do now? The man has had his sin exposed. The wife has found out. The marriage has been injured. That's quite an understatement. I believe that for both parties, but especially for the wife, When there is this discovery of a husband's sexual sin, that will probably prove to be one of the most, if not the most difficult thing she has ever dealt with. Because it is a wound that goes deeper than most people realize. It is catastrophic. Now I learned again the hard way when I repented that the great sin in my life was not homosexuality, it was not pornography, it was not uncleanness. Those were terrible sins. But the number one sin I was guilty of that I had to turn from, I had made a god out of Joe Dallas. The night I said to myself, I hereby give myself permission to walk into an adult bookstore and gorge. That was the night I said, not in so many words, but I truly said it, God, My pleasure hereby takes precedence over your will and over you yourself. That's idolatry, you see. Now I get it more and more when I think of why Samuel said, rebellion is the sin of witchcraft. It's got its roots in Lucifer who said, I will, I will. And when a man says basically, I don't know what's wrong, but I will, he's aligning himself with a very ancient evil. That was what I had to turn from, and I believe at some point and at some level, every man deliberately who is a Christian committing sexual sin needs to do the same. He's going to start living beyond, that means first turning from. Where there is repentance, there is churning. Let's not forget that. A lot of men mistakenly think if they confessed, they repented. That's not true. Confession's a good start. Goodness, yes, I confess every day, don't you? I mean, we confess our sins. He's faithful and just to forgive us. I had to confess this morning just for what I thought of some of the guys on the road I went past while I was driving. So yeah, okay. But that's not repentance. A lot of guys confess their sin and then do nothing about it. They really haven't turned from it. Until you've turned, no, that's not repentance. It's turning from. Turning from, like Jesus said, your hand offends, you cut it off. Your eye offends, you pluck it out, you know? There has to be repentance, a turning from. And then there must, in that process, be a coming clean. So often the man who has been committing sexual sin is not willing to be honest with his wife about what he's really been doing, so he minimizes it. She finds a link to pornography on his phone or some such thing, and she says, what have you been doing? And he's like, oh, well, how much do you know? And so he does what I call the Chinese water torture. He drips out a little bit of confession. And then she presses and finds out later, no, you've had this problem for a year. And then, oh no, you've had this problem for several years. Oh no, you've had this problem and other problems. And the poor woman is just being tortured to death with the Chinese water torture. Much better to gush it all out. Here. This is what I've done, and I'm fully convinced that if we are not ready to bring to light the sin we say we are repenting of, we're not really repenting. We're still holding on to the prerogative of secrecy. So there must be that coming clean, you see? And then an acknowledgement. There's a turning from, there's a coming clean, and then a very important part of restoring trust. Acknowledge. This a lot of guys have never thought of, but let's think about it seriously, okay? When you want to restore someone's trust, you must acknowledge the severity of what you've done. Remember when the prodigal son returned, the first thing he said was he didn't give excuses. He didn't even ask for anything. He acknowledged, Father, I have sinned against heaven and you, and I am no longer worthy to be called your son. You see? Acknowledgement. And acknowledgement shows that you have at least tried to grasp the enormity of what you have done. I swear, this is the commonest question I get from wives. Does he have a clue what he did to me? He says he's sorry. He says it won't happen again. But somehow the way he says it, he says it as though he spilled the milk at the table. I don't think he knows. I don't think he's taken the time to think of the wound he has inflicted on me. Acknowledgement then is awfully helpful. I mean, look, let's get practical. We were supposed to start at one o'clock, okay? Now, suppose I came breezing in here at about 1.45. That'd be pretty weird. You'd probably forgive me, but I think you'd want some acknowledgement. Could you imagine if I breezed in at 1.45 and said, Hi everybody, it's good to see you. Okay, let's get to the lesson. At some point, I think one of you would go, Ah, time! How about at least an acknowledgement of the fact that you are extremely late, you've kept us waiting, and some kind of an explanation. That's very reasonable. So it is reasonable that a man will acknowledge to his wife, I am beginning to get it. What does he need to acknowledge? The nature of what he has done. It's never just, I had an affair. I used a prostitute. I looked at porn. I, whatever. No, I betrayed you. We had a covenant. I willfully broke that covenant. I get it. I betrayed you. And I recognize that betrayal is one of the worst experiences a human being can have. And I, the one person in your life you should have been safe with, I betrayed you. And when you think about that safety factor, it's a pretty critical one. I mean, the world is a very, very, very rough place to function in, isn't it? One thing we expect in marriage is, well, there's at least one person I'm safe with, at least one person I can trust, at least one person who I can be honest with, at least one person who is not going to betray me. And boom, I betrayed you. I acknowledge that. And I not only acknowledge that I betrayed you, I also ignored you. I ignored your needs and satisfied my own. I deceived you, I lied to you. I told you everything was fine and it wasn't and I gaslighted you. Now we use that term a lot. I wonder if you know where it came from. There's a great old film Gaslight, Charles Boyer and Ingrid Bergman in which a real scoundrel marries a wealthy woman to get her inheritance and in those Victorian days you could get your wife's inheritance if she was insane and she was committed to a madhouse, you could take over her estate. So he decides to drive her insane by basically convincing her that she's losing her mind. He would steal a picture and hide it under the couch and say, Paula, what did you do with the picture? I don't know. What do you mean? I saw you take it, and you're always taking things and then losing them. Something's wrong, Paula. And he keeps repeating that kind of behavior until she finally is like, OK, I guess I'm crazy. Now, so many wives know, don't they? Wives and mothers are two of the scariest creatures on the planet. You've got antennae, and it's really weird. but we can't get away with anything with you. You know something's wrong when it's wrong, even though you don't have tangible evidence. And so a wife will know, now there's something wrong. You seem distant, you seemed unsettled. There's something going on here. What's happening? Nothing. You are so suspicious. You are such a nag. You make life so hard for me. You are always thinking the worst of me. Do you know how hard it is to be with you sometimes? Why don't you knock it off? And the poor woman, beaten down with that, is like, OK, I guess, well, she's gaslighted. No wonder she's so enraged when she finds out the truth. You let me think it was me all this time, and it wasn't. I acknowledge all of that, and I acknowledge the nature of the sin and the impact of the sin. I acknowledge the fact that this has undermined your confidence in so many things, your confidence in me. Probably your confidence even in yourself. A lot of women think, boy, I must be an idiot. I believed him. Or maybe I'm not attractive. I thought I had something to offer my husband. I guess I don't. He wanted that instead. Undermine her confidence. Even sometimes, this is awful, but it's true. A man committing sexual sin against his wife can undermine her very confidence in God. Most devastating thing a woman ever said to me was when one wife of a husband I was working with said, you know, if my daddy knew that the man who wanted to marry me was going to shatter my heart, my daddy would shoot that man before he'd let him marry me. My Heavenly Father knew that this guy was gonna break my heart. Why did my Heavenly Father allow that man to marry me? Gee, I guess I don't even matter to God. You see how severe these kinds of injuries can be. So then there needs to be an expression. I am sorry, I feel pain over this. It's never enough just to say, I know I did the wrong thing. There is also a place for expressing, it matters to me that I've hurt you. It matters to me that you are now injured because of what I have done. And I crave your forgiveness, I wait for your forgiveness, but don't think this will ever be okay with me. I will never be off the hook because I will always retain an understanding of the fact that I severely injured the one person who I never truly wanted to injure. So he acknowledges. And then, of course, he finally, after expressing, he goes for some structure. Because after all, it's not enough to just say you're sorry, you gotta follow that up with something. That's why John the Baptist said, Matthew 3, eight, bring forth fruit that is worthy of repentance. You know, show me the money. You say you're sorry, great start. You've acknowledged and expressed, bravo. But now, whatcha gonna do? Well, that starts, of course, with structure having to do with God. The structure having to do with him is made up of disciplines. Any man who is truly repentant needs to recommit himself to daily communing with God through reading the word in prayer. The man who has sexually sinned has grown cold in his love towards God. That's a critical part of all this. Jesus said, if you love me, keep my commandments. Now, if a man is investing in knowing God, he's going to love God. I know I need to love God. I don't just get to say, oh, okay, I'll love God and turn on the love God switch. It doesn't work that way. I have the heart of a rebel. Therefore, I can't just decide, oh, okay, I'll love Him. I can decide I will know Him. I can commit daily reading the Word through which I hear from Him and then cleansed and built up and communing with Him in prayer. You know what's going to happen? Well, to know Him is to love Him. I commit myself to knowing God, I'm gonna love God. I love God, what's gonna happen? Obedience, you see? So the investment of the spiritual disciplines and of the accountability, very critical. No man does this alone. When a man has sexually betrayed his wife, he has proven that he is capable of crossing serious lines. He needs then to recognize, I won't make it on my own. I won't make this on my own. That's why Hebrews, the author of Hebrews said, Hebrews 3.13, let us exhort one another daily while it is called today. Let's build each other up. The man who has an area of weakness that he has kept giving into should not be so naive as to think that just because he repented of the sin, he has lost the weakness. That's not true. He's going to need the accountability of a godly brother who is going to, on a regular basis, exhort him, pray with him, listen to him, and build him up. This is one of the greatest things men can do for each other, is love each other by believing in the work of God in each other. If you go to a gym and you see guys who are training partners working out together, you see that love and action. When guys are working out together, you have a good workout partner. The way they talk to each other, it's not a good English movie, okay? They don't say, my good fellow, would you care to curl that weight? Don't exert yourself now. No, it's like, come on, come on, come on, don't be a wimp, do it, ah, ah, you know, that's love. Because what the man is saying is, I truly believe that you are capable by the grace of God of more, you see? I believe in the work of God in you, and I want you to believe in the work of God in me. Let's build each other up that way. Good accountability and guidance. I love the way the Proverbs put that. Every purpose is established by good counsel, so by good counsel make war. Proverbs 20, 18. When my clients come to me and say, I want to for once and forever put away this sexual sin from my life, and I want to restore things with my wife. I want to be the man of God that I'm meant to be. So I'm coming to you for advice. I'm coming to you for counsel. I'm coming to you. I always say, no, you're coming to me because you've declared war. This is war. You're gonna get serious about your warfare against the flesh, against the devil, against the spirit of the world. You're gonna declare war on everything that is gonna take you outside of the will of God, and I wanna do the best I can to be an advisor, as it were, in the war that you're going to be fighting. Now, where does all this leave the couple? Is there any hope beyond this? Oh, of course there is. Good night, yeah. You know, my first supervisor told me, don't ever worry about disappointing your clients, because you will. I mean, you're going to say something stupid, or you'll show up late, or you'll yawn when they're talking. That's a very stupid thing for a counselor to do, by the way. But the point is, you're going to hurt them at some point. And he said, here's the deal. If you are willing to get in there with them and say, I messed up, I'm really sorry, let's work this out, the relationship will actually get stronger than ever, like a broken bone that mends. Does that mean it ever should have been broken in the first place? Of course not. The sin is never God's will, never. Well, this is the beauty of kingdom living. Paul said it perfectly, Romans 5.20, but where sin did abound. Grace did much more abound. Was the sin a good thing? Of course not. And what does God the Redeemer do? He takes something horrible. And I have seen couples magnificently grow stronger than ever despite the terrible thing that had happened to them where sin did abound. Grace does much more abound, that's a fact. And that is also a promise. Let's pray together just a moment, okay? Father, we're presenting ourselves to you as living sacrifices, our marriages, our lives, our desires, our passions, our bodies, all the capacities you've given us. We are praying that you will correct within us what needs correcting, that you will strengthen within each of us what needs strengthening, that you will bring to light the areas of darkness that need to be brought to light. Let us be recipients of your healing and your transformative work, and let us, Lord, be vessels that you use to bring others into that same work. We ask all this in Jesus' name. Amen. Thank you very much. Good talking with you. Thanks.