I literally hate having to write this article knowing that it could trigger pain in some people, and also create fear, which I do NOT want to do. This article comes out of my weariness of finding out and dealing with what appears to be the rising number of Bible-believing men opening doors to immorality—not just porn, but live, active adultery—sex-for-money or secret mistresses. My focus in this article is dealing with married men committing adultery. I know women commit adultery, too. But of all the cases of adultery I have dealt with recently among Christians, the majority are men.

I will say, also, here at the beginning of this article, that I have seen many men, and many marriages restored after the trauma of adultery.

A friend of mine, I’ll call Renny, called me recently because a close friend of his went down the self-centered path that so many married men these days are trekking—adultery. He got caught. There is a major problem with active adulterers—they always lie. Always. They are strategic, convincing liars. Lying and adultery are in bed together. Always. Remorseful adulterers continue to lie, but repentant, transformed adulterers come clean. Remorse is a convincing counterfeit of the real thing—a repentant brokenness.

Renny was asking for advice on what to say to his friend who had reached out to him for help after being caught,. His friend was a typical scenario of men who cheat. They get caught. They cry. Say I’m sorry. This one, like the many Ruthie and I have worked with in our marriage counseling, is a repeat offender. Never got to the roots the first time.

I didn’t know the couple, but I agreed to do a phone counsel with the victim—the wife. In her pain she vented to me all the things wives vent when they find out that their covenant husband gave to another woman, or women, the precious things that belonged only to her. Were there levels of pain and violation? Many! And a wife’s loss of trust and respect in the one who was commanded to nurture and love her as Christ loved the church is often irreparable. Abused wives are going to vent their anger. I can’t remember the words Rennie’s friend’s wife called her guilty husband, but it was on the line of, you’re a mealy mouse of a man! Almost equal to the pain of the sexual violations were the strategic lies he told to cover his butt.

Renny’s friend’s sexual sin is only a symptom of what’s out of line in his heart. Renny is now taking his friend through my book To Kill a Lion:Transforming Your Life Through Sexual Freedom. I wrote it because I became disillusioned by the behavior modification approach to counseling sexually-dependent men. I replaced the cheap surface teaching with heart transformation as the principle to access victory over lust. Sexual addiction, adultery, or any other addiction or vice is only a fruit of a root. Many contemporary “sexual-restoration” programs deal with recovery from the fruits when they should be more focused on the roots. When I’m dealing with an offender I tell them, “It matters less what you did; it matter more the carnality inside your heart that allowed you to do it!”

What Renny Said to Me

Toward the end of our initial phone conversation, Renny lamented, saying something on the order of, “Today with all the lust on the internet, it’s a horrible trap for so many men.”

I paused, then offered a different perspective, “Renny, a man’s commitment to purity can’t be dependent on the level of temptation in the culture he lives in. Every culture advertises lust. No source of temptation, no matter how prevalent, is to blame. Men of God must discover a pathway to develop a heart of hatred for lust. They need tenacity to resist every trigger point, and a value system of love and integrity so that no matter how bad the world is, no matter how society throws lust their way, no matter how sexually insensitive they think their wife is, they remain stedfast to the commandments of Christ. They must learn to love purity more than lust, and destroy the tendency to use lust when they need an emotional fix.”

Renny fully agreed with me. It’s so easy to think that the intensity and availability to sin is the blame for people sinning, but that is not so.

Two days after Renny’s phone call I had a phone conversation with a pastor who sadly told me about a well-known, influential pastor—his friend—who got caught in adultery. The full verdict was not out yet. In some of today’s church culture, as we have witnessed with recent pastor-sexual scandals, the incident may be covered up to protect the guilty only to possibly re-emerge later.

Immorality Rebellion to God

I taught on I Thessalonians 5 recently at church. Verse six is a scary verse. After Paul’s warning about immorality, he concludes, “…because the Lord is the avenger of all such, as we also forewarned you and testified.”

Adultery is an act of selfishness. Adulterers have a sexual problem only because they are self-centered, self-focused, and usually have some level of narcissism. Renny was heart-broken to hear about his friend. I was familiar with the feeling. Ruthie and I, as pastors and counselors, are often privy to the unfortunate antics of adulterers. We, too, feel the combination of grief and anger. We’re often stunned and astonished finding out men we never suspected who have been found guilty.

In tears one time in a counseling room, a man who committed adultery was fearing the loss of his amazing wife—after she lovingly took him back after the first time. He slobbered, “But I love her so much!” I came unglued! I rebuked him up one side and down the other! Brutal verbiage! I said, “Don’t you tell me you love your wife. Agape love, the love Jesus taught, can’t be divorced from how you treat another person. You made a choice to give away your covenant with your wife, and then a second time, you sabotaged her identity, because she may never feel “enough” again, you opened a legal place for Satan to come in and kill, steal, and destroy your children, and you tell me you LOVE HER? Agape is action-defined not feeling-defined!”

I could write more, but my conclusion is a challenge to all the men who are reading this. Get off yourself! Have enough self-respect to protect yourself from making cheap choices. I challenge all men, love yourself enough, love your wife enough, love God enough, love the girls on the screen or in the brothel enough to walk in sexual honor. Don’t give any part of the one life you’ve been given, to something that is far below the dignity of Kingdom manhood!

And if this article caught you too late, God is a merciful God–a redeeming God. But He is also not a cheap-fix God.