Porn Isn’t A Big Deal…
Should you tell your spouse that you watch porn?
Can a person, married or not, get through lust alone?
In a recent movie, a man was regularly watching porn but kept it from his wife. The film presented his habit as a good thing. It nurtured his sexual appetites and wasn’t hurting his wife. The attitude toward porn was, if it’s something you like and she isn’t being hurt by it then it’s totally okay to do.
In the film’s storyline, porn wasn’t a major point. The couple had severe issues and the porn was more of a laughing point than it was anything else.
The couple ends up falling apart, realizing they had forgotten how to fight for each other. But maybe this wasn’t only due to miscommunications and a nonexistent dating life. Maybe the passion had been leaking out of their marriage for years, as he pursued intimacy with pixels, and she found value elsewhere.
Do I Really Need To Tell Someone?
As you know, Proven works with hundreds of men and women every year. We go into churches and equip leadership to love their people through the hardships of lust, pornography, unfaithfulness, and divorce.
As we go into these situations and grow alongside people, there is one thing that continues to stand true: people are not meant to live in isolation, nor are we meant to hurt alone. If lust and unfaithfulness are the misuse of healthy relationships then healing cannot happen unless we learn to inhabit honest, healthy relationships. Hiding sin from your relationships simply won’t heal them.
The apostle John puts it this way: If we walk in the light, as He is in the light, then we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin.
The idea here is that truthful living is the only way to walk in the way of Jesus. When we practice walking in the light then it necessarily means we are walking in honesty with those around us. This is the kind of life that naturally cleans out the heart because you’re constantly being exposed to the light of love, forgiveness, grace, and hope.
To be in a sincere relationship with Jesus is to pursue sincere relationships with His people. It will kill your false-pride and shatter your fabricated self-image, but what Jesus resurrects will be altogether beautiful and, like topical ointment on an infection, the light on your shame will graft together a newer, truer you.
James, Jesus’ brother, communicates the significance of relationships this way: Confess your sins to one another, and pray for one another, so that you may be healed. The earnest prayer of the righteous is powerful and effective.
Sin can’t ever leave your soul apart from confession. Sin on the soul is like black mold on a home’s foundation, it is a living stain that festers, seeps, and spreads. Confession washes sin from the soul, allowing it to breathe and grow in all the ways it is meant to. There are sins that you cannot conqueror without confessing them and inviting others to pray life into those infected areas of your life.
From the mundane to the sacred, lust has changed us: from the way we sit in coffee shops, glancing at people who walk in to see if they’re attractive or not, and the way a wife and husband are sexually intimate together, as rogue images drop into the mind mid-act.
Lust will consume your life and the only way to starve it is by bringing other people in to help.
The Love of Lady Lust
Here’s the hard application:
If you’re married, tell your spouse. They’re your best friend, or at least as some point they were, enough for you to forge covenant with them. You may think you’re protecting them by keeping this a secret. The truth is that you’re not protecting them. You’re just hiding and wasting away. Jesus invites you into more, more for your soul, more for your marriage, more for life.
Get with your pastor, get with some friends, share with them first if that helps. Then go tell your wife. It will sober you up enough for you to remember who you really are, and then Jesus will form you into that person. It’ll be rough and ugly, but that’s only a mirror of your soul. Don’t leave it looking like that, don’t hide. This is the path to new creation, and we have One who went through it first so that He could lead you out of the Land of Deep Darkness and into the Kingdom New Creation.
Use us, Proven Men exists for this very journey.
If you’re single, marriage won’t save you from your current sexual sins. Being single just allows you to hide it better. One day, you’ll just give that sin to another person, with all the broken-shame of it. You may think it isn’t a big deal because it isn’t currently impacting other people, but in your honest moments you know it is changing the way you look at people, as it becomes the thing that you look forward to when your stressed or bored, the thing that tucks you in at night and wakes you up in the morning. It’s changing you. You can see around the allusion at times, you can see around it right now. Lady Lust: always satisfying, always ready, always waiting, gentle, tender, longing, faithful. But then she never really satisfies, does she? Once it’s done, you feel the emptiness and need to quickly move on to the next thing, before you can’t stand the sound of your groaning soul. She isn’t always ready or always waiting; she simply owns all of your time. You gave her dominion of that. She’s coarse and angry, insatiable, and she leaves you so hollow once she’s done with you. She doesn’t belong to you; during the very moments she is demanding your affection she is draining affection from millions of others — from your family members, your friends, your neighbors. Lady Lust hates you and at the end of your lonely, love-less life, she will smile as she remembers the kind of person you could have been, looking upon the shell you became.
Her burdens are too great, her cost is too high. She’s not your partner, you never made covenant with her. Stop being real with her in a way you dare not be real with yourself or your own spouse. Lets ensure lust doesn’t get the pleasure of wrecking our lives.
While the affection of lust will leech away your love, the affection of Christ will rinse you of your despair. This is His call:
“Come to me all you who are weary and are heavy-laden, and I will give you rest. Walk with with me and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in spirit. Keep company with me and you’ll learn to walk freely and lightly.”
A Different Life
The O in Proven stands for Open and Honest. You can practice all the other values in this acronym but if you’re not living in light then you are living without relationship. The growth to mature new creation may be long, but the second you begin you already are a new creation, just as a child is a human, simply not a fully grown one.
The pilgrimage of new creation is worth making. The Relationships go deep, you become the kind of husband or wife you’ve always wanted to be, a father or mother who knows the delight of parenting, and life becomes something to explore instead of something to hide from. Sure, you’ll need to face pain, instead of hiding from it, but then you’ll also get to keep your soul.
Jesus’ question still echoes today: “What do you benefit if you gain the whole world but lose your own soul? Is anything worth more than your soul?”
So, to answer our big question: yes, tell your spouse and stop fighting alone.
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Shane James O’Neill is the Editorial Director for Proven Men Ministries. He is currently working on a graduate degree in apologetics at Liberty University’s Rawling School of Divinity.