Marital Fidelity
Tom Shrader explores God's design for marital fidelity through the story of Joseph resisting Potiphar's wife and various Old Testament passages. He emphasizes that adultery is not just a violation of marriage vows but fundamentally a sin against God, while also affirming that adultery is not the unforgivable sin for those who truly repent.
“When you make a vow to God, don't delay in fulfilling it - he has no pleasure in fools.”
— Tom Shrader
Series: Sexuality by Design (1999)
Recorded: 1999
Duration: 43 min
Themes: fidelity, adultery, marriage, temptation, sin, repentance, forgiveness, purity, married couples, struggling with temptation, those who have failed, seeking restoration, business professionals, young adults, facing moral challenges, needing accountability
Scripture: Genesis 39, Ecclesiastes 5:2, Proverbs 5, Malachi, Exodus 20
Theological Themes: sanctification, marital covenant, biblical sexuality, sexual ethics, sin nature, redemption, holy living, divine design
Full Transcript
This is the second week of what will be eight weeks dealing with an issue that we talk about probably in our own conversations frequently, that we oftentimes mention in passing in the studies we do. But now we concentrate on this topic for eight weeks. It's the idea of our sexuality, in the title of the series "Sexuality by Design." The idea there is that there is a grand design to every component of life, including our sexuality.
As we look at this issue of sex, what we want to come back to, and we constantly try to contrast between, here's what the world says, here's what we see in the world, and here's what God says. Even today we're going to quote pretty liberally from People magazine and some other things. But when we try to lay out some principles for you and suggest you follow them, we go to the source book, and that is to the Scripture.
In fact, I was talking to somebody this week and they said, "What are you going to talk about this week?" I said, "Adultery." They said, "What do you say about it?" I said, "Well, I think probably we're going to come out against it."
The Challenge of Relativism
When you and I look at the world, I had a great conversation with a fellow the other day who is really wrestling—and I think it's a good wrestle—with how he deals now as God's put him in a place in his business where he's dealing with significant business players in the community. What's interesting to me is the conversation I have with him is the same exact conversation I had with the junior high guy and the high school guy and the college guy, because they're all fighting the same battle.
The battle is this: we're coming in with a truth, and the receiver is saying, "Yeah, I know that's what you believe, and that may be true for you, but that's not true." In other words, we've reached a time philosophically now where we are at such a state of relativism where everybody can be right and say completely opposite things. Now we come along and say, "Well, this is true," and you would say, "Who made you King? Who made you ruler? Why is what you say right?"
The answer is because what we continually do is go back to the owner's manual. God didn't leave us here all by ourselves, but He left us His word. When we go to the Scripture, we don't have a dated piece of material; we have a timeless word of God. When God spoke about issues like the issues that we're going to speak about in this series—homosexuality and adultery and pornography and sex within marriage—when God spoke about those, the principles He laid out thousands of years ago are as true today as they were then.
The Futility of Debating Without Common Ground
Let me just hit the pause button a second. In your life, when you're out there talking to people about your faith—and I don't mean witnessing here, I'm just talking about your faith, and that would be witnessing—but as you're talking about your faith, you're wasting your time when you get in this debate. You're having this discussion and you're just not getting anywhere.
Well, the reason you're not getting anywhere is you're coming from a perspective that God's Word is true; the person's coming from a perspective that there are many truths. So you're never going to get anywhere. I had a guy that came up after a message not long ago and said, "I'd like to meet and talk about this." The more we talked, the more I said, "I don't really want to meet with you." He said, "You've got to be kidding me. I would think that this would be something you'd want to do." I said, "No, because you're not going to accept the Bible as God's Word. Therefore, all we're going to do is frustrate each other. So let's not meet because we're wasting our time, because we're talking two different languages."
See, that's the problem. We're going to talk today about—and last week the singles on the way out, especially at Thursday noon, were saying, "I hope you got something for the married people next week." Yeah, this is pretty tough. Well, now we're going to come and talk to the married people about an issue that is important.
The Historical Context of Sexual Addiction
One of the great things about the material we use is that we have a little history with it. When I first dealt with this series, it was about ten years ago. At the time, there was Wade Boggs. I don't know if you remember Wade Boggs—third baseman, Red Sox, played around the league, but played around as well, thus the illustration.
At the time, Boggs had an affair, and there was nothing particularly newsworthy about it except that he discovered that what he had was a sexual addiction. This is 1989. This is an editorial from the LA paper. Let me just read it to you:
"Boston Red Sox third baseman Wade Boggs stunned fans by announcing his extramarital fling with Margo Adams was a result of sex addiction. The baseball star wasn't even aware he was suffering from the erotic ailment until viewing a segment of Geraldo." There was a show on about oversexed people, and they called it a disease. "Lights began blinking on and off," and he said, "I quote, I feel that's exactly what happened to me."
Now here's what I want you to see, because you laughed. At the time—not again, this is not some Christian document—this is the LA paper editorial writer. In the LA paper, commenting on what he just read: "Thus enters a new illness: Wade Boggs disease. Think of it: millions of sufferers driven to singles bars and noisy discos by irresistible impulses. An otherwise ordinary man walking down the street catches a glimpse of a shapely leg, blacks out."
Now here's what I want you to see. Here's the last sentence—LA editorial writer, not me: "I'd like to know..."
Anybody ever responsible for anything anymore? Now here's what's fascinating. Ten years ago when they talked about sexual addiction we said, "You've got to be kidding me. Nobody's going to buy this." You now have it covered by your insurance benefit—that's how fast the slide's been in ten years.
Here's the little part and we just need to understand that. Wade Boggs' problem is not that he's just a little boy who can't say no. His problem is sin. My generation—and I believe and I say this—my generation owes the entire nation, everybody older than us and everybody that's followed us, a giant apology for we ushered in this time that basically said we'll take care and be responsible for ourselves and a little piece of paper doesn't mean anything.
Now we take a look into what Jesse Ventura said the other day. Forget his comments and all this other stuff—I don't care about that. We'll come back to that. His defense was, "I'm just being honest. I'm just telling it like it is." My objection is not that he's honest. I disagree with what he said, and what he said was, "Because I'm honest, you've got to accept it." I mean, it's a goofy thing. I watch people destroy other people in relationships and they're just saying, "I tell you, I'm just one of those people. I just got to tell it like it is."
The Difference Between Honesty and Love
Jesus told it like it is, but He told it like it is with love. When He was done with most people, other than the hypocrites, they were built up, not torn down.
We're going to talk about sex for eight weeks. Today we're going to talk about—and you have the words of the day on your outline—we're talking about fidelity and adultery.
Fidelity simply means being faithful to an obligation or a promise that you make. Adultery—and that is not just in the context of marriage but in all promises. You know, if you say that you're going to meet somebody at 3:30, then you meet them at 3:30. There's a sense of "let your yes be yes, no be no"—it's a promise.
The other area we'll talk about is adultery. Adultery—and again, your definition is sexual relationships between two people when one or both are married to someone else.
Statistics on Affairs
Let me give you just some statistics that to me are pretty interesting. Fifty percent of all people who are involved in affairs are involved with a single person. So you have this couple, somebody has an extramarital relationship, and half the time it's with a single person. Half the time it's with somebody who's married.
Of those affairs—now this is according to the latest information I can find—two-thirds, 66%, happens at work. Now this is again, we're just part of what we'll talk about. I want you to understand in this process, especially you guys, that when you say to your wife, "You need to go back to work," and you've got her out there working for a couple of grand a year net when you're all done so you can have a little bigger house and a little bigger car, you are throwing her to the sharks.
In ten years you have not told her her hair looks nice. Before her little buns hit that desk, some slime in the office has said, "That's a beautiful hairdo you have." It does not take long before they say, "Is that a new dress?" and she says no, and he says, "You know what? I imagine every dress looks new when somebody like you wears it." You laugh and I laugh, and you know it's a joke. But when you haven't heard it from the person you care most about for a long time, you start to believe it in this relationship.
How Men and Women Define Adultery Differently
These are interesting statistics to me. When men are asked to define adultery, ninety percent of the men say sexual relations with somebody other than their spouse. Women define adultery this way—the majority of them—an emotional entanglement with somebody other than the person that makes the person more desirable than their spouse.
Now look at the difference here. Susan and I are watching the news, and they're trying to tease to keep you up. "We want you to come back. Here was the tease: We're watching the news. There's a new study out, and the study results are this—you'll want to come back for the details. Study results are this: men and women are different."
We figured that out like our wedding night. We figured it out three days after we were married. We are plumbed different and wired different. We have different thermostats. We're just different. And look how it plays itself out.
When a man talks about adultery, he talks about sex. If I say to a guy, "Does your wife love you?" he'll say, "Yep." "How do you know that?" "Let me tell you. She's got this thing she wears, and I know when she wears it I know what's going to happen. It's unbelievable. We got a trapeze, we got a safety net. It's unreal."
When you say to a woman, "Does your husband love you?" she'll say yes, and I'll say, "How do you know?" and she'll say, "Well, he talks to me. He brings me flowers. We hug." "How pointless is that? I mean, we hug, we hold hands, all right, whatever." Therein lies the difference, and now it starts to manifest itself when we talk about adultery.
Our Focus Today
We're going to hear the words for the day: fidelity and adultery. Fidelity—keeping my promise. Adultery—sex outside of marriage.
Six general observations. Here's what we're going to do in the area of fidelity: start in a very broad area and narrow it down to marriage, and then four specifics in dealing with this whole issue of adultery.
God Emphasizes Fidelity as Character
Number one: God emphasizes fidelity as just a basic, fundamental sense of your character. Jesus speaks to a group that just seems—every time He deals with them—just seems to be that group that just gets to Him or He gets to them: the hypocrites, the scribes and the Pharisees. He says, "Here's your problem: you give a tenth—that is, you tithe off of things all the way down to little spices—but you neglected the most important issues: justice, mercy," word of the day, "faithfulness." Those are the things that ought to be at your character: trustworthiness.
Always we look at somebody's behavior and we may see compliance with the law. What Jesus says is God looks not at the behavior but at
The heart and all of those things that we do—your presence here, your presence in church, all these things that you do that are important in your relationship with God—all flow out of the condition of your heart. God's Word says fidelity is an important part of just our character and who we are.
God Emphasizes Fidelity in Relationship to Your Vows
Here's the second thing: God emphasizes fidelity in relationship to your vows. Ecclesiastes chapter 5 verse 2: "Don't be quick with your mouth, do not be hasty in your heart to utter anything before God. God's in heaven and you're here on earth, so let your words be few. When you make a vow to God, don't delay in fulfilling it. He has no pleasure in fools. Fulfill your vow. It's better not to make a vow than to make a vow and not fulfill it."
In other words, when you say you're going to do something in God's economy, you need to do it. You've heard the term "foxhole conversion," and it means literally, at least in our context, somebody who's involved in some military conflict and they're in there and they're shooting and there's bullets exploding all around them. They don't expect to get out and they make a deal with God: "God, you get me out of this and I'm yours forever."
Well, we've got foxhole conversions going on around the city of Phoenix all day long. "God, you get this deal closed and I will..." "You get me this job and here's what I'll do, God..." "I want you to know what—and God, it isn't even for me, it's for you. If I get this deal closed and I make this money, do you understand God that 10% of this is going to you? Now 90% stays with me, but God, do you understand that this is the way this goes?"
He said when you make a vow—now what we're going to talk about obviously is the context of our relationship with God and the context of the vow that we make of Him, especially in the context of marriage—you made a vow. I'm doing two weddings, not this Saturday, I think the Saturday after, and in both cases they want to get together more and more assertive. Now when I get together and review what we're going to do and the vows, and the vows are very traditional: "to have and to hold from this day forward, better, worse, richer, for poor," and I go through the whole thing. And I say, "You know, it's interesting in the vows—the vows assume problems: better, worse, richer, poorer, sickness, health, as long as you both shall live." These are the promises.
If you're in here today and you're married, you made those vows or some version of them. You said to God before all your friends and family, "God, I will never violate these." And where you may have seen them as something you need to say to get this thing done, God sees them as a sacred promise.
God Emphasizes Fidelity in Marriage Vows
Here's the third point: God emphasizes fidelity in these marriage vows. It's exactly the point that we're talking about here. This is at the end of the Old Testament. The Prophet Malachi is looking at the nation of Israel. Israel at this point is in real trouble and they don't even know it, which is the worst kind of trouble you can be in.
Malachi is listing off for them all of their problems. He says, "You come in here crying and weeping and you've got all of these problems. Here's your biggest problem. You ask why is this happening? It's because the Lord is acting as a witness between you and your wife of your youth, because you've broken faith with her." This is right in the context of when Malachi speaks and says God hates divorce.
I have been in this setting I don't know how many times where I've watched Larry Wright do His marriage seminar and he says, "Sue and I will never, never, never, never, never, never, never, never, never, never get divorced." And everybody around at coffee breaks going, "Oh, they shouldn't say that. Satan's going to attack him for saying that publicly." May I remind you again, that's what you said when you got married. That's the vows.
God's got this design for marriage, and in the context of this design is this permanent union. What had happened in the nation of Israel is literally you could get a divorce for anything. It had become literally to the point where if a woman—and I'm not being frivolous here, but literally—did not prepare a meal correctly, she could be issued a certificate of divorce. And now we'd have to say didn't bring home the carryout warm, but whatever that might be. In that whole process, we reach a point where we say here's what God said should be this way, and man has taken it to a new depth.
God Emphasizes Fidelity in the Practices of Sex
God emphasizes fidelity in terms of the practices of sex. From the book of Proverbs in the fifth chapter, sounds a little bit like the Song of Solomon: "May your fountain be blessed and you rejoice in the wife of your youth, a loving doe, a graceful deer. May her breasts satisfy you always, may you ever be captivated by her love."
I love that phrase. There's a sense here not just of physical but emotional connection in the marriage. I watched the other morning—George Bush has a new book out and it's the letters of George Bush, letters that he wrote from the time he was 18 years old or 17 years old when he went into the military to His mom and all the way through. And there's one letter, and the interviewer is asking him to read it. It's a letter he wrote to His mother after he kissed Barbara for the first time. She was the first girl he ever kissed.
And here's this beautiful little letter: "Mom, I kissed her. I'm not ashamed that I kissed her. I think that's okay. I think that anything that would go beyond that would be inappropriate and would not be good for her, wouldn't be good for me. But I was willing to kiss her because I'm so in love with her." And then there's a letter a little later that he writes to His mother about this woman that he found, this Barbara, and this wedding and this marriage. And as George Bush starts to read this letter, he starts to cry and she's right there, and she's kind of just going, "Don't you know." And it was so cool because I really do think in George Bush—
I think he found a guy who probably is a pretty good guy, but here he is now at age 75 at the end of his life. It's not the CIA or the House or the Senate or the presidency that he's captivated by—it's Bathsheba. Here she is, and God said that's the relationship that I ought to have emotionally. If I have that relationship emotionally, I'll have that relationship physically. The idea is that I will be captivated by her.
God's Seriousness About Adultery
Now is God serious about adultery? Let's say we were going to create a whole new nation and we only get to have ten rules. I doubt that we'd even deal with this issue of adultery. Well, in the Old Testament God dealt with the issue of adultery, and I think He's against it because He attached a fairly severe penalty to it. If a man committed adultery with another man's wife, with the wife of his neighbor, both the adulterer and the adulteress should be put to death. That's pretty serious.
Now I don't think that we want to bring this forward into our culture. I'm not advocating that. God's dealing with the nation of Israel and He's saying, "You know what, this is real serious business." Clearly we can bring that principle forward.
Every time we start to talk about these issues we have somebody that says, "It's 1999 and this is a new generation in a new time and we're way more sophisticated now. God, if God could come back today, He'd rewrite the book." No He wouldn't. He writes a timeless book dealing with this issue, talking about the seriousness of it and saying to you and me, "This is deadly serious business."
God Emphasizes Forgiveness and Restoration
Here's the last point: God emphasizes forgiveness and the restoration of adulterers. I have learned that there are just certain topics that when we talk about them, we generate a real strong reaction in people. When we talk about parenting, you can just watch the guilt pour down the aisles. When we talk about adultery and when we talk about divorce, we hit all sorts of nerves in a room like this.
I think you could take this issue of divorce and look around and see that you have broken relationships now that would trace back to kind of the remnant. The idea that this is so awful that I can't ever be forgiven—maybe you're involved in it right now, maybe you got a spouse that's been involved in it, and you'll be darned if you're going to let him or her off the hook on this deal. Adultery is not the unpardonable sin.
There's no question that when I'm involved in this, I'm in real serious shape. Now let me tell you how you could make it even more serious: if you're involved in it and it doesn't bother you.
The Danger of Unrepentant Sin
Let me come back to where we were with the singles last week. Let me come back to all of you who are little gossipers, all of you that are little thieves, all you little slanderers out there. If you're involved in sin and there's no repentance, you are in very serious spiritual condition and have no biblical assurance of your salvation. I don't care how many times you walked an aisle or prayed a prayer or checked the box. I don't care how many times you say you took Jesus Christ as your Savior. If your life is filled with sin and you're unrepentant about it, you are in deep, serious spiritual condition.
If you're involved—let's say today you are in the process of committing adultery and your view on this is that God will forgive me, therefore "Tom, hurry up and get done because I got a casita over here and my administrative assistant's coming to do a little administrating"—if that's your view and you'll do it because God's going to forgive you, I want you to understand this is so important: you have no biblical assurance of your salvation.
You can say, "Well, how do I know?" If I say, "How you doing spiritually?" here's what I'll hear all the time: "Great! I'm reading my Bible, I got my quiet time, I'm doing this, I'm doing that." Those are all terrific. Let me tell you one more thing that in my mind will help you get a barometer of where you are spiritually: How do you react when you sin? When you sin, are you cavalier about it? "That's just the way I am. I'm working on that. Look at all these other areas I've straightened out." What's your approach in the area of sin?
The Story of Joseph and Potiphar's Wife
In this whole area of adultery, we go to a story that's pretty familiar to many: Genesis 39. I'm going to spend a ton of time setting it up. We got three characters involved: Potiphar, Potiphar's wife, and Joseph.
Potiphar is the captain of Pharaoh's guard. He's a major player in the nation. He is a man who's responsible for many things. Joseph—Joseph of the coat of many colors—Joseph has been sold into slavery. Joseph comes along and Joseph proves himself worthy, and thus he's given essentially the position where he becomes the CEO of Potiphar Enterprises. The blessing of the Lord's on everything Potiphar had, on his house and in his field, so he left Joseph to care for everything he had. Joseph is in charge of everything. Potiphar didn't concern himself with anything except the food he ate. Joseph was well built and handsome.
This is where I get into this. I like this because you get into these stories now and it makes these people real. Sometimes I think we think of these biblical characters, we think of somebody like Joseph, and we think of this little anemic, kind of a little Woody Allen, kind of a little nerdy guy. That's not it. The Scripture says he was strong, he was handsome. He was a strong, handsome guy, and as real as he is, I love how real Mrs. Potiphar is.
I know that thousands of years ago people weren't as—especially the women weren't as liberated as they are now and straightforward—but she overcomes her shyness and she says, "Come to bed with me," which is fairly direct. "Come to bed with me." And he says no. He refuses: "With me in charge, my master has not concerned himself with anything."
In this house, everything he owns he's entrusted to me. No one's greater than me. My master has withheld nothing from me except you, and here's why: because you're his wife. Then he says, "How then could I do such a thing? How could I come to bed with you and do such a thing and sin against"—not Potiphar—"sin against God?"
Though she spoke with him day after day, he refused to go to bed with her. He refused to even be around her. But unfortunately, one day he goes into the house to do his job. There's no one else around—the rest of the servants are gone. She caught him by the cloak and said, "Come to bed with me." He left his cloak behind in her hand and ran out of the house.
Literally, she's grabbing him to say, "Come to bed with me," and he's wrestling to get away. He gets away, but the cloak—his outer garment—is in her hand, and he's probably running out of there with little or nothing on. That's the story.
The Devastating Impact of Adultery
Four points real quickly. Look at the impact, and this is where we get into a lot of guilt—look at the impact that adultery has on people other than the people that are involved. Joseph understood this: "How could I do this to my master?"
We live in too complex a society to say to somebody that this singular thing has caused the demise of this. But if you look at divorces as an issue, you look at an issue that in my mind explains a lot of the psychological, sociological, and spiritual problems we see today.
Let me give you an example. As our church has grown, our youth ministries have grown. Right now we have on a typical Sunday about 300 kids—junior high and high school. With that are coming all of these kids and all of these families in the church. We're seeing kids now in the youth that are not from solid Christian homes.
We've got kids that have been there like Sarah and Haley forever, but we're dealing with junior high and high school kids who are dealing with some extraordinarily complex, awful circumstances. Drugs is like the nicest thing anybody does anymore—just awful things. There's an awful lot of sexual abuse, a lot of charges of incest, a lot of just awful stuff.
The Connection Between Broken Homes and Broken Lives
There is not one case like that that we're dealing with where the child is living with both biological parents. Now that's not to say if both biological parents are together you don't have problems with the kid—that's not my point. My point here is this is what we're seeing. As you begin to unravel this, you inevitably see these kids who've been swept away in this battle between mom and dad, and the majority of this divorce that we're looking at is caused by sexual immorality and adultery.
"Well, you mean we should stay together for the sake of the kids?" Yeah. What else? What else you got in your list? You should stay together because you said you were going to. You're trusting God—you say you trust God with your soul, but you don't trust Him with your marriage? That doesn't make any sense to me. God's got a way where this works.
The Logic of the World vs. God's Design
Let me check time here. I've used this illustration before, and I don't want to be misunderstood on this. To me, premarital sex and cohabitation makes all the sense in the world. It just does. It makes sense to me as a human being. It makes sense to me to say, "If I'm going to take this person for better or worse, one of the important aspects of this relationship is the sex. I need to find out what it's going to be like."
Again, I'm not trying to be flip here, but I don't think I'm going to go buy a car if I don't test drive it. I want to get some sense of how this is going to handle. I want to get some sense of what it's going to be like. If I'm going to marry this person, we're going to be together forever, I'm going to be faithful to this person—I need to know what the sex is like.
Cohabitation—are we going to get along? Does she squeeze the toothpaste from the middle? Does she use it from the bottom? How do we do this? Is she clean? Is she neat? It makes all the sense in the world to me. I'll tell you, you don't even have to shake your head—it makes sense to you too. It just does, humanly.
You know what? The divorce rate among people that live together before marriage is 50% higher than those who don't. How would you explain something like that? Because God says don't live together before marriage because I know what's good for you. That's how you explain these things.
God Knows What's Best
God knows what's best for you, and He's not trying to rain on your parade. He's not trying to take all the fun out of your life. What He's trying to do is say, "I've designed you in such a way, physically and emotionally, that this marriage thing is to be an intimate union between two people—so intimate that it's unique on the face of this earth. When you break it, you break the model."
There's a second point: when you're dealing with fidelity, it's important to God. Look at what Joseph said: "How could I hurt Potiphar? But ultimately, I'm sinning against God."
God's Three-Part Plan for Marriage
God's got a plan for marriage. You don't need to write it down—I bet you'll remember this. It's a three-part plan. Marriage is to be permanent, monogamous, and heterosexual.
How do I know I've got a marriage? Can I take two guys—gay people—and marry them? Nope. Don't fit the model. How come? Because God said marriage is to be permanent. I've got somewhere in my file—I can't find it—where Woman's Day did this thing. It was in this phase that society went through. They were marriage contracts, but they were like leasing an office building. It was like five years with three five-year options and bumps along the way. That's literally what it was—it was a marriage for five years with options agreeable to both people for another five, and then that's what it was.
That's not marriage. That's not God's design for marriage. I don't care—it doesn't matter what the government says, doesn't matter what we accept. God says, "This is the plan for marriage."
Reject the Invitation to Abandon Your Principles
I want to run the last two points together. Reject the invitation to abandon your principles. Though she spoke to Joseph day after day, he said there's no way, there's no way I'm going to do this. When it reached a point where circumstances were swept away and he couldn't handle it anymore, he got on his little horse and he got out of there. There may be a situation where you simply need to run away.
Here we go in this whole process, and it's important to understand this: you have to use your head. I don't want to speak down to you, and I don't think I am. I can't be, because these are the things I deal with when you come and talk to me about this.
Use Your Head - A Real Case Study
It is not unusual at all for me to have a guy - here's an actual case. He said, "I do real well on this fidelity thing." I said, "That's neat." He said, "Most of the time." Most of the time. The problem is we think it's a bit, and I sat and said, "So what's the problem?" He said, "It's just, once in a while I have a problem with it." I said, "Was there any pattern?" He said, "Yeah, there's always a pattern. So tell me about it."
He said, "There's a woman on my bowling team." I said, "Okay, that's okay. I watch them bowl on TV. That's alright. What else?" He said, "Well, after we bowl, our team always goes to the strip bar. We always just go there. It's just part of the deal - we bowl and then we go to the strip bar." He said, "Every time I'm in there, I find myself involved either with a gal or with immorality that day or the next."
Now I'm not trained, I'm not the sharpest knife in the drawer, but I'll tell you this: I was able to help this man very quickly. Here's what I said to him: "Don't go to the strip bar." He said, "Why do I have to give up bowling?" I said, "Okay, let me take it another step. Don't bowl, or get on a bowling team where your wife goes with you."
I am not kidding you. You and I laugh at that and we chuckle at that because it seems so obvious to us. But you know what? We get so inclined in these things that we don't even see them.
Office Dating Without Calling It Dating
Ladies and gentlemen, let me just talk to you about the office. You've got a lot of you who would never think of being unfaithful to your spouse, but you're dating - you just don't call it dating. You've got the gal in the office. You have a cup of coffee together. You talk together. You're hungry. "Well, it's noon. I'll bet she is. Want to just go down and get a sandwich?" "Sure." What is this? It's a date. Don't call it a date.
Well, I was in my first sales office. There were, as I remember it, like 25 sales people. Twenty-four of them were male, one gal. It was interesting because to this day, those guys - we go back and we were cutting our teeth. We were out there, we were knocking on doors, we were cold-calling, we were working agribusiness. We're walking through fields, we're out there, we're getting chased out of places. There's something that connects in that environment. There's a bonding that takes place in that relationship.
That office today is half male, half female. There's no way in those calls, in those environments, that bonding isn't going to take place if you are not cautious about stopping it.
The Great Lie: "God Wants Me to Be Happy"
Here's one more great lie, and then we're out the door. This is again a newspaper article. Joe Theismann - you football fans know him, former Washington Redskins quarterback. He doesn't sound like the kind of guy you'd like to bring home to your mother, according to his second wife. She's taking him to court, suing him in divorce, wanting half of his five million dollar fortune. He's an ESPN commentator and he is dating a cosmetic sales clerk in Memphis. His wife's attorney told the court that when his wife Jeannie asked Joe why he had an extramarital affair, he said, and I quote, "God wants Joe Theismann to be happy."
I sat right down here not long ago and had breakfast with a guy who is involved with somebody other than his wife, who's in the process of divorcing her. When I asked him how he could do this, he said, "God wants me to be happy, and I'm not happy."
Let me help you out here: God doesn't give a flip about whether you're happy or not. Couldn't care less. God wants you to have joy, and joy and happiness are different.
Joy vs. Happiness
Happiness is circumstantial. Happiness isn't even a worthy goal in life because it's unattainable. If you say, "Here's why I'm here - I'm here to be happy," happiness - just let me take one minute. Happiness is a byproduct of a joyful life. Happiness isn't a goal.
If you want to be happy, then here's what's going to happen: you're constantly evaluating your life based on circumstances, so you're happy, sad, happy, sad. Do you feel your life go like this? Do you see your moods go like this? Are you one of these people that go like this? I'll tell you why: because you're trying to be happy.
God doesn't want you happy. God wants you joyful. So Paul can sit in a Roman, awful prison and say, "I'm filled with joy." How can he say that? Because he doesn't care whether he's happy. Joy isn't circumstantial. Joy is a relationship with the Living God and a vibrant relationship where that God dwells in me.
Maybe Today's Adultery Day for You
Here's what I'm saying, because maybe today's adultery day for you. You know, we used to have - we got one of the churches down the street used to have "Mom's Day Out." That's where you came and it was a service to the mom, so you could drop the kids off and then you could go and do shopping or errands. We had one gal who would drop her kids off and then go down and meet a guy right at the hotel down the street. It struck me that that probably wasn't the intent that the church had in mind on this, but it was a byproduct of what was happening.
But see, that's cold and calculated. Maybe today's adultery day for you. Maybe it's Wednesday. Now we're at Wednesday, we're past that. Wednesday, we're getting ready for the weekend. Thursday's adultery day, or Friday. Maybe you're thinking about it right now. Maybe it's Monday.
Here's what I'm saying to you: if you can calculate that and execute that and be unrepentant about that, you are in a deep spiritual condition. Real serious.
situation and you're sinning against God, not your spouse. Maybe you're the single person that's being drawn into this, and God says I take this seriously whether you do or not, and there will be ramifications of this.
Let me tell you an area when we talk about stuff that we've had to deal with over the years. Let me tell you an area that has always been difficult and right now is so much more difficult than it's ever been. Your children are absolutely many of them just being swept away in this via the internet, and that's pornography. So next week we'll look at that and what God's view of that is.
Closing Prayer
Father, help us see the truth of this. Help us examine our lives. Help us understand that when we talk about adultery or when we talk about fornication, sex outside of marriage, when we talk about anything other than the design that You have for us, we're talking about something that places us in opposition to You. We're talking about sin.
God, let us be men and women whose deepest desire is not to be happy, whose deepest desire is to be obedient, faithful followers of Your Son Jesus Christ. In His name that we pray, amen.
See you next week.