“When a woman discovers her husband has been watching porn behind her back, it can feel absolutely devastating. It is a traumatic discovery in the truest sense of the word—the wife undergoes terrible trauma. Men, if this describes your wife, what can you do to reassure her of your love and devotion, despite the fact that you haven’t gotten to the bottom of your pornographic obsession yet?”

“I wonder if there is a sin that you feel powerless to change. Maybe the temptation grows so strong who feel unable to resist. Maybe it creeps up and takes you by surprise so that before you know it you’ve reacted badly. You’ve committed this sin many times. You’ve tried changes many times. But you just feel struck.”

“After observing the behaviors of couples from all over the world, I believe these seven indicators below are some of the clearest ways to measure the current health of your marriage and chart a clearer course towards a healthier and happier relationship.”

“Married life was typical. It was filled with good times and hard times as the challenges of family set in. He was very open about seeking help and exploring new support groups, and so I thought he was progressing. So it came as a complete shock when he said, ‘There’s something I need to talk to you about. Yesterday I did something really bad.’”

“What if for a moment we turned the finger around and called ourselves out? What if we realized the real story here is about truth instead of condemnation?  What if we found it within ourselves to give every individual who had an Ashley Madison account a second chance? What would happen if we stopped talking about hackers, and cheaters, and sexual fantasies and talked about the importance of forgiveness?”

“Uncovering and understanding the personality of God is, fortunately, not something we’ve been left to figure out on our own. There are those who have gone before us, saints and wise minds that can discern more of the puzzle than I can (for which I am grateful). But they aren’t all we have. In fact, they aren’t even among the most helpful guides given to us.”

“If you don’t have something in your life that regularly inspires adventure, risk, and passion, beware. Because if you don’t, you will seek the counterfeit.”

“If you want to be fully satisfied in your marriage, treat your wife like Eve. Let her be, in your mind, the only woman in the world.”

“I’m not surprised that Josh Duggar had an Ashley Madison account. I’m also not surprised that his admission of that only came after it was exposed online, and that it included a plea for prayer for his wife and family… I’ve been watching this kind of news break for years, and it’s stopped shocking me.”

“The point is, i didn’t need Ashley Madison to live an adulterous life. Nobody does. The fact that i didn’t have an account doesn’t make me any better than the men (or women) who did.”

“You’re probably thinking, ‘Is it ever possible to earn her trust again?’ Especially after she said, ‘How can I ever trust you again?!’ Well, I’ll tell you it is possible. But—and it is a big but—it depends greatly on you. It’s not easy and it’s not going to happen overnight.”

“I’m not writing this post to beat up on the people whose names were just released (I’m sure they’re getting plenty of that already). I’m writing this to plead with YOU (and to remind MYSELF) that we need to honor our marriages in our public lives AND our private lives too. There’s no place for secrets in marriage. Your marriage needs to be built on a sacred trust, an honest transparency and a rock-solid commitment to one another.”

“My experience is that people who expect their relationship with God to be relentlessly cheerful are in for some significant disappointment. In my case, I worked very hard to make every day with Jesus be sweeter than the day before. I worker hard. I worker harder. I worked my hardest. But the reward for all that hard work was gradually increasing depression, confusion, anger and religious compulsion.”

“People like the woman caught in adultery, the tax collector doing over his own people, the son who decides to abandon his family, the Pharisees, the Roman centurion who has a conscience, the disciple who is beginning to doubt everything, Pilate, Herod, and everyone who has ever believed that they need to earn approval, Love and acceptance. The group that the Bible is good news for includes everyone. And for some, that’s just too offensive to bear.”

“Because porn is destructive. It destroys lives, marriages, and even our relationship with God. Am I overreacting when I say that?”

“Most of us see no further than the horizons of this world. To correct our shortsightedness, God prescribes a vision correction that allows us to look through the lens of eternity. Suddenly we realize this present life is but a brief window of opportunity to invest in what will last for eternity.”

“There are Wild places within relationships that must be explored and where fierce strength is needed. Certainly, the Wild places where my addiction flourished were all internal places of my soul. But that did not make them any less a Wilderness than the deepest jungle or the peak of Mt. Everest.”

“The religious man often deceives himself in his repentance. The believer may sin the worst of sins, it is true; but to remain in the love of sin, or to be comfortable in the atmosphere of sin, is a deadly sign, for only repenters inhabit heaven. The deceived repenter would be a worse sinner if he could, but society holds him back.”

“Anyone who’s ever taken the step of admitting they’re an addict knows what it’s like to have this nagging feeling that true freedom isn’t attainable. But if you’re open, you’ll find that there are people out there screaming from the mountaintops that they have found freedom.”

“Brothers and sisters, could it be that although we’re heavily active in church, we’re doing it out of a sense of duty instead of with a willing, loving and worshipful heart? Might it be that in what we say we do for God, we actually do for ourselves and our own misplaced personal identity?”

“One of the questions I hear most frequently in my work with men battling sexual compulsions is this: Is freedom really possible?”

“For over 28 years I’ve heard the question from married men who’ve used porn: ‘Did I commit adultery? Can my wife divorce me now? Is she right when she says porn use is the same as cheating?’”

“With a rise in social media and the constant comparison we are forced to draw of ourselves to other people each time we log on, we’ve begun to believe we need to be picture perfect. But what Joshua revealed here is that the most meaningful relationships evolve out of our flaws.”

“Sex wasn’t something we talked much about at my house growing up. Yes, my dad gave me the ol’ birds and bees talk and yes, I was taught that God wanted me to save sex for marriage. Thankfully, that teaching took. I made it to marriage a virgin. But I can tell you waiting was not always easy. So what do I wish my parents told me about sex?”

“When it comes to marriage, you truly get what you give.  By giving trust and being willing to share your secrets, you will, over time, fill up your marriage.”

“Even the Church at large has had a role in the double-standard by pushing sermons, messages and ministries encouraging men to deal with their lust, porn and sexual immorality. But what about women?”

“The challenge today, then, is to follow the despised craftsman from Nazareth who was the friend of sinners on the one hand, but who was separate from sinners on the other, even speaking unpopular truth to power.”

“I think deep down I always knew I was addicted, even if I didn’t admit it to myself, but there were certainly a lot of signs if I had just been alert enough to see them. Here are five.”

“God, through the book of Galatians, had begun showing me how little I truly understood of the gospel. Instead of the true gospel, I was living by what Paul called the ‘perverted’ gospel, one of works and dead religion.”

“The greatest level of intimacy for a husband and wife lies in the soul. When you are both individually centering your lives on Christ and your souls are connecting at the spiritual level, intimacy with your wife can beyond what you thought possible.”

“Things haven’t changed much. We, just like the ancient believers, have a hard time with simple trust and often find ourselves caught in the clutches of legalism. After years of following Jesus, I found myself stuck in legalism. Trust me, I know: the struggle is real. But, like most things, one of the first steps of becoming free from legalism is to realize that you’re stuck in it.”

“I believe that I have the freedom to be wrong. I believe that the Gospel gives us the freedom to fail.”

“The point and the purpose is simple. When we take action, we find only destruction. When God begins to move, we are given grace.”

“Our emotions do all kinds of things. But perhaps most importantly, they are meant to alert us to the brokenness of life and drive us to cry out to our loving Father through the Spirit of the Son. They drive us first and foremost into his arms, and then into the arms of one another.”

“Church, the world is watching us. They see the articles we float around the Internet, they read our billboards and bumper stickers, and for many outside of the Body, they feel one thing with crushing weight: judgment. There is no invitation in condemnation and no love in passive-aggressive battles fought along the lines of a newsfeed.”

“I was having breakfast with a good friend when he told me that he’d just broken up with his girlfriend of several years. It had been a hard few weeks. During this time, he decided to take a break from dating for a while. Instead, he wanted to focus on growing his newfound relationship with Christ. However, he didn’t really know how to do that.”

“I’ve wondered why Paul contrasts individual drunkenness with the Spirit-filled Christian community, and this is what I’ve come to believe: The addictions of our life are often born from our own isolation, from our pain and anxiety.”

“God does not identify us by our sins. It’s almost as if He sees things the other way around—while we might magnify our mistakes, God magnifies the beauty given to us. He is not intimidated by our weaknesses, like we so often are. He sees their power as already dissolved by the cross.”

“Sex is mysterious and wonderful, but it’s risky — even in a committed, loving relationship. Ask any husband about his hesitancy initiating sex with his wife. Or ask a wife about the uncertainty of initiating with her husband.”

“It’s not that God sends evil. Evil exists. It lives and moves and has its being on this earth. What Joseph is saying here is that people who do evil things are not God. They cannot orchestrate time and eternity. They may think they are destroying us, but the final outcome rests in God’s hands. People don’t have the ultimate power to change a life.”