It’s late at night. She rolls over and sees her husband is missing. She gets up, walks down the hall, and sees light emanating from the bottom of the door to their office room.
She opens the door and walks in. He is bathed in the glow of the computer, transfixed by the screen. He is momentarily shocked at her arrival, then recovers and quickly closes the internet browser.
“What are you doing?”
“Um, just catching up on work stuff and surfing YouTube.”
Her eyes narrow.
“What were you watching?”
He shifts in his seat.
“Just some sports videos.”
“You weren’t watching anything else?”
“No.”
He knows that she knows he was looking at porn. His faltering lies may have set her back, for the moment, but he knows she senses the truth. She saw the fear on his face, his squirming body language, his shaky, nervous tone. One researcher found that 55% of communication is through body language, 38% by tone of voice, 7% by words.
She knows.
In the porn-addicted church, scenes like this play out constantly in Christian homes everywhere between husband and wives, parents and youth. It’s not uncommon for a wife to walk in on her husband while he’s masturbating to porn. There will come a day when the truth is exposed, especially for those who are God’s children.
“Do not be deceived: God is not mocked, for whatever one sows, that will he also reap.”
Galatians 6:7
The truth can come out one of two ways. The husband can go to his wife and tell her, or he can do it the hard way and wait until she discovers him in the act or finds indisputable evidence, and the cluster bomb explodes. That isn’t to say that if he goes to her and confesses it will be easy, but I’ve lost count of the times I’ve heard wives say “I’m willing to pray for my husband and support him in the recovery process, but he must tell me the truth.”
Until the lying and hiding stops and he confesses to his wife:
* He will never overcome lust. Lying, isolation, and sexual sin are daisy-chained together; all 3 links must be broken.
* The lies and sin will multiply, increasing his weight of guilt and shame and the pain he will inflict on his wife when the truth comes out.
* He will live in fear of exposure. The double life extracts a high cost from those who attempt to have God and sin.
* Selfishness, anger, defensiveness, and depression fester, compounding his misery.
* The distance between him and his wife will grow.
* His relationship with God is an act. He may be able to throw people off his scent by quoting Scripture or doing ministry, but inside he knows he’s a fraud… unless he gets in so deep that he believes his own lies, searing his conscience in the process.
* His heart hardens. This is when it gets dangerous; once the heart turns to stone anything can happen.
She knows. More importantly, God knows.
Over the years I’ve heard many men say that the day their wife discovered their porn habit was a major turning point in their life. Once all the lying and hiding stopped and the games were over, they were able to launch out on a serious quest for freedom.
Such disclosures aren’t exclusive to sexual sin. It could be the spouse who’s been playing church and is empty, bitter, or miserable, has unresolved wounds from the past they’ve refused to deal with that have damaged family relationships, or maybe they’ve spent their life medicating their heart and choking themselves with work, food, ministry, drugs, alcohol, social media, entertainment, or other broken cisterns.
“For my people have committed two evils: they have forsaken me, the fountain of living waters, and hewed out cisterns for themselves, broken cisterns that can hold no water.”
– Jeremiah 2:13
If God has been weighing on you to forsake the double life and drop the broken cisterns, don’t wait. Bring the truth to the light.
Let Him restore and heal you.