The Path to an Affair
Aug 28, 2022Last Monday I got a text message from a good friend. The text said, “I need your help. A friend of mine is a pastor and he has confessed an affair. I don’t know what to do to help.”
The text broke my heart. It broke my heart for this pastor. It broke my heart for his wife and his kids. It broke my heart for the church that found out yesterday about his unfaithfulness.
There is a verse in Proverbs that came to my mind as I thought about this pastor…because it not only applies to him, but to me and maybe to you.
There is a path before each person that seems right, but it ends in death
As I was thinking about this verse, I thought about the path to an affair. There is a definite path to choosing an affair. It isn’t one big step into sin, but rather several small steps and compromises here and there.
Here is the certain path to an affair:
• Believe the lie that it will never happen to you
• Choose to equate accountability with transparency
• Find your identity in something other than Christ
• Be willing to tell little lies or leave out part of the truth when it will benefit you
• Place more of a weight on what others think about you than what your spouse thinks about you
• Pretend to be closer to God than you really are
• Overcome your insecurities and low self esteem with a false pride and arrogance
• Ignore sexual brokenness from your past and believe it won’t affect your marriage
• Romanticize a relationship with someone else as being more fulfilling than your relationship with your spouse
It is easy to look back on an affair and see the choices and compromises that were made along the way. What if we didn’t wait until the choices we can’t undo were made before we changed? What if we changed the direction of our marriage now? What if you chose to walk a path that leads to life in your marriage, today?
What if more people recognized the path before they were on it? That is why RefineUs exists.
