New Wineskins
Within the past week I’ve had two more wives approach me privately and ask for help for their husbands. They’d heard me talk about an issue from stage that is destroying marriages from within. Because of the stigma attached to this issue, many couples choose not to get help, rather choosing to suffer in silence while this corrosive issue slowly eats away at the health and intimacy of the marriage until there’s nothing left. The issue is porn.
We’re now entering a time in our society where new husbands have had easy access to pornography on their smart phones ever since they hit puberty. Husbands are walking into marriage with severe and deep sexual issues coming from years of pornography addiction. Whether they realize it or not, pornography is literally rewiring the brain and twisting healthy sexual desires into something else entirely.
And pornography addiction doesn’t stop at the doors of the church. Several different studies indicated that around fifty percent of men in the church struggle with pornography at some level. Half the men in the church are struggling with an addiction on their own, in secret and in shame because pornography is one of the few addictions you’re still not allowed to talk about out loud from the pulpit.
What’s the result? The two wives that came separately to me in the past week, knowing that our church offers porn addiction recovery groups, asking how to get their husbands involved. The other option? Divorce, broken families, kids in both families now saddled with issues they’ll carry with them the rest of their lives. Porn addiction is real and it is devastating.
If you’re a church and you’re not talking about porn and offering real help to the men in your congregation, you’re allowing the enemy to do his work unabated in their lives. As awkward as it is, we have to talk about porn, we have to remove the stigma, and we have to offer real help. Churches offer recovery groups for those with alcohol and drug addictions or even recovery from the loss of a loved one. Churches need to offer porn addiction recovery groups and get men the help that they need.
The two marriages I encountered might make it and they might not. A lot of it will depend on the husband’s willingness to get help. Porn should never be the cause of a broken family. Do whatever you can as a church to help your struggling marriages.
Here is a link to a great place to start if you’re looking to tackle this issue head on:
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In