You could have retired four years ago. Your spouse goes to bed around 10:00, the house goes quiet, the phone is in your hand, and you already know what you’re going to look at because you’ve done it 100 times. Or you’re somebody else, and it’s 1994, and you’re at a three-day school in Sacramento with somebody from another agency at the hotel bar. It happened only once. You drove home, kissed your spouse in the driveway, and you haven’t said a word about it in 30 years. By Jesus’ definition, both of those people committed adultery, and both of them can be completely forgiven today.
This is week 16, the last study in the series, and it’s written for the women who served as much as the men did. Most of these sins started in the downtime of the career: the months between deployments, the graveyard shift, the days off between 24-hour shifts, the hotel room 400 miles from your family. David’s started the same way: campaign season, the army in the field at Rabbah, and the commander home, getting up off his couch late in the afternoon with nothing to do. Plenty of people have told themselves porn is not cheating because nobody got touched, but Jesus put what happens on the screen in the same verse as the affair. Job settled it before the moment came, the way rules of engagement get written in the briefing while heads are clear. And if you live with PTSD, the trauma is part of why the sin took hold, but you still made the choices, Scripture still calls it sin, and grace still covers it.
Paul wrote to a church with former adulterers sitting in it and told them they were washed. God put David’s sin away the moment he owned it, even though the consequences stayed. If you’ve decided this is the one sin God will not cover, read or watch week 4 of this series, “I Could Never Be Forgiven.”
Then the hardest question in the study: do you have to tell your spouse? I looked for a verse that commands it, and it is not in the Bible, so this study will not claim that it is. Scripture does require confession to God and to another believer, and it draws two hard lines. You do not lie when your spouse asks you directly, and if an affair put your spouse’s health at risk, your spouse has to know. Past those lines, take it to your pastor or a Christian counselor with the specifics, because keeping quiet is a decision too, and nobody should settle it alone at 2:00 in the morning.
Your work for the next seven days:
1. If you’re in an affair, end it today in a single message. No final meeting, and no coffee to talk it through.
2. Charge your phone in the kitchen tonight.
3. Install accountability software on every phone, tablet and computer by Friday, set to report to someone you trust.
4. Name one person and tell them before Sunday. A man tells a man, and a woman tells a woman.
5. If you’re carrying something from years ago, call your pastor and schedule the appointment.
Be watchful, stand firm in the faith, act like men, be strong. Always Be Carrying.
Chapters
0:00 Two Warriors, One Sin
0:59 PTSD and the Sin
1:58 Downtime: How David Fell
4:04 What Jesus Says About the Eyes
5:11 Still In It? Flee Like Joseph
5:44 Four Things to Do This Week
6:37 The Worst News and the Best News
7:51 Do You Have to Tell Your Spouse?
9:51 Your Work for the Next 7 Days
Scripture (ESV): 2 Samuel 11:1-4; James 1:14-15; Matthew 5:27-28; Job 31:1; 1 Corinthians 6:18; Genesis 39:12; 1 Corinthians 6:9-11; 2 Samuel 12:13; 1 John 1:9; James 5:16; Ephesians 4:25; 1 Corinthians 7:4; 1 Corinthians 16:13
