Should
I tell my spouse my secret?
This can be an alarming question, a
question that we want to get out of our minds as quickly as possible.
I know I did. In fact, over the
12 years that I kept my secret life hidden from my wife, this question jumped
into my head at the strangest times. On
occasion, something inside me was screaming to stop the act and tell the
secret. I crushed that voice time and
time again. For many years, I believed
I could never tell anyone my secret, let alone my wife.
The natural result of this belief system was years of prolonged bondage
to sexual addiction that grew worse with each passing year.
In truth, I believed I needed my addiction on a surface level, after
all, it helped numb my pain of feeling like a complete failure at life.
But, deeper in my heart, I wanted out and I hated what sexual
misbehavior was doing to me. I wanted
to be free of my secrets; to be known completely and loved anyway, the way the
Bible says is possible. But how?
First, a little of my story so you’ll know I’ve been where you are.
As a child, I
was saved as my father told me of a God who loved so much, that he took my sin
upon himself and died to pay the penalty for my sin.
At the age of 8, I didn’t feel particularly sinful, but I was
attracted by the love of this man named Jesus Christ.
It was his kind of love I wanted that evening, as I gazed at the
vastness of the Milky Way with my father. I
accepted Christ and a surge of love washed over me warming me and bringing
great joy. In the years that followed,
due partly to abuses in my home of origin and mainly to my own sinful heart, I
fell into a pattern of ever increasing sexual behavior in my teens looking for
the love I craved and I forgot the pure love I had known as a pre-teen with
Christ.
The years marched on with new stresses and I found that I
could not stop what I was doing. More
than that, keeping up the act of the respectable guy, was taking it’s toll.
Depression was my constant companion as was out bursts of anger,
arrogance, senselessness, deceitfulness, rebellion, hatred, envy, unending
lies, paranoia, unreasonable fears, and on and on.
I wanted off the roller coaster I was on, but how?
I was too far gone to tell anyone what I was dealing with, I’d lose
everything – even my life! This is
how my thoughts went. I often wondered
why my love affair with Christ cooled and why God didn’t seem interested in
helping me stop acting out sexually. Scripture
had the answer:
“Listen
now! The Lord isn’t too weak to save
you. And he isn’t going deaf!
He can hear you when you call. But the
trouble is that your sins have
Because of sin he has turned his face
(Isaiah 59:1, 2 Living)
Actually, God was VERY interested in helping, but only if I took the first step toward him. Inwardly, I broke down and told God that whatever it took, I wanted freedom from my secret life. The answer I got to this prayer was the one I feared the worst. I had to tell my wife. Nothing more than that! Oh, is that all, I thought. But at long last, 20 years into my sexual sin, I had decided I didn’t care any more what happened to me. I might as well let God finish me off and destroy me for all I’d done (I really thought this way). I had lived in denial so long, I couldn’t tell my wife directly, it had to be drug out of me in little pieces at a time until at last I just wrote down my sins on several sheets of paper and gave them to my wife. Those papers destroyed my wife, but I did what was commanded and God jumped into action in my life and my wife’s. To say that this time was smooth would be a complete lie. I had hurt my wife beyond description and ruined my reputation with loads of people. But the truly amazing thing was that instead of being beaten to death for my sins as I had expected, I found forgiveness and reconciliation, understanding and love. A tremendous weight was taken off me in that I didn’t have to keep my secret any more. Unknowingly, I had discovered another truth in the Bible:
“He
who covers his sins will not prosper, but whoever
forsakes [his sins] will have mercy.”
(Proverbs
28:13 NKJV)
I got mercy big time and I never expected it. The extension of mercy to me played itself out intensely over 3 years from the time I told my wife to the time our relationship was restored. But mercy is still being extended to me everyday. The Lord took me through so many “learning opportunities” during those years, that my self-centered view of myself and my world changed forever. I would never trade for those years and the experiences they brought in spite of the pain they induced. I learned things about myself, my God and my family and friends that are beyond price to me. Greatest of all, I re-started my love affair with this man Jesus. He’s a Lord that can be trusted completely because he doesn’t want to see us destroyed, he wants us free from the ravages of sin and restored to right living, right relationship with him. Here’s another verse that hit me between the eyes:
“In
the past you voluntarily gave your bodies to the service of vice and
wickedness,
for the purposes of evil.
of righteousness [right living]—for
the purpose
(Romans 6:19 Phillips)
So, should you tell your spouse The Secret? In my experience and in scripture, the answer is a resounding, yes. Be certain however, this decision will cost you dearly in loss of the status quo, but isn’t that what you’re sick and tired of anyway? Our God is a wonderfully inventive and creative God. His plan for your life is different than mine and the details of his recovery plan for you will be different than mine. But, the first step is the same for everyone, a heart that is ready to change no matter what the cost. If so, tell your spouse and welcome to real living with Christ, a journey that will last a lifetime and beyond.
“Stop
loving this evil world and all that it offers you,
for when you love these
things
for all these worldly things, these evil desires
everything that appeals to you, and the
pride that comes from
wealth and importance—these are not from God.
They are from this evil world itself.
This world is fading
but whoever keeps
doing
(1
John 2:15-17 Living)