Creating a Battle Plan

There are a lot of husbands who have a lot of messed up ideas when it comes to their expectations around marital intimacy.

Joe Rigney says there's a good reason for that. What's happened is for a number of years, you have been taking sex ed curriculum from liars and incompetence. That's what pornography is.

You have been conditioned to think that this is what sexuality is, and then you get into marriage and you go, that's not how it is. That's a lie. That's artificial.

It's fake. And yet you've conditioned yourself by the choices you've made, and now you need to unlearn some things. This is Family Life Today. Our hosts are Dave and Ann Wilson.

I'm Bob Lapine. You can find us online at FamilyLifeToday.com. There are lots of things about sexuality that many of us need to unlearn, and lots of things about dealing with our own lust that many of us need to begin to practice. We're going to talk about both of those things today. Stay with us. And welcome to Family Life Today.

Thanks for joining us. I remember speaking to a group of men, it was about 1,500 guys, and we were talking about lust and temptation, sexual sin, and I asked every guy in the room to stand up. I said, everybody stand up, except the single guys. Single guys, you can stay seated. Just all the married guys stand up. Then I said, I want you to sit down if since you got married, you have not had any ongoing struggle with pornography or lust. Go ahead and sit down. I think maybe four guys in the room sat down.

It's so depressing. So you're saying four guys had not struggled, everybody else had. Yeah, right. I said to the single guys, I wanted to do this for you because I wanted you single guys who were thinking, I've got this struggle going on in my life, but when I'm married and when I'm able to be intimate with my wife regularly, then this battle will go away.

I wanted them to see, here's the testimony of the tribe. It's not going to go away. That's not the cure you're looking for.

That's not going to fix this for you. And Bob, most women that are engaged and their fiancé has come and talked to them like, hey, this has been a battle in the past. And he's usually reassuring, but I'm sure when we get married, it will no longer be a battle. Like I think it's important for her to know this could be something that we need to battle together. And it's not an easy conversation to have. And your fiancé almost certainly has had exposure to pornography.

And the question is, what's that ongoing exposure look like and how is this going to impact your marriage? We need help, Bob. We do need help.

We need a doctor in the house. And we've got one. Joe Rigney is joining us this week on Family Life Today. Joe, welcome back.

It's great to be here. Joe is a pastor in the Twin Cities. He is an associate professor at Bethlehem College and Seminary. And he's written a book called More Than a Battle, which is a battle plan for guys to know how you get free from what is a battle for all of us.

And Joe, you've talked about your own struggle with this issue. One of the things you say in the book is the whole idea of what it means to walk by the Spirit was kind of a revolutionary game changer for you. Now, you'd heard about walking by the Spirit for years, but some light came on that affected your battle with porn. Yeah, so there's this great text, right, in Galatians chapter 5 where Paul says, Walk by the Spirit and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh. Now, in the original Greek, it's actually an intensified negation. It's walk by the Spirit and you will absolutely not gratify the desires of the flesh.

That's an amazing promise. Then immediately he comes back and he says, For the desires of the flesh are against the Spirit and the desires of the Spirit are against the flesh so that you don't do the things that you want because they're opposed to each other. For a long time, I thought what that sounds like is great promise, realistic walk back. Like Paul sort of saying, hey, if you walk by the Spirit, you won't do this at all, but you still kind of will. Like, desires of flesh, there's going to be a war and you're going to lose some. And by the way, you just described most men's Christian walk. Yes. Yeah, you kind of will.

Yeah. So, man, we got to hear the rest because... Yeah, so what the game changer was is I had a friend in seminary who was working on that passage and he said, you know, if you flip it around but kind of keep the logic of the passage. So the logic of the passage is walk by the Spirit, you won't gratify the desires of the flesh because they're opposed to each other and you don't do the things you want. He said flip it. And so what he said was the desires of the flesh are against the Spirit, desires of the Spirit are against the flesh. These are opposed to each other. Therefore, walk by the Spirit and you won't gratify the desires of the flesh.

And it was like the light just went boom. And what it meant was it's not that you have this promise and there's a realistic walk back. It's that you wake up every day in a war.

You're a Christian. There's the spiritual desires. There's fleshly desires. They're opposed to each other. It's this pitch battle.

So what should you do? Well, walk by the Spirit and then there's a promise and you won't gratify those desires of the flesh. And that was a major thing. So then what it signaled was we start in a war. The destination that we're going for is not gratifying the desires of the flesh, which isn't the same as not having any desires. That the language of gratifying is basically desires want to take you someplace, desires entice and they pull you, right? Desires want you to go someplace. If you let them take you there, that's called gratifying the desire or indulging the desire. And the promise is not that there won't be a desire, but that you won't gratify it. And so then what's the bridge between where we start and our destination?

Answer, walk by the Spirit. Which means that the question, what does that even mean, becomes massively important in terms of our sanctification. How do we get from this warfare where we're frustrated to measures of victory that maybe we can't even imagine yet. So, Joe, what does that even mean?

What does that even mean? I wrote a book about it. I think one of the things it means is it reorients us to the kind of struggle that this is.

I'm borrowing this from the late Dr. David Palleson. He was another game changer. In 2004, I heard him give a message called Making All Things New at the Desiring God National Conference in Minneapolis. I came up as a college student and he gave a talk called Making All Things New.

Eventually, he turned it into a little book, Crossway published this little book, kind of an expanded version of that. And in that talk, he basically said, look, this is a longer war. This is a deeper war.

This is a wider war. And it just opened my eyes to things in my life that I had no idea had anything to do with the struggle against sexual sin, but absolutely did. And so I lean on him heavily to really get a vision of, hey, part of walking by the Spirit is recognizing this is a long obedience in the same direction.

This is not a flash in the pan. God suddenly flips a switch. He's not going to zap you, probably.

Maybe he knocks you off your horse like Paul. But more likely, it's going to be you waking up day after day and making certain choices by the Spirit of God to be confronted with the temptations and to walk away. So there's layers of the fight. And walking by the Spirit is, by the Spirit's power, there's a lifestyle.

There's a way of conducting yourself, a way of walking in the world that fits with the Spirit's desires. And that's what we're after. And it's interesting.

I mean, Paul's getting at it. And Joe, you're developing it so well that the answer, the victory journey is not horizontal. It's capital S Spirit. It's not my human spirit. It's almost like, I mean, when you were talking, I picture a human being with a plug in his hand, looking for an outlet to get my power source.

And what Bob said earlier, when those men stood up, is we think, oh, if I get married, I plug this into marriage and my spouse, well, we're going to be able to have sexual intimacy. The struggle is going to go away. So that's going to be my power. And then it isn't. It's not.

So you go, and you unplug and you're like, okay. And what you're saying, Paul is saying, is that has to go vertical. You'll never win this battle in human spirit. It's Holy Spirit power walked by the Spirit.

And you said that means we're making daily choices. Help us. There's a guy listening going, okay, I believe it, but I still don't know what that looks like. How do I win this thing? Let me add this too, Dave, because it's a battle that's going on not only in the husband's life, but it's the wife's life as well. Because there's a battle taking place to pull us apart from one another. And so for women, we too need to know, how do I battle alongside my husband? Because this topic draws us, pulls us away as partners, but also our whole family. We as women can become so resentful, so angry, so numb that we want nothing to do with our husbands.

And at that point, Satan wins. Right. So one thing is that the story Bob told, I think in a weird way ought to encourage women. You said it's depressing. It absolutely is. But for a wife then who has a husband who is dealing with this, she needs to know it's not about her. Right.

It's so hard not to go there though. You assume it's about, it must be me, there must be some flaw in me, some failure. If I was different, he wouldn't do this. Right. That's not true. Many women will say he's basically having an affair with another woman that's not real. That's right. So I think for wives, one of the things to get straight on is this isn't my fault, and therefore I have to be able to entrust him to God.

This is between him and the Lord fundamentally. The reason why single guys who are neck deep in porn think marriage is going to fix it is that they think that intimacy is intimacy, that sex is just sex. But it's like, no, what's happened is for a number of years, you have been taking sex ed, this is a quote from a pastor friend of mine, sex ed curriculum from liars and incompetence. That's what pornography is.

Right. You have been conditioned to think that this is what sexuality looked like. And then you get into marriage and you go, that's not how it is. That's a lie. That's artificial.

It's fake. And yet you've conditioned yourself to be aroused by that. And therefore making love to a real woman just doesn't work. And therefore you get stuck.

And so it doesn't. So part of it is you've been conditioned wrong by the choices you've made. And now you need to unlearn some things right about what women are and who women are and what man or what a man is and all this stuff. So for a wife, she needs to go, this is ultimately between him and the Lord.

And therefore my role is supportive and I need to be worried about me. What's the where's the trap here? This is this is one of the main things I talk about in the book is the schemes of the devil. Paul has this great phrase, the schemes of the devil. We're not unaware of his schemes. And the idea is you guys remember the old TV show 24. You remember the Jack Bauer. Like if you're watching that show, you know, there's 24 hours. So you're watching that show. And about hour six, if Jack's closing in on the bad guy, you know, there's about to be a twist.

Right. You know that he can't catch him now. We've got 18 more hours to go. So at hour six, you know that there's about to be a deeper plot revealed. And then at hour 12, there's going to be a deeper plot revealed.

And there's always going to be a deeper plot. That's how the devil is. And so in a marriage, plot number one, scheme number one is I'm going to get this guy to fall. I'm going to get him to look at pornography.

Once that's accomplished, success for the devil. It's not like he packs it up and goes home. He goes, I got another plot now. I'm going to get him to hide it. Say that one doesn't work. Say he comes clean.

Oh, that's okay. I've got another plot. Now I'm going to use it to tear his marriage apart. And I'm going to work on his wife. And I'm going to, you know, stoke the fear and that resentment and that anger in her.

So you're the target of the spiritual attack. It's not just that you're watching your husband fall into sin. There's a danger for a wife. And this is where you get mutually feeding spousal sins.

His temptation to lust and your temptation to anger and fear is going to create a dynamic in the marriage that's going to build a massive wall. And part of walking by the Spirit is not being ignorant of the devil's schemes. So good. So some of that's just training your mind and being and again, the mentor can really help you. Yes. Understand that that scheme, that pattern, what goes on and what the deception behind it. But you just mentioned something that I found intriguing in your book, the connection between anger and lust. Now you mentioned it with the wife being angry. But in the book you're talking about a man's anger sometimes connects or spurs on a lustful desire. Talk about that. Yeah.

So this is an insight from a counselor named Jay Stringer who wrote a book on this subject on sexual brokenness. We had Jay on the program. Oh, did you? Okay, great. So his book's very, very helpful. You know, he did all the research and I just got the benefit of it.

Right. But he talks about how it's interesting the way that he says he's never met someone who has a lust problem who also doesn't have an anger problem. And oftentimes this is why, especially as sort of the pornography epidemic has sort of multiplied, that the pornography that guys are getting into these days is much more degrading because there's an anger involved in it. And it's, again, we talked earlier the desire for validation that guys feel and that's a part of the craving that they're seeking to satisfy through pornography is I want to be known and admired as a man. And so the anger is I'm not known and admired as a man. In my daily life, at work, in my marriage, with my kids, wherever it is, in life I am not known and admired as a man and that makes me angry. And I'm going to go get admired by a woman or I'm going to go degrade a woman in my imagination. And so, again, this is where if you only treat this as guys like to look at naked women and you don't recognize there might be a deep anger at the world and at God and at wife that as a mentor, I'm going to be keen in on that because until you diffuse that little time bomb, it doesn't matter how much you talk about software programs and things to help keep that away. As valuable as those may be, those are treating symptoms.

You got to go down for the roots. Yeah. And I've found, you know, as I sit with men in my church, I've also found, and you just mentioned it, there's an anger toward God.

Yes. Like God hasn't come through. My relationship with him is not what I thought it would be. The power that is in the walking in the spirit I haven't really experienced. And so it's almost like, you know, you haven't done it for me, God.

I'm going to go somewhere I know I shouldn't go, but it's going to feel good. Yes. And so it's like feeding that. Have you seen that as well? Absolutely.

Yeah. So the anger at God, this is true, could be true for married guys, could be true for single guys. I want to be married and God hadn't provided the woman yet. And so I'm going to act out by looking at something. You can't actually punch God in the face. But what I can do is, well, I can do this. I can defy you.

I can go seek satisfaction over here as a way almost of getting back in. And now, of course, sin is so subtle. We don't recognize that until after the fact.

Oh, that's what I was doing. But this is where, again, wise mentors can sort of say, I see. I see the temptation that's coming down the way here where you're at.

This is the thing that's coming next. You know, one of the things for mentors with the marriage question is helping husbands and wives who are in this to have honest but guided conversations. You know, here's here's a real practical one, because men and women are different. We experience attraction different. And so my wife and I would get tripped up like in our first year of marriage when she would say, were you attracted to that, the waitress?

You look like you noticed. Were you attracted to her? And I'm like, well, yeah, I mean, she's attractive.

How could you say that? What do you mean you're attracted to her? I was like, wait, wait. And I would stop and say, you mean you're not attracted to other men? And she's like, absolutely not. And I'm like, no, no, no. Hold on.

Time out. You don't think that other men are attractive? And she says, no, I totally think other men are attractive. I'm just not attracted to them.

And I went, that's not computing. My categories, you're saying they're attractive, but you're not attracted to them. And in her mind, those were radically different things. She could recognize that man is handsome, but have no desire or draw to him in a certain kind of way, because typically it needed to be more emotionally fueled, right? So we were just missing each other. And there was fights and tensions in the marriage that somebody else needed to come in and say, okay, hold on, this is just a vocabulary problem, y'all. We needed somebody to kind of help us work through that.

Otherwise we would just get stuck. I'm thinking it's so easy to do that as a man if you're struggling with porn, because you don't look at women as women. Yes. You have to understand what it does to your mind. Yes.

It is not pure. You say in the book, it's immoral. And it really is because you look at people different.

A woman that says he's attractive, but I'm not attracted to him, it's like they probably have never allowed that to distort. Yes. You know what I'm saying?

It's what happens. I had a guy one time who, and this was helpful, he said two things. He said, first of all, most of the women who are involved in the creation of pornography are having to take drugs to deal with what they're doing, right? These are not happy women.

These are women who are destroying their own lives. And then he said, and they are somebody's little girl, somebody's daughter. And he said, if somebody came along and said, would it be okay with you? Your daughter is cute. Would it be okay if I just asked her to go ahead and take off her clothes so I could look at her?

As a dad, you'd say, absolutely. What are you talking about? You'd come out of your skin. Well, any woman you're looking at is somebody's little girl. And that was kind of one of those, you don't think of them as real people. We talked before about the body you mentioned, but you were talking about the mental one, right? The being transformed by the renewing of your mind. Part of that renewal, this is what Walking by the Spirit includes, is a reorientation on what it means to be a man and on what it means to be a woman. Women are not objects for male gratification, and men are not beasts who prey upon women. That's what pornography teaches. Men are just animals and women are just objects.

And that's the catechism. That's what you're taught. You're conditioned to think this is what men are, this is what women are, which means you think of yourself that way as a man.

I'm just a beast and I need to be put in a cage. And a wife is going to then feel like, yeah, you do. And it's going to condition, it's going to affect the way that you engage with other women. And it's going to be distorting in all kinds of really messed up ways in churches where a guy who has conditioned himself to view all women as objects doesn't know how to relate to real women. If he's a certain kind of man, he might become predatory, meaning he might be trying to look for more than just a screen. He might be looking for an affair, adultery. On the other hand, he might be so ashamed that he has no idea how to even have a conversation with an attractive woman who's not his wife. And then his wife's going to be going, why can't you just talk to my friends like a normal human being? And it hurts. Just be nice to them. And he's going, I don't want you to think that I am interested in them.

Well, are you interested in them? I mean, it's a trap. And it's emerging out of this distortion. Pornography is feeding right into that. And this is, again, where you've got to have wise men and wise women. You mentioned earlier about the importance of older women who can say, I know what you're feeling here.

I know the anger that you're feeling and the fear that you're feeling about your husband. I get it. But it doesn't have to be this way. Let's talk through it. And then you've got the guy that will say, because I've had him sit in my office, look me in the eye.

One guy even wrote it down. He said, I know it's right, but I can't do it. I find something in my soul that keeps me from doing what is right.

I want to do what's right, but I can't do it. You ever heard that one before? Oh, yeah. That's Romans 7. I'm quoting Romans 7. Also, Paul wrote that.

But I think a lot of men read that. And you talk about in your book, it's like, oh, he battled. He didn't win. That's my get-out-of-jail-free card.

I didn't win. That's right. So, hey, you know, I'm just being a guy.

They settle, right. Well, the thing about Romans 7 that's interesting is that in Romans 7, the spirit doesn't show up. And that struggle where he's like, I know the good thing.

I do what I hate. And all that wrestling, the spirit's absent. The spirit shows up in Romans 8.

Yeah, you got to keep breathing. There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, for the law of the spirit of life has set you free. So, yes, and I think Paul is giving voice, and we can identify and say, I know what the – okay, Paul gets it. He knows what I'm feeling in this battle, but we can't stay there. Joe, was your victory in this issue an instantaneous miraculous, or was it remission over a period of time?

I would say in terms – at one level, there was kind of an immediacy. It was the shock awake of, you know, I'm getting married. This is now serious. There's other people involved, and I don't want to hurt anybody.

I don't want my wife to be hurt. And so that was kind of like a wake-up call. But the actual process of like unlearning things, of reorienting, having my mind, having my body, all of the kind of long term, it was a long road. And there were stumbles in the sense of like you're conditioned in certain ways, certain things I noticed.

And I think this is one of the things that guys miss is it didn't get easier. One of the analogies – I picked this up from Paulus, and I think. He talks about video games. You know, when you're playing a video game, and the first level, the bad guys are super slow because you're super slow.

And you're kind of trying – how do your thumbs work, right? And so they're easy bad guys because you're no good. But then level two, the bad guys get a little bit better because you're a little bit better, and you kind of keep working up. The same thing's true in our fight with sin.

The easiest sin to defeat is actually the like going to the strip club or the affair because those are things that you have to actually find somebody else. There's all kinds of effort to do it. The hard one is the double take.

The hard one is what do you notice about a woman when you first meet her? It's a different level. It's a much more subtle form of the sin. And so you should expect that as you get victory, don't think, oh, it'll get easier. It's probably going to get harder. You're going to feel like, wow, I'm fighting at a different level.

And that's not a defect. That's God growing you up into maturity. And so embrace that and keep pressing on, don't quit. And one of the principles at play here is where you choose to fight is where the battle will be fought. And here's the thing I'd say to all of us in this battle.

On the days you wake up and go, oh, I'm not really going anywhere today. I don't need to put my armor on. I'm not really going to be in the battle today. I'm going to be home alone.

You know, how much trouble can you get home alone? If you're not armoring up, this is Ephesians 6, if you're not putting on the whole armor of God, engaging in the spiritual disciplines, if this is not a part of your daily ongoing reaction to this, then don't be surprised when you find yourself suffering arrow attacks in the middle of whatever. Yeah, and I think we've already said this, but I think it's also key to understand I'm not Romans 7, I'm Romans 8.

That's right. I'm not defeated. I was. And I really didn't have the power to beat this, even though I might win here and there.

I couldn't win. I am Romans 8. I am in Christ. I'm a warrior. I can put on the armor. I couldn't even put it on before.

Yeah, the battle is real. Paul says that, but he gets the Romans 8 one. He says there is no condemnation in Christ. I can walk by the Spirit of God. Today is the day you got to take the step. You've got to come out of the dark. Picture standing in front of your wife and kids someday, looking them in the eye and saying, this marriage is blowing up because I didn't win my porn battle. That's where this is going. And you've got to remind yourself, I can stop that starting right here, right now. Get the mentor and get the buddies.

Start walking by the Spirit and let God bring you a victory. I would add this too. My wife's got to have the last little point, doesn't she?

I've been trying to get it in. I think as a woman, I used to think, I wish Dave would put his armor on. And yet we don't have control of our husbands, but we have control of our own lives. And one of the greatest places that we can do battle is on our knees.

Like this is on us too. Let's battle for our families. Let's battle for our husbands. Let's battle for our children on our knees.

Let's get girlfriends to say, let's take this home back for Jesus in the power of the Spirit and walk in the Spirit. Joe, thank you for your transparency. Thank you for the book. Thank you for helping all of us in this battle. It's my pleasure. And let's hope that a lot of our listeners will get in touch with us and get a copy of your book, More Than a Battle. We're making it available this week to any family life today listener who'd like to get a copy and can make a donation to support the ministry, whatever your donation is. Ask for your copy of Joe Rigney's book, More Than a Battle.

And plan to get multiple copies. Plan to go through this book with other guys, whether it's a small group that you've got or maybe you just need to get a group of guys together and say, this is something I've been wrestling with. I know that sounds threatening, but this is how you get help.

This is where hope comes from. Get a group of guys, say, I've been struggling with this. I don't know if you are, but I'm guessing most of us have been struggling with this. And even if you're not, maybe you can be a mentor to me.

Get your copy of Joe Rigney's book, More Than a Battle. It's available when you make a donation to family life today. And what you're supporting when you make that donation is this program being heard in your community and in communities all around the world. You're helping us bring practical, biblical help and hope to marriages and families every day of the year. We've got more people than ever listening through our mobile app, listening online, listening on this local station. You make that possible when you support this ministry.

You can donate online at familylifetoday.com or you can call 1-800-FL today to donate. Again, ask for your copy of Joe Rigney's book, More Than a Battle. When you make your donation, we're happy to send it to you as a way of saying thank you for your support, and we look forward to hearing from you. Now, tomorrow we're going to talk about what is the essence, what's the core of real leadership.

What does that look like? And we're going to be talking to somebody who has seen guys who have been leaders in the sports arena for many years. Jason Romano from Sports Spectrum. But he's got a lot to say to us as husbands, dads, to all of us as we seek to lead in our marriages and in our families. So I hope you can tune in for that. I want to thank our engineer today, Keith Lynch, along with our entire broadcast production team. On behalf of our hosts, Dave and Ann Wilson, I'm Bob Lapine. We'll see you back tomorrow for another edition of Family Life Today. MUSIC Family Life Today is a production of Family Life of Little Rock, Arkansas. A crew ministry. Help for today. Hope for tomorrow.