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Avoiding Emotional Adultery by td jakes
By: Intervention Date: July 27, 2015, 4:23 pm
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Avoiding Emotional Adultery
When you find yourself connecting with another person who starts
becoming in even the smallest way a substitute for your marital
partner, you’ve started traveling a dangerous road. So, how do
you protect yourself —and your marriage?
Here are some principles many have found helpful:
1. Know your boundaries. You should put fences around your heart
and protect the sacred ground that is reserved only for your
spouse. Barbara and I are careful to share our deepest feelings,
needs, and difficulties only with each other and not with
friends of the opposite sex.
2. Realize the power of the eyes. They are the “windows of your
soul.” Pull the shades down if you sense someone is pausing a
little too long in front of those windows. It’s true that good
eye contact is necessary for fruitful communication, but there
is a deep type of look that must be reserved for only one
person: your mate.
Frankly, I don’t trust myself. Some women may think I’m insecure
because I don’t hold eye contact too long, but that’s not it at
all. I simply don’t trust my humanity. I’ve seen what has
happened to others, and I know it could happen to me.
3. Beware of isolation and concealment. One strategy of the
enemy is to isolate you from your spouse, by tempting you to
keep secrets from your mate. Barbara and I both realize the
danger of concealment in our marriage. We work hard at bringing
things out into the open and discussing them. Our closets are
empty.
4. Extinguish any chemical reactions that may have begun. A
friendship with the opposite sex that is beginning to meet needs
your mate should be meeting must be ended quickly. A simple rule
of chemistry is this: To stop a chemical reaction, remove one of
the elements. It may be painful or embarrassing at first, but it
isn’t as painful as suffering the results of temptation that has
given birth to sin.
Ruth Senter wrote an article for Partnership Magazine entitled
simply, “Rick.” It was an incredibly honest examination of a
godly wife’s encounter and ensuing friendship with a Christian
man she met in a graduate class. Her struggle and godly response
to this temptation were graphically etched in a letter that
ended that relationship. She wrote,
“Friendship is always going somewhere unless it’s dead. You and
I both know where ours is going. When a relationship threatens
the stability of commitments we’ve made to the people we value
the most, it can no longer be.”
5. Ask God to remind you how important it is to fear Him. The
fear of God has turned me from many a temptation. it would be
one thing if another person learned I had compromised my vows,
but it’s quite another thing to realize that God’s throne would
have a knowledge of my disloyalty to Barbara faster than the
speed of light.
It has been said that a “secret sin on earth is open scandal in
heaven.” My Heavenly Father and my earthly father are there
right now. Thinking of hurting them keeps me pure.
The above article came from the book, Staying Close: Stopping
the Natural Drift Toward Isolation in Marriage by Dennis Rainey,
published by Thomas Nelson Publishing. This book won the Gold
Medallion Book Award in recognition of excellence in evangelical
Christian literature so it’s highly recognized as being a
powerful book for those who are married. It helps those of us
who are married to learn how to pull together instead of drift
apart.
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