God takes marriage very seriously.  Our marriage vows include statements like; “till death do you part” and “what God has brought together let no man take apart.”  Marriage is a life long commitment and everyone in a marriage should maintain the sanctity of that union.

 

Adultery, simply put, is when a married person has, or desires to have, sexual relations with someone other than their spouse or when a single person has sex with someone who is married.  In Sunday school I describe it as when a married person goes out on a date with someone other than their husband or wife. 

 

In Matthew 5:28 (1) Jesus states, “But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart.”  I ride my bike about three times a week on a 19 mile circuit, which takes me down to the beach and back.  There are a lot of younger people riding their bikes or running on the bike path as well, so there is always the opportunity to take a closer look at a woman as she comes down the path.  After reading this passage, I realized I needed to get a new game plan for when I see a woman on the path. 

 

What I do now is figure out what side I will pass her on and make sure I am looking straight ahead when I pass by her.  After I pass her I thank God for averting my eyes, because that is one less sin I have committed.  The way I see it, there are intentional sins and accidental sins, which I commit throughout the day.  Since I am married, I know checking out other women is a sin, so I look straight ahead and that is one less sin I have to confess that night.

 

I hear a lot of married men say, “it is ok to look” or “my wife says it is ok to look as long as I don’t touch.”  If you remember your early Bible there was an incident when the wife told the husband that it was ok for him to enjoy some of the forbidden fruit of life.  That landed Adam outside the Garden of Eden right next to Eve.  Just because your wife may give you some allowance to look does not make it ok, because adultery is not a sin against her, it is a sin against God. 

 

The person who laid it out the best for me was Gary Stubblefield our Pastor at Voyagers Bible Church (5).  He was speaking about adultery and said, “It starts out as a glance, than a look, then a stare, then a desire, then a meeting, then an opportunity, then an act.”  As he described it, adultery is nothing more than a natural progression of things.  It starts out as a seed and then grows from there.  This makes a lot of sense to me, so I figure if I never plant the seed then I will not have to worry about what could grow out of that encounter.  In this case the glance is the seed, so I avoid the glance and ride right past the opportunity for this sin to tempt me.

 

So to all the married people out there, adultery is you going out with someone other than your spouse.  It is also you checking out people other than your spouse and entertaining the thought of what it would be like to be with them.  If you have that desire to be with them and the only thing standing in between you and the act of adultery is the opportunity, then you would be wise to start looking the other way. 

 

I am 55 years old so almost all women look good to me.  I acknowledge the fact that beauty exists, but I also acknowledge the fact that it is not there for my viewing pleasure.  All our lives we will see attractive people and we will acknowledge the fact that they are good looking, but the question is what you do with that image after you see that person; do you drop it, or store it away in your data base for future reference?

 

When I was single I saw this as one of the Ten Commandments I could not break.  Since I was single and adultery applies to married people then I was clear of committing this sin.  With this one out of the way, I only had the other nine to contend with.  After reading the Bible though, I found out single people do NOT get a pass on this commandment. Hebrews 13:4, states, “Marriage should be honored by all and the marriage bed kept pure, for God will judge the adulterer and all the sexually immoral.”  I would assume “all” includes single people as well.   Jesus Christ had a lot to say about adultery in the New Testament and he shows us that anyone can knowingly or unknowingly get tangled in this web of sin. 

 

In Matthew 5:32 (1) Jesus states, “But I tell you that anyone who divorces his wife, except for marital unfaithfulness, causes her to become an adulteress, and anyone who marries the divorced woman commits adultery.”  So first off, if one of the partners is unfaithful all bets are off.  The other party is free of their marriage vow and can move on and find someone else and not be guilty of adultery.  I feel bad for the woman here.  If the guy just leaves her then she becomes guilty of adultery if she remarries and the new husband is guilty of adultery as well.  I would think the best thing the woman could do is wait until her first husband takes up with another woman, then the unfaithfulness will kick in and she will absolved of her marital commitment.

 

In Matthew 19:9 (1) Jesus states, “I tell you that anyone who divorces his wife, except for marital unfaithfulness, and marries another woman commits adultery.”  So now the man who left his wife is guilty of adultery.  In Mark 10:11 (1) Jesus states, “Anyone who divorces his wife and marries another woman commits adultery against her.”  So here is an example of someone, not part of the original marriage, becoming part of the adultery.  The man commits adultery by marring another woman and the new woman is now an adulteress.  So lucky you, you are single, fall in love with a man who was married and now you can join him in hell for committing the same sin he has.  That does not sound like a very loving person to me if he is willing to drag you into an eternity of darkness by having you share in his sin.

 

As you can see from all this it is a pretty tangled web when it comes to getting involved with people who were or are married.  Other than for unfaithfulness you do not get a pass from the vows of marriage you took.  When Jesus was talking about divorce in Mark 10:9 (1) he was serious when he stated, “Therefore what God has joined together, let man not separate.” 

 

Matthew 19:4 states, “Haven’t you read that at the beginning the Creator made them male and female, and said, for this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, the two will become one flesh?  So they are no longer two, but one.  Therefore what God has joined together, let man not separate.” (1a).  It is pretty clear that when two people get married God wants them to stay together for the rest of their lives.  They are joined as one and should remain in that closed relationship with no outsiders violating that sacred bond.  God also knows that when that bond is broken by an outsider more bad things will follow.

 

I did a search on Google and put in the words, “causes for divorce.”  Here are some of the sites that came up and what they reported:

 

DIVORCEPEERS.COM was showing the response to the question, “What is the number one reason you and your wife split up?”  Twenty two percent of the men stated she was unfaithful and another three percent stated that they were unfaithful.  If you add this up you can see that 25% of the divorces in this survey were caused by adultery.  Apparently adultery will destroy your marriage.

 

Another site, THELABOROFLOVE.COM, had an article entitled Major Reasons Couples Divorce.  The article stated the number one reason for divorce was physical and emotional abuse where the abusing party would not get treatment to correct the problem.  It went on to state another major reason was a cheating spouse.

 

UTEXAS.EDU had a paper titled Introduction to Reasons for Divorce.  They stated that in the 1960s the wives cited the main reasons for divorce were physical abuse, financial problems, drinking, and verbal abuse.  The husbands stated the problems were with the in-laws and sexual incompatibility.  You have to appreciate how guys think; their thought process is so simple; the father in law is a pain in the neck and she always has a headache.  In 1985 they did another study and found the top reasons for divorce were communication problems and basic unhappiness.  They stated that in subsequent research after 1985 one of the four major reasons was “network-romantic” reasons (adultery).  I love how we use semantics to take the edge off the ugly things we do in life; “I’m not cheating on my wife, I am romantically networking.”  Does that sound better or what? 

 

EQUITYFEMINISM.COM had an article entitled, Affairs Major Reason for Divorce in UK, Where Woman Initiate Almost All Divorces.  The article is dated March 12, 2005 and in the article they asked divorce lawyers to provide statistics on the causes of the cases they handled.  Adultery was the number one reason; accounting for 27% of their cases and 75% of the time the husband was the culprit.  Emotional or physical abuse accounted for 17% of the cases and family-related strains took third with 11%.

 

I think it is fair to say, adultery will lead you to a divorce.  Well, it is not just your life that hits a major bump in the road, but how about the lives of your children?  I have heard it said so many times “the kids would be better off if they were out of that situation.”  Did anyone ever ask the kids? 

 

It seems that a lot of my son’s friend’s parents are divorced.  One friend was telling my wife how he can still remember the day his dad told him he was leaving them.  He even remembered the cartoon he was watching when his dad came in to tell him.  He was four years old and still remembers the cartoon he was watching when his dad walked out, and you don’t think that had a huge effect on that little boy?  My son’s friend told him, “You don’t know how lucky you are that your parents are not divorced.” 

 

The mom and dad still get along, we see them together all the time at sporting and school events and they are actually very nice to each other.  I look at the two parents and can not figure out why they left each other in the first place.  They treat each other very nicely, but their son is still regretting their separation.  I compare that ex-marriage to another one where the parents throw darts at each other every chance they get and I have to wonder how bad that kid feels.  He has to feel worse than the boy in the first example of the friendly divorce.  Not only will adultery wreck your marriage, but it will wreck your kids’ lives as well.

 

I thought about leaving my wife once.  I was going to leave for irreconcilable differences.  I was at a point where I no longer wanted to be married to her, because I did not see where my marriage was giving me what I had expected from it and did not see how it was ever going to give me what I expected from it.  Like any good accountant I prepared a forecast to see how this would play out in the future.  So I sat down and took a serious look at what would happen if I left my wife and here is what I came up with. 

 

At some point after the divorce I knew I would start to look for a girl friend.  I always had a girl friend, so once I was single I would probably go find a new one.  Man was not meant to be alone and since I had gotten rid of my first wife I would some day start looking for another woman to replace her. 

 

I thought I would start off by taking night classes at the community colleges and take general educational classes in hopes of meeting the younger woman.  As I thought it through I realized no single woman in her right mind, in her twenties, was going to be interested in a divorced man in his thirties with two kids and one alimony payment. 

 

So now I had to start looking at what was available in my age bracket.  The moms of the kids who play on my baseball and soccer teams; my choices would be divorced moms, people divorced just like me.  So some day I would do like all the other divorced people in the world and marry another divorced person and we would just swap child support checks and it all would balance out financially in the end. 

 

But the moment of truth would come when I have my kids over for the week-end and we are all sitting down at the dinner table.  My new wife would be sitting across from me smiling at me, since we now have our new extended larger family.  Her kids would be sitting there looking at me and thinking; look at that jerk, he is sitting in our father’s chair and sleeping with our mother.  The real sobering moment is when I look at my children.  That is when I realize they are spending the week-end at my house and sleeping on the couch, because I do not have a room for them in my own home.  That conclusion is one I could never live with and realized at that moment I needed to get my marriage back in order and back to where it was supposed to be.

 

Another side effect of adultery is the possibility of getting an STD (there we go again with semantics).  Herbie the Love Bug was a Volkswagen bug in a Disney movie (10), but herpes the love bug is no comedy that ends in two hours like the movie.  When you stay true to your spouse you stay in a closed environment where diseases are not going to get in.  Once you go outside that relationship you are exposed to all the dangers that new gene pool you are swimming in has.  You know what they say.  When you sleep with someone, you have come in contact with everyone that person has slept with and so on and so on. 

 

Think of it like a swimming pool.  If you have your own pool you are only exposed to the people in your family who swim in it.  When you walk down the street to the association pool, you are now exposed to everyone who swam in that pool.  A lot more exposure when you leave you own back yard!

 

I took another quick trip out to Google and put in STD.  The first line item that came up in the search was the CDC, Center for Disease Control and Prevention.  They have a whole bunch of information, but here are a few quick ones.  In one article on herpes they stated that 45 million people ages 12 and older have genital HSV Infection.  The population of the United States just went over 300 million in 2007, so about 1 in 7 people have it.

 

A second site there was the American Social Health Association (ASHA).  On their fast facts sheet they stated, “one in two sexually active youth will contract an STD by age 25.”  Wow, the percentage of people getting STDs just went up.  If you don’t want STDs then stay with your spouse.  Your spouse is the person you have chosen to be with for life and one of the benefits of staying faithful is you will not expose yourself to the dangers of STDs.  God knew way ahead of time that man and his sexual appetite would bring troubles into his life, so he told us to have sex only with the person we marry. 

 

The strongest instinct we have is survival.  If I threw you in a pool you would hold your breath, pop up to the surface and start kicking your feet and thrashing your arms to get to the side.  If you saw a bear in the woods you would start to run.  If survival is our number one instinct then it would stand to reason that the survival of the species is probably our second strongest instinct.  So let’s not kid ourselves, sex is important to us and it is fun. 

 

If sex were not pleasurable, where would we be today?  What if one cold night Adam snuggled up next to Eve to stay warm, nature took over and they started to play connect the dots?  When they were done they both agreed that was not fun at all, in fact it was painful and agreed to never do that again.  Nine months later Eve would have Cain and the three of them would live happily ever after until they died of old age.

 

If sex was not pleasurable there would be no human race.  Man would not multiply and cover the earth.  It would not be something we would want to do so we would not have sex at all.  God created sex for reproduction and pleasure within a marriage.  He did not create it to be abused as a recreational activity we have after a night out with our date.  You will probably always have a desire for sex (well men anyway) but keep it within your marriage.  Sex is a gift God gives us when we get married so we should enjoy it as he meant us to. 

 

Paul talks about marriage in 1 Corinthians, Chapter 7:  1-7 (1).  Paul states that a wife’s body does not belong to her alone, but also to her husband.  Likewise the husband’s body does not belong to him alone but to his wife as well.  Corinthians 7: 5 states, you should not deprive yourselves except by mutual consent so that you may pray and “then come together again so that Satan will not temp you because of your lack of self-control.”  When you are married you have the green light, and one reason is so your spouse does not stray from you with another.  God knows our weaknesses and he wants us to enjoy each other in our marriage and by doing so we will steer clear of committing adultery.

 

When I die, I do not think I am going to go before God and he is going to say to me, “Michael, you were having way too much fun down there with Karen so I am going to have to send you to hell.”  I think I would be in trouble if he said to me, “Michael, you were having way too much fun down there with your neighbor’s wife so I am going to have to send you to hell.”  God wants us to be happy, he wants us to enjoy life and he has shown us how we can do so within the bonds of marriage.

 

Remember when you were a kid and you had a yoyo?  You would tie the string to your finger and other end was attached to the yoyo.  You would throw you wrist down, the yoyo would move away from you and then come right back.  Well, think of a man in terms of that yoyo.  The yoyo is the man and the string is connected to his wife’s finger.  Every time you let go of the yoyo it comes right back to your finger.  Now think of your finger as “love”.  A man will always come right back to the last place he was loved.  That is all he will think about all day and look forward to getting back to you.  If you want to keep your husband faithful then love him and he will not stray, he will always make a bee line back home to you.

 

Do you love your husband?  Do you love your wife?  If you do, then love that person as in the verb.  If you do your spouse will not stray from you and commit adultery.  After a life time together on this earth don’t you want your spouse to get to heaven also?  Well help your loved one out and have some fun at the same time -- it’s ok, you’re married.

 

Sex is a great thing.  It was not designed to be abused, but to be enjoyed by a man and a woman who are united in holy matrimony.  I don’t know about you, but the greatest moments I have ever had in my life have been in the arms of my wife.  It is that way, because that is how God meant it to be.  We join together as one with our husband or wife and enjoy the pleasures which God has intended for us.  There is no room for a third party.  This is an exclusive club, husband and wife, so keep it that way and enjoy all the love and happiness which God has in store for the two of you while you are here.