Five Steps to Adultery

Let me recommend to you five simple steps to committing adultery. Be assured these are tried and tested. Anyone can do this – even you!

1. Lose touch with God

If you want your marriage to fail by your unfaithfulness don’t get close to God. Stop praying and don’t allow the Bible to speak to your heart. You can keep going with the public religious stuff but not the private devotions and the personal meditation. 

2. Stop investing in your marriage

If you are trying to bankrupt your marriage, stop investing in it. Don’t try and understand your spouse’s needs. Don’t work hard at communication. Stop talking, stop listening. Allow each other to drift apart. Give up the fight for intimacy. Let anger simmer and resentments burn.  

3. Get intimate and flirt

In order to commit adultery, you need someone to do it with, so find someone you can flirt with – the lingering looks, the touches, the private conversations that no-one else must know about. 

4. Cherish the fantasy

To keep your hopes alive, hold the idea of being with someone else close to your heart. Make it your favourite daydream. Supply it with oxygen. Imagine a world where you could break free and be with that person.

5. Create the opportunity

To be a murder suspect you need to have the motive and the means. To commit adultery, you have the desire and need to create the opportunity. Get somewhere where it will be easy to act out what you think you really want to do. Find a way, a place, an event.

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This was obviously tongue-in-cheek, designed to get us thinking. It is the opposite of what I really am advising and seeking for myself. But, to be honest, it made me uncomfortable even thinking about it and writing it. I don’t want to ruin my marriage or to cause anyone else to ruin theirs. I have seen the damage done by unfaithfulness, and the break-up that often follows. 

God loves faithfulness in marriage because he is a faithful God. God takes adultery seriously because it damages a relationship and it is a betrayal of promises.

If you are already taking any of these steps, then God wants to call you back – first to him and then to faithfulness in your marriage. 

There is grace, there is forgiveness. There is the whole of biblical teaching on how to live in covenant relationship. There is the Holy Spirit living in us, giving us strength, drawing us closer to him.

Lord protect my marriage; Lord protect our marriages. 

 

Graham Nicholls is Director of Affinity