Letters to a Would-Be Adulterer and Adulteress

Have you ever entertained the possibility of having an affair?
Fantasized about it?
Wished you were married to someone else?
Do you ever daydream about that person at work or church or whose Instagram life you wish you were living?

Have you ever cautiously enjoyed a growing emotional bond with someone who is not your spouse?
Have you ever found yourself wondering if that person was sending you "signals"?
Do you believe you're capable of infidelity?

If you answered yes to any of these questions (and I'm guessing that's just about every married person alive), then John and Noel Piper wrote you a letter.

John's letter to husbands is entitled, "Husband, Lift Up Your Eyes: Letter to a Would-be Adulterer."

Brief excerpt:

• Ask God that he would make sin sickening to you, not just morally wrong.
• Ask him to make biblical realities, like hell and heaven, terribly and wonderfully real to you — real enough to taste and feel.
• Ask him to open your eyes to the glory of the spiritual world “where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God.”
• Ask him to give you a massive desire for ultimate Pleasure in God that is so strong that it makes sinful pleasures nauseous.
• Ask him to transpose the pleasures of intimacy with your wife into foretastes of the unending ecstasies of heaven.

When you have prayed, lift up your eyes. … Take your eyes off your computer, off your mirror, off your pain, off your dead dream, off your self-pitying lust. God is speaking to you. He is waving a thousand flags to get your attention. He has more to give you than you have ever tasted or felt or dreamed. The price he paid to satisfy his people, with never-dying joy and ever-new beauties, was great. Don’t push him away.

Noel's letter to wives is entitled, "Will You Cleave and Leave Your Man? Letter to a Would-be Adulteress."

 Brief excerpt:

What did it boil down to during my darkest nights? I was saved from wandering by some form of this question: What kind of a cleaver am I? Am I the deadly implement who will split my family — with a husband and five children — into shreds? Because, with or without divorce, that is what unfaithfulness will do to us. 

Or will I cleave to the husband God has given me? Will I cling to my marriage and pray desperately for something different? I chose to cling, and God is still proving his faithfulness. He will do the same for you.