http://www.familylife.com/fltoday/default.asp?id=5935&past=1
Guests: Bob Gresh, Dannah Gresh
Author of: Pursuing the Pearl
Moral Purity: Pursuing the Pearl (Day 1 of 2)
Please note: This is an archived FamilyLife Today Transcript. References to conferences, resources, or other special promotions may be obsolete.
Bob Lepine: When relationships are getting started, they often sound like this:

Bob Gresh: My dearest Dannah, 

The last year certainly has been difficult for both of us. However, even in the midst of those most difficult times, there's always a sense deep within that we'll not only survive but that we will prevail. We not only belong, we belong together. 

Over the past few weeks and months I have come to understand that only after we begin to realize the joy that exudes from within our relationship we can begin to realize the desperation of life without it. There is a Pearl of Great Price. We are told to seek it. We are commended to purchase it. If the cost is everything, it is worth the cost. Purchase of the Pearl is only gained through a personal relationship with our Savior. However, there are many earthly parallels. 

Dannah, you are my Pearl of Great Price. Your price is commitment; your love is worth the cost. 

Bobby

Bob Lepine: And welcome to FamilyLife Today, thanks for joining us. We don't often start the program with a love letter, but….

Dennis: ….. Bobby's a rascal. 

Bob Lepine: He knew what he was doing, didn't he?

Dennis: He did, and Bobby's with us.

Bob Lepine: That's right.

Dennis: And so is his wife, Dannah. He won the prize. Bob and Dannah Gresh join us – Bobby, tell us about that love letter. Dannah wasn't your bride yet, was she?

Bob Gresh: No, she wasn't, but I was workin' on it.

Bob Lepine: She was a hot property.

Dennis: Oh, tell me about that. There were some single men who listen to our broadcast who want photocopies of that. We're going to have it on the Website. You can download it. Just be careful to change Dannah's name.

Bob Lepine: That's right, don't get caught.

Dennis: That wouldn't work.

Bob Lepine: You know, one of the assignments that we give couples at our Weekend to Remember conferences is to write a love letter to one another. It's one of the projects that you do at the conference, and for a lot of couples, it's been years since that's happened in a marriage relationship, and I just need to let our listeners know, Dennis, that over the next two weeks, we are giving them an opportunity to register for an upcoming FamilyLife Weekend to Remember Marriage Conference at the discounted group rate, without being a part of a group, you can save $40 per couple by registering as a FamilyLife Today listener, and we're going to throw something in – Bob's special surprise here – you're going to get, along with the discounted rated, our Simply Romantic Nights resource – a collection of romantic ideas for husbands and wives to keep the romance alive in your marriage. Again, this offer is good only this week and next week for FamilyLife Today listeners.

If you need more information, if you need the list of where the conference is being held, go online at FamilyLife.com or call 1-800-FLTODAY, and we'll give you all the details about how to take advantage of the discount and get the special gift when you register for one of the upcoming fall Weekend to Remember conferences.

Dannah, do you remember getting that love letter from Bobby?

Dannah: I sure do. He did, he had my heart just wrapped right around his finger.

Dennis: Was that standard for him?

Dannah: To write letters like that?

Dennis: Uh-huh.

Dannah: He still does do that kind of thing, but, you know, not, like, on a daily basis or anything – kind of a rare – it's very rare.

Dennis: Tell me this – when's the last time you received a letter from Bobby?

Dannah: Hmmm, that would be Christmas 2000.

Bob Lepine: Bobby, you're a little overdue here, buddy.

Bob Gresh: That's not true.

Bob Lepine: Starting a little marital discord right here.

Bob Gresh: Well, it's good – a letter – I think the key term is a big long letter.

Dennis: I know a great book for this couple to read ….

Bob Lepine: … yes?

Dennis: It's called "Pursuing the Pearl" by Bob and Dannah Gresh. Oh, he wrote the book.

Bob Gresh: She wrote this one.

Dennis: Actually, Dannah Gresh did write the book. Both Bob and Dannah live, along with their two children in Pennsylvania. Dannah heads up a ministry called "Pure Freedom." Bob is a headmaster of a Christian school, and this book is all about achieving intimacy in a marriage relationship, and it's really the story, Dannah, of both of you, in a very real sense, coming clean with one another. Let's start with you and that story, because you wrote a book called, "The Bride Wore White." It's, really, a story of how you confessed something to Bob.

Dannah: "And The Bride Wore White" was written as kind of my love story between Bob and I and my heart's desire to marry and be pleasing to God. But, like many women, when I was 15, I fell away from the Lord, and there was sexual sin in my life. It's the great, great heartbreak of my life. I got out of that relationship and stood before the Lord and began to live a new life of purity as he taught me to do that, and five years into my marriage, I still had not shared this because it was the great heartbreak of my life. I couldn't even stand the thought of uttering it. The book is born out of watching so many other women struggle through that question – should I tell him or should I not tell him?

Dennis: Bob, do you remember that night? Dannah writes about it in her book – the lights went on, the lights went off, the lights went on, the lights went off.

Bob Gresh: I remember it like it was last night. It was a very heartbreaking night to see the woman that I loved and had known to be a strong person to collapse almost back to a teenager. It was like all the mental images and hurt feelings bubbled to the top, and to think that we'd been married for four or five years at that point, and that she had been protecting that space, or pushing that space down her mind, was heartbreaking for me because she had carried the burden so long, and it was really not necessary for her to have put herself through that, because I understood where she was at.

Bob Lepine: Dannah, what was it, four or five years into your marriage that caused you to say, "I've got to be honest with my husband about this."

Dannah: In large part, it was facing the thought that I would need to mentor my little girl through those years and that I needed to do some healing to be able to do that effectively. What I didn't realize the night that I confessed to him was the incredible wall it would bring down between the two of us. Here I was, supposed to be one flesh with this man, and yet the greatest spiritual secret of my life was locked away from him. How could we be emotionally and spiritually one when that was the case?

And on the other side of his forgiveness, him holding me that night, and forgiving me and touching me and saying with such grace and immediacy, "I forgive you," I guess it must be what it's like for an adult to come to know Christ for the first time, because he was verbalizing Christ's forgiveness in me – something that I knew in my head but couldn't believe in my heart for 10 years. All of a sudden, I was hungry for God, I was hungry for him, there was an emotional and spiritual unity between us that hadn't been there before. It was transforming to our marriage.

Bob Lepine: Bob, Dannah had carried a secret burden with her for the first four or five years of your marriage about past sexual sin. You had a burden that you were carrying, but it wasn't a secret burden, it was an ongoing challenge related to sexual sin in your own life.

Bob Gresh: Yeah, that was interesting. What was interesting to me was that Dannah had known that I struggled with just the battle of sexual thoughts and fantasy, and that's very hard for me to verbalize in front of other people, but I had talked to her about that before we got married and told her of my battle. And so I certainly didn't feel in any way like I couldn't forgive her, but in a woman it's a little bit different, and she was wired a little differently, and she still felt this incredible burden to not tell me. It was an open wound in her life.

Bob Lepine: Dannah, when Bob came to you before you were married and said, "I have this struggle with lustful thoughts," what was going through your mind at that point? Did it give you second thoughts about getting married to him?

Dannah: Not at all – I was dating him, in part, because he challenged me spiritually, he led me spiritually; I loved that about him. And so that he poured himself out so broken before me and said, "I'm struggling with this," my immediate thought was this will go away when we're married. When we can be man and wife and express ourselves physically to one another, this will not be a problem, end of story.

Bob Lepine: As soon as he can enjoy sexual intercourse, the lust issue will be over?

Dannah: Exactly.

Bob Lepine: Did you think the same thing, Bob?

Bob Gresh: Absolutely. I thought that, obviously, it was a physical issue and not necessarily a mental one.

Dennis: You confessed this before you got married?

Bob Gresh: Yes.

Dennis: This continued to be a problem during your marriage? Do you remember the first time you confronted the temptation to either get involved in pornography or lust after you were married? At that point were you surprised? Were you disappointed? What happened?

Bob Gresh: Well, I was devastated. I was surprised at the level of temptation. I was devastated at my failure because as you set a goal, and I think men go through this and boys do, too – where, well, once I do get to this point, it won't happen again. Once I get to – it could be anything – it could be the summer, it could be the fall, it could be once I start dating, if I had a girlfriend, but, certainly, that's a big blow after you get married, and you fall. Then you think, wow, now I'm on the other side of this – the marriage – and I'm right back in the soup. 

Bob Lepine: Did you immediately confess to Dannah that you'd had those thoughts, that you'd looked at something or that you were thinking things you shouldn't be thinking?

Bob Gresh: Well, I have to say, there wasn't ever a lot of immediate confession. There was generally a lot of hemming and hawing and beating around the bush, and I would sit her down and say, "I'm really struggling. Do you know what we talked about before we were married?" Or three months ago or whenever the last time – "Do you remember what we talked about?" And it was painful. It's still a little uncomfortable for me.

Bob Lepine: That had to be painful for you, Dannah, to have your husband sit down and say, "You know, that area that I told you about before we got married – that's still an issue for me."

Dannah: It was devastating, and I didn't have the optimism that I did before we were married. I didn't know what the solution would be. I blamed myself, I felt inferior, inadequate, unsatisfying. I remember for periods of time not taking care of myself very well, because I thought, "I'm not attractive to him, anyway." Then there would be times when I would vacillate all the way to the other of the spectrum – this is his fault, he's a jerk, I can't stand him, he's horrible. I would punish him with words, with anger, with silent treatment, with anything I could do.

Bob Lepine: Was this issue during the first five years of your marriage? Was this the defining issue? Were you guys – if I'd known you then, and you'd been honest with me, would you have said, "We don't have a very happy marriage?"

Dannah: We were, you know, that million-dollar family in church – a son, a daughter, smiling, doing Bible School, teaching Sunday School.

Bob Gresh: And, really, what's funny about it is we really pushed this down. It was so hard to deal with, I think, for Dannah, and she understood it so little, that once we'd talk about it, and I would confess to her and say, "I need a little bit of accountability here." If three days later she would have asked me about it, I would be, like, "What are you asking me about it for?" And it would get put underground for three or four months at a time. So was that the defining issue of our marriage? I don't think we really thought it was. I thought it was the laundry getting done on time. That was a defining issue, but I'm not sure it was.

Dennis: See, the way most couples handle these issues is exactly like you describe – they deny the problem, and they think they've resolved it, but it's still alive in their marriage, and it really is important for a couple to go after this. Dannah, I want to know from an emotional standpoint, did you feel like your marriage covenant had been violated the first time he confessed this? How serious did you view this?

Dannah: I really denied a lot of how serious it was for a couple of years, and then I realized, you know, this isn't a whole lot different from adultery. It's a far step from adultery, but, to me, the intentions felt the same, the hurt felt the same. And so I began to wear that as my main emotion and hold that against him.

Dennis: Help a man understand why a woman would view it that dramatically?

Dannah: Well, as I've talked with other women whose husbands have struggled with this, it's such a pervasive problem within the church. There seems to be a consensus, as we talk about how we feel, that the main portion of our physical relationship is because he desires me, and I fulfill something in him that nobody else can desire. It is unfathomable to me that he would share that with somebody else – devastating to me that I would not be that fulfillment and that satisfaction for him. It doesn't matter whether it's a paper woman or a physical woman. It's a woman. You can't get past that.

Dennis: You want to be the sole provider of that love.

Dannah: Mm-hm, absolutely.

Dennis: I think what a man needs to understand to confess this sin is not a matter of a woman flipping a switch and instantly forgiving and turning over a new leaf and moving on in life. There is the need to talk about the betrayal, to talk about her feelings, to talk about what that means about their relationship and how she receives it. Just as you described, you felt inadequate, you felt inferior, like he didn't love you, and then you got angry. 

Bob, I think the way a man thinks today is he compartmentalizes these things, and he doesn't realize how devastating and how damaging these can be to an intimate relationship with his wife.

Bob Lepine: Well, a man reads Matthew, chapter 5, where Jesus says – "You've heard it said not to commit adultery, but I say if you look on a woman with lust, you've committed adultery in your heart," and he says, "Well, Jesus is talking metaphorically here. He's really raising the standard here. A man doesn't read that passage and go, "Jesus is saying that I'm tripped up in the same sin – that lust and adultery have the same root cause; that there's something tangible here and whether it's the actual carrying out of adultery or whether it's the ongoing feeding of the lust in a man's heart, it's a violation of the covenant that we made when we said to have and to hold, forsaking all others, 'til death do us part.

Dennis: And as we've talked today, undoubtedly, there's a woman with a secret, there's a man with a secret. Dannah, I'd like you to speak to that woman with a secret. What does she need to do?

Dannah: Well, she needs to be very cautious and very prayerful, but I am firmly convinced that a woman will not find healing unless she confesses this to her husband, and there will be a spiritual gulf between them, and emotional gulf between them until she can confess that and receive from him a merciful and graceful forgiveness – a verbal forgiveness.

Proverbs 28:13 says, "He who conceals sin does not prosper, but whoever confesses and renounces them finds mercy." Is it a very difficult thing to find that? It sure is, but I think it's an absolute necessity in a marriage.

Bob Lepine: What if a woman is unsure, Dannah, that her husband is going to respond with the kind of grace and tenderness and forgiveness that your husband responded with? She thinks to herself, "If I tell him, he may leave."

Dannah: There's two things that I've found are very important for a woman. One is – that is a reality, it's a very sad reality. Almost every time that I ask them "How much detail did you share with your husband?" They shared a lot of detail. They shared the who, the how, and that is very, very detrimental to the forgiveness process. He doesn't need to know that. That's not something that she needs to confess. So my number-one word of advice would be that you don't confess details – you confess what happened in your heart. That's all he needs to see.

But there is also the reality that this man might not be a Christian. He might not be mature. That's when you need to go to a Christian counselor or to a godly woman in your church and first walk through the confession with her and talk it through with her and get her advice, and you attack that issue with prayer and decide together for this marriage do we need to withhold the confession? I really feel like that it's rare that you shouldn't go through that tough work, but in the case where you feel some fear, you should get counseling and consider, maybe, walking through that healing process with another woman rather than with your husband.

Dennis: And it may take another couple.

Dannah: That's right.

Dennis: Both another woman to confide in but also a man who can speak to her husband and be a sounding board for him, because it is not an easy issue. 

Bob Lepine: And can call him to a biblical response in the face of this; can call him to step up and to respond, as Christ, with forgiveness in this situation. You know, that's, Dennis, where we've got to come back to the scriptures that say, "Who are we to withhold forgiveness from another person considering what Christ has done for us?"

Dennis: Right, and there's a couple of other things that I would add not only to having another couple involved, but I would also add the word "time." Dannah, you mentioned that to work through something like this is work and work takes time and healing takes time and forgiveness takes time to experience, and I think most couples get far too impatient with the process and don't allow one another the grace of that time, and then, finally, a third thing – I believe these kinds of discussions need a restatement of covenant. They need a confirmation of commitment that says, "You know what? I don't like where we are. This hurts profoundly, but I'm in a covenant relationship with you 'til death to us part, and so I remain committed.

Bob, I want to ask you the same question – how a man can confess a problem of pornography or lust to his wife, but I feel like to be able to do this justice, we need to do that on tomorrow's broadcast because to try to slip this in at the end is not going to be really giving you an opportunity to speak directly to men. And so will you come back tomorrow and let's talk to men straight about what they're to do if they're facing this issue?

Bob Gresh: We sure will. We'd love to.

Bob Lepine: I had to think, as you were talking about the wisdom of getting another couple involved in dealing with these issues and these problems – in one sense, the couples who speak at our Weekend to Remember conferences wind up being that other couple who gets involved in the issues of your marriage over the course of the weekend. Now, they don't do one-on-one mentoring and counseling, but oftentimes as they share their own experiences, share from their heart about the challenges they've gone through in marriage, and how God has worked in the midst of those challenges, they become like a mentor couple and can help lead the couples who are attending the conference to a place of hope and a place where you have some new skills, some new tools, you can use to make a marriage turn around, to make it work.

We have a full schedule of Weekend to Remember conferences taking place in cities all across the country this fall, and this week and next week we are making it possible for our listeners to call 1-800-FLTODAY or to go online at FamilyLife.com and because you're a FamilyLife Today listener, you can register for the conference at the group rate without having to form a group to do that. In effect, you'll be saving $40 per couple of the regular registration fee, and we're throwing in a bonus for calling us now. We will give you the Simply Romantic Nights collection that we've created here at FamilyLife. It's a resource that is designed to help you keep romance and intimacy fresh and alive as a part of your marriage relationship. That's our free gift to you, along with the discounted rate.

If you'll call us this week or next week at 1-800-FLTODAY to register for one of these upcoming conferences, or go online to register at FamilyLife.com. All of the information you need about dates and locations, that's all available on our Website at FamilyLife.com or if you have a specific question, call 1-800-FLTODAY. Someone on our team can help you with information about when the conference is coming to a city near where you live.

Again, the number is 1-800-FLTODAY or go online to take advantage of the discount and to get the free gift of Simply Romantic Nights. When you do contact us, ask how you can get a copy of the book that Dannah has written called, "Pursuing the Pearl." It's really about how you work through some of the issues and the baggage that you may have brought into a marriage relationship to get to a place where your marriage is fresh and new and pure. Ask about the book, "Pursuing the Pearl," when you call 1-800-FLTODAY or when you go online at FamilyLife.com.

Well, as you said, Dennis, tomorrow one of the things we want to talk about is the process that Bob walked through to come clean in this area of pornography, because there are other men who need to follow Bob's lead, his example, and his pattern, and do the same thing in their own marriage. I hope our listeners can be with us for that.

I want to thank our engineer today, Keith Lynch, and our entire broadcast production team. On behalf of our host, Dennis Rainey, I'm Bob Lepine. We'll see you back tomorrow for another edition of FamilyLife Today. 

FamilyLife Today is a production of FamilyLife of Little Rock, Arkansas, a ministry of Campus Crusade for Christ.

Moral Purity: Pursuing the Pearl (Day 2 of 2)
Please note: This is an archived FamilyLife Today Transcript. References to conferences, resources, or other special promotions may be obsolete.
Bob Lepine: When a man is caught in the snare of pornography, it often stays below the surface in a relationship, but there are surprising symptoms that may find their way to the top of the water. That's what Dannah Gresh found in her relationship with her husband, Bob.

Dannah: I didn't realize it at the time, but one of the things feeding Bob's struggle was our busy-ness and our hunger for success and money and just appearing to look like everything was together. And what I know now that God was doing is, he was saying, "Dannah, you need to separate yourself from this, and you need to separate Bob from this."

Bob Lepine: This is FamilyLife Today for Tuesday, September 17th. Our host is the Executive Director of FamilyLife, Dennis Rainey, and I'm Bob Lepine. Are there secret symptoms of sin that have surfaced in your relationship? 

And welcome to FamilyLife Today, thanks for joining us. On Saturday afternoons at the FamilyLife Marriage Conference we have a session that we devote to sexual intimacy in marriage, helping couples understand God's plan for sexual intimacy, and that hour at the conference, Dennis, I think, is one of the most powerful hours in the weekend because we live in a culture where couples in marriage are dealing with a lot of sexual damage, either from before getting married …

Dennis: …. right …

Bob Lepine: … or things that have occurred in the context of the marriage relationship. Whenever I'm presenting that material, I always have to stop for a minute and talk straight to the guys about the issue of pornography and about what we talked about here yesterday – that pornography is infidelity in a marriage relationship. 

I tell the men that if you're dealing with this, in order to really settle the issue, you have got to, first of all, repent before God; secondly, you've got to find a man, an older man, a mature spiritual man, and tell him what you're going through and ask him to hold you accountable; and then I say, "Sometime in the next 30 days, you've got to tell your wife what you've been doing."

Then I tell the women, "Some of you in the next 30 days are going to have a husband drop a bombshell on you, and you've got to be ready now to extend grace and love and mercy and hope and forgiveness to your husband – not to punish him for telling you, but to help him out of the snare that he is trapped in." We've seen God work in some powerful ways at these Weekend to Remember conferences to help get couples unstuck from issues like this and countless other issues.

We have about 40 of the conferences being held in cities all across the country this fall, and I want to encourage our listeners this week and next week – call in and register for one of the upcoming Weekend to Remember conferences coming to a city near where you live. You will save $40 per couple off the regular registration fee. We're going to make you a part of a giant radio group and give you the group rate, and we're going to give you a free gift for registering. You'll get our Simply Romantic Nights resource – a collection of romantic ideas to keep the passion and intimacy alive in your marriage in a pure and holy context.

So ask about that when you call in, but make sure you call in this week or next week and take advantage of the discount that is available on these Weekend to Remember conferences. Our toll-free number is 1-800-FLTODAY. We can answer any questions you have about the conference over the phone, or you can get answers online at FamilyLife.com.

Again, this is an issue that is plaguing more and more marriages, Dennis, and it's one that we want to try and help some men with on our program today.

Dennis: And, Bob, I think all across the nation there's a whole generation of young couples starting out their marriages together who have no idea that these bombshells exist, and they start out with the idealism of the dreamboat marriage, where you sail off into the sunset together happily ever after, and yet they find out they're married to a person who failed before they got married and who will continue to fail after they are married. We have in the studio today a couple who are unusually honest, and their authenticity, I believe, provides some powerful ministry. Bob and Dannah Gresh join us for a second day. Dannah, Bob, welcome back to FamilyLife Today.

Bob Gresh: It's good to be here.

Dennis: Dannah has written a book called, "Pursuing the Pearl, the Quest for a Pure Passionate Marriage." And we heard yesterday that you both had really confessed to one another in the area of sexual failures. Now, Dannah, you had confessed an inappropriate relationship when you were a girl, 15, growing up. Bob, you had confessed a struggle with pornography dating all the way back to your early teen years, and it was continuing on in your marriage relationship. The healing that came in your marriage as a result of confessing this is the Pearl. That is the great story, but to get to the point of confession, cleansing, forgiveness, and healing and growth where you can look back and say, "You know what? That really was a Pearl" – takes a lot of hard work.

Bob, you shared yesterday how you had disappointed Dannah on a number of occasions in your marriage by sampling pornography.

Bob Gresh: Well, as you've detailed, I had really struggled in this area through my marriage, through the first four or five years, and in our communication I had confessed it, and then it wouldn't come up very often, because it was so painful, and I think Dannah didn't really understand what was happening – it was devastating to her, and what we were doing wasn't working. We just couldn't seem to get to the next level. 

Dennis: Dannah, when he says it wasn't working, you actually came to the point in your marriage after a number of these confessions, where you asked him not to go on a vacation with you?

Dannah: That was a very difficult and painful day. We were at a place where, externally, people saw a couple who was very successful. We had several successful businesses, a beautiful house, a pool, everything really – you could have just left it like it was and kept surviving. But the love was running out. I wasn't sure why. I thought the culprit was probably Bob's struggle, but I didn't know that for sure.

I was at a place where I was really growing in my faith. I was coming to the Lord in a new way, and I begged God to give me wisdom as to how I should approach my husband, and what I felt God telling me was that Bob needed to feel the holy consequences of his struggle to break free from it, and that meant that my manipulating and being angry at him had to stop; that meant that my consoling him and saying "It's okay" had to stop. He had to stand alone with God. I went to two pastors, I went to a Christian counselor – I said, "I feel God telling me that I need to walk away from him – not to leave him, not to claim a separation, not to threaten divorce, but to say, 'Bob, heal what's happening to us.'"

Dennis: Did you ever mention the word "divorce" in your conversations with your husband?

Dannah: I didn't, no. It wasn't that kind of a thing. In fact, the book, though it does talk about our extreme struggling with sexuality and the misuse of it, is so much more about just all of the clutter and impurity in our lives. I didn't realize it at the time, but one of the things feeding Bob's struggle was our busy-ness and our hunger for success and money and just appearing to look like everything was together. What I know now that God was doing is He was saying, "Dannah, you need to separate yourself from this, and you need to separate Bob from this."

So I went to him a few days before we were leaving for this vacation, and I said, "I'm going alone, and I'm not sure how long I'm going, because I need to know before I come back that you have a solution to fix this."

Dennis: Bob, was that out of the blue? I mean, she's given you a major wake-up call. How did you respond?

Bob Gresh: It was out of the blue, but I had two parallel feelings. One was some serious humiliation because I knew that there was no way to cover this up around some of our friends and family, and she went home – where we were going on vacation was to see her parents. She – when she drove in the driveway, and I wasn't there ….

Bob Lepine: … there's got to be some explanation for that.

Bob Gresh: Right, and the other parallel feeling was relief. When Dannah drew a line in the sand, and the way she did it was of God. There was no question in my mind it was a slam-dunk that was from God, and I reacted poorly.

Bob Lepine: What did you do? Did you get angry?

Bob Gresh: Oh, yeah. I flailed around a little bit and pitched a fit and, "No, this isn't right," and "You're doing the wrong thing," but you know what? I knew exactly what was happening, but it was just really – talk about ego bruise – it wasn't just an ego bruise, it was a – just taking a nine iron and just smacking me across the head with it.

What I felt like at that point, it was either, "I'd rather have this thing" – either kill this thing or have it kill me.

Bob Lepine: You know, as you hear Dana describe this circumstance, Dennis, I think to myself, "That was hard. That was painful. That was tough." It was exactly what needed to happen – that if you ever were to get to where God wanted you to get, it had to happen, didn't it?

Bob Gresh: Yes, and I would caution any woman out there who is in a similar situation to not go home tonight and try to pull this off tonight. It was a matter – had this presentation not been made through a lot of prayer by Dannah and through a true love for me and through wise counsel, this could have been a very different situation for our family.

Dennis: I want to read Galatians 6 here, because, really, Dannah, you fulfilled this. It reads, "Brethren, even if a man is caught in any trespass, you who are spiritual, restore such a one in a spirit of gentleness, each one looking to yourself lest you, too, be tempted." The purpose of confrontation is restoration. It's not just to hurt, but it's to restore the bone that has been broken. It's to bring healing, it's to bring wholeness, but the way and the route to do that is that you need to look inward and make sure you have a right spirit, and have a gentle spirit, because you could have done the same thing, Dannah. And not only made him angry but perhaps placed your marriage at risk.

Dannah: That verse has to be your motivation. Your motivation has to be restoration. If there is an inkling of anything else in the heart, it's not right – the timing is not right. God still has work to do in you, as a wife, before you are the tool He can use.

Bob Gresh: I also want to say in setting this up, that Dannah had, in the months prior to that, had been growing spiritually at a tremendous pace because she had confessed to me her burden of a sexual encounter that she had before marriage, and once she confessed that to me and felt the healing, her spiritual life exploded because she was committing time to prayer, she was set free, and it wasn't some miraculous one-night thing. It started that way, and then it was a lot of time spent praying and studying the Bible through her. Once I saw that as a husband, I could see she was starting to lead spiritually, and I wanted that, and so my encouragement to women is to hang in there, but to show them first – get yourself together before you try to fix your spouse.

Bob Lepine: Bob, you had, for 13 years, been caught in the snare of pornography. You'd come to your wife, you'd said, "I'm dealing with this. I hate it. I've confessed it, I want to be free from it." You've prayed together, you've sought the Lord, you've wanted the release and it hadn't happened. And now your wife says to you, "We aren't going on vacation. You get this thing dealt with." What was the difference this time that led to the point where you figured out how to deal with this?

Bob Gresh: The difference was my wife was gone. We went to stay in Ocean City, Maryland. All the motels were full on July 4th. We didn't find a motel until Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, and I started to unroll – not right away, like …. my trip. I was just running – I mean, literally running. It was kind of interesting, when I got back I had gone to see our counselor, and Dannah had talked to her, and she said, "I think it's time to get away a little bit."

What I needed in my life was to scrape away all the busy-ness and all the things that were between me and intimacy, which was just about everything. It was cell phones, it was TV, it was movies, and so I went to a friend's place in Dallas. I got counseling there a couple of hours a day, two or three hours a day, and what I did was mostly spend time by myself. It was pathetic, really -- it was painful; it was boredom. What God started to do was release the emotion in me. I realized how busy I was, and that I needed to invest time in pouring things into my life and pursuing things that filled me up with the spirit.

Bob Lepine: Help me out here – we're talking about a 13-year-old struggle with pornography, and you tell me that getting some solitude and getting away from the cell phones has a purging, cleansing effect. Help me see the correlation there.

Bob Gresh: Well, it was a multi-faceted problem. One was I didn't invest enough time in my relationship with God – not even close – and what I was filling my mind with constantly was music, movies, cell phones, traffic. Once I got that in proper relationship, then I started having to deal with the four or five other pillars of the problem – was – what my triggers were. I had to get accountability, which was the third pillar, and I had to get honest with my wife in an immediate way as far as accountability.

Dennis: So when she got back from the vacation, and you initiated the relationship back with her, take us to that day. What did you do, what did you say?

Bob Gresh: I had seen her once in the three weeks. We met in Oklahoma City, I think, between Dallas and Missouri, and it was kind of like I had been gone for a year. We started dating again. We started to spend time together alone. We actually started having fun together alone, and we started studying the Bible together, and we started to really enjoy each other – because we loved each other, and there was never any question about that. And so we just started the process over again. The love grew from our watering it.

Dennis: Did you confess something at that point, though? I mean, when you first saw her, was there a deeper, more profound repentance in confession?

Bob Gresh: I think when I first saw her, there was an apology, and I had always confessed but I had never really apologized, because confession was pretty easy to me compared to the acknowledgement of the hurt that I created in her, because all I was really confessing was the weakness in me, but I had devastated our marriage. It never really connected to me, because the pornography or the struggle with that, never – I never viewed it as being unfaithful to her, because it was so, like, two sides of my brain. It was very compartmentalized, but I knew at that point when I came back that I had devastated the marriage and that it wasn't the kind of thing I could apologize for and call it even the next day. It was a long road back.

Dannah: I think the secret that we learned in that five-week period of time is that we made the same mistake that many couples make – they look at the big monsters in their marriage, and they say, "That's the problem. If I can obliterate that, the marriage will be healed." We looked at our sexual sin as the problem. What God taught us in that five weeks is that there were a lot of little impurities, accepted impurities, impurities that lots of us shared, but they were socially acceptable.

The year and a half following that timeout that we took in our marriage, we sold our businesses, we moved, we sold our house, and lived in a rental house to get rid of our debts – painful, painful months followed, but the treasure that God gave us was so much greater than all that stuff that we saw. It was absolutely worth every moment of hurt and every moment of pain. We have a new marriage. There's a passion in our marriage that you couldn't have told me prior to the time out that we would ever know again. I would not have believed you if you'd told me that. But God made something beautiful out of it, and a lot of what we needed to learn was to get rid of the little impurities, not just the big ones.

Dennis: Yesterday, we concluded the program by asking you, Dannah, to speak to a woman who needed to confess something to her husband. Bob, there is, undoubtedly, a man who is listening who needs to come clean with pornography and truly confess, truly apologize, and become accountable, put some filters in his life, and step into the pain of getting real with his wife and even the unknown of what all that means. What would you say to that man?

Bob Gresh: Well, I would say for him to get some alone time and to spend it on his face before God and to really prepare himself for a difficult journey – not to expect to go to his wife and wrap this up in an hour before the evening news is on, but to expect that at the end of the night to have the journey just begin rather than end, and what's going to happen is that his wife is potentially going to react poorly and out of hurt, and what he is going to want to do is then say, "Well, I confessed, what more do you want? What more do you want from me?" But at that point, we need to slow down and let her take some time. You need to work through this. It is difficult, but, boy, it is worth the journey. What's difficult is living without intimacy with your spouse.

Dennis: The tendency for a man who confesses this is to feel such enormous relief, he feels like he can now get on with life. What he has to realize is that his relief is his wife's own toxic waste dump. She has become the carrier of the weight of this, and she, too, must process this, and that takes time, work, accountability, perhaps another couple and, as I mentioned at the end of yesterday's broadcast, I think it takes a restatement to the covenant, a restatement of commitment. I just want to say thanks to both of you, Dannah and Bob, for your authenticity and your willingness to allow us to peer into your lives and to learn from God's work in your marriage and in your own soul. This book, I believe, is going to minister to a lot of couples who are in similar situations.

Bob Lepine: The book is called, "Pursuing the Pearl," and it tells the story that we've unpacked over the last couple of days with our guests, Bob and Dannah Gresh, and it's available from our FamilyLife Resource Center. You can call 1-800-FLTODAY to get a copy. That's 1-800-F-as-in-family, L-as-in-life, and then the word TODAY. You can also go online at FamilyLife.com and we can have a copy sent to you.

When you do make contact with us, don't forget the special opportunity for radio listeners to take advantage of the discounted rate that is available for the Weekend to Remember conferences we're hosting all fall in more than 40 cities across the country. You can attend one of these weekend getaways for couples. They are fun and romantic times where you can together learn the biblical blueprints for how to make a marriage work, how to build a stronger relationship with one another.

Over the next several days, we're giving FamilyLife Today listeners an opportunity to register at a discounted rate. We're actually putting you all in one big group and giving you the group rate. You'll save $40 per couple off the regular registration fee and we'll give each couple a special gift. It is a collection of romantic ideas that we have put together in a unique gift box called "Simply Romantic Nights." 

It's our gift to you if you'll register this week or next week for an upcoming Weekend to Remember Marriage Conference. You can do that online at FamilyLife.com, or you can call 1-800-F-as-in-family, L-as-in-life, and then the word TODAY. 

Well, tomorrow, we're going to stay on this same theme, but we're going to move in a new direction. Karen Linamen is going to join us, and we're going to talk about what husbands and wives can do to breathe a little fresh air, a little fresh light, into the romance and the passion and the intimacy …... We've got some creative thoughts for you coming up tomorrow. I hope you can be back with us for that. 

I want to thank our engineer today, Keith Lynch, and our entire broadcast production team. On behalf of our host, Dennis Rainey, I'm Bob Lepine. We'll see you tomorrow for another edition of FamilyLife Today. 

FamilyLife Today is a production of FamilyLife of Little Rock, Arkansas, a ministry of Campus Crusade for Christ.