Audio Transcript

A wife writes in to ask, “My husband and I cannot reach an agreement about a certain thing, so we decided to ask you. I can’t stand when we watch a movie, and there are scenes with naked women. I know that he doesn’t lust after them, and he doesn’t fantasize about them, but it just bothers me when he sees other women. So, the question simply is this: Is my husband obligated to give up movies with sexual or nude scenes if I don’t like it because I’m jealous? Thank you for your answer!”

Yes, but I don’t want to start there, even though I just did, because I put the emphasis in the wrong place by making him do it because she is ticked. That is not the right motive. First of all, I would want to know: Is your husband a believer? It sounds like he is, but is he a believer? Does he want to honor Christ above all? Does he want his mind and heart to be pure and full of what is true and honorable and just and pure and lovely and commendable and excellent and worthy of praise (see Philippians 4:8)?

This Sin Killed Jesus

Does he believe that sin killed Jesus — that this woman taking her clothes off in order to make a movie racier and get a lower rating and a higher attendance — that her sin killed Jesus? Is he okay with that, okay watching that, okay endorsing that, okay making light of that? And does he realize that Jesus died to kill sin? This sin killed Jesus, and Jesus died to kill this sin, and here you are playing with it as though it doesn’t matter. Does he agree with that? So that would be my starting point.

If he is a believer, I would say that he is obligated to give up these movies, not first for the wife’s sake, but for Christ’s sake. I would say to the wife, Both of you should disapprove of these scenes for reasons other than jealousy. These scenes should not be watched for other reasons. For example, they are unloving. They are unloving to the women, because watching these scenes, buying these movies, and paying to go see them endorses — de facto — the behaviors and desires in those scenes and those women that are going to destroy them. If the woman who is performing nude for a living doesn’t repent of that, she is going to go to hell.

Unfaithful and Unloving

And here, you are saying it is okay to buy it and watch it. It is unloving to that woman’s future or current husband, because it is going to make life harder for her to have a normal, wholesome sexual relationship — she has stripped herself bare for so many men and has been touched in so many ways that nothing seems sacred and pure and precious anymore for her husband. I have thought of this so many times as I have wrestled with what to let myself watch. I have a daughter. If my daughter decided that she was going to sell her body to be looked at by men in movies or in a strip show, my heart would be broken, which means that all those men who endorse that, pay for that, encourage that, and enjoy that don’t give a rip for me and my broken heart. So it is just so unloving to glide through these scenes as though they weren’t massively important for life.

And they are just plain adulterous. This wife is naïve, I think, if she thinks that these scenes in her husband’s head have no relationship to how he relates to her. That’s crazy. That means every time he is lying with her, he has competitors in his brain. He does. And the more he has watched, the more competitors he has. If she happens to be not cool on a given night, he will just switch gears and go into one of those scenes, and that is the way he will have his stimulation. That’s adultery. So I think she needs to wake up to the fact that he may say, “Oh, I am not lusting,” or whatever. Those scenes are there, and they are locked in his brain, and they will be there in years to come, and he will use them in forty years, if not tomorrow, when she is not so pretty.

No Spectator’s Sport

And they are just destructive to a man’s soul. Our souls shrink to the kind of pleasures we are indulging in. This man is not going to be able to read his Bible as sweetly. He is not going to enjoy the fellowship of God as sweetly. He is not going to look at sunsets the same, and he is not going to look at little babies the same. His soul has always got this defilement that he is cherishing in there because he thinks this is no big deal. And that is going to push out bigger, nobler, more beautiful things.

So I think, lastly, he should really care about what his wife thinks. And if his wife is being wounded by this, even if she can’t quite articulate what it is — she just knows this is not right — I think she is intuitively wholesome, and he is a jerk if he doesn’t get this. He needs to listen to John Piper, read his Bible, look to Jesus and the cross, and realize that is sinning on that screen — and I don’t just mean the playact sinning in the movie, I don’t even know if it is — I mean the sinning in the studio where this woman, created in God’s image, is walking around naked being gawked at by cameramen, and being told by directors how to slant this part of her body and that part of her body.

That whole scene of sin right there is something that he should be deeply offended by — and profoundly brokenhearted by — for the woman herself and for her parents and for her husband and for the whole beauty of Christ that he made sex for which is being so prostituted there on the screen. It is not a spectator’s sport.