|
A
FamilyChristian.com Exclusive Interview
Fred Stoeker
Author Every Man's Battle
and Every Woman's Desire
...continued
| page one
FamilyChristian.com:
Because that ties to how a woman is wired
emotionally.
Fred: Exactly. And in my wife's case, she was very graceful. I was already
part way through the process and so she actually helped me by not withdrawing.
But I see more of the other response, actually, where a wife will withdraw for
awhile as she tries to sort herself out. So what I would say is, the one thing
you want to make sure of before you tell her is that you really hate your sin
and that you really, really want to win. Once you get to that point, then you're
going to win and so it doesn't matter if you tell her. Once you really decide
to win at this, it doesn't take that long to beat it.
FamilyChristian.com:
You have four kids. What are you doing to
teach your kids about purity?
Fred: Well the main thing that you do to teach them is the stuff that
you don't actually say.
FamilyChristian.com:
The modeling.
Fred: Yeah. I think the key aspect to parenting is having zero hypocrisy
in your life. I think that hypocrisy is the most devastating thing to a child
because when you're saying one thing and doing another, they can't make sense
of anything and pretty soon they start resenting you. When you're modeling [the
behavior you want them to learn] they don't have to look very far to find someone
else who's doing the same thing.
Now, in terms of teaching
my oldest son about purity, I told him early [about] the dangers of pornography.
I didn't tell him about my life, but I wanted him to know that when someone
was gathering around with some pornography that he should turn and walk the
other way. I've modeled it and talked about it over time so when we were watching
a TV show not too long ago, he was better than me because there was a scene
with a man and a woman in a bubble bath, and he was up and out of the room in
no time.
FamilyChristian.com:
What advice would you give to single guys
struggling with temptation when they don't have a righteous means of expressing
those desires?
Fred: A lot of teens and single guys believe that marriage is a sexual
nirvana, that all their problems are over. But the thing that we find out after
we're married is that we usually have as many unmet sexual desires as we did
beforehand. That's kind of scary, but it is true. I think that the same thing
is true to tell them as I would tell married guys: look, this is how your eyes
work. This is how your mind works. And when you are looking at these things,
lusting over these girls or the computer monitor or whatever else, what it does
is it kind of elevates your sex drive. It's almost like you have a constant
low-grade fever. Your sex drive is constantly percolating. It's always up there
just a little bit and it's very easy then to take your motor beyond that, to
rev the engine up and get into sin.
So the main thing is to
keep all those inputs out because what that does is it takes your sex drive
right back down to where it is naturally. God can easily handle that and I think
you can stand purely, even if you're not married. But with our culture, it accelerates
everything if you're constantly seeing those things. And since seeing these
things is actually a form of foreplay, you're constantly in that mode of being
driven to where you don't want to go. And of course the problem for 16 and 18-year-old
guys is they're more concerned with being accepted by their peers than they
are being accepted by God. And so if they have to choose between walking holy
for a Person they can't see or being accepted by the football players that they
can see, they're going to choose, a lot of times, to go the wrong way. The other
thing I would tell them is that the habits that they form as singles are the
habits they're going to take into marriage and those habits don't go away on
your wedding day. They just get worse.
FamilyChristian.com:
I find it interesting that you went to a
marriage class when you were single.
Fred: I did that because I knew I needed to find a Sunday school class.
I looked at myself and said, "What do you most need to know?" And, of course,
I looked at my most recent past, with the four girlfriends and I thought, "You
know, the thing I most need to know is how to treat women with respect." And
so I thought the best place to learn that would be a marriage class.
FamilyChristian.com:
So what did you learn?
Fred: Everything. The way I viewed women at that time was that they were
for me. I wasn't for them. When I got into that marriage class, I learned that
obviously, they're not there for me. But then the other thing is that they're
a lot different from me. They think differently. They don't view sex the same
way. They don't view relationships the same way. They don't view raising kids
the same way. They don't view anything the same way! And I began to understand
that rather than just being a guy with soft bodies, that they're actually quite
a gift. I began to understand that I had to respect them and that even though
they were different, [those differences] really needed to be respected.
For me, coming from the
outside, it was hard to understand all these things that were being written
because I'd never seen anything like that. After awhile [of learning about what
a godly women looks like], I thought to myself, "You know, I don't really know
anybody like this and I'd really like to see a girl who actually has all these
characteristics." And I prayed that the Lord would introduce me to one. Not
for a date or anything, I just wanted to see one so that I could understand
my lessons better and of course that's I met Brenda and the rest is history.
FamilyChristian.com:
What would you like to say to women about
the effect of visual stimulation on men?
Fred: I would say that they need to understand what they're doing. Personally
I think every woman should read Every
Man's Battle because [some women are] adding to the whole situation
because they're not living Christian lives themselves. I mean, the Bible's clear
that women are to dress modestly, for instance. Well, when they don't…in fact,
this is one of the stories in the book. ..a woman who leads worship here had
a slit in the dress she wore almost every week that went all the way up her
thigh. Well, whenever she walked across the platform, you could see that thigh
flashing. I had guys from the Teen Challenge group that were saying, "You know,
we try to be pure but there she is every week and we think about those things."
Knowing that, they can
do what my daughter does. Since she knows what guys think when they're around
her or close to her, she's really careful about her body clues and the kinds
of things she does to make sure she's not fueling that fire. I would also say
to women that it's not their responsibility [to keep men pure]. We still have
to be responsible as men for purity even though they may not doing the right
thing. Even so, as Christian brothers and sisters, we should always be trying
to help each other to Christian greatness and it doesn't help us to Christian
greatness by being a stumbling block to purity.
FamilyChristian.com:
Is your new book, Every
Woman's Desire written for men too?
Fred: Oh yeah, absolutely. We've given it a weird title but the fact
of the matter is, this title is perfect because men don't know what every woman's
desire is. Every woman's desire is this: oneness with their mate, living in
mutual submission. That's what every woman desires and that's what almost no
woman gets because men won't live in mutual submission. They want to be head
and their wives to submit and that's it. But if you go to Ephesians 5:21, it's
very clear.
The first seven chapters
talk about what true leadership is as opposed to this old, beat-you-over-the-head
thing. And then the rest of the book is showing what it looks like in marriage.
FamilyChristian.com:
What is God teaching you now?
Fred: He's teaching me to not care anything about man's thoughts and
man's acclaim at all. He's teaching me to walk straight and true and have no
fear of men.
Jen Abbas,
a writer from Grand Rapids, Michigan, conducted this interview exclusively for
FamilyChristian.com
|
