July 19, 2026
A Debt You Owe Her
1 Corinthians 7:3-5
Let the husband give his wife the affection owed her, and likewise also the wife her husband. The wife doesn’t have authority over her own body, but the husband. Likewise also the husband doesn’t have authority over his own body, but the wife. Don’t deprive one another, unless it is by consent for a season, that you may give yourselves to fasting and prayer, and may be together again, that Satan doesn’t tempt you because of your lack of self-control. (1 Corinthians 7:3-5, WEB)
Paul writes plainly about the marriage bed, saying that a husband should give his wife her conjugal rights and that the two should not deprive one another except for a time of prayer, and then come together again. He frames intimacy as something owed, a gift each spouse has a claim on. This is not a grudging duty but a settled expectation that a husband will bring himself to his wife rather than hold himself back.
Pornography quietly defaults on that debt. A man who spends himself in secret arrives at his marriage empty, with less to give the one person who has a right to him. He may tell himself it harms no one because no other person is in the room, yet his wife is left with a husband who is present in body and absent in the ways that matter. Something is being withdrawn from the account she is entitled to, and she often feels the shortfall long before she can name it. Paul assumes that the answer to temptation is a turning toward your spouse rather than away, more closeness rather than less, and the man caught in this habit has usually gotten that exactly backward.
If you have been robbing your marriage to feed a habit, confess it to God first, honestly and without softening it. Then consider in time confessing it to her with humility and patience, in a way that seeks her good and not just your own relief. Ask the Lord to restore what has been drained, to refill what secret spending has emptied, so that you can come to your wife with your whole self and not the remnant. That is the marriage Paul had in mind, and it is still within reach.