Why Freedom From Porn Matters

Drew Boa 0:37

Welcome to the Husband Material Podcast, where we help Christian men outgrow porn. Why? So you can change your brain, heal your heart, and save your relationship. My name is Drew Boa, and I'm here to show you how. Let's go. Thank you so much for listening to my interview with Josh Straub. This was specifically for men who are husbands and fathers or want to be, because Josh is an expert at reviving the soul of your family. He helps you build emotional safety, cultivate a marriage you love, raise kids full of joy, and he's the author, with his wife Christy, of Famous at Home: Seven Decisions to Put Your Family Center Stage in a World Competing for Your Time, Attention, and Identity. He talks about what it really means to show up at home, to be fully present, to be connected, and to give your kids maybe what you didn't get when you were a boy. And you're also going to hear about what it looks like to protect your family, not just physically, but spiritually, especially against the evil and the threat of porn. If you want to be the husband and father that you didn't have in your family when you were a boy, this is the episode for you. Hope you enjoy it. Welcome to Husband Material. I'm excited to introduce everybody to Dr. Joshua Straub . Welcome to the show.

Dr. Joshua Straub 2:02

Thank you so much for having me, Drew.

Drew Boa 2:05

One of the most important reasons why many men want to be free from porn is in order to more fully become the husband and the father that we know we're created to be. And I love the vision that you have cast for what that looks like. Being famous at home. What does it mean to be famous at home?

Dr. Joshua Straub 2:31

Great question. Yeah. So I mean, the reality is you already are. And I think that's where we run into problems as men, is we intellectually talk about the love of God for us. And Paul writes in Ephesians :3, 19, he says, I pray that you might know beyond knowledge. I pray that you might know in your heart, you might experience in your heart, experience in your full person, in your full being, the love of Jesus for you beyond head knowledge. And I think we can, as men, we often state, yes, Jesus loves me, God loves me, the Father loves me, I am loved, but do we truly feel it? And one of the things that leads us into sin, it leads us into places of looking for affirmation apart from him, no matter what that is. It could be pornography, it could be our pursuit of material possessions, our pursuit of, you know, our identity and what we have and what other people think of us, what we do, right? It's like we get to a place where we chase because we truly don't feel like we are truly loved. And the reality is, I just want to start, I think, in this entire conversation by creating the foundation that we are deeply loved by the Father so much that he sends his son to die for us that we could be redeemed and fully redeemed. And and he is so loving. And so you already are famous at home. You are famous in your heavenly home. And so I think it starts there to realize that. Number two, if you have children at home, if you have a wife at home, I always say it this way: the greatest red carpet will ever walk is through our front door. Again, to know that our identity is in Christ, now all of a sudden, the second place we step into, you read this in 1 Timothy that in order to be a leader, you must first take care of your own family. You already are famous at home. You go away for a couple days on a work trip or whatever, even if you're away just for a day and you come back home and your little ones, what are they doing? They are coming running to the door because you are famous at home. That is your greatest red carpet. And yet, what we end up doing is we end up believing a lie that our identity is in what we do, what we have, what we think other people think of us, that we're not lovable. And all of a sudden we start chasing the things in the world, and it leads us down a path of seeking affirmation in all the wrong places. There's a verse in the Old Testament, I believe it's in Jeremiah. Your lovers despise you, they seek your life. And what it means is it's like the things that we chase, the idols, the cakes of raisins, as the Old Testament describes, it's like they seek your life. They will ruin your life over time. They might serve you well for a season, but eventually you're not going to be able to have the same anymore to where they're they're serving you. And so we already are famous at home. Everything that we do for life and love and growing in the fruit of the spirit, love, joy, peace, it's already all there by knowing that we are loved. And that's the foundation. That's what it means to be famous at home. It's a double entendre.

Drew Boa 5:45

I love that. Famous at home with our father who loves us, and famous in being a father.

Dr. Joshua Straub 5:52

That's right.

Why Showing Up Feels Impossible

Drew Boa 5:53

And a husband as well. That sounds so good to me, and I want more of that. And I'm also aware that being fully present at home is ridiculously difficult. Like, why is it so hard for us to show up at home?

Dr. Joshua Straub 6:08

Man, you know what? I think it's because deep down we all have been wounded at some level. We were wounded as boys. You know, we were left alone at times, we felt lonely, we felt anxious, we felt scared, we felt sad, we felt maybe abandoned. And we have memory built within our bodies, by the way, built within our nervous systems, by the way, that taught us how to cope when we were feeling those feelings. And those ways that we coped could have been any number of things, in that we withdrew and we, you know, went into our own little worlds and we turned to things to calm and soothe us. It could have been that we started to pursue relationships and that we were too needy, and that our affirmation was on how much someone liked me, and so we end up people pleasing. It could have been any number of different ways that we cope. And what happens is if those needs go unmet over time, and we live in a broken society, we live in a broken culture, now all of a sudden you enter into a massively deep relationship with a wife who is that knows you better than anybody on the planet, sees everything, your emotional nakedness, your physical nakedness, you are completely vulnerable before this one human on the planet. And she also is coming into this marriage with a set of wounds and ways of coping. And when we are now all of a sudden living in a culture that is very busy, that is teaching us to, you know, we've got to work hard to just make an income, to pay our mortgage, to pay our rent, to pay for our cars, to pay for a living. And then we start having kids and they're in sports and and and and and and then all of a sudden we just get so busy that now we're meeting up against our wounds and the ways that we cope, and now we're making each other out to be the enemy, as opposed to realizing that there's a little boy and a little girl in there who was at once wounded, who is now re-coping in the context of a marriage. I call these the idiotic ways we try to get our spouse to love us deeper, because it's protest, it's an attachment protest to go, I'm feeling disconnected. But the ways that I'm protesting that disconnection aren't really that helpful because all it's doing is creating a cycle, a pain cycle in our marriage. And I think that's why it's difficult to connect in our culture today, because we're emotionally illiterate and we don't have the time to be able to get into our hearts. The Bible says that to guard your heart, it is the wellspring of life. We live on the business level with our spouses. It's like, hey, let's just talk about the business of the day, who's getting the kids here and there, and that sort of thing. And so when we're living on the surface and we're not going a level deeper, we don't feel fully seen, we don't feel fully known, and we question whether or not we're truly loved. Does my spouse really love me? Does God really love me? And I think that's why it's really difficult to connect, especially with our spouses. And then with our kids, you know, it's it's a similar thing. It's hard to see playing trains or polypockets or whatever it is that your kids want to play. It's hard to think about in the society that we live in how my sitting down and entering into their world to do those things that don't necessarily bring me a dopamine hit, especially when I need to be working to bring this income in and to be providing for our family. We got dinner coming up next. Oh, by the, the kids got to eat again. And it's like you got all these things. I think it's just the pressures of life really impact our ability to truly connect. You have these wounds, and and I think it's important that we prioritize and pay attention to those rather than just pushing them down and pushing them down. I think that's why it gets hard to connect.

Drew Boa 10:18

Especially when there is blame. Yes. You talk about the unhelpfulness of blaming the other person and blaming ourselves.

Dr. Joshua Straub 10:29

That's because self-promotion or self-protection are the ways that we cope. And both start with self, right? So, I mean, we're either self-promotion, self-promoting, meaning like we're gonna get angry, we're gonna get loud, we're gonna, hey, you need to hear my voice, or self-protection. And even blaming, it's it's self-protection. It's I'm not gonna take responsibility for the internal conflict that I'm experiencing right now. And there's anger's always a secondary emotion. So there's something going on under the anger. I see this a lot in any type of marriage coaching that we're doing, you know, it's that I feel disrespected. I hear this a lot from husbands. I feel disrespected, I feel unheard, ashamed. I hear this one a lot from from women. This this one goes both ways, but I feel ashamed. I don't feel like I'm enough.

Drew Boa 11:20

A big one for guys in our community, especially when they're in the process of outgrowing porn, is feeling villainized.

Dr. Joshua Straub 11:30

Yep. I feel villainized. And so why wouldn't we be self-protecting? That's just the natural way to feel like we can survive in that, right? And so I think it's really important that we pay attention to those underlying feelings behind the anger so that we're able to acknowledge them. When we don't acknowledge them, they sit in the darkness, and then the enemy can just speak lies to us all day long about who we are or who our wife is, and that's not helpful at all.

Drew Boa 12:00

Totally. I really appreciate how you emphasize what's happening within us, not just what's happening between us. Also, you don't use the word parenting, you use the word becoming.

Dr. Joshua Straub 12:12

Yeah.

Drew Boa 12:12

Why is that?

Dr. Joshua Straub 12:14

I'll pump it right out of the gate. You can sum up all of parenting research into one primary conclusion, and that's that our kids become who we are. So, you know, you can't change anybody. You're not going to change your spouse, you're not going to change your kids. I'm sure you've tried to change your spouse before. You can't change another human. The only person you can take responsibility for to change is yourself. And our children are a byproduct of the environment that they're raised in. And so if my children's emotional and spiritual floor is my ceiling, then I'm going to do everything I can to raise that ceiling in my own life to prioritize how I'm showing up for them. And so that's really what that's about. Parenting is even the very definition, it's on me to change who my children are becoming, who my children are. And it is my responsibility to shepherd them, but in that shepherding, it's a priority of who I'm becoming.

Drew Boa 13:10

Yeah.

Dr. Joshua Straub 13:10

It's a product of who I'm becoming.

Drew Boa 13:12

So the best thing I can do for my kids is to work on my self.

Dr. Joshua Straub 13:20

That's right. Yep. And I can give you even more data on that. You know, there was a research study done on the top 10 parenting strategies to get the outcomes we most desire in our kids. It was out of Harvard, and it was a meta analysis. So it's where you sum up data and you look, take the average of everything. They then asked parenting experts what they thought the top 10 would be, and none of the parenting experts got it right. What they found was that the number one strategy for getting the outcomes you most desire in your kids is love and affection. Love and affection. Number two was a parent's ability to manage his or her own stress. Number three was how you treat your spouse or how you treat a co-parent in a divorce situation. That research alone, I would argue, of the top three, none of them have to do with a direct relationship with our children. They have everything to do with who we're becoming as adults. I'll even go back to love and affection. Why? We love because he first loved us. What's the first question you're asked if you go to therapy? What was your relationship like with who? Your parents. In other words, how well were you loved? How well are we receiving love first from the Father? How well are we receiving love from those around us so that we can give that love back to our children? If we're chasing love in all the wrong places, we don't have a bank of love to give to our children.

Enter Your Child’s Emotional World

Drew Boa 14:45

Yeah, that's so good. One of the primary ways we need to do that is entering your child's world. You tell some great stories in Famous at Home about this, but what does it mean to not just love my kid? You know, I love my kids, but really to enter their world.

Dr. Joshua Straub 15:08

I always talk about, and this gets into the emotional safety side. The way I describe emotional safety is it's the hub of the wheel, right? It's it's the very construct that leads to every major outcome we desire in our kids. And what I mean by that is we have to have the ability to be able to enter into their world when they hit stress or duress in their lives. So what happens when they're the ones who are feeling sad? What happens when they're the ones who are left out, when they're feeling embarrassed, maybe bullied, rejected, when they're feeling anxious? How well are we entering into their world? Not punishing their uncomfortable emotion, not, and by the way, when I say not punishing it, there's opportunities for us to punish it. Because you're like, wait a minute, what do you mean punishing? Their disobedience, their talking back to us. Remember how I said earlier the idiotic ways we try to get our spouse to love us deeper. Our passive aggressiveness towards our wives, our, you know, silent treatment towards our wives, our sighing towards our wives, maybe our yelling, whatever it is that you maybe it's playing martyr or victim, whatever your coping mechanism is to try to get your spouse to love you deeper, you are acting out towards your wife because there is an underlying hurt that is unresolved, that you have not been able to communicate, that you feel disrespected, left out, villainized, whatever that looks like. The same thing is true with our kids. Their disobedience often can be linked back to something going on in their lives deeper than what we're paying attention to. And so it's easy to just punish it because we confuse it with disrespect or disobedient behavior when the reality is there's something deeper going on. We have to be able to enter into their world. I'll give you an example of this. There was a dad of a 14-year-old that I was working with, and she wanted to go to a Friday night football game, and her dad said no. And she looked at her dad and she said, Dad, I hate you, and she went storming to her bedroom. So, I mean, you think about, all right, a parent, a parent's ability to manage his or her own stress, the second greatest parenting out uh strategy to get the outcome we desire in our kids. How is your nervous system as a father in a moment when your daughter is going, Dad, I hate you, in that very moment, and then go storm into her bedroom. When I say we can't punish the uncomfortable emotion, what I mean by that is we can't look at her and go, don't you ever speak to me that way again. You go to your room of taking your phone for a month and no, you're not going to that Friday night football game. Do you understand me? We also can't minimize it by going, it's just a Friday night football game. Who cares? We also can't dismiss it by saying, Don't be mad at me. What I talk about entering into your child's world is to be able to enter into her world. If you have toddlers, you might need to get down on your knee, get in eye level with your child, sit down with them, look him in the eye, and say, honey, what is it about that Friday night football game that matters to you so much? And what that dad found out was that his daughter had been rejected by a group of friends that she hung out with in the previous school year. She would see them posting pictures on Instagram and Snapchat of them hanging out without her. And this was the first Friday night they invited her to be a part of something, and her dad said no. So there is a real or perceived threat. There's something going on. She's feeling rejected, and it comes out sideways towards the safest person in her life, which is her father. And if we can't enter into their world and lead in grace, what'll end up happening is we will personalize the I hate you when it's not personal at all. It's that there's something going on, and then we will react based on that. And so that's what I mean by entering into their world. Entering into their world in their hurts and their stressors, entering into their world in their gifts and their talents, the things that they love to do. My my little five-year-old right now is just, Dad, play soccer with me, dad, play soccer with me. My 13-year-old son is saying, Dad, work out with me, dad, let's wrestle. Let's, he's in jujitsu, like let's let's fight. My daughter is saying, Dad, can we, you know, can we draw together? Can we paint together? She's very artsy. Like, and I'm going, yes, I'm going to enter into their world with everything that I have so that they realize that I'm along with them in all of their likes, their passions, their desires, but also I'm going to be with them in helping them develop their God-given strengths and help them build resilience in their stressors and overwhelm as well.

Drew Boa 19:52

Yeah. And that's so amazing in part because you are showing them who Jesus is and who God is.

Dr. Joshua Straub 20:01

In an earthly sense, in a finite way. That's what we're called to do as parents, you know, is to be that for our kids. As a father has compassion for his children, so the heavenly father has compassion on us, Psalm 103, right? It's like this is what we are to do, but there's so much warring against us because we are sons of Adam. So much warring against us. We have to claim our authority in Jesus Christ. We have to claim our authority in who we are in him and how we've been redeemed. And I think that's where we can correct generational brokenness in profound ways.

Drew Boa 20:42

Right, because many of us did not get this experience of someone entering into my world, being fully with me.

Dr. Joshua Straub 20:53

Yeah, that's exactly right.

Drew Boa 20:55

So especially when we have been underparented, and many men in our community are doing inner child work and reparenting ourselves. What do we do with our underfatheredness? You know what I mean?

Dr. Joshua Straub 21:09

Yeah, you know, for me, it's it's wild because I found a point in my own life where so my parents were divorced when I was 10, but my dad was always in the stands for me. So I can count on one hand the number of wrestling matches he missed. He was always at baseball games. I like he was always there in the stands. It was in big emotional moments of my life that he didn't know necessarily how to show up because he he didn't know how to show up for himself in those big emotional moments. And I remember a point at which I was journeying along, and I had a I've had both good and not so healthy mentors, father figures come along in my life to kind of help me when I felt like I surpassed where my dad was on an emotional level, emotional intelligence level, emotional insight level, but also a spiritual level. My dad in particular was a pretty nominal believer most of my life. And it's like, you know, when you've outgrown your own father, your own parent, and you weren't given this blueprint. Like we, most of us as men, we weren't given this blueprint on how to lead our families. And so one of the ways that I started doing this was I just started to look for men all over the place. Whether it was local, and you need both. I think you need to find nationally people who are speaking on these things and leading their families well. I always say this find the people who have done it well. Find the people who have their kids are in their 20s, 30s, maybe older, and you look at the kids and you see the fruit in their life. And you either listen to their podcasts, you listen to their sermons, you read their books, you find who they are, but then you find those people locally as well. Don't ever ask, will you mentor me? Nobody's got the time for that. Nobody really knows what that actually means. But if you say, hey, could I grab, could I buy you coffee? Could I buy you lunch? Invite that man, might be someone in your church or whatever, to lunch, buy them their lunch, and ask every question about how they did what they did. And just start becoming a student of those men. And with no expectation other than beyond that lunch, right? Some men are gonna go, hey, let's do this again. Some men are gonna go, hey, why don't you bring your family over to my house for dinner? Some men are gonna invite you in deeper, others you just keep inviting. But find those people that you surround yourself with because I genuinely 100% believe this with everything in me. It's research-based, and I have experienced it anecdotally in my own life that you are who you spend time with. And the people you surround yourself with will guide you into who you are becoming. I'm leading my family incredibly different than how I grew up, but I needed permission from other men around me to be able to do it because I had no idea that I number one could do this, or number two, had the permission to do it this way. And so the more you're around people who give you permission to choose different, it's everything.

Drew Boa 24:06

You talk about seven choices to make, to be famous at home. What are some of those choices?

Changing The Atmosphere At Home

Dr. Joshua Straub 24:15

The first one really is is and I think this is where where we all want to start is how do you become the best version of you in Jesus? In other words, you establish the atmosphere of your home. And we are all a product of the environment we are raised in. We're all a product of the environment, and we all live in a matrix, right? And then we have these mini matrixes, and there's these macro matrixes. The macro matrix, ultimate macro matrix. If you're listening to this from America, you're living in America, which is the most individualistic culture at the most individualistic time in the history of the world. You can't separate yourself from that worldview lens because you're being brought up in that culture. You're raising your family in that culture. By the way, the definition of the word matrix actually means a womb. It is at the core. It is basically the environment that you are shaped in. Okay. And so you think about the environment that your children are shaped in, the environment that your wife is in, you are a major part of that environment in your home. I'll give you an example. When I'm able to work out, I am a much different human being for my family. So if I'm working out at least three to four days a week, and I feel like I have control that area of my life, that I can get exercise, that sort of thing. And it's more so a mental health thing for me where I'm I can just work out emotion, that sort of thing. By the time I'm done working out, when my children are awake that morning, when my wife gets awake that morning, I can greet them with more true, genuine joy than if I feel like I've woken up and I'm already behind. So one simple way of, you know, for you is to go, how can I show up as the best version of myself in Jesus? Does that mean I'm waking up before everybody else and getting in the Word? Does that mean I'm waking up before everybody else and working out? Does that mean I am setting aside a certain time of the day? Maybe I'm not a morning person, but I'm a night person. Whatever it is for you, ask Jesus what will help you show up and change the atmosphere of your home. Another example for me is the power of life and death are on the tongue. I used to use very exaggerated, probably hyperbolic words. Like if the if there were dishes in the sink, I would walk into the sink and be like, wow, this kitchen is a disaster. Like, you know, like we've got to clean the kitchen. It looks like a disaster. And my wife would cower. Her nervous system could not take that language. She's like, can you stop? Like it's too much for me. Could we just simply say, guys, let's clean up the kitchen? It's a mess right now. Like, it doesn't need to be a disaster, right? It's like finding ways that can shift, and these are super small ways. Just find one or two things that can start to help you show up differently that shifts the atmosphere of your home. That's that's really where it starts.

Feelings First Then Behavior Changes

Drew Boa 27:19

Yeah, that's great. And for so many of us, a huge area of life that is affecting how we show up is porn and other unwanted sexual behavior. Can you talk a little bit about how that affects our role as a father, as a husband?

Dr. Joshua Straub 27:43

I mean, behaviorally, we know where that leads, right? I mean, it is a shame cycle, it is all those things. And I think that what's really important to truly understand is let's talk about the feelings behind it rather than the behavior, right? The behavior itself isn't going to stop until we get honest about the feelings behind what's driving the behavior. We're big on emotions, okay? We wrote children's books called What Am I Feeling? What do I do with anger? What do I do with worry? I've heard from many women who said, Hey, I bought what am I feeling, not for my kids, but for my husband. I think it's really important that we there's a pull-out feelings chart in there that we get honest and pull out the feelings chart, put it on the refrigerator, whatever you want to do, to get honest about our feelings around these issues, you know, and and to be able to share, let's speak truth in love and let's start truth telling in a way that is I'm I'm afraid of being insecure. I'm afraid of being found out as a fraud. I'm afraid that, you know, not going to provide financially. A lot of it is fear, but let's voice those things. One of the, you know, decisions in the book that we talk about is 15 minutes a day with your spouse, where you sit down with your spouse and you identify what is one positive and one uncomfortable feeling that you had from that day. Proverbs says that guard your heart, it is the wellspring of life. If we're not identifying our feelings underneath what's going on, and that's not saying your feelings are true, what you're feeling is true, but we have to at least identify them because they're speaking to a situation, person, or something around us. They're giving us data on something around us. They could be giving us data on what we believe about ourselves or on what we believe about other people, but those feelings are flowing out of our belief systems. And I think it's important that we're able to identify them. And I'm not saying you start by, you know, sharing all these things right away, because I'll tell a married couple early on in coaching, do the 15 minutes a day, but use your uncomfortable feeling about a neutral event. Don't make it about your marriage until we at least talk through how to do that so that you're not blaming. Because you could go, well, I felt rejected today when you did this. Well, that's going to automatically put your spouse on the defensive. So just invite your spouse into your world with one uncomfortable feeling. I felt sad about this today. I felt brave about this. I felt, you know, it can be brave, content, happy, surprised, joyful, or something uncomfortable. I felt embarrassed, I felt jealous, I felt sad, I felt lonely, I felt anxious. And being able to identify that. And I think that is a key component to doing that with your spouse, doing that with your kids. Instead of doing a high low of the day, do that with your kids every every so often throughout the week. You don't have to be every day, but ask them their their most positive feeling and most uncomfortable feeling of that part of the day or that part of the week, where emotional vocabulary becomes normal in your home and we're not we're not in hiding. I think one of the most intimate things we can do with our spouse is share our deepest fears with them. And yet we're running from it. And and we run from it into places like pornography or whatever our idol is, whatever our spiritual addiction of choice is, we go and hide it in there.

Drew Boa 30:51

That's right. It's a way of avoiding emotions, escaping emotions. Oftentimes our emotions get sexualized. I don't even realize what I'm feeling until it's a really strong sexual urge. And so we totally need to learn how to name and tame our feelings. My friend Blake Brinkman came up with this feelings game that my kids are always asking to play. Can we play the feelings game? And he took all the feelings on a feelings wheel, cut them up individually, and put them in a jar. We we pick one out and say, When's the last time you felt alone? When's the last time you felt excited? That's been a fun change up.

Protecting Your Home Spiritually

Dr. Joshua Straub 31:32

I love it. And because what you're doing is you're you're allowing those things to come into the light. Because we live in such a busy culture where we're just pushing all this stuff. We just live on the surface and and we think it's okay. We've come to the belief that it's like, well, this is just the way life is. Everybody's so busy, we're running, there's no margin, there's no joy. And we think that this is okay. And I just really want to challenge, if you're a husband and a father, like just ask yourself the question: why are we doing what we're doing as a family? Why are we in the activities we're in? Why are our kids doing what they're doing? Are we putting them in it because it's just what everybody else is doing? Do they really love what it is that they're doing? Is it is it beneficial to the entire family, or is it only beneficial to one individual person in the family? Because we've got this very individualistic mindset about how we how we raise our kids these days. And I would just venture to say, like, think about how you're leading. You know, when you talked about, you asked me the question about, you know, the pornography side, I'll never forget this. This is, let's take this to the spiritual for a second. So let me start with this. When our when our youngest was was pretty small, I remember a good friend of mine telling me about a man he met with who kept coming to him. My friend was the pastor, and this guy kept coming to him and he kept saying, Hey, you know, we're hearing demons where we're hearing these demonic voices through our child's baby monitor. And he's like, Okay, so you know, he's trying to uncover like what is going on, what's going on. He's like, I don't understand like why these voices are are there. And so my pastor friend just started asking him questions. He's like, Is there, is there sin in the house? Is there sin in your life as the as as the head of the house, as the father? Is there something going on? And he admitted, yes, I'm viewing pornography. And he said, You've got to close that door. And he did, and you know, the the voices stopped. And man, that's that scared me to death to go, ain't no way I'm letting this stuff. So, as you think about this, what's one of the things we do as fathers? We pride ourselves on protection, we pride ourselves on making sure the doors are locked at night. You know how to physically protect your family. You've got that down, we've got that down as men. But the spiritual world is way more real than the physical world, and the physical world follows what's happening in the spiritual world. And so we would never think to leave our doors unlocked and open at night for our ch for our house to be fully exposed to to anybody who wants to come in and have free reign. And yet, our unconfessed sins are leaving those doors open. And I'm not saying that in any shameful way. Please don't hear that. I'm gonna always go back to the way we started this podcast in that you are unbelievably loved. As our mutual friend Sam Jolman says, the enemy wants to tie shame to your sexual story as early and often as possible. This is in no way shaming whatsoever. This is just a reality. Me as a fellow husband, father, son of God speaking to us as believers, to be watchmen over our families, to speak the truth in love that we can't leave these spiritual doors hanging open. We want to close those doors, we want to shut those things down. We want to repent. We want to turn away from. And the most significant way that I have found for this to happen isn't through behavior modification, it is through relationship. It is 100 percent through relationship. And that is why I encourage any of you who are struggling in this area to slam the doors closed spiritually. To be very honest with you, and I'm sure Drew you're probably friends and connected here very well, but we use the Wild at Heart app. There are prayers in there that you can pray to cut off any of these things. I pray a head of household prayer over our family, a morning prayer, an evening prayer over our family, every day, multiple times a week because I want to make sure that the doors are locked, that they're closed. That our family is protected in the supernatural realm. I want to take authority. Like, let's, as men in this hour that we find ourselves in, take our spiritual, God-given authority in Jesus Christ and let's protect our homes, let's protect our wives, let's protect our kids, let's protect our families. And the way to do that is find a loving group of other men in your life that you can surround yourself with who are walking this same journey. Because the way to get there is to level up and surround yourselves with other men who are leveling up, who are living at a different level. And I love AA, I love celebrate recovery, I love the recovery community. At some level, if you're the if you're the most healed one in the room, you've got to start leveling up. You should never be the smartest in the room, you should never be the most healed in the room, you should never be the best looking in the room. I don't know. Like always level up your community of people that you are living with, doing life with, so that you're getting out of the same ways of thinking that you've always been in. And you've got to find loving communities that welcome you with love, not ones that are shaming. And there's no condemnation in Christ Jesus. You experience a condemning, shaming community, you're in the wrong community. I think we have to find the loving communities where people will love us out of our sin as opposed to condemning, trying to shame us out of it. At any rate, that's a little bit of my spiel there in that area.

Drew Boa 37:31

It's such a new thought for me to protect my family, not just physically, but spiritually, and how sexual things can flow from that.

Dr. Joshua Straub 37:40

The way that I think of it is, you know, there are mere neurons in our brain. God wired our brain so beautifully that my wife, we've been married, we'll be married for 16 years, coming up here in a few months. And my wife is more beautiful to me than she's ever been to me. I think that's the way that mirror neurons are we were created. The way that we are designed as creatures, as humans, to be in monogamous relationships where sex is to meant to be for procreation, but also pleasure with one person is incredibly beautiful. And the joy of that. Now, granted, there's a lot of healing that needs to happen. Please don't hear me say that there's not healing that needs to happen. You know, there's sexual sin, then there has to be healing between and reconciliation and healing within your marriage and trust restored and rebuilt. But I've watched family after family, marriage after marriage, rebuild in that. We can't get caught in the instant gratification, this should be fixed and healed tomorrow, and my wife should automatically trust me, kind of mentality. We are in a sanctifying relationship with our wives, where we are growing trust over and over and over again, just like we are in a sanctifying relationship as kids, as sons with our heavenly father. If our heavenly father were as impatient with us as we are might be with our wives and our kids, man, I wouldn't want that at all, right? So we have to think about the way that we're parented by the Heavenly Father and give that same grace and space to our wives when we've wronged them, when we've hurt them, and come alongside them in that journey and learn together and grow together. But if we're in hiding and we're not willing to share our core emotions and we're not willing to share our journey, what it does is it inhibits the ability to be able to develop that trust over time. We're in a matrix, remember, of instant gratification, of quick fixes. And God doesn't work that way. His work is slow, but his work is thorough. It is thorough. He will do it so thoroughly. It might not go as fast as you'd like it to, but he will be thorough. And I think that is one of the most encouraging thoughts because I don't want a quick fix that isn't gonna last or that only puts band-aids on it. Let's get it right, let's be fully restored, men in Jesus' name.

Drew Boa 40:20

Amen. Reminds me of 1 Thessalonians where it says, the one who calls you is faithful and he will do it.

Dr. Joshua Straub 40:28

So good. May the God of all comfort who comforts us in our sorrows so that we may comfort others. Right? Like think of your story as a redemption story that you're going to one day comfort others, starting with your own generational lineage, the sins of the fathers past the third and fourth generations. Epigenetics, by the way, is found to be more powerful than genetics. So, and what I mean by that is our belief systems, the things we even put into our body, what we eat, how all of those things are passed into the next generation are more powerful than our genes. And so thinking about the environment we raise our kids in, the things we cut off in the supernatural through prayer, these are really, really important for the next generation. I think this is what Moses is getting at. Blessing to the thousandth generation of those who love me and seek my commands. Let's be men who go, you know what? It stops here.

Joy Identity And Final Charge

Drew Boa 41:31

Yeah. Josh, what's your favorite thing about being famous at home?

Dr. Joshua Straub 41:35

Oh man. Takes all the pressure off everywhere else. Genuinely. Like I realize, like, I there are so many days where I'm like, I can give up, like my identity is not in what I do. I can give it up tomorrow. And the joy of journeying with my kids, you know, they're 13, 11, and five now. And my 13 and 11-year-old are starting to figure out who they are more and more. And to be able to enter into their world and help them figure out who they are and do stuff together with them, there's nothing that brings more joy to my life. And I have never lived with this much joy because I realize that, you know, this is the greatest gift in all the world is to shepherd my kids, and I don't want to miss it. At the end of life, most end-of-life surveys show that one of the greatest regrets was I wish I hadn't worked so much. I wish I would have lived the life I wanted and not what other people expected of me. Bronny Ware's research. Um, she was an Australian palliative care nurse. Another one, by the way, is I wish I would have shared my feelings more with my loved ones. Let's not live with those regrets. Listen, Tim Keller said it this way: everything in your world could be a disaster, but if your marriage is strong, you step out into the world in strength. But the flip side is also true. Everything in your world could be great, but if your marriage is not, you step out into the world in weakness. And I think that my favorite thing about being famous at home is that I step out into the world in strength because we have a great marriage. We've worked hard at it. We have a great marriage. I've worked really hard at doing everything I can to live my message. I could start tomorrow doing any other job in the world if God calls me to it, and I'd be okay. It'd be good.

Drew Boa 43:17

I hear so much peace in that.

Dr. Joshua Straub 43:18

I think that's the joy of being famous at home. And it flows out of being famous in my heavenly home. It's been a journey. Again, this isn't like an overnight thing, but I am learning to experience how much He loves me and sit in that and experience that. And for many, many years I had it in my left brain, but I didn't have it in my right brain. The more I'm on that journey of knowing how loved I am, the pressure's off.

Drew Boa 43:49

So good. That's a perfect way to end. Guys, if you loved what you heard from Josh today, go down to the links in the show notes and check out his resources, his website. There's more where this came from. Thanks so much for being with us.

Dr. Joshua Straub 44:01

Thanks for having me. That was fun.

Drew Boa 44:03

And always remember you are God's beloved son. In you, he is well pleased.