Latest / Intentional Guy / The Bill Comes Due
Transcript
- Michael Chestnut: You think it's private, you think it's just you, your monitor, and nobody else in the room. Well, that's a lie. That has always been the lie. Because lust doesn't just cost you something later. It's already writing a bill, and one day that bill will come due. Today I want to show you what that looks like. where a man's two worlds, the one he built in public and the one he built in the dark, collided. Here's what every version of this temptation sells you privacy, incognito, private browsing, a username instead of your name, an app that promises discreet, and a little voice that says, No one will ever know. This stays between you and and the monitor. That promise is the hook, not the image. The promise that it's contained, that you can keep it in a box in the dark, and it will never touch your real life. Every man who ever has been exposed believed that promise right up until the moment it broke. In august twenty fifteen, hackers broke into a website built entirely around that promise, a site that existed to help married people have anonymous affairs. They leaked the names, emails, and payment records of over thirty two million users. Overnight Anonymous became a public list. Christian leaders were on that list. Pastors, elders, Seminary professors. One estimate from a well known Christianity Today editor put the numbers of pastors and church leaders exposed in the hundreds. One of those names was a seminary professor in New Orleans. A husband, a father, a man known around his campus for fixing strangers' cars for free. Six days after his name surfaced, his wife came home and found him gone. He had taken his own life, undone by the shame of being found out. In the years since, his wife has said something that I want you to sit with. She said she believed they could have worked through it together. If he had simply come to her and said, I've done this, I'm so sorry. Can we work through this together? But he never gave her the chance to say yes. That's the tragedy under the tragedy. She was willing to walk alongside him. God was willing to help him rebuild what he'd broken. But the enemy got to him first and convinced him of a different story that exposure was the end, that he was unforgivable, that the only way to stop the pain was to make it permanent. That's a lie. It's always a lie. Satan doesn't need you to stay in your sin forever. He just needs you to believe, even for one night, that there's no way back. Because a man who believes that will do something you can't undo. So let me ask you directly, right now, not a rhetoric question. Where are they? The people who would actually walk alongside you if you let them. Your version of a wife who'd say yes, a brother who'd sit with you in it? Can you name them? Because if you can't answer that question today, then you are standing exactly where he was standing that night, alone with a lie that feels louder than the truth. I'm not telling you his story to scare you into behaving. I'm telling you because isolation is a liar. And it only wins when it convinces you that you're the exception no one would walk toward. Another man on the same list. belonged to a young Christian husband and father, who built an online following as a Christian man. When his name went public, he told his wife part of the truth. Enough to survive the headlines, not enough to actually be free. For years after that, the men closest to him, his own brother, his pastors, sat across from him and asked him directly if there was more to the story. And for years he looked them in the eye and told them no. Here's the part that matters. They didn't quit on him. They kept showing up. They kept asking the hard questions. Even when he lied to their face. It took nearly a decade of that. Men who've refused to let go before he finally told the whole truth. Not just the account. But the affairs, the years of hiding in plain sight while everyone believed the highlight reels. His marriage is still standing today, not because he was strong enough to fix it alone, because he wasn't. And a handful of men loved him too much to leave him alone with it. Same list, same exposure, but look at the difference. One man had nobody pressing in. And the isolation contributed to his own death. The other had brothers who wouldn't stop asking even when he lied. And that's what eventually got him free. That's not a coincidence. Restoration has never once happened in isolation. It happens across a table with someone who refuses to quit on you. That's the whole reason I close every episode the way I do. Maybe you're thinking I'm not on some hacked website. I just search. I use incognito mode, and that's actually private. Well, it isn't. And Google omitted it. In 2024, Google settled a lawsuit worth billions after users sued them for tracking activity during incognito browsing. The exact mode millions of people use because they believe it means invisible. Court documents showed Google's own employees had called incognito mode a confusing mess. And in their own internal words, effectively a lie. Read that again. The company that built the privacy mode called it a lie internally, in writing. Google had to rewrite its own disclosure and delete billions of private browse records it was never supposed to have kept in the first place. So, if the most sophisticated privacy tool on earth couldn't actually hide you, what makes you think your search history, your second phone, your private folder is the exception? there is no incognito mode for sin. There never was. The world just spent a few billion dollars proving what your Bible already told you for free. here's what it cost when the two worlds finally collide. First, your wife. Who she was actually married to. That's the wound that's hardest to heal. Because it's not about just the betrayal. It's also about the loss of a version of you she thought was real. Then your kids. They don't need proof. They just need to watch the version of dad they believed in get replaced by the truth. That image doesn't shatter quietly. Then your job. Because for a lot of men, This didn't stay contained to midnight at home. It bled into the workplace. Company time, company devices, company trust, and companies don't do grace the way the church is supposed to. Then your church, your small group, your community, the room full of people who respected you. Some of them will walk with you, some won't. Either way, that room changes. Every one of those is a separate bill, and lust never tells you up front that you're running a tab on all four of them at once. For nothing is hidden that will not be disclosed, nor is anything concealed that will not be known or brought out into the open. Luke eight seventeen. That verse isn't a threat. It's older than the internet, and it's more accurate than Silicon Valley. Every hacked website, every court case about incognito mode, every scandal that ever broke, all of it is just the world catching up to something God told us two thousand years ago. The dark doesn't keep secrets. It just delays the light. I know this bill personally. I've paid it. There was a day my two worlds collided in front of me. Law enforcement at my door, at my job, in front of my neighbors. Everything I had built and everyone I loved found out at once. And in that moment the weight of the entire world landed on my chest. not conviction, not correction, just shame. Crushing, suffocating shame. And I want to be honest with you about something most men in ministry won't tell you. I didn't want to fight it anymore. I remember sitting in the darkness and thinking the world would be better off without me. I wanted to die. That's not a metaphor. That's not I was just really upset. I mean, I reached the very edge of ending my own life because shame convinced me I was already unforgivable. So what was the point of staying? By God's grace and mercy, I'm still here. But I won't pretend what came next was quick. My life fell into complete chaos after that. Relationships broken. Trust was gone. And it took me 15 years. Not 15 days, not 15 months. 15 years of walking it out before I found real, full restoration. That's why this subject sits so heavy on me. I'm not teaching you theory. I'm teaching you what I wish someone had grabbed me by the shoulders and told me before my bill ever came due. Shame will tell you that you're the exception, that your specific sin is too much, that the light will only destroy you. I believed that lie for 15 years, and it was a lie. The weight that almost killed me wasn't the sin. It was carrying it alone. You have a choice the seminary professor didn't feel like he had. You also have something the young dad on that list didn't start out with. Men who will keep asking the hard questions and refuse to walk away, even when you lie to their face the first few times. You cannot wait for the bill to come due on its own terms. A hack, a phone left unlocked. A wife who finally asks the right question? Or you can walk into light on your own two feet, on your own terms, with someone standing next to you instead of a headline standing over you. The second option is slower, it's humbler, it costs your pride instead of your life. It is always, always the better trade. Here's what I need you to hear before we close. There is always hope. Just because you can't see it right now doesn't mean it isn't there. I'm not going to promise you this gets easy. It doesn't. You're going to have to walk through some real pain to get to the other side of this. You're going to have to face the things about yourself you'd rather keep buried, but that part's not optional. But your story is not over. It only feels like the final chapter because you're still in the middle of it. It's only the beginning. If you let God write what comes next instead of writing your own ending in the dark. Twenty years ago, my whole world fell apart. If you had told me back then that I'd be sitting here doing a podcast and that I had written two books. That I spend my week meeting other men for coffee and using the worst chapter of my life for God's glory, I would not have believed you. I couldn't see any of this from where I was standing. And that's the point. You don't have to see it either. You just have to take the next step. If anything in this episode hit close to home, I wrote two books that walk through this exact territory in more depth than I can cover in one episode. Exposed is the full story behind what you just heard. The FBI at the my door, the hospitals, the 15 years it took to find restoration. If you want to know if it's possible to survive the worst days of your life and still come out on the other side, That's the book. That's the proof. Are you ready? A short book from men done hiding is the practical follow up for the man who knows he's hiding something right now and doesn't know what to do next. Short chapters, short talk, no shame added on top. Both books are available on Amazon. Start with whichever one meets you where you are today. This week, pick one person, one, and tell them the truth about something you've been hiding. Not the internet, not an anonymous forum, a real person, face to face, or at least voice to voice. Let it be small if it has to be. Just don't let it stay hidden. Let's get coffee. Let me be your brother. Let me walk beside you.