"God was trying to tell me I should refer her to someone else for counseling, but I convinced myself that I could handle it."  This from a minister who left his wife for an affair with a counselee.

We all tell ourselves what we want to hear, but never more so than when we are poised on the edge of an affair.  Jeremiah wrote, "The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it?"  Here is some cold reality that might save someone:

1.  There are few slopes as slippery as sexual and romantic temptation.  Every one of us, in the right circumstances, is capable of falling.  If we play around the edges of temptation, it is not if but when.  Those serious about their vows won't go there.

2.  Most Christians who fall morally do so because they are trying to have it both ways.  The only place you can be married and single at the same time is in a dream world.

3.  You cannot constantly feed on the spirit of our times without setting yourself up to fall.  Soaps and sitcoms laugh at (or glory in) promiscuity and adultery.  You will go where your mind goes.

4.  Philandering becomes addictive.  It only takes one drink to undo the recovering alcoholic.  For the recovering philanderer, one flirtation.

5.  Warning lights flash when you are approaching infidelity.  If you don't heed the early ones you reach a momentum that can't stop.  To stay faithful, you absolutely must burn the bridges that lead to temptation.

6.  God knows you may have unmet needs in your marriage.  But you have the option to look for godly solutions.  The worst advice you can get is from someone bitter from a marital breakup.

7.  Adultery is still adultery.  Don't think, "What we have is so beautiful that it must be from God."

8.  No one thinking rightly would do what the adulterer does to his/her mate, children, and to those depending on him/her as a role model.