Official Blog For Author Fred Stoeker

I am currently in Iraq on a year deployment as an Army Captain and am going home any day now.  I read three of the Every Man’s series which really opened my eyes…Every Man’s Battle, Every Man’s Marriage and Every Man’s Challenge.  I have been married for nine years and thought I was a dedicated husband but now realized I did not do anything to bring oneness to the marriage.  My faith is the strongest it has been in my life and is going to continue to grow when I am home.  My major improvement was bouncing my eyes with women and cleaning out my mind.  I still have a few slip ups if a woman bend over in front of me, but I will keep striving for perfection.  I am very happy with my progress here though it was difficult sometimes due to being away from my wife for one year.  I am looking forward to reuniting and starting what I call a new, enriched relationship with her, and being the husband she deserves.  These books really put everything in perspective, and I want to thank you.

Here is a testimony from across the ocean, from a little country called Holland. My name is Bret and I have some great things to tell you. As a 16-year-old guy I have struggled with masturbation for quite a while now. The first time it happened I felt quite bad about it and I knew it was bad, and the idea that God saw me do it made me feel guilty. By now, the problem has gone on for years, and more recently I began to fight the problem, because I know that God wants us to live holy lives. Trouble is I thought that I could probably live purely for a time, but deep down, I thought that I could never possibly do it without masturbation. So, in the past few years, sometimes I would do it a few times a day and sometimes not for months. The longest time I went without it was 14 weeks. I also found I had the wrong motive for purity. I know that freedom from sin is all grace, but I’m a bit of a perfectionist and somehow I wanted God to be proud of me and to stand as a good Christian in His eyes. That sounds very good in one sense, but it was a wrong motive for me because the only goal in purity for me was to be able to say to God, “Look how good I am that I haven’t done it for so long.” When I found out that my motives were wrong, I felt even more ashamed. But at least that knowledge allowed me to change course from trying to be “the perfect Christian” to living “Christ in me, the hope of glory.”

About that time, Every Young Man’s Battle was released in Dutch. When I read it, I was so blessed by it. I want to thank you so much for all the honestly and encouragement in the book, which I found really helpful. About halfway through, I came to the part about Job and it really blew my mind! I never really understood that not masturbating was normal and that you could simply live without it. From the day that I read the book two months ago, I haven’t slipped up, and I’m so thankful for that. But the best part came next.

As I was reading Every Young Man’s Battle, I sensed God saying to me, “I want you to buy the book for a few guys at school.” So I thought, “Okay that’s cool.” But then on the day when I finished reading it, I sensed God say, “Give it to Karl.” I had a test that day at school, so I thought, “Okay let’s do it,” but it felt a little bit weird. Nonetheless, I gave it to him, and he really appreciated the gesture, but that was it, or so I thought. He came up to me the next day at school and said, “Hey, I really have to tell you something! The day before you gave the book, I prayed to God and told Him that I really wanted to stop masturbating, but I asked Him if He would give me a sign that I should go ahead and fight it. The very next day, you gave me this book! How cool is that?”
I was blown away by that, and it is so amazing to see God working in our lives together in this battle. I also gave the book to some other very good friends who also struggle with the problem, and it was also a huge blessing for them. One of them is a volunteer for a Christian youth organization in Holland, and he recommended the book to them and they were excited about it. They want to use it as a tool for their organization in the future, so that’s even better!

There is even more. A few weeks ago, I got an email out of the blue from an old school mate whom I hadn’t seen for years, and he asked me if I could talk with him about God. So I went to see him, and it turned out that God was showing him that if he would continue to live that way he’d been living, that he would lose sight of God. So we talked about two hours and he dedicated his life to Jesus again, and he is now beginning reading the Bible again. Every week I go see him to encourage him and to talk about how it’s going with the Lord. Yesterday we talked together again, and he admitted that though he had a normal week with devotions and Bible reading, he didn’t feel the same intimacy with God that he’d been feeling before. So I asked him if there was anything in his life that could stand between him and God. The same week I had a lot of struggle with purity and felt the same distance he was talking about, so I told him about the masturbation thing, and he admitted that this was a problem for him. He thought God was not working with him anymore, but actually God had allowed my friend to feel that distance so that God could point his heart towards this issue of sexual sin and purity. I shared with him the things you shared in your book, and in the end he understood it all clearly, and he was thrilled that God was still working and that He had even used this bad thing to turn his heart back to good! So we had a great talk and at the end of the evening, I went home to get the book for him, and he is going to read it. I know it’s going to help him a lot, just like it did for me. It is so cool to see how God is working in his life like this.
These are just a few things that I wanted to share with you. I want to thank you so much for the book you guys wrote, and for all the encouragement and truth that is in it. It is extremely awesome the way God has used it in my life and the lives of my friends! Your own story was very heavy, but again, God has used that for good so that He can bless thousands of people around the world with your story and the insights God has given you about the subject of sexual purity.

God bless you!

Bret, The Netherlands.