After nearly three decades of helping individuals and couples, and based on a continual study of the Bible, I’ve reached this conclusion: To be spiritually mature, you must be sexually mature; to be sexually mature, you must be spiritually mature. That in brief is the message of my new book Undefiled and the essence of sexual redemption.

We all probably know at least one person who has been unfaithful to their spouse, or their spouse has been unfaithful to them. Still, it is hard to get a handle on how many married people have been unfaithful, given the inherent secrecy. Many of the statistics about infidelity floating around the internet are dubious. Some say that as many as 50% of wives and 70% of husbands have cheated on their spouse. The following are statistics I found online:

• 22 percent of married men have strayed at least once during their married lives.
• 14 percent of married women have had affairs at least once during their married lives.
• Younger people are more likely candidates; in fact, younger women are as likely as younger men to be unfaithful.
• 70 percent of married women and 54 percent of married men did not know of their spouses’ extramarital activity.
• 90 percent of Americans believe adultery is morally wrong.
• Up to 37% of men and 22% of women admit to having affairs.
• Recent studies reveal that 45-55% of married women and 50-60% of married men engage in extramarital sex at some time or another during their relationship.
• About 60 percent of men and 40 percent of women will have an affair at some point in some marriage.

Statistics are disturbing to read but can be held at arm’s length until they become personal. When a couple becomes part of the statistics and is battling the horror of adultery in their marriage, it is very, very personal and the agony is real. Through the study of scripture and counseling hundreds couples struggling to survive unfaithfulness, I’m convinced that adultery is preventable. I recently taught a seminar for pastors at the Moody Bible Institutes’s Pastor’s Conference: “Keeping Your Marriage Bed Undefiled.” Click the following link to purchase and download this seminar. My book that deals with this subject from a biblical foundation, Undefiled: Redemption from Sexual Sin, Restoration for Broken Relationships, is available with a pre-order discount on amazon.com.

Pastor Joseph Garlington, Senior Pastor, Covenant Church of Pittsburgh
says this about Undefiled:

“The often quoted saying, ‘When the student is ready, the teacher will appear.’ holds true in this recent work of Dr. Harry Schaumburg. The Church of Jesus Christ is thoroughly enmeshed in one moral crisis after the other, and we have been in desperate need for a truly biblical answer to this crisis. Several thousand years ago, someone said, “…Increased years should teach wisdom.” It is evident that Dr. Schaumburg’s years of experience and his commitment to a thoroughly biblical approach to dealing with this issue has produced a work that shines with penetrating light into the one of the darkest areas of 21st century Christian life. I commend this work as a handbook for study in every church, as a resource to every pastor who has or will face this matter in their ministry and as a diagnostic tool for personal evaluation of one’s own life and walk. No pastor’s library should be without this wonderful tool. If Undefiled is taken seriously, it could produce a sea change in Christian behavior.”