Terry and Rebecca Crews Explain How God Intervened to Save Their Marriage
By Movieguide® Contributor
Terry Crews and his wife Rebecca recalled the time they split because of Terry’s addiction to porn and how God worked to bring them back together, stronger than ever.
Terry had been hiding an addiction to porn for years, always believing that he could quit if he wanted to but never doing anything about it. However, it was causing him to treat his wife in a way that she knew something was up.
Pornography “changes the way you think about people,” he said in a video. “People become objects. People become body parts. They become things to be used, rather than people to be loved.”
“One thing that fuels pornography is your beliefs, and I, being the card carrying, football playing, masculine super guy, I believed I was more valuable than my wife and kids, which puts me in a place where [my] wife and kids are kind of property…” Terry told TBN. “I used to dismiss her. I remember feeling like she doesn’t know what she’s talking about, and she [was] speaking truth, but I could not hear.”
Despite Rebecca confronting him multiple times, Terry continued to push her away and believe everything was all right. That was until God intervened and forced him to share his secret.
“One day [Rebecca] called me up, and she said, ‘Something’s not right, Terry. Tell me what it is.’ And God literally told me…He said, ‘If you don’t come clean with her, I’m done with you. I’m done with you,’” Terry recalled. “And I was like, ‘Wait a minute,’ you know, ‘God, wait.’ He’s like, ‘I’ve had enough. I’ve given you grace. I’ve given you all the time. I’ve let you come back and get a chance to clean it up, and you didn’t. If you don’t do this now, it’s done.’”
Feeling the weight of his sin, Terry confessed the truth to his wife and told her about his pornography addiction. Her response was to throw him out and say they were finished because he had kept this secret from her for over a decade. However, God wasn’t done moving.
Terry decided to seek help to overcome this addiction so he could move on from this habitual sin.
“The most brilliant word the pastor gave me was that [I] need to get better for [me]. And that changed everything because usually he’s like, I want to get my wife back, and it was like, that’s her decision, that’s not my decision,” Terry said. “But I still need to work on me.”
He decided to go into rehab to find professional help to overcome the addiction.
“When my husband sat me down and said… ‘I’m going [to rehab],’ I was shocked,” Rebecca said. “I was shocked because this was somebody who I knew protected his public image tremendously, and there was something about that decision that just made me know, oh my God, he is for real. And I was like, now I’m going to have to forgive him.”
Still, God was present in that time, promising Rebecca that if Terry followed through on his promise to work on himself, she would be able to forgive him and would be proud to stand by his side.
“Once [Terry] made that decision, it was like God gave him credit because then God was on me. He said, ‘Now Rebecca, I told you to throw him out’–God told me to give him the consequence…And within [that] amount of time, I felt the pressure of the Lord to say, ‘Now, gather up the oil and the wine and the work and come and walk alongside [Terry] as he recovers.’ And he said, ‘And if he’s not a better man by X amount of time, then you leave. But if he changes, you’re not going to want to leave.’”
Thankfully, Terry was able to overcome his longstanding addiction and this time in their marriage has become a powerful part of the couple’s testimony. He shares his story because “when you put it out there in the open…it loses its power,” and he wants “to help other people who are going through the same thing.”
Only by God’s grace did the Crews’ marriage survive, and they now use their story to inspire others.
Movieguide® previously reported:
“Success is the warmest place to hide,” Crews explained. “I had so many people that were telling me I was great and there was no problem. Hollywood didn’t care. It still doesn’t care if you lose your family, it happens every day. They’re like, ‘Hey man, now we can put you in three movies!’”
However, his wife Rebecca added that her husband’s addiction took root well before becoming successful in entertainment.
“So fame just made it worse,” Rebecca said. “So it’s really true that power and success amplifies what’s going on inside you. And that is why I couldn’t help him and I’m thankful and I’m lucky that he made the choice to do that.”
As Crews began to address his addiction to pornography, Rebecca noticed a change in other areas of his life.
“Progressively, I saw what I felt was real fruit, real change, real behavioral change in my spouse,” Rebecca said. “It was in the way he stopped reacting angrily to everything. It was in the newfound patients that I saw with me and with his children. Once he healed his own trauma, he was not reflecting and deflecting his pain as anger to the rest of the world.”
