Nick StumboExecutive Director driving healing from sexual brokenness

Identifying Counterfeit Intimacy

18 Jun 2026 · 1 min

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In this brief sermon‑style segment, Nick Stumbo draws an analogy between counterfeiters who master the details of genuine $100 bills and believers who deeply understand true, godly sexuality. He explains that counterfeiters study the authentic bill’s look, feel, and even smell so thoroughly that any fake immediately stands out. Similarly, when Christians cultivate a vivid, experiential vision of authentic spiritual intimacy—its depth, closeness, and spiritual nature—they become able to recognize and reject artificial or counterfeit expressions of intimacy. The core message is that a profound, lived knowledge of genuine, god‑centered intimacy serves as a discerning lens that exposes false or superficial substitutes.

Chapters

And it makes me think of the story of how counterfeiters learn to identify fake dollar bills is they don't go out and study all the fakes. They study the real thing. And they know the genuine $100 bill inside and out, what it feels like, smells like, looks, you know, they know the real thing. And they know the real thing so well that the counterfeits just stand out. It's like, "This isn't real." Mm-hmm. And I think that's what's intended to happen in godly sexuality is that we have such a vision of the real thing, of the deepness, of the closeness. Closeness of the spiritual nature of it, that then the artificial things like, that's a fake, that's a counterfeit. Yeah.