One year after graduating from Stanford University, Des Moines author Fred Stoeker was sleeping with three different women and essentially engaged to marry two of them. “Suffice to say, I wasn’t leaving girls better off for having known me,” Fred writes in the introduction to his latest book, Hero: Becoming the Man She Desires.

Fred’s story is one of failure and redemption. As he relates in previous books such as Every Man’s Battle and Every Young Man’s Battle, Fred struggled with pornography and sexual sin for the first 27 years of his life. It wasn’t until his son Jasen was born that he straightened things up and made some incredibly important changes.

“Once you look into your son’s eyes, you can’t miss it—you know who you are at that moment,” Fred says. “You can play games, but you can’t dodge it. You look into your son’s eyes, and it’s a reflection of who you are. You know he’s going to be exactly who you are, as well. And if you don’t like who you are—if it doesn’t line up with Christ and you’re a Christian—it’s a rough road.”

It was the realization that the decisions he was making were affecting the destiny of his family that drove Fred into battle with the sexual sin in his life. How? “By stepping up and driving the stake into the ground and saying, ‘I’m going to change what the name Stoeker means. It’s not going to mean pornography, adultery, alcoholism, and divorce. It’s going to mean purity, holiness, truth, Christian. It’s going to mean Christian,’” Fred says. “If you get a vision and an excitement about destiny and what God’s dream for your destiny is, it changes the battle.”

Once he made the decision to change the destiny of his family, Fred’s dream was for each generation to follow. So far, his dream has come true.

His son, Jasen Stoeker—a graduate of Johnston High School, now 25, and co-author of Hero—experienced his first kiss at the altar when he married his wife, Rose. “Personally, Jasen is my hero,” Fred says. “He stepped into my battle with me, and he never flinched. When I saw him having his first kiss, all I could think was, ‘What a hero, what a man.’”

When Fred decided to round out his Every Man series with Hero, a book written to young men about sexuality in the context of women and dating, it was only natural that he would ask Jasen to co-author it.

“Who should write about the battle but the victorious one?” Fred says. “I want to hear from the quarterback of the Superbowl champs, not the ones who were knocked out in the first round. What Jasen brings to the table is a lot of battle experience right in the heat of the battle as a Christian in a public school setting.”Jasen wasn’t too excited at first. “I felt uncomfortable,” Jasen says. “We’re talking about issues that aren’t talked about, issues that are taboo. When anyone Googles my name, that will be the first thing that comes up.”

But Jasen decided he had something that needed to be said, and he believed God was asking him to say it. “People in the Bible did things they didn’t want to do,” Jasen says. “Moses didn’t want to go speak to Pharaoh.”

One way Fred changed the destiny of his family was by sharing stories from his life with his children. When Jasen was entering puberty, he and Fred read Dr. James Dobson’s book, Preparing for Adolescence. Anytime something triggered a memory from Fred’s past, he shared the story with Jasen.

“We were just swapping stories about our lives, and a connection was formed,” Fred says. “Instead of going to their friends when things came up, they came to me. My stories have saved my kids. I wanted them to feel the pain I felt. When I told them my weaknesses, that made them run the other way.”

Fred and Jasen use the same principles in Hero. By sharing stories from their lives, they hope to change young men’s attitudes toward sexual sin and the ability to defeat it. “I hope they’ll be encouraged,” Jasen says. “Even in this day and age, it is possible to obey God.”

And Jasen and Rose proved it. “Despite the fact that people will say it’s ridiculous, it’s not like that at all,” Jason says about his relationship with Rose prior to their marriage. “It was great, and it was pure and innocent, and it was a ton of fun, and it was by God’s standard. God’s standard didn’t ruin anything.”

Fred says he hopes people walk away from the book with a paradigm shift—an understanding that the battle for purity is not an unfair curse.

“It’s not unfair to be single and sexual,” Fred says. “It’s something that gives us the opportunity to fight and to become men in the crucible of battle. We’d like them to see that the decisions they make are long-term. They will affect their relationships with their wives and with their God and even with their children and grandchildren if they don’t put a stop to the sexual sin and get the destiny of their families lined up with Christ.”

Jasen and Fred say that if all Christian men stepped up and did this, then Christ would become beautiful to all people and evangelism would become automatic. Women would be respected like they’ve never been in history. And there would be fewer divorces, teenage pregnancies, and broken hearts.

“If this generation would get a glimpse of this and actually reverse what my generation did with the sexual revolution, you can bring revival to this nation like we’ve never seen,” Fred says. “But the question is, ‘Are you willing?’ Revival and sexual sin are not compatible.”