Safeguard Your Mind

In our culture today, it is pretty hard not to see some things that you wish you had not seen. You don’t have to even go out looking for it. You can just be standing in line at the supermarket, and there it is on the cover of the magazine. Or you are driving down the street, and there it is on the billboard. There it is flashing on the video screen. There it is, emblazoned on someone’s T-shirt.

Wickedness is just a mouse click away. Click, click, click, and you open up a Pandora’s Box of perversion. According to an Internet filter review that analyzes and rates Web content filters, revenues of pornography exceed those of all professional football, baseball, and basketball franchises combined. There are 4.2 million porn sites, representing 12 percent of all Web sites in the world. Pornographic search engine requests total 68 million a day.

Jesus said, “You have heard that it was said to those of old, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ But I say to you that whoever looks at a woman to lust for her has already committed adultery with her in his heart” (Matthew 5:27–28). The word that Jesus used for “look” in the original language does not refer to a casual glance, but to the continuous act of looking. In this usage the idea is not that it is incidental or involuntary, but it is an intentional and repeated gazing. Granted, it is worse to commit adultery than to look lustfully at someone. But at the same time, looking lustfully is a violation of this commandment as well.

This is why we need to guard our minds. This is why we need to put safeguards in place. We want to be careful of what we see and what we expose ourselves to.