What goes on in our ‘thought life’ matters a great deal. The things we think about, the type of thoughts we allow in our ‘headspace’, plus the emotions that accompany those thoughts, will inevitably shape a great deal of life’s outcomes for us…for good or bad.
Murray Smith
Actually, guarding our thoughts ought to be routine for us, just as much as any regimen we undertake for healthy, whole living – watching the food we eat, exercising, cleaning our teeth, getting appropriate sleep and rest, managing stress and so on.
The thing is, nobody sees our thoughts. That means it’s possible to secretly internalise thinking in a way that remains hidden from other people. Without personal discipline, we’re capable in various ways, of drifting into destructive thought patterns within the shady private world of our ‘neck top’.
‘How we think’ is a subject addressed frequently in the Bible. We’re admonished to ‘capture’ early on, any tendency in our hearts and minds to be drawn down wayward paths.
“Whatever is true, whatever is honourable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence and if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.” (Philippians 4:8)
Another Bible verse states emphatically, ‘as a person thinks, so they will be’. (Proverbs 23:7). Right here, is deep and profound truth.
Flat Lay of the Holy Bible and Items on the Desk. Photo: Chris Liu, pexels.com
Years ago living in another location, my nearby neighbours were a young couple renting an upstairs flat. One day I was devastated to learn the husband had been arrested and was before the court on rape charges. Around this time a large cardboard box appeared alongside my letterbox. Curious, I opened it to discover its contents and where it had come from. Invoices and paperwork pertaining to the young man being prosecuted were strewn throughout, but the main bulk of the contents was seriously alarming. Stacks of filthy pornographic magazines lay piled among his other possessions. The correlation could not have been clearer. Court evidence stated that from an elevated vantage point where he lived, he’d spent hours over time, watching his young female victim whilst she exercised in her flat below at night. He said he ‘didn’t know what came over him’ – that he’d been ‘overtaken by a whim’ propelling him to launch his attack.
This young man tragically provided demonstration that ‘as a person thinks, so they will be.’ It’s inevitable that incubating depraved images, nurturing perverted thoughts will gain mastery which at some point in time will find expression. It’s also clear that clouded thinking leads to impulse control problems… garbage in, garbage out.
A published study I saw recently (“Frontiers in Human Neuroscience”), gave insights into how progressive exposure to pornography rewires the brain’s ‘reward and control circuits’, leading to neurological arousal, behavioural changes, and dependency comparable to drug addiction. To quote this article, the doctor wrote, “There’s clear evidence that porn changes the brain. Pornography is not just a private matter, it affects those around us.”
The final word belongs to the Bible, “Don’t copy the behaviour and customs of this world, but let God transform you into a new person by changing the way you think.” (Romans 12:2)
Holy Bible on Stand. Photo: Pixabay
