In the middle of my eighth week at camp, fatigue really started to overtake me. I started to get tired. I started to get dehydrated. I started missing friends and family and the other things of my “normal” life. It was here that I started being bombarded by thoughts that were not pure. And thoughts that if left unattended would have flourished within me and left me a torn down mess of shame, disappointment and disgust. It always happens like that, and is no coincidence my friends. Rather it is a well rehearsed, time tested battle plan that the devil uses against us. This has been an in for him for a long time and there is no reason for it to change. Since that fateful day in Eden, when we are tired, when we are frazzled, when we are frustrated at things not going perfectly or at the nagging of a woman or kids or coworkers, this is when our mental defenses are weakened to absolute bath water strength. It is then that the devil invades our minds and hijacks our thoughts. Our moments of tiredness and complacency are when the devil goes on the all out attack force.
But as C.S. Lewis so masterfully illustrates in “The Screwtape Letters” it is not by putting things into our minds necessarily, it is by keeping things and thoughts out that the devil works his evil plan. By shutting down our defenses and filters to let the inherent evilness of man's mind take over. The devil knows our thoughts and struggles better than we do; just like God. It is merely up to us to filter and restrain our thoughts through prayer, or to release the reigns and let our minds run rampant in an orgy of putrid, fun, disgusting, pleasing, healthy and purely destructive thoughts. What we must remember is that it is what is inside of us that shows on the outside. Like the word says in Mark 7:20-22 “And he said, 'What comes out of a person is what defiles him. For from within, out of the heart of man, come evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, coveting, wickedness, deceit, sensuality, envy, slander, pride, foolishness.'” And also in Matthew 7 and Luke 6 with the good trees producing good fruit and the bad trees producing bad fruit. We must have the innate filter that rids us of the bad so that our fruit will be good, and this filter comes only from God and us surrendering “our lives” to him.
As men our thoughts can be hijacked by thoughts of women; not always or necessarily sexual, but merely women in general. While this is my struggle in particular, other guys struggle with work or status or having more than the next guy or getting ahead or living up to others' expectations and not what God wills them to be or where he wills them to go. Anything and everything, wholesome or dirty, legit or bogus, can be turned and used against us. But for this article's sake I will be dealing with women in our heads because that is where I am attacked and where I have personal gains and loses, scars and trophies in my thoughts, memories, emotions, and heart.
Now am I saying women are evil?? ABSOLUTELY NOT!!! Women are great! I love them! As should all men! They are a true gift from God to us. Next to waking up every morning saved by his grace, women are our greatest blessing that God gives us! That's how God wanted it to be and how he created it to be; first created us and then saw that we needed more than just living on this earth, we needed a woman! Amen! We should love them, respect them, and cherish them. Women truly exemplify God's beauty, love, care, and compassion. They are our balance. Our opposites through which God's wholeness and magnificence is revealed. Feminine beauty should be appreciated for the sole purpose that it is God's beauty personified! Like a landscape is God's masterpiece painting, a woman is God's masterpiece sculpture. God created woman in her majestic beauty and gave her as a gift and balance for man. That should be honored and respected. But like a vandal breaking into the Louvre and drawing a mustache on Michelangelo's David, woman's beauty has been neglected, defaced, destroyed, and devalued.
God also wants us to enjoy woman's beauty through sex. Hallelujah! God gave us sex, and loves sex, and wants us to have sex and love sex too! Yes Lord! (If you ever doubted that God loves you, that should be the selling point that has you totally convinced that he in fact does.) It is a bond between a man and a woman that should be cherished, respected, loved, and honored. It is the combination of the two imperfect and unbalanced beings we have made of ourselves into the creation of the perfect and balanced being which God had originally planned from the beginning.
I speak to this not only because it is my personal struggle, but also because our society is just writing sex and the woman off as a no big deal. We put so much effort and importance into presents and getting stuff and the best cars and the biggest houses and the newest phones; into awards and rewards and gifts, yet we completely throw down and stomp on two of the most beautiful gifts and rewards ever given to us. Talk about pissing in our own Cheerios... We sabotage everything that the Lord gives us. We can't just appreciate that what he has made is all good and perfect already, we have to try and “fix it” or enhance it or keep it modern. And what ends up happening is that we end up destroying it. Burning our map and not knowing how to get to where God wanted us to be. Whatever happened to the old saying “If it ain't broke, don't fix it”??
Now is this completely our fault? No. The devil takes good, perfect, awesome things and completely uses them against us and against God. But as a man, you already know this. It's been like that your entire life. But neither is this an excuse for us, our actions, and our absolute disregard for God's will and his perfect creation and gifts.
But what does the Bible have to say about this issue?
Remind you, we are not talking about physical sins, or necessarily sin at all. I am talking about the thoughts. That split … second where something comes to mind, out of nowhere; you were just floating along the river of life and … WHAMMY!!! a tree branch hits you in the face. You have to make a choice: fight it with God or picture, process, and act on that thought. If you are faithful in your prayer walk and continuously in prayer as we are urged to do in I Thessalonians 5, this will not even be a conscious decision because God will already be there holding the line against all of the devil's onslaughts.
But alas, we are human and we are men. Our minds get put on hibernate as if they were this computer that I am typing on. And that is when our firewall is turned off and we get a Trojan horse virus from the devil. These thoughts are not something that our own minds create, but rather are a carrot that the devil uses to get our thoughts to turn to whatever our struggle is, thus sinning.
My hope is not to convey the false mindset that “thinking about/envisioning is not sinning” because it most certainly is. Jesus himself clearly states that even though we may never sleep with another woman or physically commit adultery against our wives, our mere lustful thoughts count as adultery. Check it out! Matthew 5:27-30. It's there. In the red print.
I have found that once we get started on the downward slope, it is a slippery and dangerous and seemingly impossible journey back up. We are like sharks, one drop of that lust-blood and we are all-in for the entire school of fish. And we never can get enough. One drop just leaves us wanting more and more and MORE!!! This struggle and dangerous dance on the cliff's ledge is why Paul urges us in Philippians 4:8 to continuously fix our thoughts on good things. With our thoughts occupied by good and Godly things they cannot be hijacked by the devil. The more of God's presence in your heart and thoughts means the less room for the devil to pry his way in with his perverse carrots.
We are in a constant battle, and to not be prepared for such or to deny that is complete foolishness! Listen to what Paul preaches to us in Galatians 5:16-25:
“But I say, walk by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh. For the desires of the flesh are against the Spirit, and the desires of the Spirit are against the flesh, for these are opposed to each other, to keep you from doing the things you want to do. But if you are led by the Spirit, you are not under the law. Now the works of the flesh are evident: sexual immorality, impurity, sensuality, idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, fits of anger, rivalries, dissensions, divisions, envy, drunkenness, orgies, and things like these. I warn you, as I warned you before, that those who do such things will not inherit the kingdom of God. But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control; against such things there is no law. And those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires.”
The flesh and spirit are clearly battling and we, our hearts and minds, are the battle grounds! And it's clear that it is not just with lustful thoughts that our spirit is attacked but in a multitude of facets, wherever the devil can finagle his way into our insecurities and weaknesses. The key to keeping the upper hand in the battle is being led by the spirit. With the spirit leading us and being ever present in guiding our thoughts the flesh, the devil's plans of action are crucified, are killed, are dead. Something that is dead cannot grow, cannot propagate, and thus cannot have a hold on or hijack our thoughts.
In conclusion, when we are tired is when the chinks in our armor showing their vulnerability the most. It is these times when we are tired that we should be ever present in turning on our minds, not turning them off. It is when our thoughts and brain lapse that these spontaneous thoughts are weaseled in. But why is that? It is because we have not occupied our thoughts with things that are good and pure. Does this mean that we are occupying our minds with trash? Not necessarily. It may mean that our thoughts are not occupied at all in many cases, and there lies the opening that the devil needs to get our mind off of the spirit. If nothing is occupying the space then there is an opportunity for something to move into occupying it. Is it going to be the flesh or is it going to be the spirit? Like the old saying says, the best offense is a good defense. Go ahead and fill that void in your life and thoughts with the spirit, with prayer. By doing so you prevent the devil from being able to infect that space and grow his disease, and allow a garden for the fruit of the spirit to prosper.
