July 15
“because the mind set on the flesh is hostile toward God, for it does not subject itself to the law of God, for it is not even able to do so; and those who are in the flesh cannot please God..” (Romans 8:7-8)
One huge problem with the believers today, it seems to me, is that we spend a lot of time saturating our minds with earthly things. At least I will speak for myself here, and perhaps some of you can relate to what I am saying. With today’s media and internet, it is so easy to spend endless hours absorbing everything from news to television to movies to reading for entertainment (both fiction and non-fiction) to surfing the web to music to social media to playing computer games, and the options to entertain ourselves and opportunities to divert our minds from eternal things grow daily, do they not? There is an enormous QUANTITY of materials readily available with the touch of a button to occupy our minds on earthly things.
Ask yourself how much time do you spend inputting biblical truth into your mind? In a given day and week, how many hours, or minutes for some, do you spend consciously trying to place God’s word into your mind, meditating on His truths, and thinking about Him? How much of the time do you obey the numerous commands of scripture to set your minds on the things above, not on the things that are on earth? Now estimate, honestly, since this is between you and God – He sees all, how much time you spend inputting fleshly, temporal things into your mind? What is the ratio of temporal input to spiritual input? I would be willing to bet that for a large percentage of Christians, temporal inputs outweigh spiritual inputs by a large margin, possibly for many it would exceed 10:1, or ten times more temporal input than spiritual.
Now let’s ask the question about the QUALITY of those inputs. The great majority of temporal inputs I believe, I hope, are more or less neutral from a moral standpoint; they are neither immoral nor moral, neither false nor true, they are just facts and information. Or are they? I think there are a lot of messages and programs that on the surface may seem innocuous but in reality are sending messages that are contrary to God’s word. Perhaps a television show portrays immorality as just an accepted fact, or perhaps it is there sort of in the background without specific comment. It may not be explicitly immoral or pornographic, but it is sending a godless message all the same. In addition to this background of what I will term “godless radiation,” there is also an increasing boldness to openly portray immorality and other evil things in a positive light. And we as Christians are willingly and deliberately exposing our minds to these things.
When we really take the time to examine each and every program, book, song, movie, and message we read, watch, or listen to, I think we will find that we are continually absorbing messages that promote unbelief, immorality, godlessness, violence, and other such things that absolutely are hostile to God. I think we would be shocked to know what we as Christians are consuming in terms of both QUALITY and QUANTITY, if we really could see it from God’s perspective.
How can we expect to overcome temptation when we continually expose our minds to this background radiation of godlessness? When we lower our standards of what we put into our minds, continually throughout the day, day after day, this then opens the door wide for exposure to even more directly harmful inputs such as pornography. We cannot be victorious in the Christian life if we do not recognize the constant stream of unprofitable and harmful things we expose our minds to. We have to become aware of this and discipline ourselves to replace fleshly thoughts with spiritual thoughts.