What The Bible Says About Lustful And Nasty Thoughts
What The Bible Says About Lustful And Nasty Thoughts |
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If you're suffering from a religious form of OCD where you have disturbing thoughts intruding into your mind of a sexual nature or worries over blasphemous thoughts, you might benefit from reading our self-help article instead: Conquering Distressing Abhorrent OCD Thoughts.
Psalm 139 (TEV)
1 Lord, you have examined me and you know me.
2 You know everything I do;
from far away you understand all my thoughts.
3 You see me, whether I am working or resting;
you know all my actions.
4 Even before I speak, you already know what I will say.
5 You are all around me on every side; you protect me with your power.
Psalm 139 (NLT)
23 Search me, O God, and know my heart;
test me and know my thoughts.
24 Point out anything in me that offends you,
and lead me along the path of everlasting life.
Matthew chapter 5 (NLT)
27 "You have heard that the law of Moses says, 'Do not commit adultery.' 28 But I say, anyone who even looks at a woman with lust in his eye has already committed adultery with her in his heart.
Mark chapter 7 (NIV)
21 For from within, out of men's hearts, come evil thoughts,
Proverbs chapter 15 (TEV)
11 Not even the world of the dead can keep the Lord from knowing what is there; how then can we hide our thoughts from God?
Romans chapter 8 (NLT)
3 The law of Moses could not save us, because of our sinful nature. But God put into effect a different plan to save us. He sent his own Son in a human body like ours, except that ours are sinful. God destroyed sin's control over us by giving his Son as a sacrifice for our sins. 4 He did this so that the requirement of the law would be fully accomplished for us who no longer follow our sinful nature but instead follow the Spirit.
5 Those who are dominated by the sinful nature think about sinful things, but those who are controlled by the Holy Spirit think about things that please the Spirit. 6 If your sinful nature controls your mind, there is death. But if the Holy Spirit controls your mind, there is life and peace. 7 For the sinful nature is always hostile to God. It never did obey God's laws, and it never will. 8 That's why those who are still under the control of their sinful nature can never please God.
9 But you are not controlled by your sinful nature. You are controlled by the Spirit if you have the Spirit of God living in you. (And remember that those who do not have the Spirit of Christ living in them are not Christians at all.)
10 Since Christ lives within you, even though your body will die because of sin, your spirit is alive because you have been made right with God. 11 The Spirit of God, who raised Jesus from the dead, lives in you. And just as he raised Christ from the dead, he will give life to your mortal body by this same Spirit living within you.
12 So, dear brothers and sisters, you have no obligation whatsoever to do what your sinful nature urges you to do. 13 For if you keep on following it, you will perish. But if through the power of the Holy Spirit you turn from it and its evil deeds, you will live. 14 For all who are led by the Spirit of God are children of God. 15 So you should not be like cowering, fearful slaves. You should behave instead like God's very own children, adopted into his family - calling him "Father, dear Father." 16 For his Holy Spirit speaks to us deep in our hearts and tells us that we are God's children.
17 And since we are his children, we will share his treasures - for everything God gives to his Son, Christ, is ours, too.
Proverbs chapter 4 (TEV)
23 Be careful how you think; your life is shaped by your thoughts.
24 Never say anything that isn't true. Have nothing to do with lies and misleading words.
Proverbs chapter 21 (TEV)
2 You may think that everything you do is right, but remember that the Lord judges your motives.
Proverbs chapter 30 (TEV)
12 There are people who think they are pure when they are as filthy as they can be.
13 There are people who think they are so good-oh, how good they think they are!
Proverbs chapter 16 (TEV)
30 Watch out for people who grin and wink at you; they have thought of something evil.
Philippians chapter 4 (Living Bible)
8 Fix your thoughts on what is true and good and right. Think about things that are pure and lovely, and dwell on the fine, good things in others. Think about all you can praise God for and be glad about.
Isaiah chapter 65 (NIV)
2 All day long I have held out my hands to an obstinate people, who walk in ways not good, pursuing their own imaginations-- 3 a people who continually provoke me to my very face, ... 7 ... says the LORD.
Jeremiah chapter 17 (NLT)
9 "The human heart is most deceitful and desperately wicked. Who really knows how bad it is? 10 But I know! I, the LORD, search all hearts and examine secret motives.
Luke chapter 17 (NLT)
1 One day Jesus said to his disciples, "There will always be temptations to sin, but how terrible it will be for the person who does the tempting. 2 It would be better to be thrown into the sea with a large millstone tied around the neck than to face the punishment in store for harming one of these little ones.
James chapter 1 (TEV)
13 If we are tempted … we must not say, "This temptation comes from God." For God cannot be tempted by evil, and he himself tempts no one. 14 But we are tempted when we are drawn away and trapped by our own evil desires. 15 Then our evil desires conceive and give birth to sin; and sin, when it is full-grown, gives birth to death.
To demonstrate how thoughts can lead to actions, and thus, one reason why they should be considered sinful, here are two excerpts from articles. The first is from a story about what appeared to be an occult experience inflicted on a woman by a man, the woman taking action which was very unkind after a while to try to rid herself of the problem: (The article is linked to Here.)
"I resorted to doing something that was probably far more drastic than necessary to make him leave me alone, and to try to make him think about what he was doing. Although I'm a Christian, I regrettably discovered a few of my weaknesses and resorted to some sinful behaviour in the process. I sent him a long letter, most of which responded to the many criticisms of Christians he often made, the thinking partly being that if he became less antagonistic towards Christians, he might be more open to becoming one, and if he did, he wouldn't want to do scary things to people anymore. I did also genuinely want him to become a Christian. I was concerned about him. … The sinful part involved me thinking up some weird theories about why he was the way he was, some of which were reasonable, but some of which were extreme. I let my imagination run away with me. I found some of them rather amusing for reasons I can't remember now, but they probably upset him. …
I'd actually been entertaining myself with very mildly racist thoughts about the man for some time. ... I'd enjoyed trying to imagine what he would do if I provoked him by telling him the jokes I'd made up, because he got very scathing even about trivial comments he didn't like. I'd thought my thoughts were just a piece of harmless fun, particularly since I'd never mentioned them to anyone else. But they weren't godly thoughts. They were disrespectful.
I found him fascinating sometimes, but I'd actually begun to think of him some of the time as an object of entertainment and curiosity, because some things about him were so unusual. But I discovered that that's dangerous, because thinking of someone as an object makes it easier to do horrible things to them, because you're less concerned about how what you do will make them feel, because of course objects don't have feelings.
I was so amused by my thoughts at the time that I didn't stop to think about whether I should have been having them. But when the time came when I wanted to fend off the man, having been thinking them already, it was easy to embellish the thoughts and make them nastier. If I had stopped myself from thinking the ungodly thoughts much earlier, it's very doubtful that it would have suddenly occurred to me to begin thinking nastier versions of them when I was under stress. Therefore, my attack on him wouldn't have been so bad.
This realisation was mirrored a few months later when someone who helped me sort out the occult problem turned up and read me parts of some Christian books, some of which were about the occult and some of which were about other things. One was about a Christian thought life. I can't remember who the author was or what the title was, but it said that a pastor the author counselled had had an affair with a woman that eventually ended his career. The affair had started after she'd come to him for counselling and he was sexually attracted to her, and she'd enticed him to begin a relationship with her, and he couldn't resist the temptation. Apparently, the reason he'd been so quick to fall into it was because he'd been having sexual thoughts about women and so his mind was on that track to begin with. If he'd had a history of stopping himself from having lustful thoughts whenever they came into his head, obeying the Bible, which says that thinking about extramarital sex is as sinful as doing it, it would have been less likely that he'd have been so quick to fall into temptation, because his mind wouldn't have been focused on such things.
Worse than this, it's known that sex offenders feed their compulsions to offend through their thought life. From an article about current treatment programmes for sex offenders. Multi Agency Work With Sex Offenders in Northern Ireland:
"Sexual offending is now viewed by workers in the field as a form of compulsive and obsessional behaviour. It involves:
Sex offending is now viewed as a cyclical process with offenders targeting their victims, de-personalising them through fantasy and distorted thinking, sometimes even rehearsing part of the offence and building up to the offence itself. This "cycle of abuse" is not fully worked through by all offenders, in all cases, but the model provides a useful framework within which sex offending can be understood and interpreted. A programme of work can then be developed to try and reduce the probability of offending in the future.
... There is a lot of evidence that sex offenders consciously work on developing inappropriate arousal and fantasy patterns over prolonged periods of time as a way of overcoming their inhibitions to carry out their sexual offences. Sexual arousal is learned behaviour and is controllable. More suitable outlets for sexual expression can be developed."
It's been said that when a murderer claims in court that they just snapped temporarily and lost control, that is actually very unlikely to be true. They will probably have been fantasising about murdering the person for some time, and then one day under provocation - even if the provocation is only a minor irritation while they're feeling angry about something else, they actually do it. They may have thought of their fantasy as a mere safety valve before, but it does make them far more likely to commit the act they've been fantasizing about when they're under temptation than they would have done if they'd never fantasised about it.
Someone once emailed me saying he had a pornography addiction. He was ashamed of it and would often clear his hard drive of pornographic images; but no matter how bad he sometimes felt about having looked at them, within days, he was searching the Internet for pornography again, looking for worse and worse things, which worried him afterwards, but at the time it gave him pleasure. He wanted help. He was worried that sooner or later he would start wanting to do the things portrayed in the pornography he looked at to people, and that he would merely think of women as objects. I suggested that he re-focus his mind on other things. He said he was a Christian, so I suggested that in the times when he would normally search for porn, one thing he could do would be to go to websites where he could read Christian testimonies instead. (There are testimonies linked to on this site on the main Bible pages.) I advised that one thing he should try to re-focus his mind on was other people and their needs, and on trying to help them. I said he could do this partly by going to websites where there are lists of prayer requests, where he could pray for others instead of looking for porn. (There are links to websites where you can pray for others on Bible Part 1.) I advised that he should remember the prayer requests, so that when his mind was unoccupied, he could pray for the people with problems. I said that filling his mind with something useful might well stop it from going back to dwell on unhealthy thoughts at those times. I also suggested he focus his mind on the Bible, and specifically on his favourite verses. I recommended him to read some about the compassion of Jesus, such as you might find written about in the selections of Bible quotations about Jesus linked to in Bible Part 1.) I gave him links to websites where he could get further help with recovering from addiction. (There's a website where people can get help with addiction to pornography called Pure Intimacy: A resource for Those Struggling with Online Pornography and Affairs.)
When he got my email, he said that it was as if it brought him to his senses, and he lost the desire to look at pornography for the most part after that.
Ephesians chapter 5 (NLT)
3 Let there be no sexual immorality, impurity, or greed among you. Such sins have no place among God's people. 4 Obscene stories, foolish talk, and coarse jokes - these are not for you. Instead, let there be thankfulness to God.
Galatians chapter 6 (NLT)
1 Dear brothers and sisters, if another Christian is overcome by some sin, you who are godly should gently and humbly help that person back onto the right path. And be careful not to fall into the same temptation yourself.
1 Corinthians chapter 10 (NLT)
12 If you think you are standing strong, be careful, for you, too, may fall into the same sin.
1 Corinthians chapter 10 (TEV)
13 Every test that you have experienced is the kind that normally comes to people. But God keeps his promise, and he will not allow you to be tested beyond your power to remain firm; at the time you are put to the test, he will give you the strength to endure it, and so provide you with a way out.
Hebrews chapter 4 (TEV)
13 There is nothing that can be hid from God; everything in all creation is exposed and lies open before his eyes. And it is to him that we must all give an account of ourselves. 14 Let us, then, hold firmly to the faith we profess. For we have a great High Priest who has gone into the very presence of God - Jesus, the Son of God. 15 Our High Priest is not one who cannot feel sympathy for our weaknesses. On the contrary, we have a High Priest who was tempted in every way that we are, but did not sin. 16 Let us have confidence, then, and approach God's throne, where there is grace. There we will receive mercy and find grace to help us just when we need it.
1 Peter chapter 1 (TEV)
13 ... have your minds ready for action. Keep alert and set your hope completely on the blessing which will be given you when Jesus Christ is revealed. 14 Be obedient to God, and do not allow your lives to be shaped by those desires you had when you were still ignorant. 15 Instead, be holy in all that you do, just as God who called you is holy. 16 The scripture says, "Be holy because I am holy."
Colossians chapter 3 (NLT)
1 Since you have been raised to new life with Christ, set your sights on the realities of heaven, where Christ sits at God's right hand in the place of honor and power. 2 Let heaven fill your thoughts. Do not think only about things down here on earth. 3 For you died when Christ died, and your real life is hidden with Christ in God. 4 And when Christ, who is your real life, is revealed to the whole world, you will share in all his glory.
I heard a sermon by the inventor of the Alpha course, Nicky Gumble, who said he recalled a man who had been to a strip club several years before, and after that had developed an on-going lustful attitude towards people. His attitude to his wife changed and they lost the intimacy in their marriage. Part of him began to want desperately to be cleansed by God from his constant lustful thoughts, but another part of him didn't want to let them go, because he enjoyed them so much. But one day, it occurred to him that God was offering something so much more enjoyable and precious than his lustful thoughts that it would be worth letting them go. When he did, his relationship with his wife improved and he began to see it as a precious thing and her as a valuable person again, which made it much more fulfilling for him.
Another reason unholy thoughts are considered sinful is that they disappoint God's ideal of purity which all Christians should aspire to, with the help of God's Holy Spirit, and which it is said Christians will achieve in heaven, a state in which we will live for eternity.
1 Thessalonians chapter 5 (TEV)
23 May the God who gives us peace make you holy in every way and keep your whole being-spirit, soul, and body-free from every fault at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.
Ephesians chapter 1 (TEV)
4 Even before the world was made, God had already chosen us to be his through our union with Christ, so that we would be holy and without fault before him.
Colossians chapter 1 (TEV)
21 At one time you were far away from God and were his enemies because of the evil things you did and thought. 22 But now, by means of the physical death of his Son, God has made you his friends, in order to bring you, holy, pure, and faultless, into his presence. 23 You must, of course, continue faithful on a firm and sure foundation, and must not allow yourselves to be shaken from the hope you gained when you heard the gospel.
Ephesians chapter 5 (NLT)
25 You husbands must love your wives with the same love Christ showed the church. He gave up his life for her 26 to make her holy and clean, washed by baptism and God's word. 27 He did this to present her to himself as a glorious church without a spot or wrinkle or any other blemish. Instead, she will be holy and without fault.
1 Corinthians chapter 1 (TEV)
6 The message about Christ has become so firmly established in you 7 that you have not failed to receive a single blessing, as you wait for our Lord Jesus Christ to be revealed. 8 He will also keep you firm to the end, so that you will be faultless on the Day of our Lord Jesus Christ.
1 Thessalonians chapter 3 (TEV)
12 May the Lord make your love for one another and for all people grow more and more and become as great as our love for you. 13 In this way he will strengthen you, and you will be perfect and holy in the presence of our God and Father when our Lord Jesus comes with all who belong to him.
Hebrews chapter 12 (TEV)
18 You have not come, as the people of Israel came, to what you can feel, to Mount Sinai with its blazing fire, the darkness and the gloom, the storm, 19 the blast of a trumpet, and the sound of a voice. When the people heard the voice, they begged not to hear another word, 20 because they could not bear the order which said, "If even an animal touches the mountain, it must be stoned to death." 21 The sight was so terrifying that Moses said, "I am trembling and afraid!" 22 Instead, you have come to Mount Zion and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, with its thousands of angels. 23 You have come to the joyful gathering of God's first-born, whose names are written in heaven. You have come to God, who is the judge of all people, and to the spirits of good people made perfect. 24 You have come to Jesus, who arranged the new covenant.
1 Peter chapter 1 (TEV)
2 You were chosen according to the purpose of God the Father and were made a holy people by his Spirit, to obey Jesus Christ and be purified by his blood.
2 Corinthians chapter 7 (TEV)
1 So let us purify ourselves from everything that makes body or soul unclean, and let us be completely holy by living in awe of God.
Romans chapter 12 (TEV)
1 So then, my friends, because of God's great mercy to us I appeal to you: Offer yourselves as a living sacrifice to God, dedicated to his service and pleasing to him. This is the true worship that you should offer.
2 Do not conform yourselves to the standards of this world, but let God transform you inwardly by a complete change of your mind. Then you will be able to know the will of God-what is good and is pleasing to him and is perfect. 3 And because of God's gracious gift to me I say to every one of you: Do not think of yourself more highly than you should. Instead, be modest in your thinking, and judge yourself according to the amount of faith that God has given you.
Isaiah chapter 55 (NLT)
6 Seek the LORD while you can find him. Call on him now while he is near. 7 Let the people turn from their wicked deeds. Let them banish from their minds the very thought of doing wrong! Let them turn to the LORD that he may have mercy on them. Yes, turn to our God, for he will abundantly pardon.
8 "My thoughts are completely different from yours," says the LORD. "And my ways are far beyond anything you could imagine. 9 For just as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts higher than your thoughts.
The main pages on this site:
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Bible Part 1: The Bible, The Holy Spirit Today, People And Their Stories (Bible topics include the story of Jesus, sex and marriage, violence, anger and jealousy, whether Christians should get drunk, gossip and tell dirty jokes, and some of the reasons why Christians suffer. There are also articles to help with various problem behaviours like alcoholism and anger management.) |
| Bible Part 2: The Lives and Suffering of the Ancient Israelites, hell, The Book of Revelation, And People's Religious Experiences Today | |
| Bible Part 3: The Bible, Articles About Alleged Inaccuracies in it, And Stories of People who Became Christians (Bible topics include love and caring, the appropriate Christian attitude to personal wealth, prejudice, and false Christian teaching.) | |
| Or go directly to the next in the series: Bible Quotes About Why It's Wrong To Get Drunk. | |
The selections of Bible quotations have been put together by Diana Holbourn.
Throughout this series, wherever the initials TEV appear, they stand for Today's English Version (The Good News Bible).
Other initials:Are you up to trying the challenges of the New Testament's moral guidelines, and would you like to know more of what it says about the love of Jesus? Here are some links to Bible quotes about the beautiful ideals the New Testament encourages Christians to try to live up to:
Fancy some light relief or laughter therapy? Then go to the first of our jokes pages:
If you have a problem affecting your mental health or well-being, like depression, a difficulty with life-damaging worry, panic attacks, phobias or OCD, marriage problems, an addiction, an eating disorder, recovering from the trauma of sexual abuse or domestic violence, coping with bullies in the workplace, or bullying and teasing at school, trying to lose weight, raising difficult teenagers, wanting to recover from anorexia or self-harm, or grieving for someone you were close to or feeling lonely, and you'd like some ideas on getting past it, visit our Self-help series.
If this is the first page you have visited on this site, this is part of Broadcaster.org.uk, a website about social and psychological issues, what the Bible says about social problems and other topics, and how they affect people's lives today.
Go to the Broadcaster.org.uk home page to find out more.....