Have you ever been in a conversation with a couple of people and you’re telling them of some happening in your life that is completely proper and one person hears it for what it is and the other hears it and because of their coarse thoughts twists your innocent words into innuendo and double entendre, which they mention to your embarrassment, leaving you dumbfounded, aghast at the very thought, and tripping over your tongue to be sure to proclaim that you meant no such thing?
Maybe at times we, ourselves, have allowed our “sense of humour” to become impure, coarse, and defiled; thinking we can simply laugh it off with “I was just joking” (please consider Proverbs 26:18-19). When we allow ourselves to behave like that, to think and speak like that we exemplify what is written in Titus 1:16 “They profess to know God, but in works they deny Him, being abominable, disobedient, and disqualified for every good work.”
When we allow impurities to dwell in our hearts/minds because we find them “naughty” (a.k.a. “a guilty pleasure”) we are allowing a form of childish rebellion take hold in our minds, we think that “no one will ever know, so it’s okay,” as though you are keeping a secret from the people around you, but Matthew 12:33-37 declares that what you think in your heart will come out, the bad fruit we are developing will become obvious because the longer we harbor impure thoughts the more comfortable we become with them and the more natural it will be for us to let them come out in our speech.
Can you understand then, the difficulty you would have in trying to teach someone the Truth and tell them of the need to submit to Jesus and His commands, if you have spent much of your previous conversations with them laughing about impure things and twisting words into innuendo? You have disqualified yourself from every good work and God saved us from our sins and created us in Christ Jesus for good works, which He prepared beforehand so that we may continue in them (Ephesians 2:1-10)!
Let’s be brutally honest with ourselves. Let’s look carefully at our hearts and take note of where our minds go when we listen. Take the time to truly scrutinize what you watch, what you listen to, what you read. If you find yourself guilty of impurity confess your shortcoming to God (1 John 1:9)! Do all you can to cleanse your life of every evil influence and fill your mind instead with God’s pure and holy word each and every day, so that our words will be pleasant in their purity and we can do the good that God created us to do!!
Much needed thoughts for everyone. Thanks, Catharine!
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