7 February 2024 Mark 7:14-23
Every evil act begins as an evil thought. True. Cleansing from evil means first cleansing our thinking. Also true.
But cleansing our thinking isn't as easy as it sounds.
Ask anyone who has ever loved an alcoholic. Ask anyone who has ever cared for a drug abuser. Ask anyone who has ever had an addicted child. The things we put into ourselves can poison our thinking, and deliver us to evil. They don’t have to be the nasty things. They can appear harmless, the kind of thing that doesn’t hurt anyone. But they create misery. Sometimes they kill.
On YouTube now: “Fails of the week” – 13 minutes, 23 seconds. It’s just a few minutes, a little harmless fun. “Ultimate Motorsports Crash Compilation” – 27 minutes, 59 seconds. “Funny Moments of the week” – 12 minutes, 43 seconds. “When Car Chases End Badly” – 7 minutes, 5 seconds. Nothing immoral or wicked about any of these things, and yet suddenly over an hour has gone by. It was 9:30 pm, now it is after 10:30. Time to get some sleep. Tomorrow night, repeat. On the weekend, a little more – don’t have to get up Saturday morning, after all. After a week, what amounts to an entire working day has been lost to videos, junk food for the brain. It was time that could have been devoted to reading, or praying, or conversation with a loved one, thinking, thinking better.
And that’s nothing compared to what is actually going on.
According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Gallup organization, the Pew Research Center, and countless other analysts, American teenagers are spending more than five hours daily playing online, and are reading less and less. That amounts to a half time job every week. More. At the same time, teachers all over America comment daily on how student writing and critical thinking skills are decaying. The CDC publishes data regularly about how dismally unhappy young people are, how depressed they are, how suicidal they are. We know all this, and still the problem gets worse. People, especially young people, are becoming more miserable, and far easier for malign forces to control, and those forces don’t even have to be the really nasty ones. The “harmless fun” can poison our thinking, is poisoning the thinking of the young, and nothing is in the way to stop it.
“Fails of the Week” – 13 minutes, 23 seconds.
It is true that “whatever goes into a person from outside cannot defile.” But that doesn’t mean that the things we allow into ourselves have no power. The things we let in can poison our thinking, and our favorite poison is anesthetics, the things that numb and distract, the things that burn time. The poison distorts our thinking, and bad thinking is what defiles.
“From within the man, from his heart, come evil thoughts.” And every evil deed begins with a poisoned thought. True.
Someone is surely thinking now, “But we need time to waste to decompress, to relax, to enjoy our lives.” True enough. All time cannot be structured time. Earlier generations used unstructured time to read, to pray, to talk with the people nearest by. Isn’t it a sign of our times that reading, prayer and conversation have decreased as our unhappiness has increased? Isn’t a source of our healing, in part, recovery of reading, prayer and conversation?
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn – 33 minutes, 11 seconds. Romans 8 – eleven minutes, 7 seconds. “What’s on your mind, sweetheart?” – 17 minutes, 48 seconds.
Every evil deed begins with an evil thought. True.
Every joyful deed begins with a joyful thought, every loving deed with a loving thought, every honorable deed with an honorable thought, every faithful deed with a faithful thought.
True, too. Feed the right thoughts the right stuff.
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