“Your eye is the lamp of your body. When your eye is healthy, your whole body is full of light, but when it is bad, your body is full of darkness. Therefore be careful lest the light in you be darkness.” –Luke 11:34-35

We need to watch ourselves. Jesus is simply stating a spiritual law here. The stuff that comes into you from the outside, the stuff you see, affects your insides. All too often we think we are unaffected. We think it is fine to watch the movie, because we would never do any of the things in it ourselves. The question is never, “what can I do and still be Christian?” The question is always, “how can I become more like Christ?”

I’m sick of standing on the edge of a cliff. I definitely don’t want to fall down, back to the valley where I was. I don’t want to stop being a Christian, because then I would feel guilty, but I want to get as close as I can. This is a sad state for infant Christians, and I see it everywhere. I hear far too many discussions about how many hours of video games a Christian can play rather than how radical we can be for Jesus Christ. I mention this because I know that in what I am about to say someone out there will accuse me of legalism.

Back to the verse. As Christians we often struggle with internal sin. We wrestle with ourselves and the ugly parts of our thoughts. Lust, anger, bitterness, depression, laziness. We often feel totally out of control, like there is nothing we can do to keep the ugliness of sin out of our minds. Jesus tells us here that this is not the case. The darkness in us comes from somewhere. There is obviously sin all around us in the world and we casually drink it in.

This is one area where I feel the modern day American church has fallen woefully short. We live lives which are identical to the pagan world, but we are told to stop short of actually sinning. That is a bit like letting an alcoholic go to a bar and order a shot of bourbon but then telling him not to drink it. Paul exhorts us to be in the world but not of it. We are to be aliens in this world, left here as Christ’s ambassadors. If that is the case, why do we allow ourselves the same inputs as the world?

That was a bit abstract. I was riding in my car one sunny afternoon last week, and I realized that the pop songs I was listening to on the radio had filled my head with ideas of money and romance. The captivating images displayed in J. Crew and Dillards at the mall made me crave trendy clothes and an opulent lifestyle. I watch CSI and I am surprised to find myself thinking about murders and sexual scandals.

None of these actions were wrong.  I’m not trying to condemn anything in particular or set up some law by which we should live. I have simply noticed that Christians are surprised when they have sin-soaked thoughts running around in their head, and they wonder how they got in there. Perhaps we should be a little more zealous at eliminating the sources of the problems.  Perhaps we should take Christ’s advice seriously and guard the lamp of our bodies.