Matthew 5:29 (NKJV)
“If your right eye causes you to sin, pluck it out and cast it from you; for it is more profitable for you that one of your members perish, than for your whole body to be cast into hell.”
It was said of old that adultery was when an unmarried person slept with another person, not his or her spouse, but Jesus shone His light of truth on a deeper practice of carnality and sensuality through visual adultery and lustful gazing. Though the eye is a critical organ in the body, the eye, in this case, was the reason why the entire body may be liable to judgment. So in the mind of Jesus, irrespective of how critical an aspect of your life is, if it consistently leads you to sin against God then that aspect of your life must be let go. Because of the stark reality of hell, Jesus commands that we be brutal and radical in dealing with anything around us and in us that could be the reason we miss eternity. Brutality with no measure of sympathy, is Jesus’ recommendation on how to deal with any aspect of our lives that’s seeking to lead us away from the truth.
And this I must practice. Against the cries of my body to maintain the status quo, I need to fight away and brutally disconnect my life from anything that serves as a risk of entering the fires of hell. Don’t accept lame excuses why we must maintain the old. Once there is a clear understanding that a particular thing is abhorrent to God and a trap for my spiritual journey, such a thing must be brutally excavated and evacuated with uttermost speed and without sympathy. This is the mindset that will prevail in this cantankerous generation of deception and false ease.
“O Father, despite the pain of the abstinence, help me to abstain from those loves and passions that so easily trip me up and lead me in the direction I don’t want to go. This I pray with all my heart, in Jesus name.”
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