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Put filters on your windows (Matthew 6:22-23) January 24, 2016

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Today’s Bible reading plan:

Read it in a year – Romans 7-8

see the whole year’s plan [here](http://www.bible-reading.com/bible-plan.pdf)

Today’s Devotional

Matthew 6:22-23
Jesus: The eye is the lamp of the body. You draw light into your body through your eyes, and light shines out to the world through your eyes. So if your eye is well and shows you what is true, then your whole body will be filled with light. But if your eye is clouded or evil, then your body will be filled with evil and dark clouds. And the darkness that takes over the body of a child of God who has gone astray—that is the deepest, darkest darkness there is.

What do Jesus’ words mean for us today?

Educators spend lots of time and research figuring out what how people learn. They talk about kinetic learners, auditory learners, visual learners, and so forth, but the truth is we are all more visual learners than we think. Jesus understood that when He said, “The eye is the lamp of the body.” Unless you have some visual impairment, more than 75% of your learning comes as a result of what you see, researchers tell us. Even for the most gifted auditory and kinetic learners.

It’s easy to understand the truth of this reasoning when you think about it. We live in a visual world. Our brain takes in everything around us through our vision. It’s true we have five physical senses, but the one we use the most is by far linked to what we see. The window of our eyes brings more information into our brain than all the other senses combined. The millions of rods and cones on the back of our eyeball gathers signals light signals from the time we wake until the time we fall asleep and pour that information into the most miraculous computer every conceived, our brain.

Our eyes take in everything around us without us even thinking about it. We see things we don’t even notice, but they somehow find their way into our brain. Advertisers learned about subliminal messages that can be buried into pictures and flashed into screens so quickly they don’t register in our conscious mind, but over time twist our subconscious to make us bend toward a certain product or elicit a particular mood. All because we see something for a split second.

So these two windows we have that impact us so heavily, these two eyes that sit in the front of our face, how do we protect what goes into them to shield the mind from short-circuiting and self-destructing from evil? Jeremiah says our thoughts are continually evil, but can we get away from that by stopping the evil input and training our minds with good? How do we do that in today’s culture?

I think about what changes we allow in our culture and the degradation that evil brings as we let our eyes continue to remain open to anything and everything. Just look at the change in television since it began in the 1950’s. As a kid, I remember watching “Leave It to Beaver,” “The Donna Reed Show,” “The Dick Van Dyke Show,” and “Gunsmoke.” “Gunsmoke” was the violent show of the time. That was the television show that had some killing and gore. No show depicted sleeping around or pre-marital sexual experimentation. Drugs weren’t a topic in any scene. Cigarette smoking was the big vice. Beaver learned lying was bad because every time he did, bad things happened. Main characters were good to others and helped their neighbors.

Today, it’s hard to find any program, any program without a gay couple in it. Lying, cheating, getting the best of others to gain the upper hand and come out on top for yourself, these are the themes today. Reality shows. Come on, there’s nothing real about the reality shows. It’s television, scripted, edited, made to entertain and make money for the producers and sponsors. The boob tube now has so few wholesome shows on it, it would probably do us all good to not just turn them off, but throw them out and save the space and electricity they consume in our home.

The same is true with most of our movies, books, magazines. The culture today floods us with things that will try to turn us away from what is good. And I really get concerned about Jesus’ last words in this part of His discourse. Listen again. He said, “And the darkness that takes over the body of a child of God who has gone astray—that is the deepest, darkest darkness there is.”

I know what darkness is. I dropped my light spelunking once in a cave in Tennessee and it went out when if fell. It took me about five minutes to find it in the dark. It seemed like five hours. The dark in a cave deep under the earth makes you appreciate light. I could not see. Period. The black nothingness closed around me like a glove, even though I knew the walls of the cavern were forty feet away. My breath quicken and started to come in short gasps as I felt around me on the dark cavern floor. I longed for even the tiniest bit of light, but there was none. I think about that day when I read this verse. As a child of God, I do not want to go astray.

How do we stay on track? Watch what comes into the windows of your body, your mind, your soul. Filter the things you can filter. I know the culture will expose you to things you cannot help but see. Billboards are everywhere and we cannot avoid them. Magazine covers hit you in the face at checkout lines. But we do not have to keep our eyes glued to those things. We don’t have to dwell on what the world puts in front of us. We have the power to avert our gaze. We can, with God’s help, filter the things that we focus on. We can do what Paul admonishes us to do. “Finally, brothers and sisters, fill your minds with beauty and truth. Meditate on whatever is honorable, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is good, whatever is virtuous and praiseworthy.”

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