Be Careful Little Eyes

My eyesight is extremely important to me.

Everyone in my family wears classes or needs to wear glasses.  My parents, my brother, my aunts and uncles, my cousins and my grandparents all wear glasses.  Somehow I got the recessive gene because I have 20/15 vision.  As such, I am the only person in my entire family that does not require glasses or contact lenses.

I value my eyesight.  I get nervous when an object or a finger gets too close to my eyes.  I don't want to compromise my eyesight because I know what a hassle glasses can be.

So when Jesus says in Matthew 5:29-30 that if your eye causes you to sin you should gouge it out, it causes me to pause.  My eye has caused me to sin many times.  The thing I hold dear sometimes ensnares me in sin.  Should I gouge out my eyes?

Of course Jesus doesn't mean that scripture literally.  He also doesn't mean we should cut off our hands.  What he does tell us is that nothing should be more precious than our relationship with him.  If something in our lives tempts us to sin, it's better to get rid of it than to continue in sin. 

He's asking this question:  What's more important to you - Jesus or something that causes you to sin?

We have to note that Jesus is the middle of the Sermon on the Mount and in particular is dealing with sexual sin.  He just finished up about adultery and he's about to speak on divorce.  We know he's talking about sexual temptation.

So when he talks about our eyes leading us to sin, you must encase that in a discussion about sexual temptation.  Our eyes let us down in that area quite a lot.  What we see often leads to sexual sins, such as lust.  We really must be careful what we view.

For me, I've had to purge my DVD collection of movies with intense sex scenes or nudity.  I try to be careful what I view online.  I don't want my eyes to tempt me.

Yet, it goes beyond that.  One of the fastest growing fiction genres is classified as "Chick Fic" and is commonly referred to as "Mommy Porn."  The literature features intense and sometimes graphic sex scenes inside romantic novels.  Instead of images (which tend to tempt men), it focuses on emotions and words (which tend to tempt women).  One of the best sellers, 50 Shades of Gray, started this phenomenon.  The advent of E-readers helped the book soar in sales, because people can no longer tell what you read when there is no book cover to see.

In other words, we can hide our reading habits just as easily as the images we seek.  If you eye causes you to sin, gouge it.  Jesus' words don't sound so bad when we consider the amount of images, literature, movies and magazines that can cause us to sin.

Jesus' advice would be to cast it away.  What do you need to cast away?