Integrity report: Explaining the concept of “mind-lies”, also thoughts on racism, sexual purity

TL; DR:  Do not allow unholy or impure thoughts to grow in your mind. Rather, you need to brutally excise them with the power of God and the Holy Spirit and God’s word the Bible.
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Do you ever find yourself telling (yourself) a mind-lie? Yesterday, I caught myself telling (myself) a huge mind-lie, and I had to go before God and ask for His forgiveness.
A mind-lie is yet another concept that I have made up, and basically it means this: mentally rehearsing a lie in advance.

You know, pragmatically speaking, we cannot always be transparent and completely open with people. Sometimes something is none of their business. I think the difference between “lying” and being discreet is this:  the pretending. So if someone asks something that is not their business, or you don’t want to discuss it, you could say “I don’t want to discuss that”.

So recently, something happened, and it was quite significant, and it could have been very big. The question was how to deal with it. If I said something and dealt with it the “proper” way, I was worried that I could have been penalised (even though other people would not have been penalised but rather praised for taking exactly the same actions. That is sometimes a big aspect of these considerations – sheer injustice at work).
But by saying nothing and trying to act as if nothing had happened, then that could have resulted in even bigger ramifications.
A few thoughts quickly flashed through my head: “Perhaps I’ll say…” (eg lie outright) but I quickly shut those down. No! That is not who I am, or who I want to be!
But then another, seemingly more innocent thought flashed through my head: “OK you know what, I won’t lie – but I won’t say anything!” And I uneasily accepted it, and went ahead and decided to do nothing. And thankfully, none of my fears materialised, and I was able to breathe a big sigh of relief.

However, I realised later on that in that context even my silence would have constituted a lie, so by rehearsing this over in my mind, and accepting it, I had essentially told myself, or endorsed for myself, a big mind-lie.

This thought really struck me over the head. You know, mind-lies are something I struggle with. I strive to be honest at all times. Beyond subtle fudges here and there I can tell you the last outright lie that I told that I remember clearly – it was in 2018, the “lack of deodorant” incident at work which I have recently written about here. I felt awful, and all the more so because it was completely unforced. I could very easily have told the truth.
But the point about mind-lies is this: it can be too easy to rehearse a lie to get out of trouble, (which tends to be the one reason why I lie.)
What that means though is that even though what I eventually say will be true, my mind will still be full of dishonesty.

To be fair, before this recent incident, it has been a while since I have been at risk of getting into trouble. But still, the fact that my mind still thinks this way – oh my goodness!
So you know what?  I have had to catch myself again, and resolve once again, to cultivate radical, but gracious honesty, from my mind outwards. To not even let myself reflect on or think up diplomatic untruths for the sake of getting out of trouble, or for any other reasons. Obviously, the point of thinking up these things in the first place is for the sake of honing them to be as credible as possible.

This is also the kind of incident that makes me realise that I really need to invest more time with God. I also need to practise telling the truth, insisting on a completely pure mind from the inside to spoken words. You know, it occurs to me as I am typing this, that there might be something to be said for first practising radical candour….and then learning to add a layer of gentleness on top of that.  But as for the getting out of trouble thing – it can just be so instinctive.

Where my own personal safety is at stake, perhaps from someone else, then there are lies that I do not beat myself up for telling. However they are still lies, and to me they still feel like an expression of faithlessness, or lack of trust in God.

So this is something that I need to work on. And this also illustrates my need of active ongoing intimacy with God.  And as it is with me, I am sure that it is the same with other people too. No matter how committed I am to God, no matter how sincere I am in it all, my faith needs consistent time, because the truth is that I have a sinful nature that is as real as anyone else’s, and if left unchecked it will grow, like anyone else’s, and it will assert itself. A “mind-lie” might not seem all that big a deal, but it genuinely is a huge deal. If I allow myself to get into the habit of telling mind-lies, then it is such a small step to move from that to telling actual lies out loud. (NO! The whole point of this post is to accept that mind-lies ARE actual lies, just unverbalised.  It is the very act of planning deceit that constitutes a lie.)
I believe that this is why the Bible tells us that we should love the Lord our God with all our heart and soul, because so much sin starts in our hearts, but as humans we constantly make the mistake of thinking that our sin is not real until we actually speak it out or act on it. I have considered this a lot in the context of racism. People think that they can allow themselves to cultivate all the racist thoughts that they wish, as long as they don’t actually verbalise those thoughts. They take it for granted that they will be able to stop themselves from saying out their thoughts. However, the problem is that sometimes those thoughts come out in split seconds, before you have time to control them, or stop them, and then people can lose their jobs and reputations because of what they said in one unthinking moment.

Whatever the kind of sinful thought, once we allow these thoughts to take root in our hearts then we have already sinned against God. If we allow these thoughts to habitually take root in our hearts then we are living in habitual sin, and furthermore it will only ever be a small step between the thoughts and the actions.

Another big area regarding this is the realm of sexual sin. I have spoken about my own struggles with erotica. This is why I am so adamant that these thoughts must be broken in my mind. Because I know that if I allowed myself to cultivate them, to allow them to fester in my mind, to nurture them and water them, then one day, possibly sooner rather than later, they will inevitably manifest themselves in actual physical actions, with potentially life-changing consequences. I simply cannot afford that level of mistake in my life.
Furthermore, when men, typically, are found to have committed sexual harassment, I know that it will be because they allowed themselves to cultivate dangerous thoughts in their mind, but thought that it would be OK, they thought that they were in control of their thoughts – until one day their thoughts predictably overpowered them and they…went ahead to do something  stupid.  And the thing is that it is utterly predictable that their thoughts would one day overpower them.  I’m sure that every single person who has ever done something regrettable like this initially assumed that they were in control. And yet so many people are consistently found and proven to have acted like this that this demonstrates that as humans we are not nearly in as much control of ourselves as we like to think

If you are reading this, please trust me, you need God as much as I do! Sometimes as Christians it is embarrassing to admit, even to God, the kind of thoughts that occur to us, and the kind of thoughts that we allow ourselves to cultivate in our mind. And yet if we cry out to God, He can deliver us from these things. I know that for me, a key to overcoming my own struggles is this:

1. Praying that God would truly grant me a deep heart for Him, to live for HIm, His truth, His righteousness – everything. Philippians 2v13: “for it is God who works in you both to will and to do for His good pleasure.”
I have to admit that this is something I have taken for granted in recent years. But when my mind-lies and/or erotica flares up like this, then I have to remember that my commitment to God is not an inherent part of me, but is rather a gracious gift from God Himself.

2. Reading the Bible.  Reading the Bible has such power over my life – really. Whenever I read the Bible I can feel the Spirit of God working in my heart, to grant me a joy in God, an appreciation of how amazing and awesome He is.  Reading the Bible for a protracted length of time actually changes the way I think but in a positive way.

My issue with reading the BIble of late, as with almost everything else, has been time. However when I do find the time or make the time to really immerse myself in the Word of God, it is so powerful.

There is another blog post that I had been meaning to write even before the “mind-lie” inducing incident that I have written about here.
However, I have so challenged myself with this post that before all else I am going to take my Bible and immerse myself in it!  And also pray for God’s empowerment to want to live for Him.
Actually, no, what I am going to do first is sleep, because a wave of crazy tiredness just washed over me.
Then when I am feeling a little better rested then I am going to read my Bible and pray!