Your website has helped me tremendously.

Over the past two and half months I’ve been having terribly blasphemous thoughts against other people. It worried me at first. I thought they were my own thoughts and so I got really scared. Then I found your website and I just about broke down after reading some of it. I’m a guy in college, so crying doesn’t come easily. I just want you to realize how much you have helped me to realize I’m normal, that these are not my thoughts, and that many, many other people have suffered just as I have.

It helped a lot, but it all came back to me a week later and I’m not doing so well anymore. I’m getting extreme anxiety over these thoughts. Also, the thoughts have built shame in me and I get embarrassed very easily around people now. It’s like I’ve lost my confidence and feel responsible for these thoughts. What can I do so I don’t blush so easily whenever these topics come up? Also, what can I do to combat the thoughts? They get triggered so easily just by being around other people. Please help me. I feel trapped.

See what happened? After finding freedom, he was slipping back into accepting the thoughts as his own.

This is common. With our every advance we can expect a counterattack in which the devil will try to retake the ground we have gained. We must stubbornly resist the pressure to surrender to his lies, whether it be false condemnation or believing that we are responsible for thoughts we do not want.

In war, the enemy can gain a major tactical advantage by making a show of attacking at one location when it is actually about to launch its main assault at a different location. If one falls for this trick, most of one’s defenses are moved from the area where they are critically needed and focused where they are not so needed.

Don’t waste your resources getting sidetracked into self-examination or fighting thoughts or feelings. No matter how real and scary they seem, they are just cardboard cut-outs. The real battlefront is whether you believe that Jesus died for the sins of the world – believing that through Jesus forgiveness is available for every sin that anyone could ever commit, provided one believes it.

Consider this scenario: A teenager is head of heels in love with the girl of his dreams. Cindy is stunningly beautiful in his eyes. Her spiteful sister, however, is insanely jealous and desperately wants to sabotage the relationship. So she hatches a plan. She keeps dropping hints to Cindy that she is fat and that no boy would ever want her. Cindy begins to panic and does everything she can think of to lose weight but her sister keeps insisting that Cindy is so ugly that any boy showing interest in her would be secretly disgusted with her and merely pretending to like her so that he can boast to others about how he tricked her and then dumped her.

Cindy ends up so focused on losing weight and so convinced that she is ugly that every indication of love from her would-be boyfriend is misinterpreted. She grows so certain that he will dump her that she thinks the only way to protect herself from heartbreak is to keep pushing him away.

That is like the plan the devil has hatched to try to sabotage our relationship with God. He wants us so fixated on trying to fight unwanted blasphemous thoughts and so foolishly convinced that they render us repulsive to God that we misinterpret our Lord’s every expression of love for us. The devil wants us to push God away through being duped into wrongly thinking that ugly thoughts render us unacceptable to the God who is head over heels in love with us – the God who went to the extreme of the cross to forgive our every sin.

Instead of getting to know how loving God really is, we ignore him by becoming so obsessed with ourselves and so focused on our thoughts and feelings that we end up breaking God’s heart by refusing to believe the magnitude of his love for us. We get so distracted by worrying needlessly about insulting God with thoughts we cannot control that we unknowingly fall into the devil’s trap of doing the only thing that truly insults God – not believing in the power of his love and forgiveness.

Unwanted thoughts, no matter how repulsive, are merely pesky flies that refuse to be shooed away. The average person would be annoyed, but would get on with life. People who are obsessed about germs that the flies might carry, however, could become so fearful of a few flies that they lose sight of the big picture and abandon their great potential by daily devoting all their efforts to trying to fight the flies. The real danger is not the germs but letting the fear of germs get so out of control that it keeps them from the important things in life. Likewise, the real danger with uncontrollable blasphemous thoughts is not that they are anti-God but that we become so obsessed with fighting them that we lose sight of how deeply in love with us God is and how much he approves of us because of the magnitude of what Christ achieved by bearing on the cross our every sin. We become so obsessed with trying to shoo thoughts away that we forget the power of the cross and that salvation is freely showered upon all who simply accept it by faith.

What makes most attacks so spiritually dangerous is that they tempt people to focus on themselves instead of keeping their eyes on their Savior. It is like Peter walking on the water. It was a little scary for Peter but it went fine until he took his eyes off Christ and onto the waves. It was then that fear took over and he began to sink. Nevertheless, Jesus was right there and kept him safe. No matter what scary distractions the devil throws at you, keep your focus on Jesus. What matters is not how inadequate you are but how adequate Christ is.

People with an overactive conscience will keep feeling guilty and people trying to help them typically expect to be able to remove those feelings by rational argument, but rational argument simply won’t help. It’s like a person who is afraid of harmless spiders. No amount of rational argument that the spiders are harmless will reduce the person’s fear. Every Christian who is plagued by guilt feelings despite believing in Christ and longing to be free from sin, needs to realize that guilt feelings will remain, and simply choose not to be dominated by those feelings, even though the feelings are unpleasant and upsetting.

The real reason for Christians being harassed by blasphemous thoughts is the same reason why forgiven Christians feel condemned. It is a satanic attempt to distract us from the real issue: we are saved by simple faith in Christ, not by works. Unwanted thoughts are simply a form of temptation, and all Christians are tempted. The temptation, however, is not an attempt to get us to think wrong thoughts. Neither God nor the devil cares about the thoughts he puts in our head. The devil’s goal is to get us to doubt the reality of the forgiveness and divine approval that we have in Christ.