158. Is This Thought a Sin? 

Oftentimes I find that my Christian clients are concerned that they’re doing something with the wrong intentions or the wrong motives, that they’re intentionally trying to harm people in some way or hurt people’s feelings or take advantage of them. When that’s not actually what their true internal desire is.

And how do we know what our true intents and desires are? Sometimes it may be pretty clear to us. But sometimes it may not be, and we may be questioning, am I doing something for the right motives? 

Hello, and welcome to Christian Faith and OCD with Carrie Bock. I’m a Christ follower, wife and mother, licensed professional counselor who helps Christians struggling with OCD get to a deeper level of healing. When I couldn’t find resources for my clients with OCD, God called me to bring this podcast to you. With practical tools for developing greater peace. We’re here to bust through the shame and stigma surrounding struggling with OCD as a Christian, sharing hopeful stories of healing and helping you replace uncertainty with faith. I’m here to help you let go of the past and future to walk in the present abundant life God has for you.

So let’s dive right into today’s episode.  I wanted to take an episode and try to answer a question I think that so many of you are facing with. Is this thought that I’m experiencing a sin? Oftentimes we know that Christians who are struggling with OCD will often seek out help for their obsessions from a pastor or a small group leader.

Some type of spiritual mentor or advisor first before seeking professional help because they see these thoughts as a spiritual problem. Maybe you’ve been in church a while and you’ve heard verses like Philippians 4, 8. Whatever is true, whatever is noble, right, pure, lovely, whatever is admirable. Think about these things.

That’s a rough paraphrase. So you’re thinking, how do I do that? When I have these awful thoughts that pop into my head about sexually abusing children, violent thoughts, harming others, harming myself, blasphemous thoughts, maybe you’re struggling with homosexual thoughts that you would say, I would never act on that thought.

Regardless of the type of thought that you may be struggling with, one thing I know that I want you to know is that God already understands this issue even more than you do. God knows your heart and your mind, and He knows your true intentions and desires. When Philippians 4. 8, it’s telling us to be intentional about our thoughts.

Obsessions are not things that you are intentionally thinking about. They pop into your mind when you don’t want them to, and they’re what we call egotistonic thoughts, meaning They’re not in line with who you see yourself as and the things that you value. If we view a thought as bad, especially coming from a church teaching concept, a lot of times we will try one of two things.

We will try either thought suppression.  Or, we will try thought replacement. Neither of these actually work, but let’s look at them individually. Thought suppression is when we say, Oh, can’t think about that. Don’t think about that. Don’t want to think about that. Push that down. Push that down. Almost like you’re trying to shove a beach ball underneath the water, and then it just pops back up when you don’t want it to.

There’s a concept called thought thought fusion that captures this pretty well. It’s where When we’re thinking about, what if I have that thought? I recognize that may be very metacognitive for some of you and not quite make sense. How this shows up in practicality for people typically is, let’s say I have intrusions about hitting a pedestrian with my car.

Is that I may get in my car and then go, Oh no, what if I’m driving to work? And what if I have that thought? And then because now we’ve opened up that door or I may say something like, Oh, I’m about to drive to work and I don’t want to have that thought. And I want to try to suppress that thought and put it down.

Instead of acknowledging, like, these are thoughts that sometimes I struggle with when I’m driving in the car and getting to this place of acceptance, that’s an issue for you in your life. Just being able to acknowledge that something is there, as hard as that is, and as much as you don’t want it, That can really be the first step towards healing.

Psychology will tell you that thought suppression doesn’t work. They’ve actually done studies on this where they’ve asked people, Hey, don’t think of a white bear, I believe was the study, and then they come back and they ask people, how often did you think about the white bear, versus having a control group where they were just told, think about whatever you’re going to think about, and then they came back and asked them, how much did you think about a white bear?

Well, I didn’t think about that at all, because no one had kind of planted that in there, right? So we know that thought suppression does not work in us being able to not think about certain things. You probably know from personal experience that doesn’t work as well. Don’t feel bad if you’ve tried that, though, because many people do as a way to control their thoughts.

The next thing that we try to do to control our thoughts is thought replacement. Now this is a favorite for the church, and I actually call it kind of a Christianized CBT approach, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. What the church does is it says, okay, if you’re having a certain thought, like a sexual thought, I want you to go find a verse that talks about your body’s a temple of the Holy Spirit, or I want you to find a verse on flee from sexual immorality.

The verse about temptation, and every time that particular thought comes up, that you repeat that verse. The problem is that in OCD, this becomes a compulsion. It may provide some temporary relief, but that compulsion is actually reinforcing the obsessive compulsive cycle, so you just get caught in that loop over and over again.

You feel slightly better, But then the thought comes back and so then you feel like you’ve got to do something about the thought. Another way this shows up oftentimes for Christians is either compulsive praying, I’m praying that God will get rid of that thought or take it away, or I’m rebuking that thought in the name of Jesus.

So I’ve seen both of those come up for people quite a bit depending on their spiritual backgrounds. Okay, Carrie, so I have these unwanted thoughts, and suppressing them isn’t working, and replacing them isn’t working, praying them away isn’t working. What in the world do I do? We’re going to get to that a little later.

Because you actually showed up for, is this thought a sin or not? And let me tell you, when it is not a time to determine whether or not a thought is a sin, it’s not a good time to determine that when you are in this OCD bubble, is what we call it, where you’ve gotten sucked into an OCD story, and now you’re looping in obsessions and compulsions, and you’re having a really hard time.

Thinking clearly and seeing your way out of that. That’s not a good time to evaluate your thought process or evaluate the content of your heart. James 1 14 15 says, But each person is tempted when he is lured and enticed by his own desire. Then desire, when it has conceived, gives birth to sin, and sin, when it is fully grown, brings forth death.

So let’s look at this process of sinning. First there’s a desire, then there’s a sin, and then if we don’t deal with our sin, it brings spiritual death. One of the things that I really like about inference based cognitive behavioral therapy, or ICBT, Is that it really encourages people to tune into what we call internal sense data, which is your true intentions and desires.

So if I asked you today, do you have a desire to travel across the country? Some of you might say, yes, that’s so exciting, I really want to do that. And then others of you are going to feel something inside like, no, I really just like being at home and I want to be in my cozy pajamas and watch a movie on TV, sipping my hot chocolate.

I’m good. I don’t really like to travel or I don’t want to go too far. OCD is going to cause you to question what you actually desire spiritually. Oftentimes, I find that my Christian clients are concerned that they’re doing something with the wrong intentions or the wrong motives, that they’re intentionally trying to Harm people in some way or hurt people’s feelings or take advantage of them when that’s not actually what their true internal desire is.

And how do we know what our true intents and desires are? Sometimes it may be pretty clear to us, but sometimes it may not be. And we may be questioning, am I doing something for the right motives? I will give you an example from my own life, way back in  2015, for those of you who aren’t familiar with my story.

My first husband left, he did not want any part of the marital home, and I had to make a decision about whether or not to try and stay in the house, or try to sell it. I was really praying through this process, and obviously it’s a big decision to make when you’re already emotionally a mess. But I was concerned that I was trying to hold on to this house for reasons of greed or monetary gain.

And through the process of prayer and being in touch with the Holy Spirit, it took a process of several days and weighing out all of the options. God really showed me that the reason I wanted to stay in my house was because I felt safe there. And it was in a good neighborhood, and so perhaps, I’m not sure, and I know God would have taken care of me either way, had I sold the house, I think that I might have ended up living in an apartment complex or somewhere else where I didn’t feel as safe as being able to stay in my home.

This led to me pursuing getting roommates in order to be able to pay the mortgage and stay there, but my point of the whole story of telling you that is that as you pray about decisions or as you are concerned about eradicating certain sins from your life, the Holy Spirit is able to reveal to you the desires of your heart and the things that are not in line with God’s will for you.

We can really trust and rest that the Holy Spirit is there to keep us on course and on track. Doesn’t mean that we aren’t ever going to get off track. We do have sin in our lives that’s going to come up. It’s the Holy Spirit’s job to search our heart and to convict us of that sin. When we look at the progression in James 1.

14 and 15, We see that sin is not an instantaneous situation. We look at situations, for example, where someone decides to have an affair on their spouse, and we think, oh wow, that was sudden, that just seemed to come out of nowhere. Well, from the process of these verses, that’s not the case at all. We come to a point of decision, but even before we come to that point of decision, there’s a desire.

So there’s a heart condition first, and then a behavior. That leads me to believe that intrusive thoughts in themselves do not have enough time to give birth to sin. If we say, oh, I’m having this thought, and I don’t want to have this thought, it’s just popping into my mind. All kinds of people have intrusive thoughts.

The problem is that when Christians have these thoughts that go so against their values, They then try to make some type of meaning about it, that somehow my desires are evil because I’m having these types of thoughts pop into my head, or I’m not a good Christian, or I don’t love God because I’m struggling with intrusive thoughts.

That’s not the case. OCD is a mental health condition that affects your brain. It’s not a spiritual problem. I talk with so many people who have trouble grasping this, but it really helps reduce shame. And it really helps you seek the proper type of treatment so that you’re not continuing to suppress thoughts and replace thoughts.

Here’s a verse that some of my clients get really stuck on. I wanted to talk with you about it a little bit. Matthew 5, 28. But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed to lust. adultery with her in his heart. Specifically for people who struggle with sexual intrusions, this can be a very challenging verse because they feel like, well, I must be committing adultery because I’m having these sexual intrusions in my brain.

If you look at the entire context of this passage, Jesus is calling out the Pharisees in the Sermon on the Mount. He’s saying, look, you guys are doing all these outward, quote, religious type activities. You’re tithing, not just you’re tithing your money, but now you’re tithing, like, your spices. But your hearts are corrupt.

You don’t care about people. You’re not loving the poor. You’re looking down and judging other people. Doesn’t matter how good you look on the outside if the inside is corrupt. If you interpret Matthew 5. 28 into that larger context. It goes back to what we were just talking about earlier, about intentions, the heart, trusting the Holy Spirit for conviction.

This verse is not about us working to control our internal experience that’s happening. We submit ourselves to the Holy Spirit who works within us, both to will and to work for His good pleasure. Philippians 2. 13. There’s probably much that could be said on this topic, but I want you to know that if you are struggling with these types of intrusive thoughts, You’ve tried suppressing them, you’ve tried replacing them with scripture, you’ve tried praying them away.

I want you to know that there is help and hope. I would love to tell you more about inference based cognitive behavioral therapy and how that might be helpful for you, especially if you’re dealing with a lot of mental compulsions. It helps you to learn how the obsession is irrelevant. All the tricks and cheats of OCD, the thinking errors that are involved, the over reliance on possibility, and really targets you recognizing the irrelevance of the obsession so that you can move forward and not buy into the OCD lies and story.

Stay tuned as over the next couple months we’re going to be talking about the individual themes of OCD, how they show up. I’ll be flying solo again on some of the episodes, but I also have some guests that I’m trying to arrange and bring along that I’m really excited about. Until next time, may you be comforted by God’s great love for you.

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Christian Faith and OCD is a production of By the Well Counseling. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be a substitute for seeking mental health treatment in your area.