Blood and Guts: Plucking out your eyeballs

We decided to run with a creepy halloween thing as we talk about personal development for men this month. Blood and Guts may sound creepy – but let’s turn it around and talk about the offal and innards from a completely different perspective.

I tell people frequently that this isn’t a Christian blog. I’m a Christian though – and I find deep meaning in the teachings of Jesus. I never want anyone to think I’m forcing religion on them, but I do want people to think about the truths that are in the Bible – because no matter what you believe about it – there really is great truth in those pages.

One of these truths involves plucking out eyeballs.

 Matthew 18: 7Woe to the world because of the things that cause people to stumble! Such things must come, but woe to the person through whom they come! 8If your hand or your foot causes you to stumble, cut it off and throw it away. It is better for you to enter life maimed or crippled than to have two hands or two feet and be thrown into eternal fire. 9And if your eye causes you to stumble, gouge it out and throw it away. It is better for you to enter life with one eye than to have two eyes and be thrown into the fire of hell.

The truth here is this… if we are committed to be better men – there are things we must stop doing. Mindsets we must change, behaviours we must modify.

Some of those things are easy to stop- others take extreme action.  If you want to stop a behaviour, you need to do whatever it takes to stop it.

Most people that want to quit drinking, for example, aren’t willing to pour all the booze in the house down the drain, aren’t willing to stop hanging out in social situations with drinking, and aren’t willing to get checked in and get professional help. So they often don’t stop drinking.

Most people that want to stop looking at porn aren’t willing to change the way they use their computers, to install accountability software, to talk to their wife about it, or to sell their smartphone and get a flip phone.

Most people who need to lose weight aren’t willing to stop eating pizza everyday, to put in countless hours of exercise, and to make drastic lifestyle changes.

If we want to defeat our bad behaviour – we have to take extreme and drastic changes… the “plucking of the eyeballs” or the “cutting off of the hand.”