Thoughts come into my head that horrify me, violent or blasphemous things I would never choose. I am scared of what it means about me. Is something wrong with my soul?

“Lord, all my desire is before thee; and my groaning is not hid from thee.”

This is one of the penitential psalms, written by someone physically ill and socially abandoned, and it is unusually raw about the inner life. The line is not a boast about transparency but a kind of relief: all my desire is before you, my groaning is not hidden. Nothing in David's interior world is news to God. Whatever appears unbidden in your mind has already been seen, and it has not driven him off.

“Casting down imaginations, and every high thing that exalteth itself against the knowledge of God, and bringing into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ;”

Paul uses military language here, describing thoughts as a fortified position to be taken rather than a moral verdict to be accepted. The assumption is that unwanted thoughts arrive and that the work is what you do with them next. That framing matters enormously: a thought that shows up uninvited is traffic, not identity. What you set your will toward, not what intrudes on you, is where responsibility actually lives.