A couple of years ago, I gave a devotional at BYU called "Loving God with All Thy Mind." And toward the end of that talk, I reminded the audience that "Jacob would have known the commandment ‘Thou shalt love the Lord thy God.’" from Deuteronomy 6:5. President Kimball once talked about the false gods we worship and how we can create things that we care about that crowd out our love for God. Wealth can be one of them, and sexual immorality can be another. President Kimball talked very bluntly about how idolatry takes us away from our ability to love God. If it is a commandment to love God, then it is certainly possible to break that commandment. So I proposed, in my devotional, that we should think about ways that we break it, so we can stop doing so.
Here is an excerpt from that talk,
Beware: Satan is the father of lies. And he’s a good liar. Take the lie of pornography. Satan tells us we will find satisfaction by staring at pornography. This is simply a lie. Can we love God with all our mind if even part of our mind is filled with this pollution? When I came to BYU in the sixties, we were just beginning to worry about environmental pollution. Previous generations had foolishly believed that the oceans could absorb an endless amount of garbage and waste. We learned that pollution doesn’t just go away.
I wonder if people aren’t just as naïve today. They foolishly think that the human mind can absorb an endless amount of filth and violence and that somehow we can just push a delete key in our brain and erase all that. You have been blessed with an amazing brain, with incredible retentive powers. Whether or not you can recall that information during a test, it’s all still there. Old folks often find that their brains retain things they haven’t thought of for decades. Mental pollution sticks; there are no teflon brains. Just as it is true that "whatever principle of intelligence we attain unto in this life, it will rise with us in the resurrection" (D&C 130:18), so, too, whatever degree of unrepented smut or cynicism we attain unto, it will rise with us as well.
Now I would hope that recognizing the amazing storage capacity of the brain may help us be careful about what we put into it. The things we choose to participate in and witness will be written deep into our countenances. I think that is what Jacob is saying when he tells them about the "awful consequences" of "fornication and lasciviousness" (v. 12). And he pleads with the people not to go down that path, which he warns will transform them into "angels of the devil" (v. 11). That is ultimately where all sin leads.
Book of Mormon Central, "What Does It Mean to Love God with ‘All Thy Mind’? (Moroni 10:32)," KnoWhy 517 (May 23, 2019).