Tag: media

1Cor 15:33 – Be not deceived: evil communications corrupt good manners.

If you think that listening to, reading, or watching evil communcations has no effect on you, then you are deceived.

Now, don’t go and blame television or the media for your behavior. Don’t blame your gossiping friends or your complaining coworkers for your bad attitudes.

Don’t shift blame and responsiblity for your thoughts and behavior to anyone or anything else.

Now that you know that these things will impact you, you now know you need to take action to minimize that impact.

Even if the evil communications provided the seeds you have a choice in how far they develop.

There is a process in which seeds develop into weeds. They get distributed, planted (exposed but not resisted), germinate (concieve the idea), develop roots (impacts thoughts, overrides your resistance and rationalizes), develop leaves (begins impacting speech and behavior), and finally bear fruit (result in sinful behavior).

The earlier you interrupt this process the better.

First, in the vast majority of cases you have the choice in whether you expose yourself to corrupt seeds. If you are never exposed to it, then you are never tempted by it. The things you see or hear the most will dominate you.

Being that we are in the world, we cannot expect to prevent all exposure. We can still interrupt and reverse the process.

To prevent the seeds from developing into weeds, you must first recognize them as counter to God’s Word. To do this, you must actually know what God has to say about the subject by having spent time in the Word. Once you recognize it as wrong, then remind yourself repeatedly of God’s view on the subject.

Additionally, you must starve out the weeds by not feeding and watering them. Repeated exposure, daydreaming wrong things, or idle conversations go to reenforce and grow the weeds.

(Updated 3 Aug)

Part I

1Cor 15:33 – Be not deceived: evil communications corrupt good manners.

You can turn this around and say it another way:

“If you think you can listen to, read, or watch evil communcations and not be effected, you are deceived.”

Just turn on the television, listen to the radio, or flip through a magazine at the supermarket. Within in 5 minutes you will be exposed to more perversity and obscenity that most folks might have been exposed to in an entire lifetime not 50 years ago.

All around us, every form of media seeks to push the limits and go to another level of extreme in order to get our attention. The reason they have to keep going to extremes to get our attention, is that we get desensitized to what we are repeatedly exposed to. A side effect is that once they sink to a deeper level of depravity or go to another level of extreme, we become desensitized to what once we had an emotional reaction to.

Desensitized simply means that we are no longer sensitive to it, that it no longer provokes the emotional reaction it once did.

Desensitized DOES NOT mean that it no longer has an impact on us. To the contrary, it merely means that our guard is now totally ineffective, and we now let these media messages come pouring into our minds without any check or balance.

Things that were once abhorrent are now the subject of sitcoms that we blithely laugh along with the prerecorded audence to. All the while our minds are being conditioned to accept and even support things that are an abomination before God.

Rom 12:9 Let love be without dissimulation. Abhor that which is evil; cleave to that which is good.

Isa 5:20 Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter!

Part II

Every once in a while, I get one of those emails that circulate about the net that are actually worth keeping.

STRANGER WITHIN (Author Unknown)

A few months before I was born, my Dad met a stranger who was new to our small Tennessee town. From the beginning, Dad was fascinated with this enchanting newcomer and soon invited him to live with our family.

The stranger was quickly accepted and was around to welcome me into the world a few months later. As I grew up, I never questioned his place in my family. In my young mind, he had a special niche. My parents were complementary instructors: Mom taught me the word of God, and Dad taught me to obey it.

But the stranger?; He was our storyteller. He would keep us spellbound for hours on end with adventures, mysteries and comedies. If I wanted to know anything about politics, history or science, he always knew the answers about the past, understood the present and even seemed able to predict the future! He took my family to the first major league ball game. He made me laugh, and he made me cry. The stranger never stopped talking, but Dad didn’t seem to mind.

Sometimes Mom would get up quietly while the rest of us were shushing each other to listen to what he had to say, and she would go to her room and read her books. (I wonder now if she ever prayed for the stranger to leave.)

Dad ruled our household with certain moral convictions, but the stranger never felt obligated to honor them. Profanity, for example, was not allowed in our home … not from us, our friends or any visitors. Our longtime visitor, however, got away with four-letter words that burned my ears and made my dad squirm and my mother blush.

My Dad was a teetotaler who didn’t permit alcohol in the home, not even for cooking. But the stranger encouraged us to try it on a regular basis. He made cigarettes look cool, cigars manly and pipes distinguished. He talked freely (much too freely!) about sex. His comments were sometimes blatant, sometimes suggestive, and generally embarrassing. I now know that my early concepts about relationships were influenced strongly by the stranger.

Time after time, he opposed the values of my parents, yet he was seldom rebuked … and NEVER asked to leave.

More than fifty years have passed since the stranger moved in with our family. He has blended right in and is not nearly as fascinating as he was at first. Still, if you were to walk into my parents’ den today you would still find him sitting over in his corner, waiting for someone to listen to him talk and watch him draw his pictures.

His name?

We just call him TV.