DWM-35 & NR1-40 & NR7-22 & RIG-08 & WFF-51 & WWJ-32
Short Clip
THE RESTLESSNESS OF OUR GAMING, SURFING, SHOPPING & MOVIE WATCHING GENERATION
As you open to our exposition of Colossians 3:1-17 this morning, may I make one thing perfectly clear: God wants your mind.
More than anything else God wants to have control of your mind.
If God has your mind – He has your body,
If God has your mind – He has your emotions,
If God has your mind – He has your appetites,
If God has your mind – He has your time,
If God has your mind – He has your money . . . see the point. The one who gets your mind gets it all. All the rest are just scraps. Your mind is the prize!
The battlefield is for our minds. Satan is seeking to steal the minds of God’s children. Your mind is the key to knowing God. Only a mind stayed on the Lord can have perfect peace. A personal Sabbath rest is the road to God’s perfect peace filling your mind! Sadly it seems that Satan has caught many believers off guard. While they carefully avoid many obvious dangers, perhaps the most powerful mind robber has been overlooked. Satan is neutralizing the power of a godly mind little by little every day through the onslaught of the media that overflows us like a raging flooded river every day.
Has it troubled you yet that our modern media has reset the Moral Acceptability Threshold? Here is the test – “Do the things that once offended you now entertain you?” asks media critic Al Menconi. “Are you able to enjoy the company of television programs, videos, and movies that have values diametrically opposed to yours? This moral drift is important to understand, for it continues unabated. Extrapolate ten or twenty years into the future and it is frightening to imagine what media content awaits us.
Has it troubled you yet that our modern media has reset the Shock Threshold In the past, if we saw blood, killing, or tragedies on the evening news, it would disturb us for weeks. Today, however, the rule of the newsroom is, “If it bleeds it leads.” Movies are worse. Beginning about thirty years ago, succeeding waves of movies relied on more and more violence to attract crowds. Audiences became numbed to the repulsiveness of each level of violence, so directors had to enhance the horror to maintain interest. Such common fare no longer elicits anguish. But no shock over the sin.
Has it troubled you yet that God defines spiritual adultery in Ezk 23:21 as the sin when His people spend and invest more time getting our help, counsel, direction, and advice from TV, secular books, unsaved professionals, magazines, commercials, and the internet — than from God and His Word?