Recently I enjoyed a trip to Lancaster to see a brother and sister in Christ. It was a beautiful day, the landscape was breathtaking, and the fellowship was sweet. What was also sweet was the delicious ice-cream shop we stopped in to enjoy. While in this quaint little ice-cream shop, I noticed a free Christian devotional booklet that I gladly picked up. Before reading it however, I looked at the listed beliefs of those who wrote the booklet and was surprised to find the following:
- We believe that the radio and television are detrimental to the believers walk with God.
The scripture referenced to back up this statement was, “I will set nothing [b]wicked before my eyes; I hate the work of those who fall away;”.
Now if you are like me, your first reaction may be, “Well Rob, that is very rigid and legalistic. I mean there are a lot of good qualities about television. Why, I can name fifteen shows that are good wholesome shows that would be of no offense to God. “and you would be right. However, the more I thought about it, the more I started to see that wisdom was contained in the idea they were promoting. Now dear reader, please don’t hit the delete button without hearing me out. While it is true that there are good and wholesome shows that are broadcast on television, there are many more unwholesome shows (some of them very unwholesome) that are broadcast as well. So, let’s just say that for every good show, there are fifteen that display things that could be detrimental to a believer’s walk. How should a person seeking God’s heart respond? Should we mindlessly flip the channels and allow our minds to meditate on whatever wickedness would come before our eyes? Should we allow our children free access to whatever is broadcast because, “There are a lot of good family shows they like to watch”? Put another way, if you had a plumbing problem in your house where fifteen plumbing lines randomly delivered raw sewage to your faucets and one delivered pure water, would you just tell your child to take their chances? Yet this is how many people approach watching television. Dare I say that this approach to watching television has ensnared more adults and children into watching what is perverse and offensive to God that any of us would care to count.
Now please don’t pull back from your computer and say, “Boy, Rob has really become way too uptight about this television thing.” I will allow you to call me uptight as long as you can honestly tell me that you have absolutely no concerns about much of the content on modern day television (and the internet!). You can tell me that I am too rigid if you can honestly say that if someone watches the majority of the content that is offered through television, that it will have no impact on their heart or their walk with God. Is it fair to say that so much of what is broadcast would definitely fall into the category of a “hint of sexual immorality”, the very thing God warns us to keep far from? (Ephesians 5:3).
So, I am not a big fan of identifying problems without offering solutions. If indeed you are very committed to watching television or utilizing the internet, is it not wise to have filters and restrictions on these devices that give us access to so much of the filth that is freely broadcast? There is a lot of really good technology out there that can accomplish this quite easily. Now perhaps you are saying, “But wait a minute Rob, surely I don’t need such restrictions if I have no kids in my house” and my answer would be, “I don’t know…do you?” After all, whether child or adult, temptation is not foreign to any of us.
If nothing else, I hope this blog has given you food for thought (and prayer). God’s Word tells us in many instances to guard our hearts (and certainly the hearts of our children). Are you doing so? Am I? Let’s do this well together, for the glory of God.
For Him,
Rob