31 Aug We Must Guard What We Allow Into Our Minds
Blog Series:
Renew Your Mind ~ Transform Your Life
The world is a hostile environment for a Christian’s mind
Billy Graham once said, “My grandchildren face more temptation going to school on Monday morning than my friends and I, when we were their age, could find driving around looking for it on Saturday nights.”
Reinforcing this point, Mary Pipher, has written in her book, The Shelter of Each Other, regarding media:
Families are old institutions with very new problems. For the first time in two thousand years of Western civilization, families live in houses without walls. That is, they live in a world in which walls no longer offer protection. Technology has brought the outside world into the living room. Electronic media seeps into the [openings] of homes and teaches children ways of thinking, feeling, and behaving that are at odds with common sense. Families are reeling under the pressure of a culture they can’t control. (p 13-14)
We must remember that all television is educational. It teaches values and behavior. Children learn these things from ads:
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- that they are the most important person in the universe
- that impulses are not to be denied,
- that pain should not be tolerated
- that the cure for any kind of pain is a product
They learn a weird mix of dissatisfaction and entitlement. With the messages of ads, we are socializing children to be self-centered, impulsive, and addictive. The television that Leonard Cohen called “that hopeless little screen” teaches values as clearly as any church. (p 14-15)
Peggy Noonan, former speechwriter for President Reagan and who is now a best-selling author, news analyst, and commentator, writes in her book Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness:
We are the inheritors of a coarsened society. My generation cooperated happily in the coarsening, of course, in the sixties and seventies…and now we’re stuck with it. The coarsened nation is what we’re left with to bring up our children. A coarse place is by definition anti-child because is it anti-innocence.
Parents today go to great lengths to protect their children from the environment that they helped create.
There aren’t enough good parents to go around. This would not carry such heavy implications if there were a healthy culture to pick up some of the slack but there isn’t. There is only the coarse culture to make things worse.
The old culture may have been a little naïve, but when I was a kid watching television, there were game shows, cartoons, some boring nature show, an old movie, Spanish lessons on educational TV, and a soap opera. That is better than today when the Ghetto Boys on channel 25 rap about killing women, and [violating their dead bodies].
Ms. Noonan goes on to write,
Really, you have [to be morally bankrupt not] to know that this stuff is harmful, that it damages the young, the unsteady, the unfinished. You have to not care about anyone to sing these words and put this song on TV for money. You have to be a pig.
Hollywood knows it encourages and discourages points of view, habits, and social tendencies. And deep in their guilty little hearts, filmmakers know they encourage violence in men and boys and sexual acting out in everyone else. It’s what they do for a living.
After shocking and violating everyone on one level so that they get used to it, Hollywood has to come up with even more outrageous violence and sex to get some attention, to grab and get an audience. Imagine what that does to the soul. (summarized from pages 68-70)
So, this is the world in which we now live. It has been deeply corrupted from what it once was, and the corruption is largely initiated in the entertainment industry… which is disseminated primarily through electronic media. And this coarsened culture has its automatic effect on us, whether we want it to or not.
We must carefully guard what we allow into our minds
Gary Smalley wrote in his book, Change Your Heart, Change Your Life:
“Our society is disintegrating, and many Christians are unwittingly caught up in its thinking. Do you know what your children see and hear all day long on TV, iPads, radio, and the Internet, and even from their peers?
“What they see on TV or the Internet is affecting the way they think and react. Please don’t put your head in the sand when it comes to regulating what your kids are exposed to. This is deadly serious. Most of us realize that our society is in big trouble. Many Christians are in big trouble because the world’s values have become embedded in their hearts. But they have no idea that it’s happened, and so they’re oblivious to the danger.”
Neil Postman wrote a compelling book many years ago regarding the impact of television on modern life entitled, Amusing Ourselves to Death. In it, he makes the case that television is fundamentally changing how our brain processes truth and the negative impact television is making on our entire culture. After making that compelling case, he states that the first step in breaking the hold of television is realizing that it has a hold on us.
That’s one of the major points I want to make in this blog – that modern media has a hold on us, that the hold is largely bad, and that the first and most important step in breaking that hold is recognizing that it has a hold.
If all that weren’t bad enough, it is, in a sense, old news. The new news is even worse. Added to all of that has been 24/7 access to any and all manner of godlessness via the ubiquitous internet. And with the recent Covid lock-downs, parents have been appalled to see what their children are being taught in their classrooms, and it makes the things I just mentioned (while all still true) seem like child’s play in comparison.
We now see our children being taught “drag-queen hour,” the legitimacy of homosexuality and transgenderism, shown the value of sexual exploration in early grade school, and other things not just unmentionable but unthinkable a generation ago. We have gone off the deep end, culturally and morally.
And this polluted world is the world in which our children and grandchildren will grow up in. Christians must be alert to the dangers and quick to respond.
So, we become what we behold, and unless we move to a remote, fenced-in compound without electricity in northern Montana, we are beholding plenty of harmful input from electronic media in the living of our everyday life, and are being negatively affected by it.
There are three steps to guarding our minds
- Don’t input harmful thoughts.
The first step that we have been focusing on, and which is the most dangerous issue is, don’t input harmful thoughts. Scripture says, “set your minds on things above, not on things that are on earth” (Colossians 3:2). As we have seen in previous posts in this series, both Dr. Caroline Leaf and Gary Smalley have made powerful points about the necessity of guarding what we let into our minds. Reinforcing negative thoughts deepens neurological pathways that make it easier to think those thoughts and have those values – and more difficult to think better thoughts and have better values. So, vital to the process of mental renewal is guarding what we let into our minds.
- Don’t create harmful thoughts.
Beyond that, there is the danger of creating harmful thoughts in our mind. Scripture says, “everyone who looks at a woman with lust for her has already committed adultery with her in his heart” (Matthew 5:28). In addition, we must guard what we let our minds create. Our minds are capable of creating thoughts that can be just as destructive as that which we allow in from the outside. We can have thoughts of anger, lust, fear, envy, pride, and a host of other things. Our minds can create things that are just as destructive as anything we let in from the world.
- Be careful what you let our mind dwell on.
Finally, there is the danger of letting our mind dwell on unhelpful thoughts, regardless of where they came from. Scripture says, “whatever is excellent and worthy of praise, dwell on these things” (Philippians 4:8). After we have exercised caution on what we allow into our minds from the outside, after we have exercised caution on what we allow our minds to create, we must now guard what we let our minds dwell on. Of course, we must obviously not allow our minds to dwell on negative things. We might be tempted to dwell on negative thoughts, but if we do, it will strengthen those things. However, the opposite is also true, if we dwell on positive thoughts, it will strengthen those things.
Conclusion
Scripture teaches us that, “whatever is true, honorable, right, pure, lovely, of good repute, if there is any excellence and if anything worthy of praise, dwell on these things” (Philippians 4:8). It teaches us this for the same reason there are warning signs on poison. It’s bad for you. You should only put good things into your body. In the same way, we should only put good things into our mind.
God is not trying to limit us or stunt our freedom or enjoyment by giving us this standard. He is trying to protect us and give us the freedom of robust spiritual and emotional health. It all starts with the mind.
How well we guard our minds will largely determine the quality of our entire life.
Join us next week as we continue to explore how to steward our mind so that we become our best self.
In case you’re new here
This blog post is part of a series titled “Renew Your Mind, Transform Your Life”, introduced on January 5, 2021. As the series continues, each succeeding post will be added to and available in the blog archives at www.maxanders.com.
If you know anyone who you think might enjoy joining us in this study, please forward this blog to them and encourage them to go to my web site (www.maxanders.com) and sign up for the free video, “Master the Bible So Well That the Bible Masters You”, available there on the home page. This will put them on my regular mailing list and they’ll receive my weekly blogs on this subject.
In addition, I am creating a new online membership site, The Change Zone, that will provide information, strategies and resources to help motivated Christians renew their mind and transform their lives. If you would like to learn more about this and get updates to know when The Change Zone will be available, click here.
I look forward to going through this life-changing journey with you.
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