I
believe Christians are falling for a trap. We cannot know the
Scriptures that our forefathers passed down to us if we do not devote
ourselves to study them. We cannot study the Scriptures if our
allegiance is to the next episode of some debaucherous and hedonistic
television drama or pointless reality show. Men and women were burned at the stake so that we
might have God's Word in our language, yet we take this treasure
for granted.
The amount of television being consumed
is staggering. The fact that our children are taking in twice as
much useless nonsense as actual schooling is unacceptable. As
Christians, our commitment should be to content and not
entertainment. Should not our lives be radically different from
those of the world? Parents desperately need to reign in this
“cultural narcissism” amongst children before it consumes them.
Our allegiance should be to developing the minds of the next
generation so that the torch of the gospel may be passed on. My wife
and I do not have cable, and rarely watch television at all.
However, this has not always been the case. Before we truly
committed to serving Christ, we watched a good bit of television. We
were convicted by the mindless time wasting that was stealing our
opportunity to know God personally. I can always tell when my
children have been watching teenage sitcoms because their attitude
changes, and their behavior jumps ahead to adolescence. If we are
truly Imago Dei, the
image of God, then how can we abdicate the responsibility to think
and reason to a mindless electronic beast?