Scripture

Jesus replied, “Your mistake is that you don’t know the Scriptures, and you don’t know the power of God.

~Matthew 22:29, NLT

Quote

The scandal of today’s church is that we are producing Christians without the mind of Christ: Christians who don’t think like Christians.

~Kent Hughes

I would edit the quote just a bit and say we are producing professing Christians that do not think like Christ. I doubt seriously, that we are talking about true believers. The big problem in the church is that our folks are starving. They are not getting the spiritual vitamins and nutrition they need to grow. Is this not the preacher’s fault, he is the one tasks with feeding the sheep. To answer that question, let me ask another question: do you eat once a week? No, no that would not be healthy. I agree and neither can a Christian grow strong when they are eating only once a week or for some once a month. What is the problem? There is an ongoing battle for the mind and the world seems to be winning. According to Barna, Christians watch more TV than agnostics and atheist. The average American consumes over ten hours of media per day. Note: I said media because this includes TV, radio, phones, computers and social media. This next one was hard for me to believe but according to the Pew Research Center, 70% of American adults are on Facebook which is still the most popular social media platform for adults. Of that huge 70%, three fourths of them access Facebook every day. Some folks live in a cyber haze from the moment they get up until the moment they close their eyes in sleep. Some even lay in bed at night viewing post of Facebook.

Let me be fair; can social media be used in positive ways? Sure! Many churches advertise on Facebook and even broadcast their services via Facebook. We are talking about churches that would never be able to afford TV contracts. I use YouTube daily. When a song comes to mind, I spin around in my chair and go to YouTube. YouTube is filled with good Christian music and sermons galore. So, yes, social media can be a good thing. The problem is with us; we lack discipline. Ten hours of TV and social media is too much. We must guard our minds. The world is making an intentional effort to conform us to its ways. They use programing to desensitize us to sin. Chuck Colson, after he was converted, had supper with a Network executive and he could not resist asking him this question. “Why do the Networks promote so much that is not wholesome family entertainment?” The executive said, “Something like Chariots of Fire?” Colson said, “Yes, exactly, that is a good Christian movie.” Suddenly Colson knew he had been had, the exec said, “We ran that movie two weeks ago and it finished on the bottom 11.8, the lowest of the low. Dallas was number one and Chariots of fire was number 57.” Then he looked at Colson and said, “Where were your 50 million born again believers? If they had watched Chariots of Fire, it would have finished first.” What is my point: professing Christians are watching what everyone else is watching and that should not be.

My advice is do not watch TV especially the news. It is skewed, slanted, twisted and nothing more than propaganda. How can we have the mind of Christ when we eat from the same trough as the unbelieving Christ hating world? By the way, one of the consequences of too much media is depression. Another is it will shorten your attention span; diminish your ability to communicate and reduce your capacity for abstraction. In other words, it will reduce you to a dummy or a dupe. Someone who cannot see the truth or draw it out.

Extra

January 2, 2024…unbelievable! Today is Peggy Lindsey’s 90th birthday. Peggy’s is easy to remember. She was born on 1/2/34! The football season is over for the SEC with Alabama and Texas biting the dust. I am more surprised with the Texas loss than Alabama. All in all, the SEC did OK. I didn’t watch much last night. The two games I saw the most of was Missouri putting the whip to Ohio State and Ole Miss beating Penn State. I am a sore loser, or a bad sport or both. When things don’t go my way, I stop watching. It’s over and we can start looking to the new year and the new fellowship hall.

Have a great day and thanks for reading the blog. The statistics came from Kent Hughes book, DISCIPLINES OF THE GODLY MAN.