TLP 170: The Most Destructive Thing about Your Entertainment is Not What You’d Think

Truth.Love.Parent.

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I said earlier that your average objectionable content is wicked and should have no place in a

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Christian's life. And yet, as we strive to find those quote -unquote good shows, we still miss the fact that what's flooding over our senses is even worse.

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Welcome to Truth, Love, Parents, where we use God's Word to become intentional premeditated parents.

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Here's your host, A .M. Brewster. If you live in the Northern Hemisphere and your family has not yet commenced your summer activities, for what are you waiting?

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Unfortunately, one of the things our American family spend a lot of time doing in the summer is watching movies. In fact, that's when a lot of blockbuster movies come out.

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Now, please understand that I am not anti -movie. I love movies and have many favorites. I love listening to music.

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I love watching shows. I love reading books. But we'd be foolish to think that anything created by the world is without danger.

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Today, we review a concept from our pilot series called Kids and Movies, Parenting Your Kids to Success.

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And during the discussion, we're going to look at the most destructive element in our modern entertainment, whether it be movies, books, music, or shows, and I'm pretty certain it's going to surprise you.

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This episode was originally recorded and published during the Christmas season, which is, in my own personal experience, probably the peak time for movie watching in our house.

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So this is a great time of year to be asking what we need to teach our children to watch out for and how to guide them through making

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Christ -honoring viewing choices. However, I'm not going to approach this topic the way many have. We all know that Americans watch way too many shows and movies.

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Our average screen time is painfully disproportionate to our time with God. And we know this, and if you're an intentional premeditated parent, you're probably already working on that in your own home.

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I also don't think I need to spend much time talking about the dangers of sex, drugs, vulgarity, and nudity in the entertainment industry.

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Again, if you love the Lord, you're already taking steps to properly protect your children from some things and prepare them to handle others.

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As a side note, I've recently been using VidAngel for my family and the students we minister to at Victory Academy for Boys.

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They really do a great job giving you complete control over what is edited out of the movies you're watching.

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If you're not familiar with them, I'd encourage you to become familiar right away. This is an amazing tool for families who want to get rid of the garbage in their movies.

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Also, if you missed it, I'd encourage you to listen to Episode 12, entitled Prepare Your Kids, Don't Protect Them.

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There we discussed how we should prepare our children to respond to Skanky Movie 3 and its real -life counterparts.

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So instead of rehashing workshops about the amount of time we spend on movies or the obvious objectionable content we need to avoid,

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I'd like to make you aware of what I believe is the single most destructive thing about Hollywood.

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In fact, it's something VidAngel can't even filter out, and you're probably unaware of what it is.

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I know I was. So let's talk about Hollywood. And for our purposes here, Hollywood will represent the companies, individuals, and organizations that create the stuff

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Americans are daily stuffing into their ears and eyes. That means that all the movies, shows, both

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TV and internet, books, and the music that fill iTunes are basically the topic of this conversation.

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Of course, Hollywood and the American entertainment culture as a whole are by no means the only culprits.

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The most destructive force in entertainment today is the same in every living room, culture, and hemisphere.

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Now, I already acknowledge that God -passionate believers react pretty aggressively to the obvious filth pervading modern entertainment.

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And they should. Psalm 103 says, I will set no wicked thing before my eyes.

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And I think we realize that, you know, we need to be a little bit more aggressive about this in our day and age, because it really doesn't come as any surprise that things are just getting worse.

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When I was a child, I watched Honey, I Shrunk the Kids on TV and was saved the horror of hearing

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Ron Thompson proclaim, we're all the size of boogers, because my beloved edited for TV man substituted the word bugs instead of boogers.

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Phew, that was a close call. But seriously, just click on your favorite TV app and you'll see that profanity, flagrant rebelliousness, and aberrant sexuality are written to practically every script.

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In fact, nowadays, the homosexual agenda is being pushed in, I would say, 98 % of the

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TV shows out there and movies out there. There is something in it about homosexuality.

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And this is no surprise. And undoubtedly, you might be tempted to just kind of move on from this podcast because I've really said nothing that you don't know.

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But I can test that these and other equally vile elements of modern entertainment are not nearly as dangerous as what most

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God desiring Christians actually let into their house nearly every single day.

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I know that was a pretty shocking thing to say. So please allow me to illustrate. I want you to pick a movie or show, pick your favorite children's book or song, doesn't matter what it is.

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If they're catching criminals, saving animals, or battling extraterrestrials, it doesn't matter what they're doing.

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The story could be about wizards, wimpy kids, or wushu. The song may warble on about work, romance, or politics.

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Perhaps your favorite TV show features children, or maybe it's about adults, or potentially it's a cartoon that you thought was about kids, but it's definitely for adults.

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It doesn't really matter. Nearly everyone, whether they're rated G, R, or X, has this one common narrative thread.

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Are you ready for it? Godlessness. Now, stop for a minute.

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I really need you to think about the implications of what that means.

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There are some stories that encompass the events of a day. Others display a lifetime. Most shows feature normal people, aliens, or animals making decisions that will change the course of their own lives, or even the future of a nation.

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And whether they're waging war against dragons and orcs, or they're simply trying to navigate the halls of a new school, the characters live their lives for all of us to enjoy with bated breath and buttery fingers.

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And they do it all without a single thought of God. Not a cell of gray matter was given to his will.

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Not a consideration was spent on him. Sure, at some point in the climax or the denouement, some pray like George Bailey, or they visit a church like Superman or the

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Godfather. But think with me how many screen lives you've seen lived without a moment's contemplation of God, his commands, or his desires.

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The God of the Bible doesn't even exist in most of the worlds Hollywood creates. Granted, more and more

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Christian movies are coming out, and despite the frequent bad theology like heaven is for real, and the generally bad acting, kind of like all the early left behind movies, really they often do fine, a fine job showing how

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Christians should live in this world. But take the total number of Christian movies you've watched recently and divide that number by the total number of movies you've watched in the same time period.

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You see what I mean? Again, let me illustrate this in a different way. Think about how you learn to talk.

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Being a professional communicator and a speech teacher, I can tell you that every one of us, barring significant effort to the contrary, talks just like our parents.

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And it wasn't because your parents sat down to teach you grammar or diction. All we had to do was hear them talk their way through life and our own speech patterns were subconsciously formed.

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It didn't even matter that our high school English teacher told us to say whom when used as an object or to use the subjunctive case if we were to state a hypothetical.

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We still talk like our parents. This daily talking slash listening directed the course of our communication and some of us won't veer from it until the day we pass through the waters and circling the celestial city.

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So consider with me for a moment, the impact that daily watching people experiencing every conceivable conflict known to man, watching these same people make decisions with absolutely no care for God and his revealed truth.

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Imagine the impact that will have on a life. Thanks to Google, I learned that the average

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American over the age of two spends more than 34 hours a week watching live television, plus another three to six hours watching taped programs.

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That's 40 hours of being trained how to make it through life without God.

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From Doc McStuffins on one end of the spectrum to Guardians of the Galaxy on the other, they model for us how to ignore

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God and we think this won't have an effect on how we make our choices? We don't believe this will play itself out in how we fight our own battles?

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We just reject the idea that as long as no one's swearing or having sex that this godless version of life will impact how we live?

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I said earlier that your average objectionable content like nudity or profanity is wicked and it should have no place in a

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Christian's life. And yet as we strive to find those quote -unquote good shows, we still miss the fact that what's flooding over our senses is a godless existence.

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Every vampire, pony, superhero, and politician ignores him. Every student, police officer, and parent gets along just fine without his word.

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And every sibling, contestant, and guy in a pickup truck manages to resolve their conflicts, achieve their goals, or save the universes without God's help.

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And Christians are okay with it because no one used the F -word while doing it. In fact, because of our obsessive amusement, now let me clarify, the word amusement, that letter

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A there means no, and the muse means thinking, okay? So because of our obsessive not thinking, we have been programmed to believe that that's how life works.

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No objectionable content equals good, even if it teaches me that I don't need God. And then we wonder why there's this staggering dichotomy between the sacred and the secular in the lives of Christians.

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So what's a premeditated parent to do? Do we protect our kids from the godlessness of the age by only watching

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Christian programs? Of course not. We need to prepare our children to identify and respond correctly to the lives of the world.

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Let me give you an example. My son and I were watching Turbo. It's the story of a snail who wants to be a NASCAR driver.

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And it was somewhere in the first 10 minutes that this conversation took place. My son turns to me and says, dad, is it okay for Turbo to want to be fast?

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Now at this point, he's a little guy and I'm so glad he asked it because, you know, I was just sitting there mindlessly amusing myself.

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But he says, is it okay for Turbo to want to be fast? And I said, yeah, we should always want to do our very best for God.

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If we can be faster, we should want to be. But do you think it's okay to be mad or sad if our best isn't as good as we want?

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He thought and replied, no, God wants us to be content with what he's given us. So I said, do you think

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Turbo is sinning? And then Micah, little Micah says to me, yeah.

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Let's see if he'll change. Unfortunately, when the end of the movie came, Turbo had made many choices and learned many lessons, but not one of them acknowledged his creator.

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Right behavior for wrong motivation is as sinful as wrong behavior for wrong motivations.

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Again, please understand that I'm not saying we should never watch or read any story that isn't deliberately Christian. I believe there's much that can be learned from godless sources, but such material must be ingested with wisdom and discretion that few young people and many old people possess.

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So here's a good place to start. Number one, as to be a premeditated parent to help guide our children through the milieu of movies.

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First of all, we personally need to watch, read, and listen with discernment. This isn't just about movies.

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It includes our books and includes our music. You see, biblical discernment is comparing and contrasting the material pouring over our faces with God's absolute truth.

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Discernment is judging whether or not the movie glorifies God and being aware of the possible consequences of watching said movie.

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Christians are never allowed to be amused. We must always be thinking. So number one, we need to watch, read, and listen with discernment.

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Number two, we need to be wise. The wisdom is then taking the conclusions that biblically informed discernment provide and making the right decision with them.

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Should we be watching this movie? Sure, it might be okay to watch the movie, but should we be allowing it to affect the way that we make decisions?

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The third step we need to take is to realize that our children are not going to watch, read, and listen with the same discernment or wisdom unless we teach them.

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You see, God put us into their lives to guide their thinking. And I realize this is time consuming, but I guarantee you that being a premeditated parent that explains and applies

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God's truth to what was just watched will not take nearly as much time as watching everyone in the show live a godless life.

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I remember my mom telling me that the movie Bambi wanted us to think that hunters were bad people because they kill helpless, cuddly, talking animals and set forests on fire.

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She went on to observe what God's word says about the proper stewardship of animals and nature. And I have never forgotten that conversation.

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Teaching your children to think in line with God is much easier than trying to rectify a worldview that's been taught to ignore

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God unless they're in church. The fourth thing we need to do is to curb our intake of evil.

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You see, the fool says there is no God, and the almost a fool happily watches him do it.

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As I mentioned before, you don't have to throw your devices out the nearest window, but I guarantee that the more filth you delete from your life, the cleaner you can live.

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Whether that filth is obvious impurity or hidden godlessness, it will all affect us.

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And the less of it we have in our diet, the healthier we can be. So the first thing that we needed to do was to watch, read, and listen with discernment.

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The second thing we need to do is take that discernment and be wise with it, apply it correctly. And then we need to teach our children to do that.

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Obviously curbing number four, our intake of evil is going to be a huge part of this. But the fifth part

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I think is a little counterintuitive. We know to work on ourselves and we know to help our children to grow and mature into Christlikeness, but what about everyone else in our life?

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Number five, please spread the word. Maybe this is the first time you've considered the insidious infiltration

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Satan has drilled into our lives via quote unquote good movies. I must admit that I only recently realized the subconscious dangers of watching supposed good people live a godless life.

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It was just a few years ago, my son was watching an old 80s show called Ghostwriter. My wife had introduced him to it because it was one of her favorite shows as a kid.

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And it was only a few weeks earlier that I had shown my kids Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood. But as I looked over Micah's shoulder at the story unfolding before him,

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I realized he was spending his time with kids and a ghost, or in the case of Mr. Rogers, a nice gentleman and his puppets.

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And these people just kind of managed to make new friends and complete assignments and learn how stuff works and save the day every day without once even caring that a loving

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God had created them, died for them, and had a plan for them. I might as well let my kids spend his entire day being taught by an atheist that God doesn't exist.

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And I believe that most God desirous believers would never sign up for a class to learn how to live a godless life.

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And yet on a daily basis, those same believers are doing exactly that. So share this podcast with a friend.

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I also wrote an article on this exact same subject. You can share that too and I'll put a link to that article in the description.

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Listen, we all know pornography, drug abuse, and sinful worldviews are desperately hazardous to people, even when we experience it vicariously through entertainment.

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But let us not deceive ourselves into the spiritually insane belief that the quote unquote good movies are okay.

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We must be on guard. Satan is a lion who wants to make a mess out of our lives, but he doesn't always leap off the screen with claws swinging.

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More often than not, he just inoculates us to godlessness as children and reinforces the benefits of a

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Christless life with every frame. Truth. Love.

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Parents. Is part of the Evermind Ministries family and is dedicated to helping you become an intentional premeditated parent.

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Join us next time as we search God's Word for the truth your family needs today.