The Media Monster Series

Protection of loved ones is a driving motivation for many of the things we do – lock our doors at night – security systems – guns – childproofing our homes when we still have little ones there.

We do all of these things, & yet we leave our children unprotected many times as so many of them of all ages are allowed to have unsupervised, unfiltered access to cellphones, iPads, & tablets. We get lazy, or busy, or just need them to get out of hair for a little while. So the phone or the tablet becomes the babysitter. Get serious about protecting your kids & family. Do the research! Talk to & team up w/ other parents! Set the boundaries! Get help when needed! Don’t take this lightly! Our kids are being eaten alive by the media monster!

Peace of mind – Just finished up my 40-day social media fast this past Friday. I can testify that one of the greatest blessings that came out of those weeks of no Facebook or Twitter or Instagram was the peace that I experienced in the midst of some of the heaviest spiritual attacks I’ve ever experienced in my life & ministry. Not saying that the peace I experienced was all b/c of my fast, but I can assure you that not having the constant deluge of information & images from my social media feeds definitely contributed to a calmer state of mind for me. Get serious about cultivating the peace of mind that the Holy Spirit gives to us. The media monster is out to decimate this peace of mind.

Priorities – Those things that are truly important to us are the things we are going to devote our time to. Avg time spent on social media daily is 2 ½ hours a day. Imagine if we spent that time in Bible study & prayer – or even half that amount of time in Bible study & prayer.

Passed a house on my way to church every day in Byram. Every time I passed it, I could see their big screen TV in their den or living room from the road. And every time it was on Fox News. Don’t know these people. Nothing inherently wrong with that. But how many of us just leave the TV on nonstop just b/c we’ve got to have some noise going on.

Get serious about prioritizing your time to build & deepen your walk w/ Christ, which, for most of us, means we need to decrease our media input time & increase our time spent in the Word & prayer. Which leads to next point:

GRAB YOUR BIBLE! – If you & I are going to be victorious in our spiritual battles, we’ve got to go to the Word, know the Word, & grow in the Word.

Our verse for this sermon is so important in this ongoing battle w/ the media monster that we are all in. The true battlefield is our mind. This is where the enemy strikes the most frequently & the most intensely. That’s why it is SO important that we saturate our minds w/ the truths of God’s Word. Here in this one verse, we are instructed to occupy our minds w/ things that are:

- “True” – The media world is filled w/ stuff that is just wrong! - false teachers, wrong ideologies, deceptive philosophies

- “Honorable” – “noble” (NIV) – Lofty, majestic things that lift us above the world’s dirt & scandals