On Television (from John Piper)

I read an interesting article by John Piper this morning about television and its effects on our faith. Understand, I'm not hyper-critical of TV, but I think Piper raises some good questions.
If you want to go the actual page, here is the link.
However, for your viewing pleasure, I've copied the article and pasted it below.

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Why I Don’t Have a Television and Rarely Go to Movies

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By John Piper June 25, 2009

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Now that the video of the Q&A at Advance 09 is available, I can look at it and feel bad all over again. Here’s what I regret, indeed what I have apologized for to the person who asked the question.

The first question to me and Mark Driscoll was, “Piper says get rid of my TV, and Driscoll says buy extra DVRs. How do you reconcile this difference?”

I responded, “Get your sources right. . . . I never said that in my life.”

Almost as soon as it was out of my mouth, I felt: “What a jerk, Piper!” A jerk is a person who nitpicks about the way a question is worded rather than taking the opportunity to address the issue in a serious way. I blew it at multiple levels.

So I was very glad when the person who asked the question wrote to me. I wrote back,

Be totally relieved that YOU did not ask a bad question. I gave a useless and unhelpful, and I think snide, answer and missed a GOLDEN opportunity to make plain the dangers of the triviality you referred to. . . . I don’t know why I snapped about the wording of the question instead of using it for what it was intended for. It was foolish and I think sinful.

So let me see if I can do better now. I can’t give an answer for what Mark means by “buy extra DVRs,” but I can tell you why my advice sounds different. I suspect that Mark and I would not agree on the degree to which the average pastor needs to be movie-savvy in order to be relevant, and the degree to which we should expose ourselves to the world’s entertainment.

I think relevance in preaching hangs very little on watching movies, and I think that much exposure to sensuality, banality, and God-absent entertainment does more to deaden our capacities for joy in Jesus than it does to make us spiritually powerful in the lives of the living dead. Sources of spiritual power—which are what we desperately need—are not in the cinema. You will not want your biographer to write: Prick him and he bleeds movies.

If you want to be relevant, say, for prostitutes, don’t watch a movie with a lot of tumbles in a brothel. Immerse yourself in the gospel, which is tailor-made for prostitutes; then watch Jesus deal with them in the Bible; then go find a prostitute and talk to her. Listen to her, not the movie. Being entertained by sin does not increase compassion for sinners.

There are, perhaps, a few extraordinary men who can watch action-packed, suspenseful, sexually explicit films and come away more godly. But there are not many. And I am certainly not one of them.

I have a high tolerance for violence, high tolerance for bad language, and zero tolerance for nudity. There is a reason for these differences. The violence is make-believe. They don’t really mean those bad words. But that lady is really naked, and I am really watching. And somewhere she has a brokenhearted father.

I’ll put it bluntly. The only nude female body a guy should ever lay his eyes on is his wife’s. The few exceptions include doctors, morticians, and fathers changing diapers. “I have made a covenant with my eyes; how then could I gaze at a virgin?” (Job 31:1). What the eyes see really matters. “Everyone who looks at a woman to desire her has already committed adultery with her in his heart” (Matthew 5:28). Better to gouge your eye than go to hell (verse 29).

Brothers, that is serious. Really serious. Jesus is violent about this. What we do with our eyes can damn us. One reason is that it is virtually impossible to transition from being entertained by nudity to an act of “beholding the glory of the Lord.” But this means the entire Christian life is threatened by the deadening effects of sexual titillation.

All Christ-exalting transformation comes from “beholding the glory of Christ.” “Beholding the glory of the Lord, [we] are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another” (2 Corinthians 3:18). Whatever dulls the eyes of our mind from seeing Christ powerfully and purely is destroying us. There is not one man in a thousand whose spiritual eyes are more readily moved by the beauty of Christ because he has just seen a bare breast with his buddies.

But leave sex aside (as if that were possible for fifteen minutes on TV). It’s the unremitting triviality that makes television so deadly. What we desperately need is help to enlarge our capacities to be moved by the immeasurable glories of Christ. Television takes us almost constantly in the opposite direction, lowering, shrinking, and deadening our capacities for worshiping Christ.

One more smaller concern with TV (besides its addictive tendencies, trivialization of life, and deadening effects): It takes time. I have so many things I want to accomplish in this one short life. Don’t waste your life is not a catchphrase for me; it’s a cliff I walk beside every day with trembling.

TV consumes more and more time for those who get used to watching it. You start to feel like it belongs. You wonder how you could get along without it. I am jealous for my evenings. There are so many things in life I want to accomplish. I simply could not do what I do if I watched television. So we have never had a TV in 40 years of marriage (except in Germany, to help learn the language). I don’t regret it.

Sorry again, for the bad answer. I hope this helps.

Pastor John

On (Dead) Animal Crossings

About a week ago, I was driving down the road, headed into town from my house. All of a sudden I see this fox squirrel run out in the middle of the road. He kind of sits there in the road, as I approach him. Then, another care comes around the curve, headed towards us. So there sits the squirrel in the middle of the road as both cars bear down on him. He turns left, no right, no left again, hesitates for a second, then darts left--only to get hit by the other car.

Fast-forward a couple of days.

I'm driving down the same stretch of road, when I see a buzzard in the distance, sitting right on the yellow line in the middle of the road. As I approach, he doesn't move. There's another care coming towards him from the other direction. He still doesn't move. Then right before the other car got to him, he finally flew off to the left--right into the bumper of the oncoming car.

Weird, huh? I'm thinking that if I were that buzzard, I'd see that squirrel sitting there and think to myself, "You know, that squirrel is pretty fast, and it got its brains splattered on the road because it was too stupid to move. Perhaps I shouldn't go out there on that dangerous road." The buzzard obviously was thinking differently. Whatever he was eating in the middle of the road was just too good to pass up.

How similar are we? We stand by and watch our family, friends, peers, and mentors fall into traps of sin and get crushed by it. However, instead of getting away, we find ourselves standing at the same intersections in life, trying to get as close as we can to sinful things without getting hit. After all, that temptation may affect them, but it surely won't affect us.

Pride is a dangerous thing.

We are reminded by Paul in 1 Corinthians that we should be careful: "Let him who stands take heed before he falls."

We ought to take a lesson from the people around us. We are too weak to stand that close to sin and not get burned. We ought to run as far away from temptation as we can. Don't stand near it. Flee.

Otherwise, you'll just end up as spiritual roadkill.

On Pumping Too Much Gas

The other day I was at the gas station filling up my truck. I went about the routine process, starting to pump the gas and clicking on the automatic holder that keeps the gas flowing while you walk away. I then went up to the front of my truck and leaned inside for something (I think it was to clean out some trash---which should be a surprise because my truck never gets trashy......ahem.....).

Suddenly, I started hearing this splashing noise, and my feet started feeling sprinkles. Could it be raining? Nope....blue skies. Perhaps someone had emptied a bucket of water. No, because no water smelled like this, not to mention there was no one around me. Then, I poked my head back out of the truck to see a dismal sight.

To my shock and horror, gas was spouting out of my gas tank like Old Faithful. A river of unleaded fuel was pouring down the pavement onto my feet. I was just waiting on the serial killer to light the match that would send me up in smoke, when I realized that it was just the handle's automatic shut-off obviously not working. I quickly shut off the pump and assessed the damage.

Other than gasoline all over my feet, a dollar of wasted money, and a little bit of embarrassment, everything was OK. I started to curse the pump like Jesus cursed the barren fig tree, but I figured that the people next to me would probably find that a little awkward. So, I just drove off.

How many times had I pumped gas before and had it stop exactly when it needed to? Several hundred at least. I'd done it so many times before, I thought I knew what I was getting.

I was wrong. I got more than I expected. Then it hit me.....

What if God wants to do the same thing?

How many times do we go to church or spend time in prayer, expecting a set amount of God. OK, God, we want 15 gallons of you this week, and that should fill me up. Or, God, I'm pretty full this week, so why don't you just give me about 3 gallons?

Imagine this, though. What if God doesn't just want to fill up the spot you've offered him? What if he wants you to have so much of him that you overflow, drowning in the goodness of his presence?

I know. It's not what we expect. Most of the time it's not convenient. It will cost more than we're used to paying. It will cause us to have a certain "odor" about us that might be a little different. And it could even mean that you're in danger of catching on fire....

David said in Psalm 23 that God had given him so much that his "cup overflows." That's what I want.

Not so much for my gas tank as for my heart, but still. Whatever it takes to get the point, right?

On Fixing Leaks with Band-Aids

Yesterday I took my youth group to Wild Adventures. As we were heading back to the bus that evening, it started pouring down rain, so much so that one of the windows on our church bus started leaking around the top seal. Being that our bus is pretty old, I wasn't too surprised, however my seventh graders sitting in the seat next to the window weren't too excited about having water drip on them.

So, what to do? How do you fix a leaky window on a giant bus with no tools, no tape, and no mechanical skills?

That's when I kicked into MacGyver mode.

I looked around the bus until I found the only adhesive available--a box of band-aids that looked to be 20 years old. No worries. They were still sticky. Then I snatched an empty cup from one of my youth.

Time was ticking. We could all die at any minute. The lives of these little seventh graders was in my hands, along with an empty Coke cup and some band-aids. So I hurriedly taped together about 15 band-aids, forming a strip of "tape" slapped that cup against the window to catch the dripping, and tacked on a couple of extra band-aids to the top to help hold the cup up.

Just in time. Because it stopped raining about 5 seconds after I taped up my makeshift contraption.

As I looked at my device, I was pretty proud of what I had accomplished (if you know my mechanical skills, you'll understand why...). After all, I had stopped a damaging leak without having the "proper" tools.

Sometimes you might feel that way when faced with many of the situations you encounter throughout life. You feel like you just don't have what it takes to accomplish the task that God has put in front of you. You may feel inadequate or ill-equipped.

Never fear. God never puts you in a situation without giving you exactly what you need to bring him glory in that situation. In simple terms, God calls you to do what you can with what you have for his glory, nothing less and nothing more.

Gideon defeated an army with 300 men. David felled a giant with a rock. Jesus fed 5000 people with 2 fish and some bread. None of these men sat there and questioned God about his supplies for the job at hand. They didn't wait until more came along. They used what God provided them to accomplish his will.

Stop saying you'll serve God when you have more money, more time, more education, more experience, or more stuff. God has put you exactly where he wants you, right now, with exactly what you need to accomplish your task.

Go put MacGyver to shame.

On Swimming

I went swimming this evening for the first time in awhile. We had a youth event at one of my student's house, and they happened to have a pool, so most of us went swimming after dinner and Bible study.

I'm not that big a fan of swimming, honestly. It's not that I'm not a good swimmer. I was on swim team for several years and even lifeguarded for 3 years during high school and college. It's just that now that I've gotten a little older, swimming doesn't appeal to me that much.

I took my swimming stuff tonight just in case I decided to hop in, which I ended up doing after several of the youth got in. Don't get me wrong, I had a great time. It's just that if none of the youth wanted to swim, I definitely wouldn't have been the first person in the pool.

I think it's rooted in laziness honestly. I know that if I get in the pool, it will require me first of all to change clothes. Then, after I swim, I'll have to dry off from getting wet. Then I'll have to put on some dry clothes after I get out so that I don't soak my truck on the way home. Then when I get home, I'll want to shower to get the feel of the pool water off of me. Aahhh, it's just not worth it to me.....

But whenever I actually do go swimming, I realize that it's fun, and that it really is worth the trouble. I have a great time hanging out with friends, and it's definitely good exercise.

It's just so hard to get myself to see the benefits instead of the consequences.

I do the same thing with prayer (which we just happened to discuss tonight in Bible study). I get lazy and don't want to do it. I know that I'll have to put aside time, then I'll probably get convicted of some stuff in my life that I'll have to change, not to mention I really don't like to hear the sound of my voice when I pray outside by myself....

But then I spend time in prayer, and it's great. The fellowship and communion with God is wonderful--totally worth any consequence of "lost" time or uncomfortable feelings.

If you're like me, sometimes it's hard convincing yourself to spend concentrated time in prayer. Sometimes, though, you just have to ignore those voices and jump in anyway.

Come on in. The water's perfect.

On Automatic Bathroom Air Fresheners

They hate me. I've decided that.

Every time I walk in the bathroom at church, as soon as I walk around the corner, I get blasted by one of those automatic air fresheners. It's infuriating.

Today, I even tried to fake it out. I thought that maybe it was the lights that caused the thing to shoot super-concentrated-smell-good-scentiness into the air. So I flipped on the lights, waited a second, then walked around the corner, only to be shot in the side of the head by the air freshener (whoever put it right at ear-level is beyond me....).

So, if not light activated, maybe it's motion activated. So, I went back outside, came back in, and stuck my arm around the corner, waving it like crazy. Nothing. So I figured I was safe. Bad assumption. I rounded the corner and got my second dose of "essence of springtime" or whatever the scent is called.

Air fresheners are stupid. OK, I'm biased because of this vendetta that a certain air freshener has taken out on me. However, I still think they're a waste of money, energy, and space.

Why? They're nothing but a cover up. They're shady. It's not like they truly get rid of odor. They just disguise it. They cover it up with overly powerful not-so-terrible smells and fool you into thinking the foul odors are gone. They trick you. The odor of Billy-Bob's handiwork is still in the air, you just have been duped by this air freshener into believing that it's gone.

Crafty little devils.

However, they're a lot like us. When we sin, we often try to simply cover it up rather than addressing the sin itself. How? We often cover up our sin by trying to replace it with good deeds. For instance, if I slipped up and cussed this morning, I would give a few extra encouraging words throughout the day to try and make up for it. Or if I was extra sinful today, I'd pray an extra-long blessing to counteract my disobedience.

But it's just a mask. My sin is still there. Good deeds, hard work, extra prayer time, or super-spiritual experiences can never truly rid our hearts of sin. It's still there, just shrouded in a nice-smelling mist of spirituality.

The only thing that can rid our hearts of sin is repentance through Jesus Christ. Jesus forgives us of our sins and offers us freedom from them. This freedom is not a cover up. Romans 8 says that the Spirit of Christ "puts to death the misdeeds of the body" so that we can live in freedom (Rom. 8:13). Our sins are no longer there. They're not just scented over by good feelings. They're truly gone. Praise be to God!

So next time you get sprayed by an air freshener (grrr........), think about your heart. Have you truly been freed from your sin, or are you still holding on, refusing to repent and truly get rid of the root of your problem?

Don't mask your sin. It'll still be there, and it will eventually continue to reek, no matter how much you try to cover it up. Not to mention, God says your good deeds appear like Billy-Bob's 'handiwork" to him anyway.

When I stand before God, I don't want him to be holding his nose. Do you?

On Vaccinations

I got all my vaccinations last week in preparation for my upcoming East Asia trip. The shots included Typhoid, Hepatitis A & B, and some pills for preventing malaria (which I started taking this morning--the pill was the size of a small mammal).

Getting shots is never fun, but it's a necessary evil if you're going to go overseas, particularly to a part of the world which is very prone to diseases. So I paid $300 to sit in a doctor's office for 4 hours so that they could stick me in the arms with needles and inject me with diseases. Fun, fun. But enough ranting. There is a point to this discussion.

If you're unfamiliar with how vaccines work, here's a short synopsis of the process: You get a shot of some sort which contains a small amount of a weakened form of the disease that you want to be defended against. Once you are injected with the disease, your body reacts, forming antibodies against that disease so that when you encounter the real form of the disease, your body is already prepared to fight against it. Got it? Good.

Vaccines are good for our bodies, but exposing our spirits to small, weakened forms of spiritual "diseases" doesn't work out too well for us. You see, small doses of sin don't protect us against the "larger" sins. Unlike a vaccination, they weaken our defenses, leaving us vulnerable to a full attack.

The process of temptation starts out very similar to the process of vaccination. The Enemy often works in the following manner: we are exposed to some sort of temptation which seems very trivial, i.e. looking at a scantily-clad woman on a shampoo commercial. Soon, we don't see anything wrong with the trivial temptation. We're not affected by it anymore. So, he tempts us with the next level of temptation, such as viewing a sex-scene in a movie. After all, it's not "true" pornography, so it can't be that bad. And so the process continues until before very long, we have gotten so used to sin we longer see it as being that bad.

Satan very rarely tempts us with the full, ugly form of sin in the very beginning. Most of the time, he works us up to it with things that we deem as being "not that bad." However, every small temptation that we give in to leads on a slippery slope to sin.

James describes the process of sin this way: "Each person is tempted when he is lured and enticed by his own desire. Then desire when it has conceived gives birth to sin, and sin when it is fully grown brings forth death." (James 1:14-15)

Get your shots for school and trips. We don't want you getting sick if you can help it! However, don't expose yourself to "weakened" forms of temptation. Sin is sin, and it all leads to death.

On Getting Updates

As you start your computer up, you notice that it's running a little slower than usual. It creeps along in the loading process, taking so long you think that your desktop background is going to change seasons. You mutter under your breath, waiting on the thing to finish loading so that you can get done what you intended to do. Then you notice this little shield thing in your toolbar. It is yellow and obnoxious. And it's slowing your computer down.

Your computer is getting updates. And it's ruining your day.

At this point, you fall into one of two camps. Camp #1 includes the people who encourage the updates. Your thoughts might include the following: "This update is a good thing. It helps my computer. It keeps things secure from hackers, spyware, and viruses. Sure, it might be inconvenient, but it's helpful. I might actually get some more updates....."

If you're in Camp #2, you don't even get this far. You've already turned off the computer and restarted it, bypassing the whole updating process.

This whole update thing is oddly similar to our spiritual walk. Just like our computers, we need updates, too. We must get the information and strength we need to function correctly. And like our computers, we need these updates very often.

Our reactions to our spiritual "updates" are often pretty similar to our computer-based reactions. We often view our time with the Lord as a "necessary inconvenience" so that we can get on with the rest of our day. Or we might even just forsake these updates altogether in exchange for moving ahead with our other business.

If you fail to update your computer, you may not immediately notice much difference. However, over time, your computer will slow down, it will become unsafe, and it could ultimately crash and fail.

Our spirits have the same outlook. Without daily time spent with the Lord, we are destined to become ineffective and on the brink of crashing.

Sure, it takes time. But the benefits far outweigh the cost.

It's time to get excited about updating your spirit. I can't say that much about your computer, but you get the idea...