Men Moulding Media
How the Media Shapes the Way Men Think Today
My aim in this seminar is to facilitate us in helping each
other prize God as our treasure in a media-saturated generation. The aim is not
that we go away with lots of notes, but that we go away doing Philippians 4:8:
considering whatever is true, noble, right, pure lovely, admirable, excellent
and praiseworthy. We are going to think about this in three main areas:
* How to make sure
that TV doesn’t lead us in ungodliness
* What to make of
the bombardment we get from the magazine culture
* How to respond
in a godly way to the internet
Which is a lot in an hour, so we will be quite broad brush.
How to make sure TV doesn’t lead us in ungodliness
How many people get digital TV in one shape or form – eg
Sky, Freeview. In pairs, what kind of effect does having 30 channels have on
your viewing habits?
At a rough estimate there are probably over 1 million
advertising slots on digital TV available in the UK every week. Its estimated
that most of us view around 1200 advertising images every day. We don’t notice
most of them, so used have we become to the invasion. But they work, or they
wouldn’t be there.
The Noisy Generation
Proverbs 1:20 says
"Wisdom calls aloud in the street, she raises her voice
in the public squares; at the head of the noisy streets she cries out, in the
gateways of the city she makes her speech."
The streets are noisy. This generation is the noisy
generation. We have to choose to listen to wisdom’s voice - to God’s voice -
because there is this huge cacophony of noise. The devil uses noise as his
smoke screen. He gets in under the smoke screen while we are distracted and
can’t see clearly.
The most obvious affect of the increasing number of channels
is that we can find something interesting or attractive to watch almost all the
time. The temptation therefore to find something to see by channel surfing
rather than deliberate scheduling therefore increases dramatically. And most of
all at times when we are tired and want something mindless to slob out to. But
of course not only is the sheer quantity of advertising extraordinary in terms
of delivering the Spirit of the Age into our front rooms, but the content on
the extra channels is often very low grade. It is exactly as much as providers
need to give to drive viewers to advertisers and no more.
And for that reason the percentage of unedifying content is
huge. A great amount is immodest, suggestive or pornographic. And it is aimed
at us. We are all men, so my starting point is that there is nobody here who
never struggles with lust. If you don’t, then you are the only one. We are
being targeted with stuff that feeds our old nature, that is highly addictive
and that increases our desire to prize ungodliness. When he gets in under cover
of his smoke screen the devil’s deepest desire is to open up your fuel tank and
suck out the rocket fuel and replace it with sewage. You see them launching the
space shuttle that rises on an amazing column of flame because that huge
booster tank is full of stuff that ignites with power. Fill it with sewage and
it isn’t going anywhere.
I am not saying there is nothing good on TV. I have a
particular thing about CSI Miami, The West Wing and 24. But I am saying that
the percentage of corrosive stuff is very large and the likelihood of watching
unthinkingly is very high. I want to point out four areas of concern for us:
4 cs of TV watching
1. Content – is
it healthy or unhealthy
2. Consumerism –
how is TV trying to shape our desires and our buying habits
3. Quantity –
the percentage of our time we give to this entertainment medium compared with
other things. Access to entertainment is supremely easy and we are told that
distraction is our right
4. Cultural
values
This last one is important. Clearly not all TV producers
deliberately produce to a commercial agenda (other than the need to provide
good TV which is a commercial agenda in its own right). However they always
support the current values of society because they are under pressure to keep
up with what is new, exciting and marketable.
"Programme makers are compelled to follow the latest
trends and insights and ideas, often without any attempt to come to grips with
their underlying principles"
"Modern views are constantly being preached in a most
effective way: effective because it is not intended or overt, so we are not on
our guard against it. The message is there from pop music up to them most
sophisticated cultural programme and the most intellectual lecture"
Hans Rookmaaker
In other word TV is never, ever value-neutral. It only ever presents pre-packaged views of what is important and valuable. And good TV so often means what is gladiatorial, titillating, and scandalous. Which is why the gospel is so un-TV worthy. TV isn’t about truth, it is about entertainment. It offers a commodity – happiness – and tells us that the way to get it is by paying to be entertained.
Exercise:
* How important is
TV in forming your opinion about the world?
* How can we teach
ourselves to be discerning about what we watch on TV?
- Don’t have
one. If it controls you rather than you controlling it then that has to be a
serious option to help us not watch unedifying TV
- Programme
what you watch and then turn off. Programme what your children watch. It is not
neutral. Keep TV for important things. Unplug it so you have to make an active
effort to use it
- Call lies,
lies:
Challenge
each other to submit ourselves and our watching habits to God. That is not to
be legalistic, but to agree to help each other fight a very powerful and subtle
battle for our hearts and minds. Let’s not watch stuff what destroys faith,
wastes huge amounts of time and diminishes our love for God and others
What to Make of the Bombardment we get from the Magazine Culture?
Question:
There are a dozen magazines on mountain-biking. I am about
to be given a mountain bike by a friend whose wife is getting him another one.
Maybe I will discover why but at the moment it escapes me.
Those magazines weren’t there 30 years ago, but they all
sell. That indicates two things to me:
1. The
understanding that leisure pursuits are the highpoint of personal fulfilment
for many people. Work is no longer the valuable part of life. Leisure is the
valuable part of life and we work to finance leisure. It reflects the desire to
dedicate residual income to the fulfilment of personal pleasure. The culture of
providing detail, history, community to leisure activity is a way of validating
that leisure activity as important in itself. Matthew Paris in The Times said
that football clubs having a celebrated history with player tables, detailed
game-plans and heroes is a way of distracting from real history, real life and
real heroes by providing a leisure alternative
2. Rapidly
escalating individualism and tribalism. People identify with a narrower and
narrower niche according to very tightly defined interest. And there is no
commitment required from the leisure tribe. If I cease to like the magazine
offering another 3 will be along tomorrow
The prevalence of the magazine culture invites us to give
our time and money to trivia rather than to the important. Obviously the
magazines that appeal to us men aren’t as trivial as women’s gossip magazines.
Closer, Heat, OK, Hello, not for us these trifling publications. Our preferred
eye-candy are magazines about technology. Or women. Or increasingly about
technology and women.
Exercise:
The
prevalence of the magazine culture indicates the priority most people place on
leisure. What challenges does the media message of leisure being the highpoint
of personal fulfilment raise for you as a Christian?
Major challenges:
* Opinion forming
is trivialised. The most information comes from the least reliable sources
* The universally
important is replaced with what is merely personally satisfying
* The only
commitment required is the commitment to individual enjoyment. There has been
some very interesting writing and commentary recently about the tendency to
reduce the idea of democracy to nothing more than “everyone can have what they
want.” We are becoming a generation of thoughtless and individualistic
consumers to which the magazine bombardment pampers by suggesting that nothing
is particularly serious
* The things we
are encouraged to prize and desire. Gadgets, holidays, body type.
Commodification never gets us to put our priorities in the right place. We
become empty vessels into which the advertising industry pours its aspirations
* Celebrity of the
lowest common denominator kind replaces commentary because the visual always
trumps the abstract. It makes us thick
Let’s be aware that we are targets for a set of
products and a consumerism that would like to conform us to its likeness.
Squeeze us into its mould. It is very difficult these days to be distinctively
different to those around us. We can blend in very easily. Read the same things
as non-Christians, have the same aspirations and values, desire and own the
same products. Buy into the same measures of success.
Remember Proverbs 1. There are 2 voices. Wisdom
strategically places herself at the gates because she wants her voice to be the
first voice that anyone hears. Not the last one when we have indulged and
saturated our demand for entertainment.
How crucial it is to be transformed by the renewing of our
minds. If we are like the world externally it is probably because we are like
it internally too. Which means that the priority of leisure and consuming
challenges our spiritual worship. Here is the question for us to go away with:
what values have I absorbed from my culture that are detrimental to spiritual
worship? How have I been conformed? Romans 12 says don’t be conformed, be
transformed so that you can test what God’s good, pleasing and perfect will is.
How do we do that? The answer is in 2 Cor 3 where it says
“prize him by beholding Christ. Be transformed in glory through the Holy Spirit
by gazing on him.” Or in other words, as in Psalm 37, delight yourself in the
lord and he will give you the desires of your heart. There is a battle on to
try to capture what we desire for the world.
The Internet
On which subject lets turn to how we respond in a godly way
to the internet
* The nature of
email
* The sheer
accessibility of privatised images
Exercise:
Who has internet access at home?
Who has work email access at home?
Email is a form of communication that is possible to use
without thinking about what it is doing to us, just because of its speed and
ubiquity. We dash off a quick message, expect a reply instantly but use it in
ways we would never use a phone call.
For me the major challenge of email is its insistence and
its appearance of urgency. And that makes it a constant temptation for me to be
a slave to it. To fail to be able to do without it, or at least persuade myself
that I couldn’t. And that is just the medium, before we talk about any content.
But let’s talk about content. It seems to me that the chief
challenge of the internet is the ability to look privately at things we would
never look at publicly. Because we have an old nature, struggles with lust are
going to be a factor in our lives until we die and the internet has the
potential to remove lots of very helpful barriers to instantly gratifying that
lust.
The tragedy is not mainly that we might look with sinful
hearts on alluring and salacious images. The tragedy is that Satan uses them to
rob us of spiritual vitality, to accuse us day and night and to try to persuade
us that we stretch the elasticity of God’s grace too far for us to be able to
come to him as his children.
If the TV is a challenge to our values and the magazine
culture to our desire for personal fulfilment then the sheer privacy of the
internet is a challenge to our most basic appetites.
Exercise:
How can we remove that weapon from Satan’s hand?
Practical
strategies
- Accountability.
Isolation is a big hindrance to holiness. The idea that talking about
temptation and shame will bring condemnation is a great tool of the devil. We
are meant to bear each others’ burdens, help each other in temptation and
gently restore each other when we sin. As guys I counsel everyone here to get
close enough to another Christian guy that you could confidentially share and
pray through any issues with pornography
- Deliberate
decisions to not view anything online that you wouldn’t view publicly. If
necessary get an online buddy piece of software like Covenant Eyes
- Set time limits
outside of which you won’t use the internet, especially late at night or when
there is nobody else around. And set time limits on internet use full stop. It
isn’t only inappropriate websites that steal our joy. You can lose it just
through wasting lots of time and feeling guilty. Decide to check your home
email 3 times a week rather than 3 times a day
Treasuring Christ
I asked a pastor yesterday what he thought was the chief
ways are in which the internet diminishes our discipleship. He said “by
inducing guilt, either real or imagined.” And we all know how to deal with
that. Reckon yourself dead to sin and alive to God in Christ.
You know that walking by the Spirit has to do with our
desires. Gal 5:16 says that when we live by the Spirit we don’t gratify the
desires of the sinful nature. And Romans 8 says that those who live by the
Spirit are those whose minds are set on what the Spirit desires. Titus 2:11
says that the grace of God teaches us to say “No” to ungodliness.
But we have to recognise we are in a battle in order to be
in fighting mode. Otherwise when the thing that is promising a better joy than
God is going to pop up and we are going to believe it. The gadget, the
ambition, the image, the poor use of time, the temptation to value what the
world values. There is a huge media machine putting stuff out that is designed
to impoverish our souls and to lead us into lukewarm love for God and mediocre
gospel ambitions. Evil has become very bold in our day. It is becoming more and
more confident and more and more unashamed to declare its wickedness and to
deliver it right into our homes.
Lets pray for each other that God will turn up the heat of
our devotion to him to a passionate white hot and holy zeal. And lets
deliberately identify and turn our backs on things that make us slaves to
pleasing this world rather than pleasing God. The ultimate weapon in this war
is knowing God. Know Him. Pursue Him. Love Him. Make sure that when you get up
every day the first thing you do is make sure your soul is happy in him.
Heavenly Father, I pray you will help us set our hearts on what the
Spirit desires. There are many here today who are in the grip of the media in
whatever form who want to throw off the values of this world and follow you
with white hot hearts. And help us to take real steps of obedience and faith in
resisting the devil.
Increase our love. Draw us to enjoy our salvation and to realise that seeking joy elsewhere is suicidal for our delight. Lord Jesus Christ, Bright Morning Star, won’t you shine in our hearts with your brilliant splendour today revealing and cutting out any values and attitudes and addictions that you hate. Make us Men who receive the media always through the lens of the gospel rather than junking the gospel in order to enjoy the media.