Viewer Discernment Advised #2

Pastor Craig Cabiness in Worldiness (edited by C. J. Mahaney) offers the following heart questions to ask as we consider our daily media intake.  He says, “We need more than a rating if we’re to honor God through our viewing.  We need an evalution process that takes into account our time and our motive, as well as offering a biblical benchmark for measuring content.”

Heart Questions

• Why do I want to watch this program or film? What do I find entertaining about it?

• Am I seeking to escape from something I should be facing by watching this? Am I seeking comfort or relief that can be found only in God?

• What sinful temptations will this program or film present?

• Do I secretly want to view something that’s sinful? Am I deceiving myself by saying, “I’ll fast forward through the bad parts”?

• Similarly, am I telling myself, “I’ll just visit this web site once, and I won’t click on any other links I find there”?

• Am I watching because I’m bored or lazy? If so, what does that reveal about my heart?

• Am I watching simply because others are? Am I trying to be relevant or to fit in?

• How have my online relationships impacted my face-to-face relationships? How has my online activity impacted my soul? For better or worse?

• What motivates me to create and maintain a blog, MySpace, or Facebook presence? Am I attempting to impress others? Am I being prideful, slanderous, deceitful, or self-righteous?

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Learning from Edwards’ resolutions

What can we learn for Christian living today from the resolutions themselves? Sinclair Ferguson provides three of many outstanding lessons:

Life is for the glory of God. Resolution 4 epitomizes this: “Resolved, never to do any manner of thing, whether in soul or body, less or more, but what tends to the glory of God; nor be, nor suffer it, if I can avoid it.”

Life should be lived in the light of eternity. This was, of course, a dominant perspective throughout Edwards’ later life. But it was already powerfully present in his late teens. He sought to relate the whole of life to its end (in both senses of the word). In pain he reflected on the sufferings of hell (resolution 10). He lived from death and judgment backwards into the present (resolution 17), and endeavored to do so as if each hour might be his last (resolution 19). He sought to make future happiness a central goal (resolutions 22, 50, 55). Thus, if living for the glory of God simplifies all of life, living in the light of eternity solemnizes all of life and enables one increasingly to give weight to every thought, word, and deed.

Life is lived best by those who guard the heart. Edwards guarded his emotions and affections — and his verbal and physical expressions of them — with great care. This emerges in several resolutions (including 31, 34, 36, 45, 58, and 59). Particularly noteworthy is resolution 25. Here he stresses that, if he wishes so to live in a holy manner, he must be “resolved, to examine carefully, and constantly, what that one thing in me is, which causes me in the least to doubt of the love of God; and to direct all my forces against it.” Whether consciously or not, Edwards here recognized a cardinal element in the original temptation — to malign and thus destroy a sense of the generous love and goodness of God to Adam and Eve (“Has he set you in this garden and forbidden you to eat of all the trees?” see Gen. 3:1).

Read the rest of the short article.

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