The average American, according to the A.C. Nielsen Co., “watches
more than 4 hours of television every day, which translates to 28 hours per week,
or two whole months of nonstop TV-watching per year!!! In a 65-year life, that
person will have spent 9 years glued to the tube”!!!
Spending a 7th of our lives watching television seems
like a lot of authority we give to different voices to plant seeds of thought into
our minds. These seeds will ultimately shape and mold our personal belief
systems. Our value systems are shaped by the voices and ideas that we are
constantly assimilating from our environment. According to these statistics
television is a very big influence in our modern society.
As you watch your favorite show this week, ask yourselves, ‘what
am I learning from this television program?’ Ask yourself, ‘how is watching
this benefiting me, is it adding value to me? How does this help me achieve my
goals?’ These are very important questions that we seldom ask ourselves. As reformers we have to be intentional about
everything that we allow into our minds, because what we meditate on and think molds
our perceptions and thoughts, and therefore ultimately influences what we
believe. The Bible tells us that, “As a
man thinks so is he.” In other words, we are what we believe and we believe
what we think.
As we ask ourselves hard questions, and face the answers we may
not want to ‘hear’, we are better positioned to direct our time as we really
want to. You need to know that the outcomes of your engaging in this sort of
analysis are life-changing, and far outweigh the effort you invest in doing
them.
