Glued to the tube

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 7^th 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.