25 August 2010
And then to close out his thought in this particular section of the book, Dr. Stanley says, “Some of the smartest people in the world seem to be working in marketing and advertising, and with the increased media coming at us every day from every angle – print, broadcast, online – it’s difficult to resist the siren song of Grey Goose, Mercedes, Tag Heuer, Hermes, and all the other prestige products around us.”
So, Dr. Stanley is saying the same thing about our mind, and how easily it is influenced, as I have been writing for years about financial pornography. The media is very powerful. But the Bible tells us to renew our minds with His people and with prayer and of course, when you’re watching advertisements, they are very, very powerful. People find it so amusing that my children have no idea what to ask “Satan Claus” for Christmas, because we don’t have TV commercials in our house. Now, we do have Netflix, but the movies that are on Netflix have no commercials. And it’s amazing when my children go to school and they learn about these toys that they’ve never heard of. It’s impressive every year, how powerful the media is over children, how powerful it is over adults, and most of us will never have the humility to understand that. Most of my Christian friends believe that they can watch rated R films and that it has no impact on them. I was in a Bible study with some friends, and we were talking about watching Natural Born Killers, and I was telling them what a negative impact I thought it had on my thinking. And they said “oh yeah, they watched Natural Born Killer and it had no negative impact on their minds.” I don’t see how a person can sit through any movie and then say it had no impact on them.
Same way that you cannot read magazines, listen to the radio, go online, watch TV, and see all these advertisements, by these marketing geniuses, and say that it has no impact on you. It’s impossible. So, certainly, in God’s Bible, it speaks to that about renewing our minds. The Bible also says that what we see with our eyes can also have an affect us.
Proverbs 4:25 - Let your eyes look directly ahead, And let your gaze be fixed straight in front of you.
Proverbs 23:33 - Your eyes will see strange things, And your mind will utter perverse things.
