This past Sunday I preached through 1 John 5:6-13. You can listen to it here. The major point that I made from the text is that God testifies that Jesus is King. But do we? We dove into four areas that we tend to not to submit to Jesus as King in: our minds, mouths, marriages and money. And today I would like to follow up one of those points. 

During the point about submitting to King Jesus as Lord of our minds I mentioned the fact that we will fill our minds with hours upon hours of music, movies and television that not only has little good to say about Jesus, but in many ways stands in direct opposition to His Gospel while claiming to have no time or mental capacity for prayer or Scripture reading. Inevitably, when someone mentions entertainment in a sermon, we tend to find ourselves polarized. No matter what point the preacher is making, we usually find ourselves either saying “Whatever dude, I can and am going to listen to, read, and watch whatever I want to” or “That’s right, let’s get rid of everything ‘secular’ in our lives, because that is the only way to truly glorify God.” (Cue old memories of burning your tapes, cd’s, comic books or movie collections after a fiery week of church camp) 

But I would argue both responses are wrong. I believe both responses are our natural, sinful responses to the standards of God: irreligion and religion. We either completely buck God’s holy standards for how we should live our lives or we create our own rules to section our lives off from the world at large for fear that we will fall into sin and every kind of depravity. In Jesus’ most famous sermon, the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7) he lines out these two ways, denies both of them and gives us His third way, the Gospel. No, the Gospel isn’t some sort of middle ground that compromises between the two. Instead, it is a way in a completely different plane...a new way of life, the true way of life... life surrendered to the glory of God in all things. 

My point was not about disengaging with culture. In fact, my point was the opposite. I do my very best to speak to this subject on a consistent basis and when I do, my point is this: Christians should be the best engagers of culture. For inherent in who we are as people (our mission) is to find each and every way to take the Gospel to the world. In many ways, entertainment is a piece of social commentary. It tells a story of what we as a people or section of society believe about life. Most of the time, what our culture believes is a lie. And it is the Christian’s responsibility to understand the lies we believe so that we can replace them with the truth (the Gospel). This can only happen when we become thoughtful consumers of entertainment, purposefully engaging with entertainment, not passively soaking it in. 

Jesus told us in Luke 10:27 that part of the greatest commandment, the one that summed up all the others, is to love God with all our minds. We don’t break this command by just watching, listening to or reading secular “entertainment.” We disregard it by not engaging everything for the Glory of God.

[Side Note: True! There are things that we cannot and should not engage with (let’s be honest, there isn’t much about hot, naked vampires that we can engage with for the Glory of God). And we need to create a system for that in our own lives. Some refer to this as the “receive, reject, redeem” aspect of engaging with culture.]

Below are a few links that I believe are beneficial for this subject. Be sure to check out the link to his website if you are interested in learning more about this subject. 

http://theresurgence.com/2007/08/21/christianity-and-culture
http://theresurgence.com/2010/09/02/film-theology-101