How Do You Not Let What You Watch and View Warp You? Here's How

I gotta admit.   The stories get a little scary.   You read about some young mom who starts neglecting her kids, staying up to all hours of the night to check out the latest dispatches on the internet.   Or you read about the dad, who stops any relationship with his adult kids.  Why? He thinks they are in on the conspiracy.  You don’t have to even look that far to find the stories.  I just googled the phrase “Qanon took my parents,” and pages of stories showed up, far too many for me to read.  But the few I did read scared me plenty. 

And here’s what’s really scary.  The folks who go down this rabbit hole aren’t, for the most part, folks you’d think would go down it.   And for so many, it started out so innocently.   They just read one story online, maybe a Facebook post, and it led them to another story and another.   Before long, they were reading Q stories all the time, buying guns and survival gear, and behaving in all sort of strange ways that freaked their families out.

But the more I’ve thought about it, the more I’ve realized.   I may not have fallen down the Q rabbit hole, but that doesn’t mean that I can’t fall down a different one.  I’ve heard of too many families on all sides of the political spectrum whose members aren’t talking to each other, all because of how someone voted.   Justin Earley described well the profit plans of each and every news channel, all of whom exacerbate these divisions all too well.   Here’s the plan.  It’s simple, really.  “We get mad, they get rich.”   But the news isn’t the only thing that can warp us. 

What about the shows we’re watching?  How are they shaping us in ways we don’t even realize?  How are the electronic habits we’ve built twisted us up in ways we can’t even see?   I read a powerful quote last week from a preacher I admire.   He simply wrote “what consumes our minds controls our lives.”    So how do you make sure that isn’t happening, that social media isn’t doing that or the things we choose to watch on our screens or the countless subtle messages our culture delivers on billboards or the cars we see on the streets or the clothes we see others wear?  How do you live a life controlled by the truth and not by a world trying to sell you a world of their own making, one built not to give you life, but to make them money?   In these words, God points the way.  Let’s listen and hear what God has to say.

Psalm 119:33-37       

Every day, countless things in your life compete for the most valuable and most limited thing you have.   And it’s not your money.   It’s your time and your attention.   By the way, this competition should help you realize.   The media you watch, even the ones that don’t cost you anything, cost you more than you realize.   They cost you what you can never get back.  They cost you your time and attention.   But as they do, they shape you, even twist you in ways you don’t even realize.  So how do you make sure that doesn’t happen?  Here in these verses God tells you.  God says.  You can only turn your eyes away by turning your heart towards, by turning your hearts towards what is truly real.

Because, here’s the problem.   It’s really, really hard to turn your eyes away.  In fact, you and I live in a world that has created all sorts of ways to turn your eyeballs in their direction.   After all, that’s why every app wants to send you notifications or alerts.  They want your eyes.  Why?  They know once they’ve got your eyes, they can start shaping your life, and do it without you even noticing.  What do I mean? 

Justin Earley, (in his book - The  Common Rule from which this sermon draws)  tells of how when he started out in his job as a lawyer, he was working with a branch of his firm that worked out of London.  That meant, when he woke up each morning, he already had a bunch of emails from his co-workers in London they had written while he slept.  So, motivated by wanting to do a good job, his eyes always went to those emails first thing.  They set the agenda not simply for a lot of his day, but even the first few minutes of each morning.   His email check became a habit. 

Then one morning, he woke up to his son’s cries in the next room.  But even as he got out of bed to calm him, he saw the glow of the phone, the messages that had already arrived.  So, he thought.  I’ll just check those real quick before checking on my boy.  Then he noticed one or two that well, he could respond to quickly.   And as he was typing away, a little thought niggled at him in the back of his mind. Wasn’t there something else he needed to do?  Then he realized. “My son is still crying.”   But how did that happen?  How did he get to a place where emails from an office thousands of miles away, an office likely closed by the way, carry more urgency than the cries of his own son just a room away?  

It happens the way it happens for all of us.  Every day, you do all sorts of things on auto pilot, without even thinking.  That’s why when you get in the shower, you’re not thinking.  “Now how far do I turn the knob to get the temperature I like?  Which part am I gonna wash first?”  That all comes automatically, without you even thinking about it.   But that auto-pilot, if it’s leading you in the wrong direction, will lead you into a crash and burn, into a life more focused on your emails than your son.

Now, emails might not be your problem.  It might be something else, but here’s the point.  What you first focus on in the morning is not only telling you what you need to do.   It’s giving you a message about who you need to be.   Those emails told Earley.  Your value doesn’t lie in the God who made you or the family that loves you.  No, your value lies only in how you perform, what you produce, and nothing else matters more than that.   And without even realizing it, that is a lie that Justin Earley had come to believe. 

Do you know how to get someone to believe a lie?  It’s not hard really.  You just keep repeating the lie.   You repeat it often enough, people eventually believe it.   It’s a glitch in our brains. Researchers even gave it a name, the illusory truth effect. 

But why do we have that?  It likely has to do with how little of our brains we actually use. That hinders us from seeing the difference between what is real and what is not.   Oh, hold on a second.   That whole deal about how little of our brains we use.  That’s a lie.  It’s not true.   But folks have repeated that lie so often, that you might think it is true.   Do you see the point? 

Whatever you repeatedly hear or see, you’ll eventually come to believe.  And what you repeatedly first look at in the morning, even if it’s a lie you’ll start believing is the truth.  That’s why people get depressed looking at social media.  They start believing Fakebook isn’t fake or that Instagram really is real life.   Sometimes what is true can even tell you a lie.  I used to check the news first thing in the morning, often even before I got out of bed.  And what it told me was true.  But here was the problem.  Invariably I’d read something that troubled or worried me.   It affected, and not in a good way, how I related to my wife, to my son, to everything in my day.  Do you see the lie?   I had come to believe that a true thing, but one that in that moment I could do nothing about needed to be more my focus than the very people with whom I lived my life. 

So how do you change that?  Well, you change the first thing you look at.   That’s why Justin Earley make one of his daily habits, simply three words – scripture before phone.   He realized.  If I want to know what is real, then I need to begin with the creator of reality, with God.   And honestly, you can even use your phone to do that. 

When I decided to try out this daily habit, I downloaded one of the many daily prayer apps you can find out there.   It gave me my first thing in the morning prayer, and it gave me some scriptures to look at too.   Now you can also just keep a Bible by your bed and do it that way too. 

And when I began to do this habit, things began to shift.  First, when I did check the news, it didn’t capture me.  I realized.  God was far bigger than whatever the headlines held that day.  And work emails didn’t stress me as much either.  In those scriptures, God had reminded me of who I was, of whose I was, of who ultimately determined my value.  

Where do you start?  Sheesh, it could be anywhere, with a psalm in the morning or if it’s a long one, a portion of one or a chapter in the gospels or simply a story or set of verses in that chapter.  What matters is that whatever you read, you are beginning your day there, with the truth of who God is, of who you are.    And the more you do that, the more clearly you see what is real and what is not, the more you let the truth shape you rather than the subtle lies that our culture can try to sell you. 

But hey, let’s not totally trash the culture.  Out there, you can find beauty and truth in all sorts of amazing places.  But here’s the problem.   We can get lazy and miss the truth and beauty God yearns for us to see.   And that’s where the weekly habit comes in, curating media. 

Now what the heck does that fancy word curating means?   Well, it simply means that when you go to a great art museum, what you see doesn’t begin to represent all they have.   So how do they decide what goes up?  They curate it.  They pick the very best to show you, or at times, they put things together to help you understand something more deeply or see it more clearly.

And right now, in our world, you have the same challenge those art museums have.  You have way more stuff you could watch than you have time to see.  So, what do you do?  You curate it.    You carefully select what you want to see.   Now Earley decided to curate his media down to four hours a week.  But that’s his choice not yours.   You can go with whatever number of hours makes sense to you.  The key is that you think about it, you choose it.   Each year, for example, I pick shows or movies I think it would be good to see.   Some of them I pick because of their beauty and wisdom.  Others I pick because they open my eyes to see a truth more clearly or an injustice more deeply.   And of course, some I pick simply because I think they’ll be fun.  But the point is, don’t let the algorithms choose.  No, you choose.   And ask yourself too.  Is what I’m watching giving me life or taking it away?   For that reason, I limit how much TV news I watch or social media I consume.  I find both those things get toxic in anything but small doses. 

And as you make those choices, as you choose scripture before phone, as you think more carefully about what you choose to watch, do you see what you are doing?  You are rooting yourself in what is real, in the God who loves you, in the beauty and wonder of the world God created.   And as you do that, God will turn your eyes from the vanities of a world whose values are often warped and twisted in destructive ways.    And instead, God will turn your heart towards what is true, this God who loves you, this God who gave everything for you, this God who even now is healing and restoring this world, and who is inviting you to be part of that great work.   And as God turns your heart, God will heal it, God will grow it, God will shape your heart into something bigger, more wondrous, more beautiful, more love-filled than you could ever imagine or dream.