What You Feed On Determines How You Grow!

     Two of my favorite fast-food items are Krispy-Kreme doughnuts and French fries; they are just the tastiest things I can easily get a hold of and they make me want to have more of it every time I get it. However, it’s been a while since I’ve had either of these.

     A Krispy Kreme Original Glazed doughnut is made from at least 50 ingredients – mostly artificial food additives that increase your risk of cancer, diabetes, heart disease, allergies, and digestive disorders. A medium order of French Fries has 365 calories along with 17 grams of fat, 26% of your daily value. Sodium clocks in at 246 mg, or 10% of the upper limit you should eat in a day.

If you eat junk food all the time, your body is going to show it sooner or later. If you eat healthy food, you will have better results. Some of us are very careful in eating the right thing. We see more people are beginning to give value for nutrition rather than just taste.

We here in America are being bombarded daily with a lot of junk. It definitely does not seem like it, it does not taste bad; we have become used to it and kind of like it. No, I’m not talking about food, I’m not talking about fries or doughnuts or milkshakes, but about Satan’s No.1 channel of influence: Media.

     More than our friends or anything else we can think of, what influences us the most is simply the media outlet. For the most part we assume that the media is just simply there, providing a constant stream of news and views, images and sounds, information and entertainment.

     The apps on the phones/tablets, the television sets, movies, news, reality shows and the long list of programs that feed into our minds daily are outrageous. Messages are conveyed instantaneously in sound and vision to you knowingly or unknowingly. We may criticize those video clips or that television program for its content, we may not like the News media and their propaganda but we never question the fact that we spend so much of our leisure time with the television or with the phone or maybe even just listening to some music as a background noise. What we do is, allow the media to feed our minds continually and repeatedly. We may cringe initially at many immoral, non-biblical practices that we watch or read on these media outlets, but later on we become desensitized, tolerant and then accept those as part of our culture, then before we know it – we end up practicing the same. It almost reminds me of the verse: Satan comes to steal, then to kill and then to destroy (John 10:10)… It’s a step by step process for the enemy and we fail to recognize it.

     “The need to follow Christ in a media-culture demands that we become aware of how we use the media and how much we depend on the media to shape the routine of our lives” says Dr. James McDonnell. The time we spend on these media outlets is shockingly shameful. We end up not having time for ourselves, our family, our spouses, our children and above all - our God.

     In an article “Christian Discernment in a mass media culture,” James McDonnell says “critical awareness to these has to begin not with the content of the mass media, but with the presence of the media in our daily life”. Unless we are prepared to liberate ourselves from the compulsion to view, listen or read simply to "pass the time," critical awareness will be no more than a commentary on our own dependence. We have to choose times when we turn off our phone, ignore the television and put the iPad aside. Discernment, like prayer, reading and meditating on God’s word requires a measure of silence and solitude in our life. All of us need to find "peace and quiet" amid the endless routines of daily life. Disengaging every now and then from the noise of the media provides precious moments in which to listen to God and to examine how far we are creative and free in our media use.(Ph. McDonnell)

     Listening to His Word and to the Holy Spirit is something we need to feed ourselves on: Prov. 4:20 says “My son, attend to my words; incline thine ear unto my sayings.” And verse 21 tells us to not let the Word of God depart from our eyes. Ps 119:105 says “Your word is a lamp for my feet, a light on my path.” Let’s take time to feed ourselves with his Word and ask the guidance of the Holy Spirit. Let’s be selective about the time we spend on our phones, iPads, laptops, or TVs.