IDEA: The church can help Christians resist the lure of covetousness.
TEXT: "You shall not covet your neighbor’s house; you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, nor his male servant, nor his female servant, nor his ox, nor his donkey, nor anything that is your neighbor’s" (Exodus 20:17).
"You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife; and you shall not desire your neighbor’s house, his field, his male servant, his female servant, his ox, his donkey, or anything that is your neighbor’s" (Deuteronomy 5:21).
PURPOSE: To help Christian leaders think about how to help people deal with the temptations of the media.
We think of Christian education, but if we’re serious about Christian education, we need to educate people not only about the Bible but also about the society in which we live.
I. People often raise their guard when they hear someone preach, but lower their guard when they think they’re being entertained.
Advertisers are evangelists for greed.
In May 15, 1950, TIME magazine published the following: Coke’s peaceful near-conquest of the world is one of the remarkable phenomena of the age. It has put itself (in the phrase of a Coca-Cola executive), "always within an arm’s length of desire." And where there is no desire for it, Coke creates desire. Its advertising, which garnishes the world from the edge of the Arctic to the Cape of Good Hope, has created more new appetites and thirsts in more people than an army of dancing girls bearing jugs of wine. It has brought refrigeration to sweltering one-ox towns without plumbing, and it has transformed men one generation removed from jungle barter into American salesmen with an irresistibly sincere approach.
Television tells us the big story to tell us the little story. We sometimes are aware of the danger of the big story (we have TV-14), but we don’t have symbols for the advertisements which may be doing us more damage than anything we see in the big story.
By the time someone reaches age 21 in our culture, he or she will have watched between 700,000 and one million commercials on television.
II. The church needs to teach us not only about the Scriptures but also about the culture that is antagonistic to the values of the Bible.
If you take a child into Toys R Us, you don’t have to tell that child what to do. But if you expect that child to stand up to the lures of this world and say No, that child must be formed and re-formed by a people who have learned to want the right things rightly. Unfortunately, parents go along with the children’s desires rather than reshaping those desires.
The church can do a better job of enabling ordinary Christians to want the right things rightly.
We must develop better skills in analysis, discernment and resistance if we are to live lives congruent with the tenth commandment.
William Willamon illustrates this: "We had a young couples’ church school class that selected a course offered by our denomination called "TV and Christian Values." It involved analyzing TV ads, keeping a log of family viewing habits, discerning hidden messages behind programs, etc. The course seemed like a waste of time–except that the class doubled in size in two months. These young couples knew: it’s not only the "idiot box" but the "ideology box." TV is about indoctrination, inculcation into an ideology alien to our theology. And it’s winning."