"The average adult who spends 50 hours a year in a pew will also spend 2,000 hours at home watching television" –Brian Chapel in "Christ Centered Preaching"
The American culture is defined by busyness. Our schedules are packed and we rarely have time for things that haven't been planned into our busy days. Or at least that is what we try to communicate to others, but the impression we give of being busy doesn't line up with this statistic. If this statistic is true (which lines up accurately with other statistical research) than this means average Joe American spends 5.4 hours a day watching TV. That is over 37 hours a week, which is just shy of being the equivalent of a full time job.
Going off what we said yesterday, if we are so heavily influenced by the things we see and hear, than this shows why our spiritual lives are such a struggle. You may not watch this much TV, but however much you watch I am guessing there is more time spent in front of the TV than a Christian book. We are being heavily influenced by the media, and rarely influenced by the Bible, church, and things of the like.
So when the preacher gives a 30 minute message about living for others, that same listener is bombarded with countless hours of media telling them to serve themselves: buy this to make you look better, this to make you feel better, you deserve this and that. They are opposing messages, yet the message from the culture is taking center stage!
This is going to be a struggle for us, because obviously we can't just be in church 5 hours a day to combat this. But there are some things we can do to live in such a way that our influences are Biblical ones, so when we are around media and culture, instead of being influenced by it, we begin to see things through the lens of Scripture and seek to influence the culture itself. This is what we will tackle tomorrow.
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