Sample Discussion: Dad, why does it matter what I watch?

“You are the salt of the earth, but if salt has lost its taste, how shall its saltiness be restored? It is no longer good for anything except to be thrown out and trampled under people’s feet.” —Matthew 5:13

This saying is hard for us to understand today, because our salt is so pure that it doesn’t become less salty. But in Jesus’s day, it wasn’t as pure, so if you let it mix with other things, the actual salt would be lost, and you would be left with only the impurities. If Jesus was trying to make this point today, maybe he would have used cereal instead.

I don’t know about you, but I really don’t enjoy eating soggy cereal. You get distracted, eat your cereal too slowly, and suddenly, instead of those crunchy Cheerios floating in milk, you just have a mush of milk and cereal, and you can barely tell one from the other. Gross! 

Cereal makers know we don’t like that, so they coat the cereal in oil and sugar so it maintains its crunchiness longer. But that coating won’t last forever. If you leave your cereal in the milk too long, the milk will dissolve the coating, and it will get soggy. To avoid that, someone invented a bowl with two compartments—one for cereal and the other for milk. When you’re ready for a bite, you just take a spoonful of cereal, dip it in the milk, and it’s crunchy every time!

We’re all a bit like cereal. The more time we soak ourselves in the world’s TV shows, movies, and songs, the more it will seep into our hearts and make us part of the mush that surrounds us. And that’s bad, not just because mush is gross, but because the world will teach us a message that will ultimately leave us empty. Our culture believes that everything revolves around us and our desires, but the gospel teaches that we live for God. He is a much more solid foundation for our lives than our own hearts, which are so often mistaken.

So, when we read our Bibles, pray together, and go to church, it’s like spraying ourselves in a coating of the gospel that will help us stay crunchy in the world. But that coating won’t last forever if we let ourselves just float along in the world’s messages. That’s why I limit how much screen time you have and what you watch and listen to. Our family and our church is like the cereal side of one of those bowls they invented. We are made to be ambassadors, to go into the world (or milk) on the other side of the container and give it the flavor of the gospel, but we need to decide when and how to do that. We don’t let ourselves just soak there.

Jesus has given us a great responsibility: to be the salt of the earth—to make the world taste more like the gospel. And the gospel is delicious—it’s what our hearts truly desire! But, if we aren’t careful, the opposite will happen—we’ll lose our distinct flavor and become part of the mush that surrounds us. So let’s work together to make good decisions about how we engage with entertainment.