What Do You Do With All Your Time?

Transcript

I appreciate the chance to speak to you today.  I hope you’ve all been enjoying the warmer weather.  We’re getting used to Texas weather now, so we find out that you never really know what’s going to happen from one week to the next.  It can feel like summer or it can feel like Siberia, and sometimes you get all of that in the same week at the same time.  

So I will start out by mentioning that there have been a few new words added to the English language recently, and these words have been formed by either adding, deleting or changing one or two letters in the word.  And so that’s how these new vocabulary words have come about and I thought I’d start by sharing some of those with you today.  

The first new word now that we have is intaxication,  and intaxication is the euphoria at getting a tax refund, which lasts until you realize it was really your money to start with all along.   Intaxication.  

Giraffiti, you see they’ve added a couple of letters there, and the definition is vandalism that is sprayed really, really high up. 

Sarchasm, you can see they added an h in the middle there.  The definition of sarchasm:   that’s the gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the person who doesn’t get it.  

Then we have decafalon.  Decafalon.  That is a noun of course and it means the grueling event of getting through the day consuming only things that are good for you.  None of us like to have to do that I think.

Then we have the arachnoleptic fit, also a noun, and that is the frantic dance performed just after you’ve accidently walked through a spider web.  

And finally, this is my favorite, catorpallor.  Catorpallor is the color you turn after finding only half a worm in the fruit that you’re eating.  

So now you’ve learned a few new vocabulary words that you can dazzle people at school or at work with.  

But actually this presentation today, this sermon or bible study, however you want to choose to categorize it, starts in my kitchen.  Now I need to tell you this is not a picture of my kitchen, this looks nicer than my kitchen, which is why I am showing you this one instead of my kitchen.  But this was a few years ago, and we had a lady that we knew very well from Africa, she was from East Africa, and we had been in her home many times, the home of her family.  And by a very unusual circumstance she was actually able to come to the United States for the graduation of one of her children who was studying in university in the U.S., and we were very happy to be able to have her over for dinner in our home.  Of course she was used to the way things worked in Africa, and it was quite different for her to step into an American, even a sort of average American, kitchen.  She watched my wife as she was going through all the preparations for the meal in the evening.  She noticed that we had an electric stove that did the cooking – you didn’t have to build a fire to do any of the cooking.  She saw this very large refrigerator, with enough space in it to hold food enough for a week or even two weeks, she didn’t have to go shopping every day, as most women have to do in Africa.  She noticed that we had a freezer, and the freezer would preserve meat almost indefinitely.  You could keep meat up there for months even, and that’s something that people in Africa don’t have, they’re not able to do that, they have to do their shopping almost daily in most cases.  She noticed that we had a garbage disposal – she didn’t have to even worry about putting everything in the garbage can, some of it just went down the garbage disposal and disappeared.  She was amazed by that, she’d never seen anything like that before.  She saw that we had a very large and efficient clothes washer, a washing machine and a dryer – you didn’t have to go outside.  You didn’t have to wash things by hand on a wash board and you didn’t have to hang them out on a line to dry them, all of that could be done automatically while my wife was engaged in something else.  She saw the vacuum cleaner, and the rug was taken care of in just a couple of seconds rather than having to carry it outside and drape it over a branch and beat it with a stick to get the dust out of it, which again is how things like that are done in Africa.  So after spending a few hours with my wife in our kitchen and observing all of these amazing devices that we all take for granted, we would be lost without most of those things, she said to my wife, “ What do you do with all your time?”  because her day in Africa is taken up doing all of those things by hand.  She has to go to the market and shop every day.  She has to build a fire and cook the food.  She washes her clothes by hand.  She hangs them out to dry.  When cleaning time comes she has no vacuum cleaner; she goes through with a broom and she carries the rugs outside and beats them with a stick.  What do you do with all your time?  And that is what I would like us to think about today.  What do you do with all your time? 

Now that may seem like a rather strange question because you may not think, first of all, that you have a lot of free time.  You may feel like you’re busy, busy, busy, like you’re doing things from morning till night, that you don’t have time to breathe.  That’s often the way Americans feel about their lives.  In fact there are studies that have been done recently that show that most Americans don’t get enough sleep. We are under sleeping by an hour or more a night on average.  So people don’t think that they have a lot of extra time, they don’t feel like they’ve got a lot of time on their hands, but in fact they do.  So that’s what we’re going to look at today.  

This is a study that was done by the United States Department of Labor, and what they said there, this is the way that we use our time on an average day, that is our leisure time.  Now this is time where you get to decide what you are going to do with it.  This is not including sleeping time, this doesn’t include working or getting to and from work.  This is the free time that you can choose to do whatever you want during the day.  And on average, it is stated here that the average American has over 5 hours of free time, or leisure time, every day.  

So look at the way we use our free time here.  This is the way that most Americans use their 5 hours plus of free time each day.  Now I would like for you to think about that for a moment.  Five hours of time, on average, you have available every day, that is time you can choose to use however you want.  Now, not every day will be like that, but on average that’s what this says here.  You have that much time on your hands and you choose what to do with it, and this is how the average Americans use that time.  Most of it, almost 3 hours of it, about 3 hours, is watching television.  As you can see that’s the largest part of it.  Socializing and communicating you can see 39 minutes.  Reading 20 minutes.  Participating in sports, exercise, or recreation, maybe going to the gym or taking a walk or something 19 minutes.  Computer games for leisure or pleasure 25 minutes.  You’ll be happy to know that most Americans think about 10 minutes a day, that’s a good sign.  And then other leisure activities 18 minutes.  

Now that’s interesting when you think about it, because probably when I said what do you do with all your time you’re thinking well I don’t have time to breathe.   If you really think about it and you break down your day, I believe you’ll find that you actually do have a lot of time where you get to choose how you’re going to use it, and that’s what I would like for us to think about today.  How do you use your time?  Well we can see already from this chart that the labor department has put out, that most people use the vast majority of their free time to entertain themselves.  They just want to be entertained.  They want to have fun, they want to do something that diverts them, it’s not necessarily anything useful, just entertainment.  Anthony Robbins famously said, “We are not in an information age; we are in an entertainment age,” and that is so true.  It’s probably more noticeable for older people to see it in young people, but now with smart phones and electronic tablets and things of that nature, pretty much any down time that a child would have in between things, they are either texting their friends or they’re playing an app, or there’s some sort of entertaining thing that’s going on.  And that is the age that we live in.

And so this is one of the things that I would like for us to think about today:  What role does entertainment have in the life of a Christian?  What kind of entertainments are appropriate for us.  Is it appropriate even to use entertainment to just divert ourselves, to kind of kill some time by doing something fun?  Does the Bible say anything about that?  What are the principles that we should use to decide what kind of entertainment we’ll allow ourselves, if any, and what we should be doing with our free time?  That’s what we are going to talk about today.  

Aiden Wilson Tozer, a pretty well-known writer, said that our reputation is formed, or we are known to others, by these 7 things that you see up on the screen:

1.    What we want most.
2.    What we think about most.
3.    How we use our money.
4.    What we do with our leisure time.   (There it is in all letters, so what we do with our leisure time says a lot about our character, a lot about who we are, and what we’re about, and what we stand for.)
5.    The company we enjoy. (And we’re going to talk about that a little bit later, because company nowadays doesn’t mean flesh and blood human company with whom we spend time.  It can also mean the people on the screen, or the recordings of people, or even characters in internet games or computer games.  We spend time with those people, and as virtual reality becomes more and more real, those people become more and more real, and so those people….  whose company online do we enjoy?  That says something about who we are as well.)
6.    Who and what we admire.
7.    What we laugh at.  (We could probably give a whole presentation just on the way humor has evolved, and devolved, and how much worse it has gotten over past decades.)  

How we use our leisure time, of course it’s there in all letters in number 4, that’s a big part of how our reputation is formed.  When people think about us they think about someone who uses his leisure time to do this….  maybe sports, or maybe it’s something else, maybe he’s an online gamer, or he does something else.  But even in some of these other things here, how we use our leisure time is there.  The company we enjoy, that tends to be when we have some free time.  Who do we choose to associate with?  Who and what do we admire, that’s going to show in the way we use our time.  We are going to be engaged or involved in activities that allow us to express or explore that admiration.  When we are laughing at things, sometimes it’ll be jokes with other people, but sometimes it’ll be the kind of entertainment that we look at to make ourselves laugh, and we all know that there are different kinds of humor.  So these aspects to think about, which really reflect what our character is, reflects what we are like deep down inside, a lot of this has to do with what we do in our free time, or our leisure time.  And I’m going to be discussing the term leisure time a little bit later as well, so we have a hopefully a clearer understanding of what that is.  

Geoffrey Chaucer, who wrote the Canterbury Tales, wrote around 1300, so this goes way back.  He is the first one to whom is attributed the phrase, “Idle hands are the devil’s workshop.”  That’s a phrase that older folks probably would remember in their youth.  Nowadays we often will state it differently:  we’ll say “He had too much time on his hands.”  Now when do we use a phrase like that?  When do we say “Idle hands are the devil’s workshop” or “He had too much time on his hands.”   It’s usually when somebody’s done something really stupid, right?   They did something really catastrophic that they hadn’t thought through, and you’re trying to understand why would he do something like that, and the explanation is he had too much time on his hands.  He didn’t have anything constructive or useful to do, and since he wasn’t engaged in something constructive or useful he ended up doing something dumb.  So it’s been recognized at least back to the 1300’s, in fact we can even find proverbs that reflect this as well, if we’re not using our time properly, if we’re sort of at a loss and we’re not directing the use of time that’s available to us, we’ll end up getting into trouble.  And that is a problem that our society is dealing with now.  Young people without supervision have a lot of free time after school, and they end up getting in trouble doing things that they shouldn’t.  

Well, what does the Bible say about free time or leisure time?  And is it good for us to have leisure time?  You know there are some people, it used to be thought that you were never supposed to have leisure time, you were supposed to spend every waking moment you could working.  Six days shalt thou labor, and even on the Sabbath, we heard about in the sermonette, there were a lot of restrictions on what you could do.  You were supposed to be occupied all the time and there wasn’t any room really for leisure time.  People thought that wasn’t a good thing.  Well, does the Bible teach that?  What does the Bible tell us about leisure time, and what should we understand?

Well, one verse we could think about is Ecclesiastes 2:24 where it says Nothing is better for a man than that he should eat and drink, and that his soul should enjoy good in his labor.  This also, I saw, was from the hand of God.  Enjoying good in his labor means enjoying the fruits of your labor.  You’re supposed to have some time after work or when you’re not working, to be able to enjoy what you produced from your work.  So this indicates that it’s good to have some what we call down time.  It’s good to have some free time when you can sit and think and enjoy the fruits of your labor.  That’s something that comes from God, it’s a gift of God.  

We can also consider 1 Timothy 6:17  where it says Command those who are rich in this present age not to be haughty, nor to trust in uncertain riches but in the living God, who gives us richly all things to enjoy.  Now this indicates that God gives us many blessings and He wants us to have the time to enjoy them.  And usually that is going to indicate that we are going to have some free time with which we can enjoy those things and decide how to use the good things that God gives us.  Share them with family members, and share them with friends, and just have time to rest and appreciate it and enjoy the things that God gives us.  Again an indication from the Bible that it’s not wrong for us to have free time or to have leisure time available to us.  

And then we can think about Ecclesiastes 11:9  where it says Rejoice, O young man, in your youth, and let your heart cheer you in the days of your youth; walk in the ways of your heart, and in the sight of your eyes; but know that for all these God will bring you into judgment.   Now here this is specifically directed to young people and it says you should be happy when you’re young.  That’s a time when you don’t have to deal, mostly, with things you will have to deal with when you get a little older.  You probably don’t have as many health issues as you will when you are older.  You are kind of indestructible health wise, you can get by on little sleep, and eat nothing but pizza all week, and still be healthy, and things that your parents probably couldn’t get away with.  I’m not suggesting that you do that, by the way.  And the Bible says it’s a time to explore different aspects of life, different options about life.  Walk in the sight of your eyes and in the ways of your heart.  Explore different things, learn about the world.  There are lots of wonderful things in this life that God has given us.  We spent some time around some young children recently and it was very interesting for my wife and I to reflect back on when our daughters were young, and what an amazing thing it is when young children are discovering the world. There are so many new things, there are so many interesting things that there are to explore and discover, and it’s an exciting and wonderful time.  And it’s good for young people to have the time to be able to explore different interests in life.  But the caveat is also added at the end that for all these things God will bring you into judgment.  So the way we use our time, He’s given us some leeway.  We have different options to explore.  There are different things that we could look at in the world.  There are different aspects of life that we can experiment with.  But we always need to keep in the back of our minds that God is aware of how we use that time, and He expects us to use it constructively.  He expects us to use our time appropriately and wisely, and that’s true when we have free time as well.  God is going to bring us into judgment for the way we use our time.  

So the Bible does indicate it’s good to have some free time.  But God watches the way we use it, and so we want to use it appropriately.

Well, does the Bible give us any guidance about making choices about how we use our free time?  Are there biblical principles that should guide us and help us determine, yes, this is an appropriate activity that I can engage in, and no, I really shouldn’t do this?   What are some principles that the Bible gives us?  Well, here’s one in Matthew 23: 25-26   He often had to castigate the scribes and the Pharisees for their hypocrisy.  They spoke a good religion but they didn’t live up to it, and here is one of those occasions.  “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!  For you cleanse the outside of the cup and dish, but inside they are full of extortion and self-indulgence.  Blind Pharisee, first cleanse the inside of the cup and dish, that the outside of them may be clean also.”  Now here’s a principle that can apply to what we’re going to choose to do in our free time.  Basically we can sum this up as to say what’s happening in our minds, or in our hearts, if you prefer, is more important than what’s happening just on the outside.  There are some people that know how to project a very righteous exterior, they’ll be very careful of what they do when people are watching, but inside it may not be that way at all.  This was true of the Pharisees in the first century and I’m sure you would agree it’s true of a lot of people today as well.  What’s happening in their minds can be pretty messy, or pretty dirty, up there.  But you don’t see that on the outside.  God expects us to be the same on the inside as what people see on the outside.  He wants us to avoid that hypocrisy.  So what’s happening in our minds, what we allow into our minds, and into our hearts, is important to God.  There are some things we should just not allow into our minds, because it’s supposed to be as clean in there as the image we project or want to project on the outside.  

Have you ever seen in a movie or on a television show or some other entertainment, a scene that was so shocking that you’ve never been able to get that image out of your mind?  In spite of yourself, you don’t want to remember it any more, it’s troubling to you whenever you think of it, you wish you hadn’t seen it, but it’s there, and it’s probably not going away any time soon.  Those kinds of images, really we shouldn’t go places where we risk even seeing things like that.  Why would we want to scar ourselves on the inside for the sake of some entertainment?  What’s happening on the inside and the way we look to God on the inside is just as important, even more important, than the way we appear on the outside.  

So what we think, the thoughts that we harbor, the wishes that we have, or the things that we mull over and think about, that’s very important.  That determines a big part of who we are in reality, in God’s eyes.  So that’s one principle that can guide us.

Here we have something in Matthew 5:21-22, and also 27-28.  Jesus said here in this passage of the Sermon on the Mount, “You have heard that it was said to those of old, ‘You shall not murder, and whoever murders will be in danger of the judgment.’ But I say to you that whoever is angry with his brother without a cause shall be in danger of the judgment. (It’s as if you committed murder, in other words.)  And whoever says to his brother, ‘Raca!’ shall be in danger of the council. (Raca means empty or like idiot, stupid, very condescending.)   But whoever says, ‘You fool!’ shall be in danger of hell fire….  You have heard that it was said to those of old, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’  But I say to you that whoever looks at a woman to lust for her has already committed adultery with her in his heart.”  

What do we learn here?  Well, it’s the same thing.  What’s happening in our minds and our hearts is a reality to God.  Even if we never commit the physical act, the fact that we harbor that hatred or we harbor that lust for somebody, we’ve already transgressed God’s law.  It’s as if we committed the act, and it’s a sin, a sin for which we have to repent and must be forgiven.  This is very, very important.  It doesn’t matter if things like that happen in public, it doesn’t matter if it happens in a movie theater, it doesn’t matter if it happens on a DVD in our living room.  Those kinds of desires that we can have, to hurt someone or to have some sort of wrong relationship with someone, that’s already transgressing God’s law.  This is very important in choosing the kind of entertainment that we will accept and allow ourselves, because I’m sure we would all agree there is a lot of what passes for entertainment out there in the world that is going to cause you to want to do things that violate God’s law.  You’ll be cheering for the guy who’s killing a lot of people.  Yes, get him.  Or you’ll be enticed to desire this attractive person on the screen or on the computer, whatever it might be.  

Young people need to understand this, we all need to understand this.  Even if nobody catches us doing something like that, it changes who we are.  It changes the essence of who we are, even if nobody knows, even if nobody catches us.  It’s still a sin, it violates God’s law, and we really are violating ourselves.  We’re changing who we are.  

Let’s think about now 1 Corinthians 15:33-34  where it says  Do not be deceived:  “Evil company corrupts good habits.”  Awake to righteousness, and do not sin; for some do not have the knowledge of God.  I speak this to your shame.  This is interesting.  Paul was writing to church members in Corinth and he was saying this applies to some of you sitting in the congregation in Corinth.  I’m saying this to your shame, you should know better than this.  But apparently there were some people in Corinth who were hanging around with the wrong crowd.  Now we don’t have a lot more details on what that was exactly or how that played out, but evil company corrupts good habits.  Some people in Corinth were allowing themselves to be drawn along with the current of the world.  Corinth was a very immoral city, and apparently some of the Corinthian Christians were being carried along with that current.  They were going along with evil company and they were finding that their good habits were being corrupted.  This usually doesn’t happen all at once.  It happens in little incremental steps, and it happens to Christians today as well who get sucked into various forms of entertainment.  It can be very attractive, really get our attention, very enticing, and little by little our moral standing can shift.  We are willing to accept things that we wouldn’t have accepted five years ago.  Well, it’s common place now, it’s so common, and that’s how evil company ends up corrupting good manners.  We can’t let society’s values, falling values, draw us along with it in its downward slide.  And that is going to require a lot of attention from us.  It already does, and it’s going to be increasingly that way as time goes on.    

Let’s also think about Proverbs 22: 24-25.  Here we read Make no friendship with an angry man, and with a furious man do not go, lest you learn his ways and set a snare for your soul.  Now this is a very important principle, and young people in particular need to understand it, although it’s important for all of us.  The people you hang around with affect you.  I can remember telling my Mom, “No they don’t.  My friends don’t affect me.  I know what I’m supposed to do.  It doesn’t really matter what they do.   It’s not going to affect me, I’m still going to do the right thing.”  And I’ve learned over time that the Bible is true, they do affect us.  The people we hang around with affect us.  If you hang around with people who are in trouble with the law you’re going to end up in trouble with the law sooner or later.  Not the first day maybe, but it’ll happen.  If you hang around with people that do drugs you’re going to be enticed to do that.   If you hang around people that engage in other wrong kinds of behaviors you’re going to be pulled in that direction.  Don’t keep company with people who are going to entice you to go the wrong way.  And remember, we’ve said that what’s going on on the inside is just as important as what’s happening on the outside.  

Nowadays it’s possible to hang around with people simply on the computer screen.  Maybe you hang around with Grand Theft Auto, guys who are shooting hookers, and stealing cars, and shooting at policemen.  That’s a very bad crowd to hang around with.  You say, “Well, that’s not people, that’s just a computer game.”  We’re going to talk more about that.  When you repeat behaviors, even just in a virtual environment, it affects you.  It does affect you.  And like I said we will talk more about that later.

So when it says make no friendship with an angry man, I would also say make no friendship with a bad videogame, with a violent videogame, or with any kind of entertainment, MTV or whatever it might be, that is going to drag your mind in a direction where really deep down inside if you think about it you know you shouldn’t really go.  It’s important that you guard yourself.  You’ve got to guard your own heart and mind about this.  

For example, in Proverbs 4:23 it says in the NKJ version  Keep your heart with all diligence, for out of it spring the issues of life.  The New Living Translation translates it Guard your heart above all else, for it determines the course of your life.   Now when the Bible talks about your heart, it’s not really talking about the organ that pumps blood.  Sometimes we say today, we still use expressions like,  I love my wife with all my heart.  It doesn’t mean the organ pumping blood; it means who I am, down deep inside.  The core of who we are, that’s our heart.  And this proverb warns us, protect that.  Protect who you are deep down inside.  Guard and keep your heart.  Guard your heart, because the way you do that or don’t do that is going to determine the course of your life.  Because whatever you allow to happen to you on the inside, whatever kind of thinking you allow yourself to get into, that’s the person you’re eventually going to become.   So we have a lot of choice in the kind of people we are going to become.  We make choices every day that determine how we’re going to turn out.  And that’s true for everybody, all human beings of all ages, but it’s especially true for young people.  You are preparing every day now by the decisions you make, you are determining the kind of adult you’re very likely to become later on.  And you can really help yourself move forward and give yourself some advantages, or you can made choices that will heavily disadvantage you later on, and maybe even close off some avenues to you later on in life.

Alright, let’s look at some specific dangers out there.  Now we’ve already established that some kinds of entertainment, some uses of our leisure time are appropriate and good, God wants us to have leisure time that we can use in an appropriate way.  But we’ve also seen already, there are a number of verses that say, there are some things you can’t let happen.  So specifically now, in our modern context, 21st century world America, what are some things that we need to be very careful about?  Well, one I would say is violent entertainment, and this falls into a couple of different categories.  It can be violent movies, that is certainly something that happens increasingly.  There are genres of movies that just set out to show as much awful gratuitous violence as possible, people being cut up while they’re still alive, etc, etc.  They make these things more and more graphic all the time, and they make a lot of money.  People flock to watch movies like that.  They like the thrill, the shiver that goes up their back when they see something really horrible happening.  But it changes the way you look at people.  And there are a lot of computer games now, electronic games that you can play like Call of Duty or Grand Theft Auto, or others  where it’s extremely violent, and not only that, but it puts you behind the gun.  You actually see the gun on the screen, you’re the one that’s walking around shooting people or doing whatever you’re doing, stealing cars or shooting at police or whatever it might be.  This is a huge problem, and it’s going to get even worse in the future, because so many young people take these things for granted today, and it’s changing the way they’re going to be later on.  

This fellow here is named Lt Colonel Dave Grossman, and he is a military psychologist, and he especially studies the effect of violence and killing in combat, and he has written a couple of really interesting books.  I’ve put one up on the screen here, it’s called On Killing.  I really recommend it.  It’s a fascinating book that just shows the impact that it has on human beings when they are in situations where they kill, or when they survive a situation like that.  But then at the end he talks a lot about the impact that violent entertainment is having on our culture today, and he says that we have a whole generation of young people now in America, and not so young people as well, who are becoming or have become desensitized to violence.  They’ve become desensitized to killing people, because they’ve seen it so many times, and they’ve seen it in such entertaining environments.  They’re sitting on the couch watching a movie, eating popcorn, sitting next to their girlfriend, and someone gets blown away.  And you probably, if you’ve been to the movies, and if  you’ve ever seen these kinds of movies, sometimes when a killing occurs, the audience cheers.  It wasn’t that way 40 years ago.  It wasn’t that way 50 years ago.  People didn’t cheer when somebody, even a bad guy, when somebody got blown all over the screen.  People didn’t take that lightly.  

Part of the research that he’s done in this book, he shows how the United States military set out to make better soldiers.  Because starting even back in the days of the Civil War, and especially after World War II, there was a study done by a gentleman named S.L.A. Marshall, and he researched the way the American soldier fought.  And he would interview men, and he interviewed them about what happened in different battle circumstances, and when his report first came out people said no, that’s not possible.  But later on it’s been confirmed that this actually was true.  He found through his research that out of 100 soldiers that would be on the firing line, on average only 15 or 20 would shoot to kill the enemy.  These were American soldiers.  Because there’s a very strong inhibition in human beings to killing other human beings, especially in a face to face kind of circumstance.  He found that only 15 to 20 of the soldiers would actually shoot to kill the enemy, out of 100.  Now it didn’t mean the men were cowards.  They would stay up there in the firing line, they didn’t run away, they risked their lives, they tried to help their friends if they got wounded or shot, but this inhibition was so strong to look at another human being, to see his face, and to shoot at him to try to kill him.  The inhibition was so strong that only that small percentage of soldiers would actually do that.  Now in one sense that’s a very good thing; we should be thankful for that that there is that, there was a care for human life.  But of course from a military point of view that’s not a good thing.  You don’t want only 15 or 20 of your soldiers shooting, out of every hundred, you want a much higher percentage.  So the U.S. army set out to improve that percentage, and they were able to improve that percentage.  By the Korean War, 55% of American soldiers were shooting to kill.  By the Vietnam War, 90-95% were shooting to kill, out of every 100.  

And they did this by a very careful strategy of training for the soldiers.  The first step was desensitization.  Desensitization was getting the soldiers used to the idea of killing people.  They would talk about it a lot.  Officers would tell them what a good thing it was.  They would be informed that they would get rewards if they did, medals or recognition or admiration from others.  They repeatedly heard all the way through boot camp, all the way through training, what a great thing it was to kill people.  

Then there came what’s called conditioning.  That was the second step.  Pavlovian and Skinnerian conditioning.  You’ve probably read about Pavlov’s dogs, I think they still study those things in school.  Pavlov had dogs in a laboratory, he would ring a bell, and give them food, ring a bell, give them food, ring a bell, give them food.  After a very short time, just a few days, he could ring the bell, not give the dog any food, and the dog would salivate anyway.  The dog had been conditioned to associate the bell with food.  Eventually it became the same thing in the dog’s mind, to the point where when he heard the bell he started salivating.  Dogs don’t decide when they are going to salivate, it happens or it doesn’t happen, they have no control over that, but they were conditioned to associate those two things.  Soldiers were conditioned in quick shot scenarios.  That is, a target would suddenly appear, and the soldier had to make a snap decision to shoot, and he would shoot before he even had time to think about it.  And they would have them do this over and over and over again, to where it just became enemy – shoot.  No thought involved in it anymore.  That was the conditioning of it.  They learned to act automatically without thinking.  Practice over and over.  Make the conditions as realistic as possible.

Then there was a denial mechanism, or denial defense mechanism.  That is, treating the enemy as if he weren’t really a human being.  There was always a slang name for the enemy.  You can probably think in different wars what the other side was called.  This was a denial mechanism – I don’t have to think of them really as people – to the point where, and this was extremely successful, right now in the United States army it’s extremely effective when it comes to military action.  In 1993 American soldiers were ambushed and trapped in the city of Mogadishu in Somalia.  At the end of the fight 18 American soldiers had been killed, but at least 1,000 Somalis had been killed, and some estimates go much, much higher than that.  That’s the kind of lopsided engagements you have when soldiers are trained to act just that way.

Well why am I telling you that?  Because, one of the things that Colonel Grossman points out is that a lot of the entertainment that our young people are watching, and older people as well, but especially younger people, is going through exactly that same process.  Especially first person shooter games, where you’re the guy holding the gun in the computer game.  But even others where when you’re just watching the movie, you’re desensitized.  That’s the first thing that happens, because you’ve watched people, how many people have you seen killed on the screen in your lifetime?   Thousands.  Even those of us that don’t go to the movies very often, wouldn’t you agree?  At least thousands of people we’ve seen die, and that didn’t use to happen that way a generation ago, or two generations ago.  So we’ve been desensitized to it, to the point where, as I mentioned sometimes in theaters, somebody gets just blown apart and people cheer, yay.  It wouldn’t have been that way a generation or two ago.  

So our young people get desensitized to violence, they take it for granted, they almost miss it if there isn’t some bloodshed in the film, it’s going to be boring.  Oh, it’s only a G rated movie, only PG, that means there’s not going to be any skin and there’s not going to be any violence, it’s not worth going.  Young people want that now, and older people as well, those are the movies or the games that make a lot of money.  There’s conditioning, like I said, where you play that computer game, you get rewarded.  You get points for shooting more of the enemy.  You get upgraded weapons, or you get whatever it is, you’re getting rewarded for doing it, and you learn to shoot, you learn to make snap decisions, and a lot of those things end up transferring over into the real world.  Almost all of the school shooters in recent American shootings had been playing these kinds of games hours and hours and hours.  They get desensitized, they get conditioned, and even the training that they do transfers over.  There was one fellow in a school shooting, I’ve forgotten exactly where that was, I was trying to track down the example, and I remember it very clearly but I couldn’t find the source, he killed something  like 10 of his schoolmates with head shots and he’d never really done any much real life shooting; it was just the fact that he had practiced that over and over again in computer simulations so many times, that even when it came to the real thing, he was making head shots, which even police don’t usually try to do that.  So some of that stuff transfers over very directly into real life.  

So it’s important for us to understand, as parents we need to be very aware of what our children are doing, what games they’re playing, and what they’re doing on the internet, and what movies they’re watching.  And I would say to young people here, and this tends to be more guys than girls, if you’re playing Grand Theft Auto V you shouldn’t be.  If you’re playing those first person shooter games, you need to stop, or you need to have a long talk with your parents about it, because it is changing who you are.  It’s desensitizing you to violence, and it’s teaching you, your heart, that it’s OK to do those things.  You’re hanging around with the wrong crowd.  So don’t do it.  Please stay away from that.  That’s not the only game.  There are other games like Doom, Call of Duty, Bulletstorm, Mortal Kombat, etc.  Parents please, if you’ve not done this before, go in your son’s room and find out what games he’s playing.  Ask him, have a conversation about it, and discuss whether or not that really has a place in your family’s life.  This is a really, really important conversation that you need to have.

Another thing that we have to be very careful about now in entertainment is sexual conduct, content rather, conduct as well, in media.  The same thing is happening here on a different level.   People are becoming desensitized to it.  They’re accepting as normal things that would never have been accepted as normal a generation or two ago, even 10 or 15 or 20 years ago, would not have been accepted as normal and now they are.  There is a huge shift happening in America right now of what is going to be considered acceptable.  

If you think about music, you ever listen to the lyrics of modern popular music?  A lot of it is pornography set to music.  They are pushing wrong values, it’s not about marriage and courtship and family life.  It’s about quickies and all of that kind of stuff where there is no follow-up to it, there is no real relationship.  So music, which a lot of our young people are listening to all the time.  You’ve got it on your phone, you’ve got it on your I-pad, you can choose the music you listen to.  Pay attention to the lyrics that you’re listening to, because you’re hanging around with those people, and they’re changing your heart.  

Popular books and magazines encourage wrong sexual relationships all the time, and that’s how they make their money.

Movies, PG-13 and R rated movies are pushing the envelope more and more.  Most films don’t hit blockbuster status unless there’s nudity and sexual conduct or violence, or some combination of the two, because that’s what people have become accustomed to, and that’s what they want.  But that’s not what a Christian should want.  We can’t imagine Jesus Christ going into one of those cinemas and watching that movie.   And I may mention this again, but that’s a pretty good indicator for us, is to say if Jesus was coming over to my house tonight would I be playing this video for the evening’s entertainment.  Or would I want Him to play this video game with me for a few minutes.  If we would be uncomfortable with that, then that’s probably our conscience telling us you really should be finding another form of entertainment.  Movies are getting worse and worse, and you probably are aware of this, but a lot of times what they’ll do is they will work with the ratings agency because they want to have an R, they don’t want an NC-17, so they’ll put as much in there as they can, and they’ll get right up to the edge, the outside edge of what an R is allowed, and sometimes they go over a little bit, and the ratings commission will say you’re going to get an NC-17.  And they’ll say well what’s the scene that I can take out, and they’ll take out just that one scene that went kind of over the top, because they want to get as far out there as they can with the nudity and the violence.  And that’s the entertainment culture that we live in, and we have to make choices about what we’re going to accept to watch and what we’re not.  

This is going to be, this is already, a huge scourge in our country and it’s going to get worse.  That is, pornography, especially internet pornography.  It is increasingly easy to access.  It used to be if you wanted to look at pornography you had to go down to a seedy part of town, or you had to go into a magazine shop and you risked some of your neighbors seeing you, and that was a deterrent.  Now you can sit in a private room in your house, in your bedroom or whatever, and you can see things that are way beyond any kind of pornography that would have existed even 20, even 10 years ago. It’s increasingly vile and violent, and the reason is because people are getting desensitized.  They’re always looking for that kick, they’re always looking for that thrill that goes beyond what they had before, and so the pornography has to get harder and harder and more vile all the time.  I saw an interview recently with an expert on the matter who said she had interviewed a lot of men who had a pornography addition, and almost invariably they admitted that they ended up looking at things that they would have found so abhorrent when they started that they wouldn’t have looked at it, but they ended up accepting it down the road because they became desensitized.  They always had to look for something that was farther out and farther out.  

Parents need to know that your children have probably already come across it in spite of your best efforts.  According to the Justice Department, 90% of children between the ages of 8 and 16 have accessed it, either by accident or on purpose.  So it’s really important as parents that we have filters on the internet at home, but those don’t work 100%, so you’ve got to be aware, there’s got to be some oversight, you really need to be aware of what your children are looking at.  It’s a good idea not to let them be able to watch, let them have unfettered access to the internet in their room where they can close the door.  Internet especially for younger kids and younger teens needs to be out in a public part of the house, where everybody can be aware of what they’re looking at.  

I read a report from a psychologist and several doctors who have looked into this, and they feel that the addiction that comes from pornography is stronger than that that comes from cocaine.  And we all know, we’ve heard the stories, of how addictive that can be.  So you start going down that road, you could get caught up in it, and have a really, really hard time stopping.  So the best thing is just don’t go, don’t go there.  It’s not good for you, it’s not good for society, and it’s not going to take you any place good.  Please don’t get involved in that guys, men, and this can be a temptation for any man.  Don’t do it for the sake of your family.  Most divorces that happen today, internet porn is somehow tied up in it.  Lawyers will tell you that, more than half, that’s some factor in the divorce, in the break-up of the family.  For the sake of your education, it can be so addictive that you lose interest in getting your education and getting good grades and the rest of it.  That’s happened to many, many people.  For the sake of your mental health, because it will change who you are, and if you hang around with wrong, twisted people, it will twist you, so just don’t.  For the sake of your mate, if you are married now, or if you are not married now, for the sake of your future mate, because you’re being unfaithful to her if you’re watching things like that now, and it will change the kind of husband you’ll be.  And for the sake of your relationship with God, because it can get in the way of your relationship with God as well.  It’s hard to pray when you’re feeling guilty about something like that, you’re caught up with something or you feel like you’re losing control, you can feel guilty about talking to God in those kinds of situations.  So please, guys, don’t go there.  Stay away from it.  It’s incredibly, incredibly destructive.  And parents we’ve got to make sure we do everything we can to protect our children and our teens from these kinds of influences.  They need help.  Even the best kids need help to be able to resist those kinds of influences.  

We also need to be aware of hidden messages in the entertainment of society.  And these are also things that we become desensitized to, and so it’s important in family situations and in our own lives if we are adults, even if we don’t have children right now.  We’ve got to be aware of very seductive message that are constantly put out there in most all of the entertainment that’s out there, and we’ll look at a couple of them.  One of them is disrespect for God and all authority.  Christianity is under attack in the United States; they want it out of the public, can’t even talk about it, don’t bring a Bible to school, don’t talk about God at school.  None of that was true when I went to school, and it wasn’t for you parents of teens that are here now.  You could bring a Bible to school, you could talk about it, you could pray sometimes.  We prayed over lunch when I was in public schools.  That was very common.  And now they want all of that out of there.  There is disrespect for God, there is disrespect for the principles that are found in His word.  The Christian way of life is being increasingly vilified, and we’ve got to be careful that we don’t allow that to affect us.  

There is a great disrespect for God’s law and for most law.  People don’t want to have any laws now.  You can’t tell me what to do, I can do whatever I want.  The police are seen as the bad guys, right, because they’re enforcing the law, and that’s bad, laws are bad, we don’t want laws enforced.  But God’s law is good.  It’s the way that shows us the way to life.  We’ve got to understand law is good.  Good law at least is good.  It’s a good thing.  We need laws, we need rules.  And so we’ve got to be careful that the societal message that law is bad, that Christianity is bad, that God doesn’t really exist, all that stuff that’s out there, that that doesn’t begin to subtly influence the way we think.  

Selfishness.  This is a big thing that’s pushed out there now.  You owe it to yourself to do whatever you have to do to be happy.    If that means betraying your mate and leaving your family and whatever, stealing money, or anything, your first priority has got to be to make you happy.  That’s the message out there in the world.  And that’s not God’s message.  That’s not God’s message.  God’s message is seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and that’s not the easy way to go.  That means denying yourself, as Jesus said, if any man wants to follow Me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow Me.  That’s the way the Bible teaches, not number one first, I get whatever I want to make me happy.  But that really is the situation, increasingly that way.  

Demonic influences.  How many vampire, werewolf, super-natural thrillers do we see come out every year, either on television or in the movie theaters?  And there’s a desensitization that goes on there as well.  Those are influences we’ve got to be very, very careful about, not let that become blasé for us or normal, that we would not be repulsed by things like that.  Anything demonic is of Satan, the enemy of God, who is trying to kill all of us.  We don’t want to take those things lightly or get pulled along in that direction.

Basically the underlying message in all of that, and we know Satan has a big hand in inspiring all of that, is they are pushing us to rebel against God.  And to go the way of pride, me first, I’m the greatest, I know what’s best, and sensuality, whatever pleases the senses.  If it feels good, do it.  That’s the message today.  And those messages are very subtly vehicled by all sorts of entertainments that are out there that we need to be very careful about.  

Alright then, there are a couple of major things that we need to be very careful about in how we use our leisure time or our free time.  Well then, how should we use our leisure time?  What should we be doing with the free time that we have?  Well first we need to ask the question what is leisure time?  How should we think about our leisure time?  If you think about what we have in the way of time, we have a certain amount of time in the day, a certain amount of time in the week, and in the classical world (this goes all the way back to classical Greece, but also the Renaissance and classical European thinking) you could, one way to look at it is to break up your time into three categories.  This is what composes our time.  You’ve got to work. You have to earn a living so that you can eat, have a place to live, have clothes to wear, you’ve got to work.  (You used to have to work; maybe we’re getting into a phase of society where a whole bunch of people never really have to work, but normally everybody has to work.)  Then you have to recuperate from work.  Work is hard.  It used to be harder.  Now a lot of times we just sit at a desk and do our work there, but some work is physically very demanding.  So there’s a certain amount of time that is required to recuperate from work.  This would include your 7 or 8 hours of sleep, we hope you’re somewhere in that range there, if you’re get less than that you’re probably depriving yourself, although that’s an individual thing.  And we need some time just to physically rest.  Once we’ve finished with our work, what we need to earn our living, and once we’ve recuperated from our work, then what we have left is what we could call our leisure time, our free time.  We choose how we’re going to use that time.  And the classical definition of leisure time, and like I said some of this goes all the way back to the Greeks, you find it in the Renaissance, you find it in the Enlightenment, these are things that people have thought about for a long time, and also these are the principles that we find underlined in the Bible as well, our free time should be used to pursue good things and improve ourselves.  Our free time, our leisure time, should be used to improve ourselves.  This is a time when the ancients would have said to pursue truth, beauty, and goodness, and those are all Biblical values as well.  Things that are true, things that are beautiful.  We’re going to look at some scriptures in a moment that talk about that.  Things that are good.  This is time for re-creation.  And notice I put a hyphen in that to show where the word recreation comes from.  It means re-creation.  We are sort of renewing ourselves.  We’re re-creating, we’re becoming something more than what we were before.  That’s the goal of recreation.  This is time in which we can achieve our human potential that God has given us.  God has given us the potential to grow, to develop qualities, to develop talents, and that takes time and some effort, and our free time is the time when we can do that.  It’s time to improve ourselves morally, intellectually, and above all spiritually.  We heard in the Sermonette the value of the Sabbath.  The Sabbath would be the highest use of our leisure time.  It’s time when we connect with God.  It’s time when we study His word, when we fellowship with His children.  It’s time when we spend time with our families, when we are building others up and we’re becoming better ourselves.  That is a wonderful use of free time that God tells us we’ve got to use.  I’m giving you this day, here’s how I want you to use it.  That’s the Sabbath; it’s for your good.  It’s going to build you up, it’s going to make you better, it’s going to re-create you.  And when we use the Sabbath properly, that’s what it does.  

The idea of leisure, actually the term that the Greeks used for it was schole.  That was their word for leisure.  And that’s where we get our term school.  School was time when you weren’t working, and you weren’t recuperating from work, it’s when you got to sit at the feet of a very educated teacher and improve yourself.  That’s what school was supposed to be.  Maybe it isn’t always anymore, but that’s how it started out.  It was a place where we could have learned discussion and we could become better, we could develop our talents and our abilities.  

Ephesians 5:15-16  says See then that you walk circumspectly, not as fools but as wise, redeeming the time, because the days are evil.  This is a really interesting verse for a couple of reasons.  You probably don’t often use the word circumspectly.  I don’t use it very often either.  Let’s break it down and see what it means.  Circum means around, like the circumference of a circle.  And spectly, that has to do with vision, like your spectacles.  So to be circumspect means to be looking at what’s around you, to be aware of your environment so that you can act appropriately.  To be circumspect means you’re avoiding dangers and you are pursuing paths that are going to be good for you.  So Ephesians 5 says we are to walk that way, that’s the way we should live our lives, be very aware of what’s going on around us, what’s dangerous, what’s bad, what’s helpful, and what’s good.  And we need to avoid what’s wrong, and we need to be pursuing what is going to help us achieve the goals that we have.  Because if we don’t walk circumspectly, we are walking foolishly.  And sadly our nation is becoming more and more foolish, because people aren’t walking circumspectly, they just want mindless entertainment all the time.  

We want to be wise, redeeming the time. Now you can look that up if you want to, but basically most of the commentaries will say to redeem the time means to make full use of it, to use it to the full, to use it wisely, to squeeze every bit of usefulness out of the time that we have.  When you think about it, think of all the free time that we have compared to what people have in other countries.  I go back to my kitchen story at the beginning, when that member of the church said “What do you do with all your time?”  She has to work all day long.  She doesn’t have very much leisure time.  We have a wonderful gift, where God has essentially said look I’m giving you five hours every day and you can use it to better yourself.  You have a lot more time to think about these things, to educate yourself, to improve yourself, and we’ll look at some ways we can do that in just a moment.  That’s a wonderful gift of time that God gives us.  What do we do with that?  Do we use it constructively or do we waste it?  Do we kill it, as our expression is in the States.  What are you doing?  Oh I’m killing time.   We shouldn’t be killing time.  We should be redeeming the time, because the days are evil, and they’re going to get more evil.

1 Peter 4:3-5 says For we have spent enough of our past lifetime in doing the will of the Gentiles – when we walked in lewdness (bad behavior, outrageous behavior), lusts, drunkenness, revelries, drinking parties, and abominable idolatries. (You know, it’s a sad commentary on our country, but if I read that list to a lot of people they’d say hey that sounds like a great time to me.  That sounds like my last Friday night.  That’s what people who don’t know God that’s what they do with their time.  But Peter said we’ve spent enough time doing that in the past.  We need to get beyond that now.)  In regard to these, they think it strange that you do not run with them in the same flood of dissipation, speaking evil of you. (Maybe you’ve got classmates that do that.  No he’s a goody two shoes.  Oh he’s too good for this.  He’s one of those Christian types, you know, never has any fun. But, Peter said at the end… )  They will give an account to Him who is ready to judge the living and the dead.    

We are going to give an account for how we use our time, and whether we walk circumspectly or not.  Wouldn’t it be a terrible thing if in the Day of Judgment God says I would like to see what you’ve done with your life.  You had a pretty long life because you were living in America in the 21st century, you had good medical care, I healed you a few times, you had 50 or 60 years of adult life, active adult life, and you had a lot of time that you could use to improve yourself.  Please give an account of what you accomplished.  Let Me see the character that you developed.  Let Me see the knowledge of My word and how to apply it.  What did you accomplish?  Wouldn’t it be a sad thing to show God look this is what I did, and He said you did that in 60 years?  You could have done that in 10.  What did you d