The Kidnapping of Our Children and How to Get Them Back

Childhood is a divinely protected season of life. That is what Jesus declared when He said,

“…But whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him to have a great millstone fastened around his neck and to be drowned in the depth of the sea” (Mark 9:42, ESV; see also Matthew 18:6 and Luke 17:2).

The Evil One will be thrown into the lake of fire, drowned in the depth of the sea of eternal flames, because of his direct attack on children. Satan masquerades in our culture as one who would help children, but we must be careful. There is not a devil under every bush, but there is a devil behind every attempt to kidnap childhood.

I used to require all of my assistant pastors to read Neil Postman‘s The Disappearance of Childhood.[1][2] The late professor of communications at the University of New York used common grace, for he was not a believer,[3] to see that childhood was, in essence, created by Jesus Christ with these very words, reclaimed, I would say, from the Fall, and subjected to re-entry into darkness when a man or woman or a community rejects the light they were given in God’s Word. Thus, Postman felt that while the Reformation, with its emphasis upon the Word, reclaimed childhood, postmodernity and the new “image based” society seeks to steal it. The picture of the little cover photograph of a little girl, she looks to be eleven or so, with twenty-year-old make up, is a shocking image in itself pointing to the professor’s thesis. These words do not do the book justice. Read it for yourself. Yet it is enough to say that our society, by rejecting God and His Word, by rejecting the commandment of God to have no other images, for images provoke the idol factory of the mind and the idols must be then be fed. The image gods are fed with immodesty at the first and then, finally, by utter moral failure and corruption until finally the child is consumed.   Continue at Reformed Theological Seminary

The Message Is the Medium: Gospel-Driven Church Planting

Editor’s Note: On October 10 and 11, The Gospel Coalition will join with 9Marks, Sovereign Grace Ministries and The NETS Institute for Church Planting for Plant New England, a conference for church planters and church-planting churches, to be held near Boston. NETS president Wes Pastor introduces this event, an official TGC regional conference for New England.

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The medium is the message. This is the idea Neil Postman popularized 25 years ago when he dropped his literary bombshell, Amusing Ourselves to Death.

Obviously we Americans could do with less entertainment, whether it’s Netflix, FarmVille, or our insatiable appetite for sports. But Postman wasn’t critiquing entertainment per se; he was critiquing our attempts to deal with serious matters through it. His thesis: We live in an age not of exposition but of entertainment, making thoughtful interaction essentially impossible, since light media can’t support serious ideas.   Keep Reading...

ON DANGEROUS READING: A Warning Against The Reading of Novels, Fiction, and Other Poisonous Literature

"Now, all works of fiction are full of scenes of imaginary distress, which are constructed to impress the sensibilities. The fatal objection to the habitual contemplation of these scenes is this, that while they deaden the sensibilities, they afford no occasion or call for the exercise of active sympathies. Thus the feelings of the heart are cultivated into a monstrous, an unnatural, and unamiable disproportion.[2] He who goes forth in the works of active benevolence among the real sufferings of his fellow creatures will have his sensibilities impressed, and at the same time will have opportunity to cultivate the principle of benevolence by its exercise. Thus the qualities of his heart will be nurtured in beautiful harmony, until they become an ornament to his character and a blessing to his race. This is God's "school of morals." This is God's plan for developing and training the emotions and moral impulses. "Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this, to visit the fatherless and the widows in their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from the world." [James 1.27.] And the adaptation of this plan of cultivation to the laws of man's nature shows that the inventor is the same wise Being who created man. It is by practicing this precept of the gospel that man is truly humanized. But the beholder of these fictitious sorrows has his sympathies impressed, and therefore deadened, while those sympathies must necessarily remain inert and passive, because the whole scene is imaginary. And thus, by equal steps, he becomes at once sentimental and inhuman. While the Christian, whose heart has been trained in the school of duty, goes forth with cheerful and active sympathies in exercises of beneficence towards the real woes of his neighbor, the novel reader sits weeping over the sorrows of imaginary heroes and heroines, too selfish and lazy to lay down the fascinating volume and reach forth his hand to relieve an actual sufferer at his door."   Read the rest HERE

See Also:

The lost art of thinking in today's entertainment-saturated, image-driven postmodern society