Join us as we discuss the matter of guarding kids against worldly ideologies and lifestyles. In today’s episode, we cover a range of subjects that parents need to pay attention to in the growing of the affections of their children, what they expose them to, how they expose them to different cultural influences, and the end goal of it all.

Welcome to the Church and Family Life podcast. Church and Family Life exists to proclaim the sufficiency of Scripture. And I've got with me Jason Dome, so good to have Jason with us again, as always. And Jared Longshore. Hey Jared, how you doing?

Doing good. Doing good. Good to see you guys. Yeah, hey, welcome back. And so Jared is a pastor at Grace Baptist Church in Cape Coral, Florida.

He's the vice president of Founders Ministries. Let's have standing ovation for that. And the Institute for Public Theology. But we're here to talk about guarding children from the worldliness of the world, worldly ideologies, lifestyles, and all that kind of thing. And I think we all recognize the tremendous danger, the escalating danger, for children in the world.

Of course, the devil hates your children. We know that for sure. The devil wants your children. He wants their souls and he wants to wreck their bodies. That's pretty clear from scripture.

You know, I've, in thinking about this, you know, I've thought the most important thing you can do to guard your kids is to give them a vision of the goodness of God. And you know, I want my kids to think like David in Psalm 27 13. You know, I would have lost my heart unless I had seen the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living. I want them to think, you know, in your presence is fullness of joy, at your right hand are pleasures forevermore. I want them to think God's Word is sweeter than honey in the honeycomb.

That's what, you know, of all the things I wanted as a father, that was what I wanted more than anything. I look back, I did it so poorly, but that's what I really wanted to do every day in my home. Yeah, I think the other thing, I had a front row seat for what you were doing in your home and that the other thing you did was you captured the hours. I think that the central question is who has the hours. It's simple math, it's basic math, and the people who wield the hours wield the influence.

You can roll out Jonathan Edwards' quotes on the bigness of God for 10 minutes a day and let the world have eight hours a day and you can predict the results. That doesn't mean that God's not sovereign and can't do whatever he wants to do, but these things do lead to places. Well, they really do. And you kind of need like offense and defense on worldly ideologies. Your first point about the goodness of God is just right.

Just inject them with it. I want to get the good truth in there so that they are protected against the viruses that come and but then you're dead right about the amount of time too and the way modern life is structured is usually a double income kind of situation where the children are being put out in some fashion and they're being handed over to whom? You know, if they're being handed over to people that get them for eight hours a day, five days a week, then that's a lot of time. And if the television is getting them for the other time, It just depends on what's coming through those sources, what's coming through their education, their teachers, what's coming through those mediums. So sometimes I, when it comes to ideologies, I like to tell parents to make sure they know where they are.

And that's somewhat of a hard thing to get your mind around today because it's easy to think of America still as, you know, one nation under God, we do have Judeo-Christian principles that are founding. You still have the residue of a Christian culture. You still do, even though we're falling away at a rapid clip. Why don't we have 90 percent polygamy in this nation? Well, that reality of one man, one woman came from a Christian foundation.

So you still have the residue in many ways, but now parents are seeing the just rapid clip falling away that's going on around us. And we really do have to wake up to the fact that we're raising children in Babylon. We are raising children in a land that is not honoring God with ideas that do not honor God and they have a massive discipleship program going on. So if you do nothing, well then water is going to run downhill. If you do nothing, then the weeds are going to grow in the garden.

You are going to have to protect them from bad ideas that come in. And that starts by simple things like regulating the kind of things that they're going to be watching. So you just, you know, unplug your television or whatever it is you're going to do to guard there. But you see, that's not enough. The thing you actually have to do is take the ideology that was coming through those mediums, show it to them, show them how it's contrary to Christ, and throw it away.

So I have a history now at the church of being known as the guy who has a practice of kneecapping Disney princesses. They have terrible, terrible ideas and we don't mind helping people to see them. What is frozen with Elsa saying, let it go, let it go. No right, no wrong, no rules for me. I'm free.

And you say, you know, Patrick Deneen as a, I believe he's a professor up at Notre Dame wrote a book called Why Liberalism Failed. You know, it's a, It's a very intellectual good book. You don't have to read that whole book to look at Elsa and say, you know, that idea was really, really bad. And you can go read how bad that idea is by go reading Deneen's Why Liberalism failed. A whole redefinition of the idea of freedom is baked into Elsa's little song in Frozen.

And so many children have imbibed that from the very beginning that, you know, these ideas of follow your heart, you can be whatever you want to be when you grow up, they get injected when they're small and those ideologies are going to bear some really, really nasty fruit later on. 11 You know, Ian Murray a few years ago wrote a book called Undercover Revolution. It's a short book. I give it away, particularly to younger girls, teenage girls, But Ian Murray's proposition is that Christianity in England was destroyed, not because of the high-flute and philosophers, but it was the romance writers, it was the fantasy writers, it was the poets, it was the people, it was like the movie makers of today type thing. And he names names, he goes through and talks about the various pagans that really ruined the church and lured people away from the gospel.

But it was the entertainers, basically. It was the media. To me, James, chapter one, verse 27, is such a clarifying verse. Let me just read it. James says, pure and undefiled religion before God and the Father is this, to visit orphans and widows in their trouble and to keep oneself unspotted from the world.

So I'm a simple guy, I like simple things, they give me two things that define pure and undefiled religion, it's service and mercy, and it is to keep oneself unspotted by the world. And what's implicit in that is the world spots things, The world is permeating things and leaving and defiling things. And it's a major category in everyone's religious practice to understand that the world is working hard to spot us, and it's our job to be unspotted by it. This has to do everything with, what are you doing with your time? Here's the reality about, all my kids are grown, they're gone, they're having children and things like that, But every single thing you do builds their affections, everything you do.

You cannot throw a moment away. You are going to build affections with everything they do, every song they hear, every film they see, everything they do. And I just, you know, I'm so disturbed about parents who will let their children fill their minds up with silly songs and silly stories and things like that. And I'm not saying that there can't be any, but you are building affections for silliness if you allow them to plunge their minds in those things. Give them things that are true, give them things that are beautiful, fill up the mind with truth, and fill the time with things that actually produce a tangible result.

Yeah, And be aware of how those bad ideas make their way into your home. So, you know, the devil doesn't often come knocking on the front door. He presents himself as an angel of light. He can come in the back door or a window, but That's where the ideas come from. Richard Weaver has written a book, and I don't think he's a Christian, but he wrote a book called Ideas Have Consequences, in that he talks about the great stereopticon.

And it's an old book, so in his day, It was like this constant communication. This great stereopticon is bombarding us with ideas. And he has like the film is one arm of the great stereopticon. And then it's the media, the news sources that are another source. And then for him, it was the radio or the television that the radio goes with you wherever and it's always it's giving you ideas constantly.

So we need to help children to understand that we need to understand his parents that that's going on 24 seven in our lives. How much more so now if it was happening in Weaver's Day? And he has an interesting line in there about about film where he warns against the idea of moral people thinking, well, I'll just cut I'll cut this part out of a film. There is that one scene that that thing is said or that thing is done, and I don't want our children to watch that, so we'll cut that out. And well, yes and amen to doing so.

So there's programs, you can run your films through and take out the things you don't like and I commend that. I think that's good. But he said, you know, the problem is the whole plot. It's the whole narrative, the whole story. How is that particular story that's being presented to you in video form?

How does it commend honor? And how does it commend love? Like what what is its definition of love of honor, of bravery, of all of those of manhood, of womanhood? It's those things that sneak in upon us and we find ourselves way downstream. Carl Truman's recent book, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self.

I love how he showed how the reason we have the LGBTQ stop the reason that one can now say I am a woman trapped in a man's body, that somebody could say that is because we had already all bought into that ideology, that understanding of the self, that this expressive individualism. We've all been steeped in that. So we've been telling children for decades now, You can be whatever you want to be when you grow up. It's just the phrase and it comes through the films. And then the children say, well, okay, dad, I want to be a woman.

And you say, well, no, you can't do that. It's like, but you've already seeded that ideology. So parents need to be aware that it's a holistic kind of thing. It comes through culture, customs, film. You know, parents need to come hard.

They can't be wallflowers about all this stuff. You know, I woke up this morning reading Psalm 94, and I hit verse 16, and I thought about this broadcast that we were going to do today. This is God speaking, who will rise up for me against the evildoers? Who will do it? Parents need to do it.

He says, who will stand up for me against the workers of inequity. And parents have a duty before God to stand up, and you know, you're not your children's buddy. You're their shepherd, and you're there to lead them to, you know, to green pastures and still waters. But parents need to steer their children away from the ungodly, and don't let those things get lodged in their heads. So the Apostle John says something that actually ought to be jarring to the modern mind in 1 John chapter 2.

So let me just read 1 John chapter 2 verses 15 through 17. He says, do not love the world or the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, is not of the Father, but is of the world. And the world is passing away, and the lust of it.

But he who does the will of God abides forever." I think it reminds me of the coexist bumper stickers that are on cars as you ride around town. Even within the Christian world, there's a sense in which these things can coexist, they can be side by side, just don't partake of the worst of it, be on the good end of the things that the world is promoting. Christians can't afford to be just 20% off of the world. They come from different kingdoms, they're diametrically opposed. And I'm sure if we went through my house, we would find things that don't pass that test.

But it's good to have jarring language for this. So here's some of the warning signs when your children are celebrating celebrities, when they're dancing like marionettes to the worldly songs of the world, when your children can recite lines from songs of ungodly movies with such joy but not so much. The things of God. Those are warning signs to parents. And I want to see parents say, I will set no unclean thing before my eyes.

I hate the work of those who fall away. That's what David said. And I want parents to hate Hollywood. I really do. It's worthy of hatred.

I think you just capsulized Jared really the whole ethic of Hollywood and that is you can be whatever you want to be just let it go. That's Hollywood. And we've been fed that for so long. And now, you know, people can't figure out what gender they are. And it's a tragic thing.

But parents are responsible for it. Absolutely. The parents are responsible. And there does have to be this very strong go out from them and be separate, you know, and but when you go out from them and you are separate, make sure that you have your own theology, your own ideology, your own customs, your own traditions that are to be glorious, that are to be loved by your children. Sometimes we're like, well, we don't want all that.

And they look at it and they go, well, it looks like fun. The sin of the world, all that looks like fun. Well, no, you don't get any of that. Go to your room. Right.

Right. But what happened to looking at that and seeing the folly and saying the way of the transgressor is hard. The sorrows of those who run after another God shall multiply. Their drink offering of blood I will not pour out or take their name on my lips. I'll set no vile thing before my eyes.

What am I going to set up before my eyes?" And you have this glorious Christian family of these Christian customs and traditions, and you read the word of God and you rejoice in it. One of the things that we've sought to employ in our own home is just the concept of a Sabbath dinner, like Saturday night before church, making sure that that night we're all sitting around the table and it's special. And maybe we try to do something a little bit more enhanced than we do on the other nights. And you look forward to it and you're thinking about the rest. You're thinking about the hard work we've done for six days.

And now we get to rest on this coming day and we get to hear the word of God and we pray for the one who's preaching. We think about the church all over the world. So even time is beginning, their time, their minds are starting to be shaped by the Christian understanding of the true understanding of time. So you've got vocation, rest, time, all of that's going on. And then with films, I encourage people, it's not just about not watching them at the right time, it's watching them and belly laughing at the things that mock God belly laughing, like help them to identify.

You know, you need to be able to, you know, read marks and see how bad the ideas are. And then, you know, watch the Disney film and look at it and be like, are you kidding me? Like, are you kidding me? Do you really think that this is brave? Do you really think this is fruitfulness?

Do you really think that this is worthy of praise? And have the children trained in that where they can identify it. I used to joke that we would all become Biblical Christian counselors in our home when we're watching a film together. One of the Disney princesses would make a move. They all seem to be quite upset about some numbskull father who stands in the way of their great journey.

And we just pause it and we're like, okay, you know, let's take it. Let's take a minute. You know, we are talking about Moana and Little Mermaid. I thought it was very interesting that one little princess who's trapped in the sea and wants to go to the land. Another little princess who's trapped on the land wants to go to the sea.

You know, which one is it? Which one's the good way? And it just doesn't matter. They don't have a goal. They don't have a telos.

It's just like whatever it is that I personally want. And I think if we can expose those things and then train the appetites, train the desires and the affections, as you mentioned earlier, of our children to say, I miss, I miss the Sabbath dinner. I miss the smells of my mother and the wonderful teaching that she taught me. And I miss seeing dad go out and come home and tell me of the, of the victories of the work that he did that day. It doesn't matter what you did, whatever you do, you do unto the Lord, and then you share that, and there's this whole culture that will protect you from all of the bad ideas that want to make their way in.

You're talking about abundance instead of sterility. You're talking about, well, there are things that should be taken away, but there should be an abundant replacement. Yeah, no room left for the bad idea. Yeah. So, you know, I've thought about this subject in terms of social media, and, you know, I've heard a story more than once.

A boy or a girl grows up in a well-ordered Christian home, and then that boy or girl comes out, and they're gay. But they never were taught anything like that. But what happened was they actually had this little secret world that grew over time, and the parents knew nothing about it. And then their child came out. But it's that secret world, you know, idleness is the devil's workshop.

And the whole matter of social media is such a pernicious threat to our families right now. I don't know if you have any comments in the few minutes we have left on that. Oh, there's so much to say about social media and the phones and the accessibility to so much information, so much data, so many bad ideas, some good ideas. But I think there's much to be said. First of all, If a child is on a bad path with social media, you need to cut it off.

And even using the language of child, I think children should not have access to social media. And because it's not that the phones are evil, They're not. It's not even that the idea of everybody getting on some kind of page and all sharing about, you know, what they had for dinner or any information they like or quotes or podcasts, that idea of an online platform to share ideas is evil. That's not evil. I think the technology that we have now is a tool.

But you know, I don't let my children play with the 12 gauge either. I don't let my children play with with I don't let the babies, the infants use the pocket knives. And a part of what we're to do is to train them up so that they can use tools that can do a lot of damage and can also do a lot of damage to you. They can be used. I think this is where the whole social media thing is at for me.

And you've got to own it as a parent. You've got to know it's not just going to be a set age, but we are going to teach you're going to at some point have access to these kinds of things. And you may never use it your whole life. That's fine. But we are going to train you and teach you how dangerous this one is because you can have access to a whole lot of lies.

You can have access to a whole lot of good teaching and content and doctrine as well, but you are going to need great wisdom in order to use those particular technologies. So it's our job to actually disciple them up into that. That's a whole lot harder than just kind of setting blocks and rules. We need some of those blocks and rules, but then you need the prayer and the discipleship so that they can learn how to use those things. Right.

And they're going to be cut loose in a world where they'll have total access to whatever they want. It's their wantor that is critical. Anything on that, Jason? Our church has been working through the book of Ephesians. One of the big themes in Ephesians is the put-offs and the put-ons, and I think there's an application here.

The Bible is the put-on. The Bible gives us a compelling, a whole, good, true worldview, and we've got to be filling them with a good worldview. In some ways, that closes and latches the back door in many ways, but then also just be aware of all the entry points for these ideas that are so destructive, putting off and putting on. Amen. Well, brothers, thank you so much.

I know we could go on and on about this, but we'll shut it off now. But parents, so give it all you got, capture the time, fill it with every good thing, go for the abundance, not the sterility. Fill up the time that you have with your children with the very best things. Help them interpret everything that's happening around them and show them the goodness of the Lord. Thanks for joining us again on the Church and Family Life podcast.

We'll see you next time. Thanks for listening to the Church and Family Life podcast. We have thousands of resources on our website, announcements of conferences coming up. Hope you can join us. Go to ChurchAndFamilyLife.com.

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