Purify Your Mind Series (Part 3) by Joe KirbySample

The World Waxes Worse

"But evil men and impostors will grow worse and worse, deceiving and being deceived." (2 Timothy 3:13)

When I was a boy, there was a DVD and VCR shop just a few hundred yards from my house. In the days before Netflix and online movies, the cheapest way to catch a movie was to rent it for a few nights. I remember having friends over for a sleepover, and my dad took us to the local DVD shop to let us pick a film for the night. It was always so embarrassing, because movies had ratings according to age: those not for all ages were labeled 12+, 15+, and 18+, and the age ratings were a little lax for my parents’ values. Some of the films that my friends were allowed to watch, I wasn’t able to because of my Christian upbringing. I remember my friend said once, “Why won’t your dad let you watch a 12+? You are 12!”

Now, as a dad myself, I’m concerned that there is literally no filtering system for kids these days. TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube are rife with adult content; even small children can access it today. “Entertainment” is getting worse and worse. Satan is so crafty at deceiving young people today. Any child without a smart phone is treated like an alien, so most children have them. That means that from a young age, children’s brains are conditioned to watch one-minute videos, to be constantly scrolling and distracted, killing their attention spans so they can’t focus on a sermon. Reading has become a thing of the past for many young people; getting a teenager to read the Bible seems nearly impossible. But perhaps worst of all, they have easier access to pornography, in much larger quantities, than earlier generations ever had. My challenge for you today is to pray for a young person in your life, that God would shield them from this wicked world and keep them pure in this modern-day Babylon.