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Raising joyful children in an angry world, a podcast dedicated to faithful parents navigating their families through a stormy culture

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I found myself in a dark wilderness for I have wondered from the straight and true. From Dante's Divine Comedy. How do we teach our kids what is real and what is an illusion? What is true and what is false? How do we help them discover that? This is Raising Joyful Children in an Angry World. I'm your host, Paul Osborne. I want to talk about this particularly in the area of of the arts, entertainment, film, books, music, and how parents may have a different approach, particularly the Christian parent, on how we approach entertainment and how we can actually use it to help teach. For generations, parents have taken an approach of what kids are not allowed to watch. When I was growing up, there were families that It would not allow kids to watch The Three Stooges because they feared their kids would start poking each other in the eye. I watched it with my brother. We didn't do that. We did some Curly Joe stuff and woo woo woo, but we did not get into that. Same thing with wrestling. Oh, don't watch professional wrestling. Well, maybe because we had a professional wrestler who was Hulk Hogan like in his fame at that time, lived in the neighborhood. Now, yes, your kids should not be exposed to sexually explicit, highly violent, continuously coarse language. Of course not. But the idea that we're going to be able to shut off all of the false ideas that are in the world from our kids just isn't true. Today, I want to suggest to you that, In order for our kids to avoid illusion, to understand what's real and what isn't, we need to sometimes use these movies and films to help explain biblical truth. I had to do a substitution this week for the fourth grade Sunday school class, and they brought up this film to me called The Despicable Me. Now, I've only seen the first film, so I don't know how this goes on from there. But these fourth graders understood the transformation of this character, Gru, who moves from the world's most famous villain to a loving, doting dad. It's an interesting story, and one that I think can help teach. biblical truth that aligns with our biblical view. This story is about, a villain world famous, the most famous world villain. And of course, there's a competing villain who wants to grab his title. As the story goes, he has these, Three orphan girls that are selling cookies. They come to his door. He doesn't even answer it. But then he sees them going to the other villain's door and he does take it in and buys the cookies and now he sees Oh, I can use them. And so this whole plot that he comes up with but at any rate the three little girls end up transforming him and his heart into becoming a loving doting dad. And he moves from villain to hero. There's some interesting things about this. The transformation, think about the transformation of Paul. It has to come from something that is outside of us, the love of Jesus. In this transformation of Gru, it's the loving trustiness of the children that transform him. The scriptures tell us we have to come like a child. And you see Gru having fun with kids in sort of some childlike play. You see, in the beginning, Gru is proud of his villainhood. Oh, there's a picture of human depravity. And of course, as I say, transformation requires a love that's outside of him. And when the transformation of his heart takes place, we see that he lives differently. It's not perfect theology. But man, does it contain some biblical truth that can be used for kids who see that film? On the other flip side, there's a movie Frozen. There's a song in it. Let it go. The lyrics in one of the sections profess a false view of freedom. Says no rules, no right, no wrong. I'm free. But did this view actually set Elsa free in the movie? No. I mean, it's not exactly the prodigal son, but again, there's some biblical truth that can be used. And so I would encourage parents to find some things that they can do. I would also encourage that in the area of reading. perceptually, if you have a reader in the house, maybe you both take time to read Lord of the Rings or the Hobbit or the Harry Potter books, things that contain some forms of Christian truth. And I would also say this is an area that I think slides by because so much of what is called YA fiction, young adult fiction, is so cleverly disguised to deliver allusions to young people that are vulnerable. There's the book Aristotle and Dante, Discover the Secrets of the Universe. It has nothing to do with the philosopher Aristotle or Dante. Who we quoted in the beginning of this, the poet from Italy, I'm not your perfect Mexican daughter is a strange twisted, sort of teenage rebellious ideology. There's many, many dystopic pieces of literature that just take this negative view, this nihilistic view, just way too far. And because our kids are vulnerable, this kind of sowing of confusion into the heart and the mind. We've got to be careful about some of that YA fiction because many of the themes and values are incredible lies and illusions. Now, why do we have to bother doing this? Why is this so critical? I want to be careful that I'm not trying to suggest here that Christianity is based on how smart I am, what good decisions I made. I know half of, you know, American evangelicalism kind of would take this approach because so many of us and so many of our churches proclaim a grace based faith, but then our speeches and what we talk about becomes our righteous works. We sing about a God of second chances, for example. God doesn't consider chance. When God speaks something, when God wants something, it is reality. He puts reality into existence. And he declares us to be righteous. He says to those who believe he gives the right to become the children of God and such we are. See, there's how God does it. It becomes reality. It's not the potential of reality. So much of Christianity tends to present the forgiveness of sins in eternal life like a student loan forgiveness. Fill out the form right. Eternal life is like picking the right policy. And it's sold and it's marketed in this framework of making the right decision and your will kind of aligning with God's will what the Bible really teaches is God's will is reality. His promise to give us new life in the waters of baptism to take the old man and crucify him with Christ so that the new man comes alive in our kids. Described by Paul in Romans 6 is that he has declared a new reality, not a potential reality. Yeah. And we are instructed and encouraged to discover that new creation by the Holy Spirit living in us. So when we say we're crucified with Christ and we no longer live, but the Christ living in us, it's because something happened to us. And that is God's reality. And what is happening is God wants to show us more and more of that reality. And what the devil does, and what the enemy of our faith does, is he wants to take those scriptural words and twist them and adjust them and tweak them in order to create illusions. So, it's easy for us to get confused by these demonic, Twisting of God's words and promises and what we end up with and what our young people fall into are illusions, which are just carefully crafted lies by the father of all lies. So that's this battle for identity, the reality of who we are. Who they are in Christ has to be fought by teaching truth from God and confronting the lives of the evil one. This is the parent responsibility and the journey of parenting where we can teach what is reality by presenting it, not just in the scriptures, but seeing it through film and literature and music. Is there something right? Is there something true in the movies that we're watching? I can't tell you how many times I hear people say something like, Oh, I can't believe why people believe that it's so untrue. Well, it's because the devil has confused them. The truth of God's reality has not been heard by them, or they have been fooled by illusions that have been ingrained in us by the lies that have been taught to us. on such a frequent basis. Your kid's reality, probably the best example I can give, when you became a parent, you didn't know everything about being a parent. You had to learn some things. You had to discover what it is to be a parent, but you were a parent. It wasn't the potential to become a parent. Once the child was given to you by God, you were one. And once this new identity is given to our kids through God's grace by the power of his Holy Spirit through word and sacrament, that is the reality. And so teaching our kids how to see what is true and what is real according to what God says is true and real in all aspects of life is what develops them and teaches them. Taking the time to discuss this in the movies and film and literature is teaching your kids to know what is real and what is illusion and how to tell the difference so that they don't end up saying the words that came out of Dante's section in Inferno, I found myself in a dark wilderness for I have wondered from the straight and true. The ultimate battle for the heart and soul is a fight for identity. Our king invites our kids to know who they are, what to believe, and where they belong. Until next time, let's remember the words for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven.