The Enemy Inside Your House

By Daniel Mayfield

Today’s article is a sermon excerpt by my friend and Who Let the Dogma Out? co-host, Daniel Mayfield. Daniel preaches for the Oldham Lane church of Christ in Abilene, TX.

Jesus said that in order to break into a home, you must first bind the strong man. This is a call for patriarchs, for father rulers to defend the treasures within their walls. To defend wives and marriages and the precious pitter patter of small feet -- of giggles and family game nights and hide and seek and the cultivation of productive human beings. So much is in our homes that we love.

This sermon is a call for strong men to rise up and defend the home. I know that you love your homes because if a window cracked at 3AM, you men would tell your wives and children to get into the closet or to lay down underneath the bed. And you'd go meet the threat. And since this is Texas, I'd imagine you'd be well equipped.

But what if an enemy has slipped in quietly through the air?

The following is shotgun scatter of rhetoric intended to make my point.

What if a private tutoring company came to your door and asked if they could teach your children to rebel against daddy? Would anybody say, sure, come on in?

Here's another one: what if somebody came to your door and said that they'd like to hang a bunch of dirty pictures inside your teenager's room. What would you say? Would they take another step?

What would you do if a hip hop music producer knocked on your door and said that they want to spend several hours a day with your children, teaching them about violence and drinking and sex and how to be cool? Would you allow them through the door?

Or what if a secular humanist organization said that they'd come in and give a free nanny service, but their plan was to undo everything your kid is learning in Bible school? They'd teach your child that truth is subjective, not a transcendent reality. God is not real, but we descended from primates. Marriage is simply a man made institution. Reality can be bent to whatever you want it to be bent to, for it is play dough. Would you bring them in?

What if somebody came to your door and said that they'd like to desensitize you from your Christian persuasion? They told you that they'd developed a painless and enjoyable process to slowly change your views on marriage and sex and gender and faith and history and politics and religion.

They said to you, "Our process will take years, but you'll enjoy every minute of it. And by the end of it, you'll have expanded your horizons. You'll no longer think of Jesus as the way and the truth and the life. He will be to you in the same camp as Gandhi or Confucius or Plato or Aristotle. By the end of it you'll be lazier, less mobile, more dependent, addicted to dopamine, and you'll not have lived many adventures, but you'll have watched them.” How's that sound? Would you allow them in?

What if somebody came to your door and said, "We've developed a genius method to make you dumber." Would you let them in?

What if somebody came to our city of Abilene and said, I've developed a mechanism that would cause strangers never to look each other in the eye. I've made a tool that would make society colder. I have a scheme that would keep neighbors from knowing neighbors. I have a product that will keep your young boys from ever getting married. I've found a way to keep your daughters insecure. I know how to keep young men from ever living out adventures because they'll do so in their minds, but in the event of danger or death, they can hit pause or merely respawn. How would we deal with that?

What if somebody has broken into our homes and we didn't even know it? What if somebody were undoing all of our hard work as parents? What if somebody were undoing the hard work of the Holy Spirit?

I believe that the devil has quietly slipped into our living rooms and our pockets. And he is destroying us, rendering us weak, foolish, addicted, and dependent.

I'm talking about the sheer prevalence of media.

Paul said that Satan is the prince of the power of the air. He's just in the air. He's in the psyche. He's in the collective conscience. He comes through AM waves and FM waves and satellites and fiber. He bounces off cell phone towers and circles the earth in satellites.

According to recent data, teenagers are spending between 7.5-8.5 hours per day on their phones. That's equivalent to a full work day. How do we think this is affecting them? If mental health is any indication, it's not helping at all. And that's not even considering the ways that our media shapes the ways we think. Why is it that every Disney princess disobeys dad, and things turn out better, and dad comes around as being bullheaded and wrong? Is that the Biblical picture? What does it teach our kids?

In this sermon I'm not demonizing media in principle. My purpose isn't to say that we should all live off grid and forget that the internet was invented. I'm not saying that televisions are inherently bad or that we should all revert to flip phones.

I believe that technology is a tool that can be used in powerful ways for education and even the promulgation of the gospel. I've attended YouTube university and was granted my honorary doctorate. He he. I use my phone to stay connected with brothers and scholars and mentors who sharpen my mind and challenge my thinking. I'm thankful for these tools.

What I'm doing in this sermon is calling out our indiscriminate use of technology and our seemingly absent use of filters for both ourselves and our children. I'm calling out the ways that it has influenced us for bad

There are things that we watch that I'm certain we wouldn't feel comfortable watching with Jesus on the couch next to us. And yet he is on the couch next to us. And His Holy Spirit resides within our bodies. There are things we would never let our children watch, but we aren't mindful that they are watching those things without our knowledge.

So I'm going to drop six lessons here, in no particular order.

Bad company corrupts good morals (Hollywood is a cesspool, and they're purposely advancing their agendas. This isn't conspiracy.)

The eye is the lamp of the body (the things that we look at and consume inform the light within us or the darkness -- so consume good media.)

Don't even go near her door (this means, don't look down that street. Don't put yourself in a place to be tempted in that direction. Use filters. Use VidAngel. Use parental controls.)

Don't cause the little ones to stumble (remember their frame. They cannot handle screen time. They cannot handle the ideological puppet strings that are being manipulated against them. Take their phones. Or give them a jitter bug. I read a book a while back about the transgender craze that is affecting our teen girls. A lot of this is driven by social media and image and young girls looking for a place to belong in the awkward years.)

Train in God's Law (Deuteronomy 6 says to train in God's Law. It says to do it from morning until night. This means, we're not letting pagans raise them. We are to be the strongest influence in shaping them.)

Be consumed with truth, goodness, and beauty. (That's philosophy. And that's Philippians. That probably means, turn off the news. Stay informed, yes. But don't be so informed that you become misinformed. Or deformed. Understand the times, but put your mind on good things. Listen to lovely music. Watch lovely films. Read excellent books. Invest in Christian media, like Angel Studios.)

This article is from Daniel’s April 7 AM sermon, ‘Christians and Media.’ You can watch the rest of the sermon here.