Spiritual Housecleaning

Have you ever done a spiritual housecleaning?? We have and tend to do it often. We will go through our movies and come up with "good" excuses as to why we hang on to this movie and that movie and convince ourselves that they are fine. A couple months later...all the sudden what seemed "good" and "fine" all the sudden isn't all that good or fine.

I was talking with Matt one day about housecleaning and we were talking about music. Now, I pretty much only listen to Christian music...but this is a personal choice and not one I would put on anyone including my husband.

But, I was discussing his music on his ipod. He tells me, my songs are clean...nothing bad. And I ask him, how can he listen to music from bands who live and breathe bad lives. Case in point...he LOVES Motley Crue (flashback anyone??). Well, I am sure you have, at some point in your lives, seen videos from Motley Crue with half-naked women prancing around and blatant sexual content. I am sure you have heard of the drugs and sex that occured (occurs, now) with this band. Well, a couple years ago, Matt was excited to go to a Motley Crue concert...which he had to attend himself cause I sure as heck wouldn't go. He had to leave the concert shortly after due to the PORN they were showing on the big screens as they sang!!!!!

So, I ask him, how can you listen to them?? He says, well, I do not have those bad songs...only their positive ones. Well, it is my opinion only.

Recently, he was thinking on his life and thinking that he needed to do some housecleaning and that was one of the first thing to go...music that he deemed as inappropriate to own.

But, what about music that may have been illegally obtained?? How many of us have copied music from websites that are not authorized?? How many of us used to do the Kazaa thing years ago before iTunes?? We did. We know people who still do!! But what about the morality in that?? We are supposed to respect and follow the law and isn't it stealing to take music and movies to add to our library without paying for it??

And think about it...when I take a song or movie illegally, as thousands (millions) do and the artist or movie maker loses out on that money...what happens?? Prices go up! Who am I to complain about a rise in movie prices when I am contributing to the rise????

So, here is Matt...deleting music that is objectionable and/or illegal. How proud am I?? VERY!! But, it does not stop there!!

Matt begins to think about how we are supposed to be good servants of our time, money and body. Ok. Here we are spending loads of time (and money...we do not illegally download movies...we are one of those consumers who pay for movies that go up in price due to.....) on a somewhat large movie collection. Matt says...let's think about this. We have an account with Netflix that we pay a monthly fee too and thus we can have delivered any movie we want and it is delivered to our door (ok, mail box at the end of our street in our case)....and we use it a lot. We rarely watch many of the movies in our collection. He says...that is it. We need to sell what we find morally objectionable or wastes of space. GOOD GRIEF!! We ended up selling WAY MORE than half our collection (he kept Star Wars and Indiana Jones, of course and I kept my Jane Austen movies and Steel Magnolias...kept our Pixar movies and other such movies).

So, we have cleaned out our music...our movies... We have set an example to our kids on being wise in choices both spiritually and economically. The result:

I feel so FREE! I feel closer to God. In thinking of how to be good servants of our time, I have spent less time on this computer and on watching tv and more time in study of his word. I found a great bible study podcast and have been doing a verse by verse study of Romans which is facinating. I am also doing a study of the apologetics. We have included Sierra in all these decisions and she is loving the changes. We are doing devotionals after dinner each night.

All those things were like heavy pieces of iron...weighing us down.

Sadly, being a good servant of our time can be SO MUCH HARDER. I have taken to getting to Sierra's school EARLY each day to pick her up so I can sit and do my Romans study. I am working on keeping my heavy foot off the pedal of the car to even do a small thing like not breaking the law in speeding. Are we getting legalistic?? I don't think so.

Now...to work on being a good servant to our bodies. lol Well, maybe we should get over these other hurdles first.

Addendum to the part about movies:

Let me clarify. We are not STOPPING watching movies...we LOVE movies. We are just not going to possess any illegally downloaded movies OR possess movies that we watch less than once a year that just sits on our shelves. We recently listened to a very good podcast (a three parter) about how we as Christians can go to the movies and learn how to take away key points. One thing that he said was that we cannot just give a blanket statement about not watching an R movie. Yes, most are bad and should not be watched, but there are those few that are very cultural. One he mentioned was "Schindler's List" and another was "American History X". I agreed with him....these are 2 HARD movies to watch. I have seen them both and will probably never watch AHX again (not because it offended me, though it had HARSH language and violence). I also, Stacie (in case you are reading), am going to watch "Slumdog Millionare". He talked about being wise in our choices. A good example of this being the choice of watching movies like the Narnia or Lord of the Rings movies vs. watching Harry Potter. While all 3 series has magic, 2 of the series uses it as allegory to scriptural events and message while the other is just magic.

OK...this is too long. Fact is, we are not shunning Hollywood and all it produces. We are always (or at least try to always be) wise with our choices of movies...

BTW...if you are interested in the podcast series on movies go to http://www.biblestudypodcasts.org/. We found it very insiteful and found little wrong with what he said. I liked what he said about NPAA ratings and how you cannot go by that alone.