Britney Spears Revisited

After reflecting on my post on Britney Spears and the questions that I raised about how we can positively influence our children to choose right and not wrong, I have reaffirmed my Christian convictions in this area. When Jesus prayed in the Garden of Gethsemane on the night in which He was betrayed, He specifically said that He was not praying that we would be taken out of the world, but that we would be protected in the world. Christians, then, are to be IN the world, but not OF the world. In other words, we are to be islands of sanity and truth in a world gone mad, a light on a hill that leads others to safety.

How can we steer our children towards the truth and not the moral wrongs promoted by the culture and their prime billboard, Britney Spears? By instilling in our children a desire to know Jesus and to receive Him as Lord and Savior. By demonstrating to them through our life and our words that it is better to choose right than to live wrong.

The experience of a Christian is that of a new creation. When we are saved, the Holy Spirit begins His work to sanctify us from the inside out. It is this cleansing presence in us that protects us from the garbage of the world. The answer is not to isolate ourselves or our children from the things outside, but to worry about what is inside ourselves. Hence Jesus' statement in Mark 7:18-20, "'Don't you see that nothing that enters a man from the ouside can make him 'unclean?' For it doesn't go into his heart but into his stomach and then out of his body (in saying this Jesus delcared all foods clean)'. He went on, 'What comes out of a man is what makes him unclean.'" If we are clean on the inside, then we don't have to worry about the influences of this world.