Daily Devotions
“Whoever drinks the water I give him will never thirst.” John 4:14
How concerned we would be if we discovered that a sewage stream had broken out of its channel and had run right through our basement! We would say: “We don’t want this germ-filled filth in our house. It endangers our health.”
Yet such a river of spiritual filth can flow right into our living rooms through television – cable and regular. Bad enough that the lyrics of some radio songs border on pornographic or pornophonic! Bad enough that spiritual sewage comes through the mail, through books and magazines, even anonymous telephone calls! Now the complete medium of sound and sight, television, has the potential of becoming a channel of immoral materials and motivation to immorality. Not only open sex but also violence is involved. Someone has found that in prime time there are 1.7 crimes per TV show. Add immoral philosophy. A woman in a soap opera justifies her illicit relationship by saying: “I wouldn’t feel this good if it weren’t right!” And it is before their TV screens that people spend thousands of hours – some young people more hours there than in school.
What to do? Mere deploring gets us nowhere. It helps, of course, to voice one’s objection to program sponsors. And it helps a lot to exercise one’s choice, to have the self-discipline to turn off offensive programs.
But needed most of all is to have a clean river flowing through one’s house. The psalmist says: “There is a river whose streams make glad the city of God” (Psalm 46:4). This is the stream of clean, clear living water flowing from the Word of God. The Holy Scripture is such a fountain because it is, as our children sing, the “Jesus Book”: “Jesus loves me, this I know for the Bible tells me so.” From Jesus comes the water of life which refreshes, quenches our spiritual thirst, and edifies. Jesus opened up this stream, which flows into our hearts and homes, when He gave His life for our redemption from sin and for continued renewal of life in Him. Is this stream refreshing your home?
PRAYER: Lord God, keep my heart and home free from moral filth through the use of Your Word as the water of life. Amen.
(Devotions from “With Jesus Every Day” copyright 1997, CPH. All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be printed, reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission of Concordia Publishing House. Permission is granted for one-time emailing of this link to a friend. For information on other devotional material, please contact CPH at 800-325-3040 or visit CPH at www.cph.org.)