A Modern Psalm 23

This was posted over at Pure Church, I thought it helpfully reminds us of the dangers of TV.

The TV is my shepherd,I shall want more.
It makes me lie down on the sofa.
It leads me away from the faith;
It destroys my soul.
It leads me in the path of sex and violence
for the sponsor's sake.
Yeah, though I walk in the shadow of Christian responsibility,
there will be no interruption, for the TV is with me.
It's cables and remote control, they comfort me.
It prepares a commercial for me in the presence of my worldliness;
It anoints my head with humanism and consumerism;
My coveting runneth over.
Surely, laziness and ignorance shall follow me all the days of my life,
and I shall dwell in the house watching TV for ever.

Hope

I was watching Flashforward in the early hours of this morning and was really struck by on comment. One of the characters who has not had a flashforward and therefore will be dead within 6 months finally confides it to his fiancee. She says his flashforward can't be true because in her flashforward she saw their wedding day. Then she says 'I choose hope'.

She just decides to live her life as if that is going to be reality and ignore the alternative. It got me thinking about hope.

One of the things we've been reminding ourselves in the last few months as a church is that bible words have bible meanings. The hope that the Bible speaks of the Christian as having is dramatically different from that expressed in Flashforward. The believers hope is sure and certain, it is not just wishing for something nice to happen, because it is grounded on the character and actions of a faithful God.

We do not choose to hope simply because we do not like the alternative, we have hope because Christ has rescued us, the spirit lives in us as a deposit and because God has said he will take us home for eternity.

Flashforward

On the recommendation of a couple of people I finally sat down last night to watch last weeks episode of Flashforward. The premise of the show is that everyone in the world blacked out for 137 seconds and had a flash forward and saw what they were doing on April 29th 2010. The questions the show grapples with surround the various problems that such an incident throws up. For example could you change the future if you knew what was going to happen? Is it right to do so?

But the most interesting one was that it brought home to people their mortality, and now everyone was different because they were living life in the light of that. It shows how we distance ourselves from our mortality in the first place. We don't need a flashforward to realise we are going to die, as Ecclesiastes tells us it is a fate common to all men.

I'm looking forward to watching the previous episodes and the rest, I think as a series it'll raise loads of interesting moral questions.