Erase the spirit of fear from your kids - Halloween Series Part 2
Growing up my sons often asked, “Our classmates watched so and so movie but you said we can’t. Aren’t they Christians too? Isn’t so and so’s father a pastor too? Why is it that they get to watch certain things and we can’t?
Before I tell you what I answered them let me first explain why I kept them from watching shows their classmates freely took in. Particularly nasty horror movies.
First, it’s unnatural. A zombie munching on the liver of a human prey, a vampire drinking the blood of a victim and turns her into a blood-sucker herself and a dead man returning to haunt his murderers and avenge his untimely death are all just unnatural. If not altogether unreal.
You could be saying, “Oh, c’mon Joey this is all fantasy, it's a movie.” True, but underneath all of it is the spirit of fear at work.
Instead the Bible commands us that we are to think of whatever is true, noble, right, whatever is pure, lovely, admirable, excellent or praiseworthy (Phil. 4:8).
Healthy Eyes
Secondly, it is unhealthy. Jesus said, the eye is lamp of the body. If your eyes are healthy your body will be full of light. "But if your eyes are unhealthy, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light within you is darkness, how great is that darkness!" (Matthew 6:22-23).
What we put before our eyes will determine if our bodies will be healthy or unhealthy. Magnify the reality of the words Jesus ten times when it comes to influencing impressionable children. This was sufficient reason to avoid putting these pictures in the eyes of my boys when they were younger. It's simply unhealthy.
Keep the logs and bricks out
But the most important reason why you want to keep the spirit of fear out of your children is because they become fortresses in their minds, arguments and pretenses that are not true but build themselves around their minds and hearts, the next thing you know their lives are besieged by a spirit of fear.
The spirit of fear works gradually. Like building a fortress it methodically layers ideas, pictures, thoughts and pretenses - like pieces of logs and bricks. By the time you know it they have formed a stronghold in your heart and mind.
So how do we fight this onslaught?
The starting point is to realize that though we live in the world, we choose not to live the way the world lives. We do not wage war as the world does (2Corinthians 10:3). By the Spirit of God we insist on thinking the thoughts listed above in Philippians 4.
We destroy fortresses and strongholds (like fear) with the word of God that strikes like a hammer that shatters them to pieces (Jer. 23:29).
In your desire to protect your children from fear be careful not to impart the spirit of fear by being overwhelmed by Halloween. Show them that the Spirit of God is greater and His light is brighter. More importantly, that no weapon forged against your family will triumph.
Remember, the weapons we fight with are not the weapons of the world. On the contrary, we believe that God has given us weapons that have divine power to demolish strongholds or the fortresses that the devil has set-up around our children’s hearts and minds (2Corinthians 10:4).
We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God by challenging their reality and we take captive every thought and insist on making it obedient to Christ regardless of how the world around us lives (2Corinthians 10:5).
The Answer to my Children's Questions
I always told them that our minds are like giant recorders, our eyes are like cameras and our ears are like microphones. When you watch the wrong things you end up recording the wrong things.
The problem is that our recorder will replay the things we record and in time will make us believe that they are true.
The key is rather than erase things from our hearts and minds, is don't record them. As far as those that have been recorded are concerned the best way to erase them is to replace them with the thoughts of God. More in my next post.
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