This image is a screenshot of the exact moment that changed my life. It is the exact moment I rejected much of what I’d accepted as good all my life⎯up to this exact moment. This morning, as I was watching one of my all-time-favorite Christmas shows, “Santa Claus is Coming to Town” and enjoying one of my favorite scenes where Santa is teaching the Winter Warlock to ‘put one foot in front of the other’, I couldn’t help but see the cataclysmic differences between what most of these Christmas shows teach and the teachings of God in the Holy Scriptures.
I used to love when the show got to that scene. “Put one foot of the other and soon you’ll be walkin’ ‘cross the floor”. It’s so catchy! Just the words bring back many happy memories throughout my childhood. But the reality is, although I’m sure unintentional, themes like this are much more sinister than what first meets the eye. Instead of emphasizing dependence on God for strength, wisdom, and provision as God intended for us, the show (and many like it) teaches us to rely only on ourselves and our own abilities. What it is teaching plays right into the sin of self-reliant pride. It teaches us that all you need is you.
Isaiah 31:1 says, “Woe to those who go down to Egypt for help and rely on horses, who trust in chariots because they are many and in horsemen because they are very strong, but do not look to the Holy One of Israel or consult the LORD!” One cannot disregard God’s observations about the Israelites: they were relying on created things and not on the Creator of ALL things! And again in Jeremiah 17:5, “Thus says the LORD: “Cursed is the man who trusts in man and makes flesh his strength, whose heart turns away from the LORD.” God sees trusting in oneself instead of Him as turning away from Him. And if God defines it as so, so it is!
However, when John 15:5 says, “I am the vine; you are the branches. Whoever abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing.”, God tells us clearly the right path we should take. Believing we can do everything (anything) ourselves leads to a lack of meaning and purpose. We miss God’s plan.
Paul’s prayer for the Ephesians in chapter 3 speaks volumes. Verses 14-21 reads, “For this reason I bow my knees before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named, that according to the riches of his glory he may grant you to be strengthened with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith—that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God. Now to him who is able to do far more abundantly than all that we ask or think, according to the power at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, forever and ever. Amen.”
So I bid my farewell to those TV shows and movies with messages that lead me away from the Creator. I may not be able to name each of them right now, but as I use better discernment while watching them this week (and beyond), I will be cutting those with evil self-reliant messages out of my life once and for all.
שָׁלוֹם שָׁלוֹם ☧
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