Should a Christian read/see The Hunger Games or Bully?
Hmmmm. I hate these types of questions.
I was asked about The Hunger Games earlier this year by a youth worker who knows I had read the book and seen the film. The youth worker also knows I was telling other youth workers to do the same.
I knew from the tone and timing of the question that I was not being asked about a particular book or movie. No, this was a question about my theology; and I was being interrogated by someone who was out to scold me for crossing a line and compromising my faith in Jesus.
This happens to me a lot, such as the time I was leading a youth worker seminar about how Christ’s followers should interact with culture.
“So what you’re saying is Christians should know the culture?” asked one uneasy youth worker.
“Yes,” I replied. “If God in His Word charges us to reach the world with the good news about Jesus Christ, we must understand the changing cultural context in which lost people live. To do that, anyone who works with the emerging generations needs to be familiar with what they’re watching and hearing—that’s the stuff shaping their worldview. By doing that, we can learn how they think and what they believe. Then, we’ll be able to connect with them in language and categories they can understand; and the unchanging, life-changing and corrective truths of God’s Word won’t fall on deaf ears. In effect, we’re cross-cultural missionaries!”
Case closed…or so I thought until I heard his response.
“So you tell those who want to reach kids to watch pornography?”
I was surprised by his connection of The Hunger Games to porn. In his mind, I wasn’t concerned with sharing the gospel anymore. Instead, I was leading youth workers and kids down the compromising road to perdition.
From A to Z
I replied as I often do in such situations.
First, I clarified that pornography is an expression of sinful and fallen sexuality, and it certainly isn’t a place where God wants us to go; and it is not a place I indirectly suggest people go. It’s not a legitimate art form that in and of itself is redeemable. It’s to be avoided. We know that it has left a trail of destroyed individuals, marriages and families in its ugly wake.
I would not suggest to parents or youth workers they look at pornography if they discover their kids are spending time in it themselves (which most of them have, by the way). If I discovered my son was spending his time in some of the deepest and darkest corners of the Internet, I wouldn’t say, “Hey, Buddy, let’s sit down and look at this together so we can talk about it.” That not only would be wrong, but ridiculous.
I’ve seen it. He’s seen it. Neither of us needs to see it again. However, because I’ve seen it and know where it comes from, what it is, and what it does, I would sit down with him and talk about it.
Second, I challenged the faulty logic followed in the argument. My inquisitor had fallen into the classic mistake of employing the flawed slippery-slope approach to logic.
In his mind, if “A” happens (in this case, “anyone who works with kids and wants to share the gospel effectively should be familiar with what they see and hear”), then through a series of small steps through B, C, D…X, Y, eventually Z (“You’re promoting pornography.”) will happen, too. Then, because Z shouldn’t happen, A never should have been said or done in the first place. If that’s the case, then Jesus, Paul and every cross-cultural missionary since has messed up big time.
Relevance or Holiness
As the conversation continued, it became abundantly clear to me the root issue wasn’t pornography or culture, but our differing understandings of what it means to be holy.
Youth workers need a proper understanding of holiness, not only as we live out our own lives to the glory of God in today’s culture, but as we endeavor to teach kids how to navigate all the confusing and difficult stuff youth culture throws at them.
God calls all of us to be holy, but we often part ways on our understanding of what that means for how are we are to live and conduct ourselves in our sinful and fallen world. The youth worker believed holiness required him to avoid any contact of any type with the ungodly elements of popular culture—the bunker mentality: To be holy is to not watch or read The Hunger Games.
As I understand it, to be holy requires obedience to Jesus’ command to go into the world…and to watch and read The Hunger Games.
Because of the questions I had been asked and the differing conclusions followers of Jesus reach on the issue, I think it’s a good thing to regroup regularly and humbly re-evaluate my understanding of holiness. What if I’ve been wrong all this time? What if I’ve somehow unknowingly slid into compromising my faith and holiness?
After all, I don’t want to defend, promote, live or teach a flawed understanding that isn’t faithful to God’s will for those who are His own. In order to check the validity of our understanding of how to approach matters of faith and culture, we need to take another look at our understanding of holiness.
Revisiting Holiness
Our trip back to square one has to start with the only holy One. What does He say in His Word about holiness; and rather than make the mistake of looking at and interpreting a few isolated verses on the subject, we need to examine the full context of Scripture—examining all the parts of the Bible from start to finish as a comprehensive worldview.
What do we find? Here is a short summary of what the Bible says about holiness.
First, holiness foremost is a divine quality. In fact, the word captures the essential nature of God and includes all His other attributes of sovereignty, mercy, awesomeness, separateness, power, wrath, etc. When the Bible speaks of God’s holiness, it means God and only God is morally perfect, and God and only God is uniquely set apart from all His creation. No one who ever has walked this earth—besides the God-man Jesus—ever has by nature been holy. It’s a truth we affirm every time we sing these words from the great hymn “Holy, Holy, Holy”: “Only Thou art holy; there is none beside Thee; perfect in power, in love and purity.”
Second, to be holy is to be set apart by God. We are declared and become holy the moment God, by grace, brings us into a relationship with Himself through Christ. The source of our holiness is Jesus Himself, who makes us holy by forgiving our sins. There’s absolutely nothing we can do to make ourselves or anyone else holy. Our holiness, righteousness and redemption are in Christ. As the writer of Hebrews said, “We have been made holy through the sacrifice of the body of Jesus Christ once for all” (
Third, to be holy is to be consecrated for service to God. We are called to be set apart to serve our Creator. As a result, we are to distance ourselves from the ways and values of the world. Even though we are holy in the eyes of God, we continue to struggle with sin—something we all know the reality of all too well. We must seek prayerfully to separate ourselves from sin and hold fast to Christ. To be holy means to be different.
Fourth, Jesus is not only the source, but the standard and example of holiness. Holiness is the opposite of sin. That means holiness is conformity to the character of God and obedience to His will. We actively are to seek to express our new life in Christ and our holiness by following the example of Christ. To be holy means we prayerfully and earnestly will strive to avoid sin while reflecting the image of Christ in how we love others inside and outside the body of Christ. “Holy, Holy, Holy” is the short answer to the great question Dean Borgman insists we ask as we minister in our contemporary culture: “How would Jesus move through the crowd today?”
Fifth, holy people live the will of God, including His call to be in, but not of, the world. This is the great paradox of holiness—that the God who calls us to be set apart turns around and tells us to go into the sinful, fallen world through the example of His Son and the commands of Scripture. We cannot forget that on the night before His death, Jesus prayed the will of His Father for all His disciples in all times and all places: “My prayer is not that You take them out of the world but that You protect them from the evil one. They are not of the world, even as I am not of it…As You sent them into the world, I have sent them into the world” (
Sixth, to be holy doesn’t mean we keep a long list of behavioral do’s and don’ts. Sadly, this is the unbiblical reality many have adopted simply because that’s what they were taught. This was exactly the problem with the Pharisees. They mistakenly believed that it’s what’s outside a person rather than what’s inside that makes him or her unclean.
Charles Colson warned us of four problems bred by this view of holiness. First, it limits the scope of true biblical holiness to a few but not all areas of our lives. We wind up living the out of and not the in the world, thereby forfeiting our mission influence.
Second, we fall into the trap of obeying rules rather than obeying God.
Third, the emphasis on rule-keeping leads us to believe we can be holy through our efforts.
Fourth, our pious efforts can lead to self-righteousness—an ego-gratifying spirituality that turns holy living into spiritual one-upmanship. The apostle Paul once lived that Pharisaical life; but after experiencing God’s grace on the road to Damascus and coming to a proper understanding of holiness, he referred back to that old way of living as “dung” (
Finally, we can’t go places we can’t go. Christ never called us to sin deliberately in order to engage the world for the sake of the gospel. If you can’t watch it, listen to it or read it without falling into sin, then don’t; but don’t fall into the trap of equating temptation with sin. We know Jesus, our example of holiness, was tempted in every way but did not sin. Being tempted or plagued by evil thoughts isn’t sin. If a lustful or ungodly thought enters the mind and we choose to reject it, we have not sinned. On the other hand, if we seek out, embrace or entertain those thoughts for the purpose of pursuing their pleasures, then we’ve fallen into sin.
Martin Luther likened the tension to the fact that evil thoughts will come as the birds that fly over our heads—and are out of our control. What we can and must do is stop them from building nests in our hair. Lest we forget, the One who was tempted in every way but did not sin promises us that we won’t be tempted beyond what we can bear and that He will not leave us without a way out (
So now I’ve got a question for you: What are your kids listening to, reading and watching? For the sake of Christ and the gospel, maybe you should be listening, reading and watching right there with them.
