Politicians, advertisers, journalists ... they all want to grab your attention.
Have you thought about the way that they do it, and the impact it could be having on your mind?
Look, think this through with me?
It's coming up to election time in Wales at the moment so there are television debates going on between the main party leaders and it just seems to me they WANT you to be angry and afraid, and they use that to motivate you to vote for their agendas.
Now it is NOT that there's no good news out there, although it's not that there's no bad news out there either!
Even leading UK politicians (not often our greastest supporters, as believers) have gone on the record recently thanking Christians and churches for their service to the poor and the vulnerable during the course of the pandemic ... and make no mistake it is not just believers, but a LOT of positive people have done some really great stuff out there over the last year.
There is a LOT of positive, good news out there in this world.
It's the BAD news that gets all the 'clicks'
But in the online journalists' world, it's the BAD news that gets all the 'clicks'!
And the end result is that we drink in the bad news ... so we can easily get to a point where we form the impression that if you're not worried enough about what's going on, you must be callous.
It comes to mean you simply don't care.
Worry and anxiety become seen as virtuous things, and if you're not anxious and losing sleep over BREXIT or COVID or the election that's coming up ... it shows you don't care, you're not nice.
Christians need to push back against that, and fight off the anxiety the wall of bad news brings, because it's really only part of the story.
You see, the thing is ...
Bad news plays to the depths of our biology
The negative narrative is actually playing to something deep in our biology. It's always been the bad news that got us to tune in to the radio or buy the 'paper.
It's actually a physical feature of people.
Your heart beat stays the same when you're looking at the good news as it is when you're looking at a screen full of static or when you're looking at a sheet of grey paper.
But when you're looking at bad news your heart beat and respiration rate pick up and your attention gets properly engaged with the story ... you're WORRIED about it and the anxiety gives you much greater 'focus'.
Bad news is PUSHED at you to gain your attention!
All this bad news is pushed our way to GRAB our attention, and the advertisers journalists and all the others wouldn't be telling us all this bad news if it didn't WORK!
But the thing is this anxiety, anger and negative emotion is not good for you and certainly is NOT God's will for you!
We need to know how to live with RESOLUTE hope for God in a very broken world.
This is an aspect of Christian spirituality that was well-known to the earliest Christians.
So Paul writes to the Colossian church about how to deal with this sort of anxiety, worry and fear. (There are other, sometimes clinical, sorts of anxiety and fear ... and these verses are not about them).
"Since, then, you have been raised with Christ,
set your hearts on things above,
where Christ is,
seated at the right hand of God.
Set your minds on things above,
not on earthly things.
For you died,
and your life is now hidden with Christ in God."
There's a lot there to help us address our anxiety that is caused by a world of bad news.
The Christian's death - the ultimate thing that can happen to us in this world - is already swallowed up in the victory of Christ ... you have been raised already with Christ when you turned from your sin to trust Him, says Paul.
So what we need to do is set our hearts on Him, noticing well where it is that He's to be found:
He is SEATED (work completed, He sits) at the right hand of God SHARING God's throne ... at the right hand of the Majesty in Heaven.
Our Jesus sits on the throne of the cosmos, ruling all things "for the Church" (Ephesians 1:21-23).
So Paul teaches the Colossians quite clearly that what they need in a world that feasts feverishly off its bad news, is to do exactly the opposite of that.
Believers need, he says, in a disciplined fashion, to:
"set your minds on things above, not on earthly things.
For you died and your life is now hidden with Christ in God."
Colossians 3:2-3
The Point
Fear is the opposite of faith, because faith is trusting the Lord in the teeth of your fieriest fears.
There are many good reasons to trust the Lord with your life ... not least the power of His defeat of fear, sin and death as He laid down His life on the Cross and was RAISED again from there.
And the fact that the One Who loves us to that extreme extent now sits ruling the Universe from Glory ... well ... that must give believers a fresh perspective on their anxieties!
The Takeaway
There are people out there in this world trying to seize hold of our anxieties to mould and manipulate us into giving them support.
Believers need to seize back the initiative in a positive way, and set their minds on the things they're headed towards, which are above .... where Christ is seated at the right hand of God.
Our eyes and ears are BOMBARDED every day by the heralds of this world's horrible news.
To maintain faith and life and peace in the face of this onslaught, we need to be very disciplined and deliberate to set our minds daily on Jesus and the things that are above.
Here's an old acapella song to help you give this some thought.
And please feel free to contact us using the contact form below if there's something we can pray about with you in connection with anything raised by this blog.
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