The Christian and Media (Part 3): Denying Ungodliness

The question of how Christians should engage with media emerges from something deeper than simple moral concerns. The Holy Spirit dwelling within believers creates an instinct for sanctification, a spiritual reaction to the world around us. Media saturates this age we live in. You cannot drive down a road without encountering it in bumper stickers, billboards, license plates, and advertising signs. All these types of media mediate information and communicate values, making media an inescapable part of our world.

The New Testament makes clear that the world presents a problem for believers. Understanding this requires grappling with what worldliness means.

• Part 1: The Christian and Media, Part 1: The Fundamentals of Sanctification
• Part 2: The Christian and Media, Part 2: Of God or Of the World?

Understanding Worldliness

The book of Titus provides essential guidance on this question. Paul writes

^{Tit 2.11-12} ¶ For the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation to all men, ¹² instructing us to deny ungodliness and worldly desires and to live sensibly, righteously and godly in the present age,

This passage points believers away from the world, and the Holy Spirit witnesses this truth in our hearts. Christians should automatically recognize when something is not right. Our spirits should react.

Seven aspects help identify worldliness in the New Testament. Something is worldly (1) when it is common or profane, taking what is holy and making it ordinary. It is worldly (2) when it is natural rather than spiritual, as Jude 19 describes the worldly minded or natural mind. Worldliness (3) orients itself toward life in the flesh, toward humanity and its troubles such as paying bills, sicknesses, and traffic jams. These concerns belong to this world rather than heaven.

Worldliness (4) focuses on concerns of this present age as opposed to heavenly concerns. 1 Corinthians 7 illustrates this, explaining how a single person can mind heavenly things while a married person must attend to worldly matters like providing for a home. These concerns are legitimate, yet even they can damage our spirits if they consume us. Worldliness is (5) self-centered rather than God-centered, choosing worldly sorrow over godly sorrow. It is (6) earthly rather than heavenly, like the worldly tabernacle described in Hebrews 9:1. Finally, worldliness (7) involves worldly desires, the passions motivated by the lost mind.

We can summarize this way: something is worldly when it belongs to the affairs of life on this earth, especially as opposed to the life of the Spirit or of heaven. When the focus rests on this life in ways that push heaven out, that becomes the problem. Christians still must pay bills and handle earthly responsibilities. The issue arises when the things of this world push out or oppose the things of God. That defines worldliness.

The Two Denials

Titus 2:12 instructs believers to deny two things. First, we must deny ungodliness. This word was used in Greek society to describe someone who would write graffiti on the walls of even a pagan temple. Ungodliness describes a way of life which shows no concern for duties to or worship of God. Such a person has a total disregard for what God says about any particular subject.”¹ Ungodliness always involves bad conduct, attitudes, and behaviors that have no concern for worshiping God.

Second, we must deny worldly desires. These are desires characterized by this world, with no upward look, as if there is no heaven. Good desires exist. We can desire holiness, good citizenship, a good reputation, and giving glory to God. But when our desires focus on the things of this world, they become worldly desires fitting that definition about the affairs of life on earth as opposed to the life of the Spirit in heaven.

All that matters for worldly desire is grasping what this world offers. This includes power. If someone sets out to become a powerful person, to rule the world, to be a political player, and makes that the whole and only focus of life, that constitutes a worldly desire. Christians can certainly be involved in politics, but where does the desire lie? Where is the focus of life? If the focus of life is on the rush that comes from drugs or from sex or any other thing, that is a worldly desire. Sometimes people do not even have to indulge in the things they desire. They can play at the edges, get a little rush, and occupy their time and attention around that, with no consideration for consequences in this world or the next.

The consuming desire for possessions can become worldly, even for things we legitimately need. In our culture, most people need a car. You can buy a car as a utility, a useful thing. But you can become the person who ends up creating a car museum because you have so many cars. You need shelter, but if driven by worldly desires, you will never be satisfied with the shelter you have. You will always want more. Nothing is wrong with having a house, but homes can become worldly desires. You need food, but if driven by worldly desires, you will always want more, more, more.

The Three Pursuits

Alongside these denials, Titus 2:12 calls believers to three pursuits. First, live sensibly and soberly, under control. Second, live righteously according to God’s standards, submissive to God’s authority. Righteousness here relates to a perfect image of how a person should be, revealed in the Bible. Living righteously means living according to the Bible, meeting God’s standards. Obviously we are humans and sinners who struggle with this, but righteous living sees God’s standard and strives to live up to it. Third, live godly and reverently in the fear of the Lord.

When we live this way, we do not give in to our impulses because we are guided by the Spirit of God. We do not want to bring dishonor to God’s name. Our spirit witnesses in our hearts that we do not want to be irreverent in our behavior in any way.

The Training of Grace

Notice how verse 12 says the grace of God “instructs us” to deny ungodliness and worldly desires and to live sensibly, righteously, and godly in the present age. This instruction functions as child training. The grace of God, salvation, the gospel, trains us like little children and puts us under discipline.

Instruction can be painful. One commentator observes “Education in Christian behavior is seldom a painless process since it involves the correction of human behavior which by nature stands in opposition to God.”² If your little child simply did whatever you said, training would be easy. But he does not. Similarly, we do not come naturally to Christianity. We must be trained by the grace of God, by the Holy Spirit. This can be painful. Paul told Timothy to suffer hardship with him as a good soldier of Jesus Christ. (2 Tim 2.3) Part of being trained to serve the Lord means suffering hardship and being willing to take it from God.

Worldly lusts, then, are desires for worldly things without regard for God or God’s perspective. The impulses of the Spirit involve these denials and pursuits, and we are instructed in them by our salvation.

Applying Principles to Media

When we approach media with this understanding, we must recognize that media in general is dominated by people occupied with worldly thinking. Their values are worldly values. They think in terms of this life. For most of them, consciousness does not extend beyond this life. They do not think about heaven at all or God at all. Some figures in media are Christians, but most media is dominated by people who are not Christians.

Malcolm Muggeridge provides valuable insight here. This British television commentator and journalist, who died in 1990, led a fascinating life. He worked as a spy during World War II, started as a communist, got assigned to Moscow while working for the Guardian newspaper because he wanted to see how communism worked. Then he decided he did not like it and quit being a communist. He converted to Christianity as an adult, spent most of his life as an Anglican, and near the end converted to Catholicism. Though not theologically trained, he expressed faith in Christ.³

As a popular television commentator, especially in the 70s, Muggeridge was brilliant, funny, witty, and a keen observer who wrote numerous books including an autobiography called Chronicles of Wasted Time. His book Christ and the Media is the text of three lectures he gave at the invitation of John Stott, a well-known Anglican Christian commentator and a friend of Muggeridge.

Muggeridge makes a striking observation: “not only can the camera lie, it always lies.” He quotes Simone Weil, a Jewish woman and thinker who died in her thirties during the war. She wrote:

“Nothing is so beautiful, nothing is so continually fresh and surprising, so full of sweet and perpetual ecstasy, as the good; no desert is so dreary, monotonous and boring as evil. But with fantasy it’s the other way round. Fictional good is boring and flat, while fictional evil is varied, intriguing, attractive and full of charm.”⁴

Good things from God are absolutely beautiful. A person who lives for evil finds it empty, just as Solomon says in Ecclesiastes that all is vanity. Then notice the reversal: with fantasy, everything reverses. Fictional good is boring and flat. Who wants a story about a good character? Who wants a story about an ordinary life, somebody going to work, doing their job, raising their kids, and having basically a decent life? That is boring. Yet fictional evil is varied, intriguing, attractive, and full of charm. Muggeridge adds this observation:

“These words were written a decade or so before television had been developed to attract its huge audiences all over the world, becoming the greatest fabricator and conveyor of fantasy that has ever existed. Its offerings, as it seems to me, bear out the point Simone Weil makes to a remarkable degree. For in them, it is almost invariably eros rather than agape that provides all the excitement; celebrity and success rather than a broken and a contrite heart that are held up as being pre-eminently desirable; Jesus Christ in lights on Broadway rather than Jesus Christ on the cross who gets a folk hero’s billing.”⁵

The world follows after Jesus Christ Superstar. The world wants nothing to do with the Jesus of the gospels.

“… The transposition of good and evil in the world of fantasy created by the media leaves us with no sense of any moral order in the universe, and without this, no order whatsoever, social, political, economic or any other, is ultimately attainable. There is only chaos. To break out of the fantasy, to rediscover the reality of good and evil, and therefore the order which informs all creation — this is the freedom that the Incarnation made available, that the Saints have celebrated and that the Holy Spirit has sanctified.”⁶

Muggeridge gave these lectures in 1976. They were published in book form in 1977. That seems ancient, yet everything he says about television transfers to all kinds of media available today.

What Should We Do?

At a minimum, we must view all media critically. It does not matter what the media is. You need to be making decisions about it, analyzing it and looking at it critically in terms of what you take in.

While I am occasionally entertained by media productions, I must remember how infused with the world it all is, how fake it is. Years ago, at Universal Studios, tour guides took us through an area where they had all these potted trees. They would use them whenever a forest was needed in a movie scene. Of course, they would only shoot the scene from waist high so you would not see the pots underneath. If the trees started losing leaves, they would just tack them back on for the set. The show must go on. This illustrates well that not only does the camera lie, it always lies.

This includes so-called news programs as well as all other forms of entertainment. In recent years, news has become entertainment. Twenty-four-hour news channels must fill their time with something. News is infused with the world, steeped in the world. It communicates the values of all those under-the-sun things that make up worldliness. We must be critical.

We can use the things of the world to be sure, and we must use them to some extent. But the media builds a fantasy where power, desire, this earth and its things are all part of the greatest good. Consider how people play role-playing games of various kinds, joining with other people all around the world. Somebody could be playing your game on the other side of the world at the same time, and you can compete with them on the internet. But what are these games communicating about truth? What values do they espouse as the great value to be followed? Often it is making war, gaining power, indulging the self.

At a minimum, we must view all media critically. We need to learn discipleship, and that will mean saying no to many things we find in the media. As Christians, we must be always discerning and at times saying no to ourselves. Those desires we have push us forward. We want it, we want it, we want it. We must submit those desires to the Holy Spirit.

This does not mean turning into an anti-technology culture cult. We are not rejecting technology itself. But as we use the world, we must make some decisions. Sometimes we are going to have to say no to the things that we want. The call remains to live holy, soberly, righteously, and godly in this present age.

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Don Johnson is the pastor of Grace Baptist Church of Victoria, Victoria, BC, Canada.

This article reproduces a sermon preached on March 26, 2023, which you can view or listen to here. We used Claude.AI to turn the transcript into the article. Pastor Johnson has reviewed and edited the final form of this article.

1. W. Stanley Outlaw, “Commentary on the Books of 1 Timothy, 2 Timothy & Titus,” in 1 Thessalonians through Philemon, ed. Robert E. Picirilli, The Randall House Bible Commentary (Nashville, TN: Randall House, 1990), 389. [↩]
2. “Titus,” in 1, 2 Timothy, Titus, by Hayne P. Griffin, The New American Commentary 34 (Nashville, Tenn: Broadman Press, 1992). [↩]
3. I make no judgement about the reality of his profession, that is God’s business. [↩]
4. Simone Weil, quoted in Malcolm Muggeridge, Christ and the Media (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1977), 46. [↩]
5. Muggeridge, 46. [↩]
6. Muggeridge, 46-47. [↩]