Prosperity

In the first Psalm we are given one of the master keys to the spiritual life: meditation. A good man meditates on God’s word day and night and, because he does this, everything he does prospers. Meditation is important because it helps us traverse that grand canyon that separates our head and our heart. The Holy Spirit uses mediation to take what is in our heads and transfer it to our hearts so that the word will come alive with transformative power in our lives.

Unfortunately the process of meditation is neutral. You can meditate good things into your hearts, and you can meditate bad things. All of which brings us back to those lying smiles on the TV commercials. Most commercials are not lying smile commercials. A commercial that simply tells you about a product and the benefits it might bring to you is not a lying smile commercial. In order for it to be a lying smile commercial the commercial message has to imply that the use of the product is the key to happiness. No one actually says this, but the message comes through from the beaming faces of the actors.

The average man watches about 4.5 hours of TV a day. The average woman watches about 5.25 hours. Total watching time for both groups has increased by about a half hour a day from twenty years ago. The average commercial time in an hour of TV is 15 minutes. For the purposes of this illustration let’s assume that about one third of the commercial time is devoted to lying smile commercials. That means that for every hour of TV you watch highly skilled actors put on skits written by highly skilled writers that are directed by highly skilled directors. Four five minutes a hour you are subjected to brain washing. If you watch four hours a day, that’s twenty minutes a day.

That works out to about 120 hours of brainwashing a year or 2,400 hours of brainwashing over a twenty year period. I wonder how many of use spend 120 hours a year meditating in God’s word? That would be twenty minutes a day.