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Key Bible Verse: Fix your thoughts on what is true and honorable and right. Think about things that are pure and lovely and admirable … excellent and worthy of praise (Philippians 4:8). Bonus Reading: Mark 7:14-23

If there's anything that wields more influence over our culture than TV and movies, it's music. Music captures the heart.

Previously, pop music was almost always sentimental, sappy, and insubstantial. Now, it is nightmarishly barbaric. Much of our rock music has no recognizable tune, pitch, cadence, or tenor. It's also so profane that it's unrepeatable. Steeped in a hopeless worldview of suicide, occultism, sexual abuse, self-mutilation, brutal sadism, and random revenge, the music is depressing, dark, and deleterious. With the advent of grunge rock, hip-hop, goth rock, gangsta rap, death metal, and speed metal, a new wave of wildly angry music—with minimal melody lines, harsh and distorted electronics, incessant syncopations, and vile lyrics—has swept onto center stage.

This is what our kids are listening to in music videos and over FM radio stations. This is what they're downloading from iTunes and swapping on the internet. This is what they have on their iPods. A steady diet of such music would have a terrible effect on anyone—especially impressionable adolescents. Between the 7th and 12th grades, the average American teen listens to it for 10,500 hours!

—Rod Parsley in Charisma

My Response: How can I assure that music plays a positive rather than destructive role in my family?

Thought to Apply: A song will outlive all sermons in the memory.—HENRY GILES (British pastor)

Adapted from Charisma (4/05) by permission.

Copyright © 2006 by the author or Christianity Today International/Men of Integrity magazine. Click here for reprint information on Men of Integrity.

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Prayer for the Week

Help me, Lord, to jam those media voices that would drown out Your voice.

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