The culture is not trying to make you evil. It is trying to make you comfortable enough not to notice.
A man sits down at nine-thirty. He is not happy. Something in his week went wrong and he has not looked at it. He picks up the remote, or the phone, or the controller, and by eleven-fifteen the wrongness has not been solved. It has been buried under four hours of pleasant noise. He goes to bed vaguely hollow and does it again tomorrow.
Nothing happened. That is exactly the point. Nothing happening is the product.
We spend a lot of energy warning the church about what entertainment shows us. We spend almost none warning it about what entertainment does to us regardless of what it shows. The content is the argument we are comfortable having. The anesthesia is the thing we never mention.
What an Anesthetic Actually Does
Anesthesia does not heal anything. It makes it possible for you not to feel what is being done. In surgery that is a mercy. In a soul it is a catastrophe, because pain in the soul is not a malfunction. It is a signal.
Conviction hurts. Grief hurts. Loneliness hurts. Shame hurts. Every one of those is a nerve God installed to move a man toward something: toward repentance, toward a brother, toward a Savior. Kill the nerve and you do not kill the problem. You only lose the instrument that would have told you where the problem was.
This is why the most spiritually dangerous evening is not the one where you watched something filthy. It is the one where you watched something harmless for five hours and never once had a thought you did not choose.
Choked, Not Uprooted
Jesus anticipated this. When He explained the soils, He named three ways the word fails, and only one of them is open hostility. The third is quieter, and He put an odd word in the list.
And that which fell among thorns are they, which, when they have heard, go forth, and are choked with cares and riches and pleasures of this life, and bring no fruit to perfection. (KJV)
Luke 8:14
Cares and riches we expect. Pleasures of this life is the one that should stop us. Not sins of this life. Pleasures. The ordinary, lawful, enjoyable things. Jesus lists them as a mechanism of spiritual failure, and He does not say the seed was stolen or scorched. He says it was choked, and it brought no fruit to perfection. Nothing dramatic. Just a life that never finished.
That is not a verse about a wicked man. That is a verse about a comfortable one.
The City That Could Not Be Told
There is a woman in Isaiah who stands for an entire civilization, and her defining trait is not cruelty. It is a settled pleasantness that has made her unreachable.
Therefore hear now this, thou that art given to pleasures, that dwellest carelessly, that sayest in thine heart, I am, and none else beside me. (KJV)
Isaiah 47:8
Given to pleasures. Dwelling carelessly. The old word carelessly does not mean sloppy. It means without care, untroubled, at ease. She is not anxious about anything, and that is the indictment. Her comfort has produced a kind of deafness. She cannot be warned, because nothing in her life hurts enough to make a warning interesting.
Sodom gets the same diagnosis, and it is not the one most people expect.
Behold, this was the iniquity of thy sister Sodom, pride, fulness of bread, and abundance of idleness was in her and in her daughters, neither did she strengthen the hand of the poor and needy. (KJV)
Ezekiel 16:49
Fulness of bread and abundance of idleness. Full and unbothered. The sins everyone remembers grew in that soil. Comfort did not replace corruption. It fertilized it.
A Machine Built to Prevent Silence
Here is where the modern situation is genuinely new. Every previous generation had to work to be numb. There was a limit to how much wine was in the house and how many hours of theater a town could stage. Boredom was structural. Silence was the default setting of human life, and it came for you every evening whether you wanted it or not.
We have engineered that away. There is now an infinite supply of mildly pleasant stimulus, free, instant, in your pocket, tuned by machines that measure whether you looked away. The gap between an uncomfortable thought and a distraction has been compressed to about a second and a half.
Think about what that second and a half used to hold. It held the drive home where you realized you had been short with your son. It held the moment before sleep where a verse surfaced and would not leave. It held the ache that eventually walked a man into a church. Conviction needs an unfilled moment to land in, and we have systematically abolished the unfilled moment.
That is not a conspiracy. Nobody set out to sedate the church. It is simply what you get when an industry is paid by the hour of attention and the cheapest way to hold a man is to keep him from ever feeling anything sharp.
Why a Numb Man Never Repents
Repentance has a prerequisite, and it is not information. Plenty of numb men know exactly what the Bible says. The prerequisite is sorrow.
For godly sorrow worketh repentance to salvation not to be repented of: but the sorrow of the world worketh death. (KJV)
2 Corinthians 7:10
Godly sorrow is not depression and it is not self-loathing. It is the ache of seeing your sin the way God sees it, and it is the engine that produces change. Now notice the problem. If you have built a life in which no ache is ever allowed to stay in the room for more than ninety seconds, you have built a life in which the engine of repentance can never turn over.
You have not rejected the gospel. You have simply arranged never to be quiet enough to need it.
This Is Not a Call to Grimness
Let me say clearly what I am not saying. I am not saying pleasure is sin. God made the nerve endings. He filled a psalm with feasting and gave Israel festivals that were essentially commanded parties. Paul says He giveth us richly all things to enjoy. A Christian who cannot laugh at a film or lose an afternoon to a ballgame is not more holy; he is just harder to be around.
The line is not between pleasure and no pleasure. It is between enjoying a good thing and using a good thing to avoid God. The same evening on the couch can be gratitude or it can be anesthesia, and only you know which one you are doing. Here is the test: when the screen goes off, do you feel refreshed, or do you feel a small dread about the quiet?
The Path Forward
- Find out what you are medicating. Before you reach tonight, stop for sixty seconds and finish the sentence: “I do not want to feel ____.” Whatever fills that blank is the actual subject of your evening.
- Reinstall one unfilled moment. The drive with the radio off. The first ten minutes after waking with the phone still face down. You are not adding a discipline; you are restoring a place for God to speak.
- Let the ache finish its sentence. When conviction shows up, do not distract it and do not wallow in it. Take it somewhere. Confess it, call the man who knows your story, open the text that addresses it.
- Enjoy things on purpose. Choose the thing, start it, finish it, and be glad. Deliberate pleasure is a gift. Drifting pleasure is a drug.
- Watch the clock, not the content. The question is rarely was that acceptable. The question is what did those four hours cost, and what did they prevent.
The Thing Worth Waking Up For
The reason to come out from under the anesthetic is not that God is waiting to scold you for the hours. It is that there is something on the other side of the quiet, and it is not condemnation.
Awake thou that sleepest, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall give thee light. (KJV)
Ephesians 5:14
Light, not exposure. That is the promise to the man who wakes up. The ache you have been drowning was never God being cruel to you. It was God refusing to let you settle for a life that brings no fruit to perfection.
Turn it off early tonight. Sit in the quiet long enough for something to hurt. Then take it to the only One who can do anything about it. That is not deprivation. That is the first honest hour you have had in a while.
Teaching the Word. Watching the Times.
— SmithForChrist