Cleaning Out Our Lives for God

Last night I spent a substantial amount of time clearing out my itunes playlist. I had recently read a great blog post about clearing the bad influences from our lives: tv shows, music, hobbies, friends that were bring us further from Christ rather than closer to Him. I took this to heart, seeing as these things do greatly affect me, I feel as if I am easily influenced at times by the emotions certain music, movies, and friends bring out in me.
I knew it was time for a change! Like Mrs. Duggar says "we don't put garbage in our mouths, so don't put it in your mind!" What a great philosophy ;) Fortunately, I don't watch too much tv anymore, only select shows I really want to watch: ie. 19 Kids and counting (which my roomie likes now! yay!) because my room mate doesn't like having the tv on. That was an adjustment for me, but a good one none the less! So I focused my attention on my music collection.

What shape is your playlist in? Your movie selections? Your favorite tv shows? Do they glorify God or do they tempt you in negative ways, toward sin perhaps? We must work harder at cleansing our lives for the Lord, as we are commanded to be separate from the world and to be a peculiar people. So even if we seem weird for boycotting crude music, or ungodly movies (Like Easy A...I refused to see it this weekend and that resulted in me getting confronted by my old room mates, as mentioned in the last post.) we need to stand firm and accept any suffering this causes us. Maybe our family and friends will be resistant to this change, and even persecute us to a degree, in trying to get us to revert back to old ways, but we need to rise above this and sacrifice these things for God.

Remember:

Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things.
-Philippians 4:8