season 2, Episode 24

How to handle the news as a Christian

It’s been a hard season of news, especially lately it just feels like it’s one thing after another. My personal thoughts is that as a generation we are the MOST exposed to negative news than any generation before us and therefore are naturally driven to anxiety by that. Instead of hearing AND SEEING sad news every once in a while or even once a week or EVEN once a day, we are inundated with news podcasts, news notifications popping up, news on television, news websites with countless awful stories about REAL HARD and even SCARY THINGS going on locally or around the globe. This is not something any generation before 50 years ago really had or went through. We’re also now exposed to more opinions and false information than ever before. We’re in this weird state of an inundation of information and misinformation and opinions, of sadness, anxiety and cancel culture. So HOW do we handle the news as Christians? Is there a right way to take it in? I’m sure there’s countless right answers to this but I want to talk about what I think are biblical thoughts. I believe the Bible is God’s Word making it timeless which means its truths last forever and no matter what. So here we go, I am going to break this episode into HOW NOT TO handle the news and HOW TO handle the news.

HOW NOT TO

Don’t be careless. While I think (and we’ll talk about this later) there is GREAT value in not being consumed by the news, another extreme that I believe is not Biblical is to be careless about the news we hear. As believers, we are called to love and even share God’s love and comfort. We see that God Himself especially throughout the books of the prophets in the Old Testament, cares DEEPLY about injustice. We never see God say, well it doesn’t affect me so, I’m not going to care. We never see Him turn a blind eye to injustice. We never see Him call Christians to FORGET about the widows and orphans. Our God is a CARING God and so His followers should reflect that.

Don’t get caught up in civilian pursuits. In 2 Timothy it says this: No one serving as a soldier gets involved in civilian affairs–he wants to please his commanding officer. Now this is not specifically regarding how to handle the news but it does speak to how we are supposed to act and live at large. And so, if we are actively fighting on Instagram and Facebook about things we are not going to do anything about in real life, if we are going to be anxious and complain about things we won’t take a stand in – that’s distracting ourselves and others from who God is. All they’ll see is someone who’s prone to fights, anxious and a complainer but someone who in real life does nothing about the situation at hand. We get caught up in saying to someone they SHOULD take care of the widow and orphan when we don’t or we get caught pointing out the speck in someone else’s eye when we don’t take care of the plank in our own.

HOW TO

Do be informed but not overwhelmed. To be informed is a good thing. I believe. I think it can show we care and that we’re involved in our communities and world and being good stewards of it when we are informed about the things going on around us, BUT like I briefly mentioned earlier there is GREAT value in not being consumed by the news. We talked about not being careless, but we also can easily become too caught up int things we have no control over. We turn to anxiety and passion without prayer and action. And I think this is often natural when we inundate ourselves with news. Instead of getting the summary in the morning or evening, we’re checking the news every hour and getting notifications on our phones, we’re looking up every possible detail of a developing story.

CARE – be gracious, be loving, be kind, be compassionate, love, donate, speak out, help, etc.

Surrender anxiety – We are called to be anxious for nothing and to have a higher hope because know the ultimate future and know the One who is in control. This truth applied when it was written and it applies today. Peace is supposed to set us apart. It is a fruit of the Spirit. How do we do that? Think on THESE things in Philippians 4:8: “Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.”

XO, Meg