(music) Today's question is about quarantine habits. We've all had a lot of time at home this year, and this is a searching question from a young woman who wants to know what her quarantine entertainment habits revealed about the state of her own soul. Here's her email. "Hello Pastor John, it has taken this period of total pandemic lockdown for me to realize that I don't read the Bible and pray when I'm stressed out.

I had never noticed that all I do is eat, sleep, and watch movies in my most stressful times. This is exactly what I did in the first two weeks of quarantine. I thought it would change, but after months I still have found little time to commune with God. It's both scary, sad, and I'm really unhappy and tired.

My question is this, if I went so long without communion with God in this season of anxiousness, does this mean I don't really love or trust God to begin with?" I'm going to break that into two questions. One is, I think the least we can say is that your experience in the last two months has shown that you do not love and trust God the way you should.

And my question is, why would I say that? Why is there a correlation between eating and sleeping and movie watching and saying you haven't trusted and loved God the way you should? That's my first question. Why would I even go there? And the other question is, how would we go about discerning whether you don't really love and trust God at all and are not a Christian, not born again?

How would we do that? So let's take these one at a time, because both are, you can see, really important. Heaven and hell important. So first question, why would I say that a young woman who devotes her discretionary time, especially stressful times, to eating and sleeping and watching movies, rather than say to solid reading, meditating, praying over God's Word and over rich food of good books that mature and insightful people have written over the centuries as well as other wholesome tasks, why would I say that such a person does not love and trust God the way she should?

And the answer is, because loving God means that God holds a place of value in our heart, that it makes us want to know him better and enjoy him more and be near him in friendship and fellowship. Movies are not well designed to do that. In fact, most of them are well designed to hinder that and to undermine the very thing that the love of God implies, namely a passion to know him, a passion to enjoy him and be close to him.

Movies do not have that effect. Therefore, defaulting to movies day after day is at least a sign that love for God is weak and probably growing weaker. John said in 1 John 5, 3 and 4, this is the love for God, that we keep his commandments and his commandments are not burdensome.

For everyone who has been born of God overcomes the world, and this is the victory that has overcome the world, our faith. What this passage does is bring together the two things that this woman is asking about, love for God and trust in God, love and faith. First, John says, love for God, delight so much in pleasing God and being close to God that obedience to his commandments is not burdensome.

And then he attributes that sense of burden, lifted enjoyment of God to the fact that we have overcome the world. In other words, that worldliness is not the dominant controlling force in our lives anymore. It has been broken, overcome. And then he explains, this is the victory that overcomes the world, namely our faith.

So, in John's way of thinking, faith is the kind of reality that receives God. Faith receives God, receives all that God is for us in Christ, receives him as such a precious deliverance and help and treasure that the world loses its power to be the most attractive thing in our lives.

So, love for God and faith in God are, in John's mind, overlapping or interlocking realities. Each one is part of the other. And the double effect of both, love and faith, together is, one, the power of the world to be our controlling treasure is broken, overcome, and two, obedience has ceased to be burdensome.

It's not a burden to be told that you must be done with what you hate to do. It's not a burden to be told that you should indulge in what you love. That's not a burden, that's freedom. So, when this young woman indulges in the excitement of movies with more pleasure than she gets from the riches of God's Word, John would say there is a defect here in love for God and in faith in God.

That's my answer to the first question, why would we suggest a defect of faith and love if she's just spending all her time eating, sleeping, and watching movies? Now, here's the more important question, the one she actually posed, I think. It seems to me that she is saying, "I went so long without communion with God in this season of anxiousness.

Does it mean that I never really loved and trusted God to begin with?" And here's the way I'm rephrasing that. How would we go about discerning whether you don't really love and trust God at all? How would we decide if you're not truly a Christian, not born again? And here's my answer.

It's relatively simple. I would not spend much time analyzing the failures of the past two months, or even a more distant memory of conversion and whether it was real or not. I think that kind of introspection and past experience analysis by and large does not produce the hoped-for outcome, namely assurance of salvation and peace of mind.

Our hearts are simply too deceptive. Our memories and our powers of assessment about the past experiences are too limited to see what we need to see. So my answer is, repent now with great seriousness about the failures of the past. Name the sins and problems that you see. Tell the Lord how you feel about that.

Renounce unbelief and lovelessness and disobedience and worldliness, and then make a decisive turn away from the past toward the future, the future of the next five minutes and five months and five years and five decades and five centuries toward that future, and believe Him, trust Him, and love Him henceforth.

Now I'm taking my cue with that answer from 2 Peter 1.10. Be all the more diligent to confirm your calling and election, for if you practice these things (so he's talking about what to do right now and henceforth into the future) if you practice these things, you'll never fall, for in this way there will be richly provided for you an entrance into the eternal kingdom of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.

In other words, the confirmation that we are truly called and truly elect, truly the children of God, truly Christian, happens, the confirmation happens by stepping into the future with faith and obedience. Assurance of salvation does not primarily come from the analysis of the past, but from the God-given earnestness of present and future faith and obedience.

So my word to our young friend is, turn away from the failures of the past two months, turn away from speculations about whether your love and faith was ever real, turn to the Lord of mercy, Jesus Christ, and turn to the future and walk with him boldly, joyfully, into that future with trusting him and with loving him.

Well said. There's an important little footnote I think to put on this episode. It's something I learned from you, Pastor John, and really find helpful when we talk about entertainment. You alluded to it at the beginning of this episode, and you've said it for years, and I just want to make it clear as we conclude here.

But the problem with entertainment is not necessarily that our movies and our TV shows are inherently sinful or celebrate sin or show no consequences for sin. All of that is a problem, a big problem. But the most pervasive problem with entertainment is that it presents a worldview in which God is obsolete and he's presented as irrelevant to our lives.

Yeah, or to say it with more precision, he's not presented at all. I mean, it's the absolute void. I used to say back when people read newspapers that you open the Star Tribune and you go page, page, page, page, page, and here's a whole section on business, here's a section on leisure, here's a section on travel, here's a section on sports, a whole section on sports, zero section on God.

Not one paragraph on God. I mean, the most important reality in the universe gets zero attention in the newspaper. Same would be true of most movies, or, like you say, if he does get presented, it's presented in a way that does not inflame our love for him, but questions his reality and his usefulness.

Yeah, that's good. That's good. As John Newton says, "The top headline on every newspaper every day should be, 'The Lord Reigns.'" Amen. Thank you, Pastor John, and thank you for joining us today. If you want new episodes of this podcast delivered to you, subscribe to Ask Pastor John in your favorite podcast app, Spotify, or by subscribing to DG's YouTube channel.

And to find other episodes in our archive, or to submit a question to us, do that online at DesiringGod.org/AskPastorJohn. Well, what is God seeking to accomplish in my suffering? It's a question Pastor John set out to answer from 1 Peter 4:12-19, and it's a word we all need to hear.

That's up next time. I'm Tony Ranke. We'll see you back here on Wednesday. you