Protecting Your Eyes

Media Influence

From Barefoot in the Snow, by Ruth Gilmore (contemporary edits by author)

Artwork by Elsa Ingulsrud

Scriptures: Psalm 119:37   “Turn my eyes from worthless things,
and give me life through your word.” (NLT)

Preparation: Bring a pair of sunglasses and a pair of safety goggles to illustrate the message.

If the sun is shining right into your eyes and you can hardly see, what do you do? (Let children respond.) You can shield your eyes with your hands. You can put on a pair of sunglasses. You could look down or close your eyes. Why would you want to protect your eyes from the sun? (Discuss.) The sun’s rays can damage your eyes permanently. If you look straight at the sun for a long time or if you glance at the sun during an eclipse, you can damage your eyes and eventually even become blind.

Have you ever seen grown-ups working with power tools? They should always wear safety goggles, shouldn’t they? If one little splinter of wood or a piece of metal comes flying toward them, it could go right into their eye, and they could lose their vision in that eye.

There is something else that can get in through our eyes that can be very harmful to us. It’s not painful to our eyes and it won’t cause blindness to our eyes. But it is something that enters our eyes and goes straight to our souls. It affects who we are and how we think about things. Your eyes let many images in every day. We see our family members and watch what they do, we see our neighborhood and the world around us. We also see hours and hours of images from a box that sits in our house called the TV. There are many good, educational images that enter our eyes from this box, but unfortunately, there is also the chance to see many bad and damaging images from the TV. Those images enter our eyes and are permanently locked into our brains. Once an image is in your brain, it’s there for good.

We protect our eyes from the sun, and from splinters, but how do we protect our eyes from seeing things that are harmful to our minds and souls? If there is something being shown on TV that is violent or scary, or something on our computer screen that is not good for us to see, what could we do to keep it from entering our eyes? (Let children offer ideas.) We could turn the TV or the computer off. We could leave the room and find something else to do. We might even unplug the TV altogether and leave it the garage. You could go find a good book to read. The Bible says, “Turn my eyes (away) from worthless things” (nlt). That was written before TVs or computers existed. It’s almost as if the Psalm writer knew what was coming.

“Turn my eyes away from worthless things, and give me life through your word.” That’s good advice; especially today.

Prayer:   Lord God, protect our eyes and souls from harmful things. Help us keep our hearts and minds fixed on you, dear Jesus.

Key Words: Safety, Worldliness, Peer pressure, Culture