Free Gas for Your Think Tank — Short Reflections, Lasting Encouragement

Why is Western culture consumed with drugs and drug commercials?

If you don’t self-regulate your life, you will eventually want to medicate the pain that your disruptive thinking and behavior causes to your emotions and body. (Philippians 4:8). People in our society medicate themselves in an attempt to compensate for the consequences of their refusal to self-regulate what they think, read, hear, eat, see, say, and do.

Being caught up in a culture consumed with consumption, captivated by concupiscence, controlled by compulsions, and callous toward consequences, creates continual consternation! If we don’t break free from the influence of that kind of culture, it will eventually cause us so much pain that we feel driven to mask our misery and find temporary relief through substances and/or self-harming habits.

The key to breaking free from the destructive effects of our culture is radical self-regulation through 1) resistance, 2) replacement, and 3) refutation.

1. Resistance: People without sales resistance will buy almost anything from a persuasive salesman. And people without moral resistance will accept almost anything from a pervasive culture.  If you are not internally resisting the forces of culture, then you are being swept along with them and brainwashed by them.  To resist is to draw a moral line in the sand and say “Here I stand, I will not be moved, no matter what anybody or everybody says or does!”
2. Replacement: In order to resist something you need a more effective alternative (something better to replace it with), otherwise you will have no ground to stand on. Is there an alternative, more advantageous way of living and thinking than our contemporary Western culture? Yes, there is the way of Christ as researched and recorded by His first followers in short biographies and letters. A through knowledge and continual exposure to those powerful records reveal a higher quality of living than our culture creates.
3. Refutation: Our relentless culture refuses to back off and will aggressively assault your thoughts and emotions with false and deceptive claims. You need to talk back to it, to refute it verbally and logically, to lovingly counter deception with the alternative of truth. One example of our culture’s many deceptions is to call truth hate speech. However, to avoid being manipulated and controlled by culture, you must refute it. If you passively accept it, it will overtake and overwhelm you. If you want to break out of our culture’s brain washing, the next time you hear, read, or see an untruth, refute it with truth. (When a commercial with beautiful music and smiling people tells me to use a drug while quietly reciting destructive side effects, I refute it by saying and/or thinking something like this: “I don’t need or want your drug and its destructive side effects because I have “joy unspeakable and full of glory,” “peace that passes understanding,” and “gifts of healing.”)