First youth lesson...critique please?

Hey everybody,

First post in the youth forum.

This week marks the first lesson I am giving in our 7th-8th grade youth group, requirements were that it needed to be on media (goes with sermon), use Matthew 15 (clean vs unclean), Romans 12:1-2, and Proverbs 4:20-27.

There are questions to ask before and after the message, but those are OK. I usually write stuff for school / for more professional / technical stuff so I'm looking for any advice / criticism. Thanks!

Final version. Probably practiced this lesson more than Obama practices a speech.

Today, we're going to be talking about how we should approach the media as growing Christians. No matter where we look, where we go, or what we do, media has an influence on our lives in some way. I'd be willing to bet that there's not a single day that goes by that you don't at least do one of the following: play video games, watch TV, browse the internet, listen to music, watch a movie. Most days I do pretty much all of those things. We need to be careful what we do with what we see and hear in the media, it can affect us a lot more than we know. I know for me, I can be doing yardwork or walking around the busy streets of New Carlisle and be listening to music on my MP3 player I haven't heard in a while, I get a song stuck in my head, next thing you know I'm walking around with a song stuck in my head for hours with lyrics I should never even THINK about saying as a Christian.
Let me give you a disclaimer: I don't expect everybody in here to watch Veggie Tales and listen to Radio Disney until you're fifty years old, but we need to be careful what we let get into our minds and hearts. Media has changed so much since a few short years ago when I was sitting where you guys are today....and all of it hasn't really been for the better. The movies that used to get a pretty clear R rating can squeak by with a PG-13 rating now. What can get an R rating now wouldn't have even been allowed in some of the movie theaters around here fifteen years ago. Music, you guys sort of lucked out. In fact, it was probably worse lyrically in our generation than anything that's coming out now (I think most of the leaders in here will agree). Video games have evolved to an entirely new level. I got my first Nintendo Entertainment System in 1988. The most violent thing I saw for the first few years of my gaming life was Mario jumping on a dude's head and it squishes down like this. Now, a game like Modern Warfare 3, everybody here knows it's got some stuff in it that really isn't that appropriate, and it has quite a bit of realistic violence, is tame compared to some of the other stuff out there... and I know the guys in here, even the leaders, even me, play MW3. In fact, a couple of em are probably thinking "When is this dude gonna wrap this up? have a few rounds of Team Deathmatch to play.
God definitely gives us advice in this area, and we should take it very seriously. As we all know, the Bible is a good place to go for pretty much anything we struggle with, this area being no exception. In the first few verses we read, Matthew 15:1-11, Jesus is addressing a pretty common problem, it's a problem that never really went away even two thousand years later. (Discuss problems then vs today). The Pharisees were an interesting group of people. They knew all the rules, they followed the rules, but they followed a lot of the rules for the wrong reasons. Their hearts were in the wrong place. At the end of this story, Jesus says "What goes into a man's mouth does not make him 'unclean' but what comes out of his mouth, that is what makes him 'unclean.' This means that a person can follow all of the rules but if his heart's not in the right place, it doesn't matter. The Pharisees were accusing Jesus and the disciples of not ceremonially washing their hands before eating, because it was their tradition. They followed the traditions that made them look good, that gave them a 'get out of jail free card', but they completely missed the point of what God wanted. A long time ago, before I came to Medway, before I really knew God, I went to a church that had a ton of people, myself included, that followed all the rules to look like good Christians, but I don't think any of us had our hearts in the right place. The people I'd see on Sunday morning were the same people I saw at a party Saturday night. That's not a good way to live, and that's definitely not a Godly way to live.
We need to learn to let God transform our heart in all areas of our life, especially when it comes to letting things influence us. Stuff we see on TV, in movies, in video games, online, and lyrics we hear in music can harden our hearts. It can make us more 'worldly' than we should be as growing Christians. It's not necessarily the act of being exposed to this stuff that hurts us, it's what happens when we let it plant a seed in our heart. A lot of things that this world tries to push on us can lead us in the wrong direction. We have to learn as young Christians to protect ourselves from the world and culture we live in, but not to isolate ourselves completely from it. It would be nice if we could just avoid watching and listening to all of the "bad" things out there, but face it, that's not going to happen in this lifetime.
The Bible's teachings in Romans 12:1-2 and Proverbs 4:23 give us a glimpse of what God wants us to do in this area. It works a couple of ways. First, Paul tells us to be "transformed in the renewing of our minds." This is pretty straightforward. As we grow as Christians, God wants us to no longer desire things of a sinful nature, and as our hearts change we should naturally avoid things that could be bad for our growth as Christians. Over time, we should grow further away from worldly things that can bring us down, even things like movies and music. I actually have a pretty funny story of how this works. I work with a lot of people that aren't very Christian and they don't have a problem watching movies that are, well, pretty offensive. If somebody tells me a movie is good, I also have a bad habit of deciding that the best time to watch it is after church at my parents' house. I won't even mention the name of the movie, but I went over to my parent's after church a couple of months ago and my mom was scrolling through movies on Demand. My mom asks if a movie's funny and I tell her 'Oh yeah, guys at work loved it. Let's watch it.' I had no idea it was a really, really, really bad movie (an R rating didn't do this movie justice). The entire time we're watching it, I'm sinking further and further into my chair, embarrassed to even be alive at this point. After the movie, I seriously don't think I could look my mom in the eyes for like a week. Before we both started coming to church, I probably would have just passed it off as something those 'old people' wouldn't find funny, but at this point, I seriously felt BAD watching it.
Proverbs 4:23 says "above all else, guard your heart for it is the wellspring of life." What does God want us to take away from this? Exactly that. Our heart guides us. Our heart contains our passions and desires. We need to make sure that we put boundaries on what we let affect our hearts. It's so easy to get off track in this area of our lives, so we have to do everything we can to try to make sure that our heart stays focused on God and Godly things. When we look forward and keep our eyes on Him, we realize how little influence all of the media being pushed on us really has. When we realize how little influence it has, we can do everything in our power to prevent it from leading us into areas of sin / areas we have no business being. God doesn't want us to shut ourselves out from the rest of the world. In fact, he tells us to go out into the world, but to not be 'of' the world. He wants us experience life, but He reminds us that we need to seriously consider the effects that the things of the world that we let into our lives could have on us. Movie, TV, Internet, Video Games, whether you want it to or not, all of it affects our hearts and we need to remember this when it comes time to make decisions of what is good and what isn't good for us in this area of our lives.