Surviving On Five Hours of TV a Week

And the king swore, saying, “As the LORD lives, who has redeemed my soul out of every adversity, as I swore to you by the LORD, the God of Israel, saying, ‘Solomon your son shall reign after me, and he shall sit on my throne in my place,’ even so will I do this day.” 1 Kings 1:29

When I was young, I loved watching television. We didn’t even have cable back then, but still, I’d sit in front of the TV for hours if I could. By the time my parents recognized this, it was an established behavior that they’d accidentally allowed to develop. They tried to help by encouraging other activities, but when I got home from school, all I wanted to do was turn on cartoons. I don’t remember the catalyst for change, but something happened that caused my parents to take what I considered to be drastic action. One day a TV log was presented to me, and I was given only five hours a week to watch TV. What!? My parents had tried to gently curb my TV-watching, but as I said, it was a learned behavior. So, if they wanted to interrupt the habit, they had to perform a radical intervention.

Though it occurred on a much grander scale, this is similar to what happened in today’s passage. In the story, King David’s son with Haggith, Adonijah, led a coup to take his father’s throne, which had already been promised to Solomon, David’s son from Bathsheba. The passage previously stated that Adonijah grew up entitled, with a father who never set limits. Adonijah got whatever he wanted and now, he’d taken the throne. Bathsheba, recognizing the danger that she and her son were now in, appealed to David. He will kill us. Will you allow this to happen? Though David had allowed Adonijah to do whatever he wanted his entire life, the future of the kingdom now hung in the balance. David had to take radical action if he wanted a different future.

Often, when we recognize a self-destructive habit, we truly want things to be different and so, we decide they will be different. I’ll change today. But we don’t really do anything and so, nothing actually changes. This is because it’s an established behavior that we’ve allowed to develop. At this point, radical behavioral intervention is required. The more established the behavior, the more radical the intervention must be. In the case of a drug addiction, sometimes the answer is to put life on hold and go to treatment, which is a pretty drastic step. My point isn’t that we must all go to treatment for every bad habit. My point is that if we truly want change, we must make radical behavioral changes, because if nothing changes, nothing changes.