“And so for me, I didn’t see this as an educational piece,” he said. “Could there be a lesson in it? Sure. There’s lessons in, you know, almost everything that people produce.”
“But this is not an educational piece of film by any means,” Winnings said. “It’s an entertainment piece. And I’m trying to warn people to say, ‘Don’t go get entertained and fascinated by dark things.’ And I think that’s what’s going to happen.”
Another pushback people gave Winnings (who made a follow-up video on the subject) was that it was just entertainment and that he was making a big deal out of simply watching a movie.
“It says in the Psalms, ‘I will set no vile thing before my eyes.’ And I think that we give ourselves way too much credit for how much control we have over our bodies,” said Winnings, “and not just our bodies, but like our heart and our mind. I see this all the time. People say, ‘Well, it doesn’t affect me. You know, I can watch all this stuff and it doesn’t affect me.’”
“I highly disagree with that,” he said. “As someone who has been to war, who has been a cop—I have seen human beings blown up, I have seen human beings chopped up, and just horrific things. The more that you see that stuff, there is a hardening, there is a callousing, there is a numbness that can happen to your heart and mind.”
“I think the more that we take in these things, let alone be entertained by them—you might not realize, but over time you’re going to become different,” he continued. “Like the Bible literally teaches that what you take in through your eye and what you allow into your mind and your heart, it will come out. Jesus even spoke about it.”
Christians might not see the consequences of their actions right away and therefore conclude, “‘I’m not affected by this,’ but the Bible says that you are,” said Winnings. “It doesn’t mean that you can only watch Christian movies, but I definitely don’t want to watch something that seems to be glorifying and entertaining using demons and gore and blood and all of that stuff.”
“It’s definitely not going to help you get closer to God,” he said.
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Winnings said that earlier in his life, he put no restrictions on the type of movies or TV he watched. “I used to watch everything,” he said. “I was in the church and I was watching crazy stuff with my friends. Whatever movie came out—we’d watch the ‘Saw’ movies. We’d watch movies that had sexual content. We didn’t really think of it just because that’s what everybody did.”
