But I want to look at this whole area of this series of Twilight. We're going to talk a little bit about it, and for those who don't know I'll have to explain a bit about it. Before I do that, let me just explain the power of a story. In Matthew 13, Verse 34, the Bible says that Jesus spoke, and He spoke to them in parables or stories. Stories carry emotional impact. When you hear a story, you have an image in your mind. The better the story is told, and the more emotional the story, the more it impacts you, so when you hear the testimony of someone, and how God has worked in their life and they were broken and damaged, you feel empathy for that person. You enter into the story with them, you're listening, and then you kind of have feelings and emotions that stir up as you hear the story.
When you listen to your friend, and they tell you about the break up of a relationship, and they're weeping on your shoulder, you get caught into the feeling and the stories. Stories are powerful ways of conveying images into our mind, impressing us, and shaping how we think, for example, how many saw the movie Titanic? I loved it. I saw it the first day it opened up. As soon as I saw it, this is going to be a winner, and there was almost no one came for about the first week, and then it just took off. Then it became a best seller and the rest is all history, so what are the things in there? There's certain things in the story that had an appeal to people. I won't go into that story. I want to get into the Twilight, and look at what's in the Twilight. Interesting the name Twilight, it's the period between when the sun's gone down and it's not yet dark, it's neither light nor dark, it's in between - the Twilight Zone.
So stories have power to affect our lives. Don't think that what you read, doesn't affect you. TV puts out millions and millions and millions of dollars into advertising, to create pictures and images to get an impact in your life, to make you feel like you're unhappy with what you have, but what they're offering on the advert is just what will make you happy. So you see the images, and many young people will buy stuff straight off the images they see on the TV, so that brings us to the stories. The Twilight series is a series of four books. There's four of them, and it's a publishing and a movie phenomena. What that means is, unbelievable, unbelievable response - over 17 million of the books sold, huge response, millions of dollars taken in the sales of the movies. It is not just now a movie, it's become a phenomenon, that's affected primarily young girls, girls pre-teen, tweens, and teens and - would you believe it - older women as well!
One of the things when something is a phenomenon, there must be some reason for it being such a phenomenon. There must be a reason, there must be some kind of reason for it, so Twilight has got people all over the world reading it, waiting for the next story, wanting to watch the next movie.
Essentially it's a love story between a girl, a fairly plain girl, ordinary girl, and really a classy guy who's actually a vampire - so it's a love story. Stories create an image about how you see relationships. They create an image about how you see relationships, so when people read the book, images are created about what relationships look like, and what I want to do is, I want to go through - I won't go into all the story, I don't want to tell all the story. You can find that out yourself. I'll just give you enough of the first one to know what it's about - but what I want to do is, I want to unlock what is behind it. If you think it's just a story, why is it so popular? If it's just another story, why has it sold so many millions? Why are so many people buying it? Why are so many millions of young girls in love with Edward in the story? You've got to ask the question; they're really in love with it, they're obsessed with it, and that's one of the fruits you'll see with this thing, is it's obsessive.