Tag: The World

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Torn Between God and the World

You adulterous people! Do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God? Therefore whoever wishes to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God.

James 4:4 NLT

Worldliness is being in love with the things of this life instead of maintaining a child-like trust and tender affection for our blessed Savior. The spirit of the world is embodied in the love of money, a hunger for unbridled sex, and a thirst for power. A worldly attitude is an arrogance that takes pride in our accomplishments, status, or rank over and above the majesty and glory of God (1 John 2:15-17).

Worldliness is any passion, craving, or hunger for the pleasures of sin while simultaneously desiring to receive the approval of others for our poor choices. Worldliness uses and misuses people for personal satisfaction, political influence, and fleshly pleasure. Worldliness is an organized scheme of humankind that uses our flesh (i.e., sin nature) to draw us away from an intimate relationship with God. Worldliness is a heart attitude intrinsic to being born in Adam and living in a fallen world.

The solution to breaking the world’s all-pervasive grip on our lives is the Cross of Christ (Gal. 6:14). Satisfaction in Christ’s love and mercy fulfills our hearts keeping us from being attracted to the world. We realize the utter emptiness of the world’s promises as we experience the depths of God’s grace. The Cross breaks the world’s hold on us: we live for Christ committed to the kingdom of God hungering to be like him.

We and the world have parted company. Each has been ‘crucified’ to the other. ‘The world’ is the society of unbelievers. Previously we were desperately anxious to be in favour with the world. But now that we have seen ourselves as sinners and Christ crucified as our sin-bearer, we do not care what the world thinks or says of us or does to us. ‘The world has been crucified to me, and I to the world”

John Stott, The Message of Galatians

Woe to those weak and timid souls who are divided between God and their world! They want and they do not want. They are torn by desire and remorse at the same time . . . They have a horror of evil and a shame of good. They have the pains of virtue without tasting its sweet consolations. O’ how wretched they are.

François Fénelon

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A Love That Delivers What It Promises

Loving Us Out of the World & Its Influences

For one will scarcely die for a righteous person—though perhaps for a good person one would dare even to die but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.

Rom. 5:7-8

Recently, I listened to Timothy Keller’s Counterfeit Gods:The Empty Promises of Money, Sex, ad Power and the Only Hope That Matters on audiobook. Pastor Keller deals with the abuse of money, sex, and power as false forms of fulfillment, empty substitutes for genuine love, and deceptive promises for real joy. Money, sex, and power are idols that promise a satisfaction that they can never deliver (1 John 5:21).

The world is a system that values money, sex, and power over and against God and his kingdom. The world believes that true spirituality is a waste of time, sacrifice is repugnant, and faith is naiveté (1 John 2:15-17). The world says that only unlimited sources of wealth, unbridled sex, and a power that dictates can bring us happiness.

However, Christ died so that we might be free from the delusions and deceptions of this world. The grip that money, sex, and power has over our lives can be broken. Our love and fulfillment needs can only be met in Christ. “But far be it from me to boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world” (Gal. 6:14). Only the Cross of Christ displays, gives, and releases the love of God that can bring true joy John 3:16).

God saw Abraham’s sacrifice and said, ‘Now I know that you love me, because you did not withhold your only son from me’ [Gen. 22:12]. But how much more can we look at his sacrifice on the Cross, and say to God, ‘Now, we know that you love us. For you did not withhold your son, your only son, whom you love, from us.’ When the magnitude of what he did dawns on us, it makes it possible finally to rest our hearts in him rather than in anything else.

Timothy Keller, Counterfeit Gods (New York, NY: Dutton, 2009), 18.