Do Not Love the World

Okay, so well, maybe you can.

Can you see the tie-in with that?

Very often as Christians, when we're living in this world, we have divided loyalties and we wind up like that little dog, confused which way to go.

Who do we love more?

What does it mean to love the world?

Well, when John is talking about the world, he's not talking about people per se.

John 3.16 says God so loved the world.

God loves the world.

God loves people.

We're created in God's image.

So John's not talking about not loving people, but, on the other hand, in John 7, verse 7, we read the world.

John 7:7

This is Jesus speaking.

The world cannot hate you, but it's speaking to people in the world, but it does hate me because I testify about it that its works are evil.

So what's going on?

Well, when we read the world here, the Bible uses world in a couple of different ways, and the way John's using it here is not just creation, the physical world around us, and it's not even just society as such, that is, people interacting and being people together.

What he's really talking about is a system, a system that's under Satan's dominion.

Paul in Ephesians calls Satan the ruler of the kingdom of the air and its creation and society in rebellion against God.

That's the world we're not to love.

And I'll unpack this a little bit more Now.

Paul, I'm not used to talking about Paul, I'm not used to talking about John.

John sort of summarises a couple of things that have to do with the world and loving the world.

He talks about the lust of the flesh.

What's that?

Well, it's all sorts of pleasures.

It's worldly desires.

When we hear the word lust, we often go straight to sex, but it's much bigger than that, actually, when you think about it.

We use the word lust in all sorts of ways, sometimes Playful, and sometimes that playfulness is hiding a deeper issue we lust after.

If you're a gadget freak like me, you lust after the latest gadget.

Or maybe you lust after our shiny BYD build your own dream electric car.

Am I showing my heart?

I don't know.

That's what we're not meant to love.

Lust of the eyes, which is what I'm talking about.

They're coveting worldly things and together these things represent things in our hearts the lust of the flesh and things which are external to us.

Lust of the eyes, which we latch onto.

And then my translation talks about the pride in one's possession.

Your translation might say the pride of life, which is the literal Greek, but it actually means sort of pride in one's possession of things that we have, and these are what it means to love the world, john says.

So what is love?

What does it mean to love these things?

Well, you probably know, if you've been around, that in the Greek there's a whole raft of words that mean love, that we translate as love, but here it's agape, which is the Christian word for love, so let's say love me more.

And that has its roots in the idea of Christian concept of love, has roots in the Old Testament and where the word agape is used to translate the Hebrew in different places, it often has the idea of a deep affection, a familial love, so love for parents and children, and very often a love for God.

It often is used in the context of the covenant relationship between God and His people, and His people are to love God, to agape God, and it speaks of our devotion to God.

That's expected as well.

And so to love the world, john is saying, is to give it the affection and devotion that we should reserve to God and the things of God, not the things of the world.

So what's the problem with loving the world, though.

God made the world, god made people, god loves the world.

What's going on?

Well, john says everything in the world is not from the Father.

Everything in the world is not from the Father.

So let's put this another way Nothing in the world is from the Father, nothing in this worldly system that's in rebellion to Him.

And remember John's summary of the world lust within, lust without, and pride.

And these things are representative of the problems, not exhaustive, and you notice when you look at these values of the world, they're sort of the opposite to the values of the kingdom, which are not lust but generosity, not pride but humility, not independence and selfishness but dependence on God.

We can serve God in the world, but we cannot serve God if we are of the world and if we share the world's values.

I love a quote from Jane Barry, who wrote Peter Pan, and if you've seen one of the versions of the movies, it has this quote about fairies.

We're a little bit like fairies.

Think about this Tink was not all bad, or rather she was all bad just now, but on the other hand, sometimes she was all good.

Fairies have to be one thing or the other because, being so small, they unfortunately have room for one feeling only at a time.

They are, however, allowed to change Only.

It must be a complete change.

We're a little bit like that, I think, in terms of our loyalties and devotions.

We might like to think we can put a foot in both camps, but the reality is we only have enough within us to be loyal and devoted to one thing.

Jesus says in Matthew 6.24, no one can serve two masters, since either he will hate one and love the other, or he will be devoted to one and despise the other.

And here he's talking about money.

He says you cannot serve both God and money.

So one of the problems with what's wrong with the world is that the things in the world are not from God and we are meant to be people of God.

The other problem is that John says the world is passing away and we are destined for eternity.

Second Corinthians, 4.17, says for our momentary light, affliction is producing for us an absolute, incomparable, eternal way of glory.

Very often we will chase these things in the world to try and deal with pain or ward off pain, make our life more comfortable I'll talk about this a bit more in a moment and we circumvent the processes God has for us to make us ready for glory, to help us grow, and suffering is a part of that.

Our discomfort in this life is part of that.

Now it's important here, when we read again that John's saying everything in the world is not from the Father and this world will pass away that, but not to love this world, that he's not talking about the enjoyment of God's creation.

So maybe you, like many people, can testify that there's a sense of feeling more connected to God when we go out into creation, when we're in nature, out in the bush or something like that, we see a sunset and we're in awe and the world is meant to point us back to God.

So, of course, we're not talking about God's good creation.

God's creation is still fundamentally good.

God created it good and it will be renewed when Jesus returns.

The problem is lust for the creation, the wrong way for the creation above the creator, and love of the values and systems of a world in rebellion against God.

So what sort of Does this love for the world look like?

How's it packaged?

Well, one way, of course, is just plain old materialism, the love for things, and I have to tell you just be or in the middle of, like Friday, sales.

Has anyone else spent too much money?

Some pot bargains out there, isn't there Great time to do Christmas shopping?

But, you know, creeps along a little bit more and we slip into consumerism.

We need to make progress.

Yesterday and then goes through to Monday, cyber Monday.

But now how to get us?

So that's just one very basic way is just this consumer mentality lusting off the things?

But love for the world comes in more subtle ways as well, because it's really that love of things is belaying deeper values and things we're holding on to Remembering we only have so much resource, so much bandwidth.

We can only love one thing at a time.

When we put him all out, in this case financial resources, into that stuff.

It's stuff we can't put into other things for the kingdom of God.

But then there are attitudes as well.

Lust of the flesh speaks of our inner desires.

What does that look like?

Well, you know one of the things we're told by society.

It's, you know you'll always find people who hold a different view, but this is sort of the vibe we get in society.

If we want to find our truth, we have to look inward rather than outward.

And have you noticed over the last I don't know 20 or 30 years or maybe a bit longer, and I just didn't see it.

But there's this real move In the West.

For hundreds of years we've had this individualistic mindset, but now we're told it's almost an abandonment of the things that held anchor us, our identity and our family, our identity in our culture and society, particularly in the West.

It's this self-destructive hate of our own culture.

And look, there's a lot of things I'm not a fan on, but it's just this kind of weird cultural self-loathing and in all sorts of ways and we're told to build our look inward and build ourselves up.

And there's this radical autonomy that is taught and accepted as normal.

People will leave family, husbands will divorce, wives will divorce because they've got to go on this journey of self-exploration or there's something they're not happy about or whatever it is.

It manifests in all sorts of ways.

We've spoken before about gender ideology and I don't want to bang on about it, but it is sort of big in our society and the problem with gender identity is this autonomy.

It has gender ideology down.

Talking about ideology here, it's not about managing gender dysphoria, it's not about gay rights, it's not about those sorts of things.

It's actually at its heart about a radical autonomy and no one can tell me what I am.

My doctor can't tell me what I am.

My parents can't tell me what I am.

I will tell me what I am.

It doesn't submit to anyone.

Biology, parents, society, the pro-choice, the abortion debate Again, you go into that debate and once it turns into a fight over autonomy a woman has autonomy over her body, and in that side of the debate the status of the unborn is irrelevant.

Now on the other side of the debate, we have to acknowledge that a woman should have autonomy over her body, but all these things are on the spectrum and we get into this fight and we sort of go to the extremes and go nuclear without finding a common-sense approach to these things.

And so I notice, in both of these things actually the science is irrelevant, it's the ideology that drives the discussion, but it's not just on that side.

It's sort of extreme libertarian.

Have you heard about the sovereign-citizen movement?

A bunch of people who think that, well, you're not the boss of the main government, I am my own sovereign person, and so they get pulled over by the police and I don't recognise your authority.

You're not sovereign over me.

He's right here.

You know what I mean.

You did licence that card, didn't you?

It's ridiculous.

I mean the COVID response.

Look at times it was frenzied and on both sides.

But you look at the response of people, they very Often I didn't want to comply with any of the mandates and what was it about?

It's about my rights.

You know, the boss is me.

It's like a three-year-old sometimes, and so both these things, actually, whether you're on the right or the left, when you go to the extreme, it's about self expression and it's about autonomy.

And both sides have aspects that are true, but it gets um, unhinged, unhinged from from God.

And you know, self expression becomes thing.

We're expected to Respect people's ridiculous choices because that's their autonomous choice.

It's like no, what about lust of the eyes?

Well, mentioned a little while ago?

You know, covetousness, envy, I mean advertising feeds on this, doesn't it?

And I was just reading yesterday about the amount of data now that Different companies collect and the way they can target you specifically, man, if you're on the internet, probably you know, they know who you are, they know how to push your buttons, so you will press buy on that thing.

So there's an element where I guess we are victims in this, but you know it feeds into that covetousness and that envy we have and we just push it.

We have to guard against it so hard.

It can be as simple lust of the eyes is sex, um, and porn and and so on.

But it's more than that.

Lust of the eyes is the things we give our time and attention to, not necessarily things we're distracted about.

There's a lot of distractions in this life.

It's something I'm constantly guarding about.

It's another, it's a different conversation.

We do have to watch the distraction but hear what John is talking about the things we give our attention to, because you know what happens when we give our attention to something that seems okay but it takes our attention away from something that's even better.

Because we only have so much attention, because we're like fairies, we can only do one thing at a time, and maybe there's other things you also can think of that.

What does love for the world look like?

So, when all of this we have to remember, love for the world Does not look like radically loving people.

Radically loving people looks like Jesus, because you look, particularly in the west, where we are now, we have this bizarre moral sort of thing where you're expected to On that, everyone's autonomous choice.

But if you make the wrong choice, or you said the wrong thing and you are canceled, you are out, which puts us in an interesting position.

As Christians, we need to be bold and stand up.

Inspired of all that, what about the pride of life?

What sort of things represent the pride of the pride of life?

Well, again, the principles beneath this.

Things like because it's talking about the Greek here the word is life, but in that idea it's often talking about possession the things that we have that make us strong, that make up our life.

If you know what I mean, it can just mean flesh and blood and biological processes, but here it's more.

What's the pride of life?

Well, things that give us status, and so, very often, the acquisition of money, the acquisition of the better car or the, you know whatever it is is about status and looking good in the eyes of others.

It's about power.

Power is about what we use to get what we want.

Rather, there's nothing wrong with power, but it's how we use our power.

Of course, and worldly power is used for the self.

Godly power is used to serve people rather than use people.

The pride of life is about our security, what we put our trust in.

Do we put our trust in the bigger bank account and the share portfolio or the house, or whatever it is, or do we put it in God?

It's about comfort.

Where do we find our rest and refreshment?

The pride of life is again about autonomy, so that I don't have to rely on anything or anyone else.

Sometimes it's also about idolatry, because we end up worshipping something.

So what's the remedy for this?

Well, it's not about looking inward.

In a sense, I don't think it's even about looking outward, although that's better.

It's about looking upward.

We need to crave the things of God rather than the things of the world.

The lust of the flesh well, what about the love of the things of the spirit, the lust of the eyes, the pride of life?

What about putting our pride, our identity, in Christ?

We need to crave God's approval rather than the world's approval.

We need to crave eternity more than we crave time.

Let's face it, we can spend a lot longer in eternity than we are on this time frame.

We need to crave heaven more than we crave earth.

So we need to repent of worldliness and trust in God's kingdom.

And I put it that way, because what the Jesus preached when he came said Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is near.

And here's the thing for you and for me is we are immersed in the culture of the world.

We cannot escape it unless you want to go live in a cave in the desert.

People tried that and even then they couldn't really escape it.

In some ways the world gave to them.

We just cannot help it.

There is nothing you can do about being immersed in the world.

But that then prompts us to think.

Well, how do we counter the influence of the world?

If we have to live in the world, how do we live in such a way that we're not of the world?

How do we live in this world, which can seem to be immersed in the dead, in such a way that we actually become immersed in the kingdom of God, the mind frame of the God, the values of God?

Because if we don't, we're going to be like that little dog spinning around, not quite known which way to go, not belonging anywhere.

We need to choose.

We cannot choose both the world and God Cannot be done.

Jesus said to one of the churches in the book of Revelation you're neither hot or cold, just choose.

I'm going to spit you out of my mouth.

The world and its desires will pass away.

Our investments will perish In any case, very often.

Look, I'm someone who doesn't like conflict.

I like everyone that likes me.

A bit of a people pleaser confession.

Why?

Why do I care so much?

Why do I care so much about people's approval?

Now, particularly as a pastor?

People aren't going to like me anyway because I'm a pastor and what I stand for.

Why do I care?

I need to.

We need to fasten our desires on God, fasten our identity onto God, fasten our minds, and our minds mind-freight, onto God and love His kingdom.

Let's pray.