Loving the World
Are You Sure? • Sermon • Submitted • Presented • 41:25
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· 117 views1 John has some strong words for us about loving the world. What does that mean, and why is it wrong? Find out in this week's message.
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We are continuing our study through 1 John as we try to answer the question, “Are you sure that you have a relationship with God and are going to heaven?”
So far, we have seen that those who have a relationship with God have one based on the Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross, not their own perfection.
Last week, we saw that you can’t claim to know God and not do what he says, especially when it comes to the matter of loving others.
This week, we are going back to the concept of love, but we are going to look at it from a different angle.
Look with me at 1 John 2:15.
In another direct statement, John tells us that those who love God cannot also love the world.
In fact, that’s the big idea for this morning’s message: Don’t love the world.
Don’t love the world.
Okay, great. We can go home now, right?
Today is Earth Day for 2018, a day when many stop and take steps towards conserving the earth’s resources and being good stewards of the world we live in.
No; we need to take a look at what John means by the term the world, and why we should avoid it.
In fact, that’s how we are going to explain this command--by answering two questions this morning: what does John mean by “the world,” and why is loving it wrong?
My prayer is that God will show you whether you are loving him or loving the world. If you are in love with all the world has to offer, I pray you will turn to God today and away from the emptiness of the world.
So, let’s dive in.
Our first question is...
1)What is “the world”?
1)What is “the world”?
For any of this to make sense, we have to figure out what John is talking about.
First, let’s talk about what “the world” in this passage isn’t.
John isn’t using “the world” here to refer to the physical world in which we live.
There are people throughout history who have thought that matter itself is evil, so we shouldn’t focus at all on our life in this world.
In their view, only the spiritual matters, so we shouldn’t care about the physical world, our physical bodies, etc.
Some even go to the point where they will go to extremes of not eating or not drinking or abstaining from all kinds of things to avoid being tainted by the evil of the material world.
That isn’t God’s perspective on the material world at all! Although sin has corrupted it in many ways, God created us with physical bodies that live in a physical place. In fact, Jesus himself has a physical body!
So, John isn’t saying not to love the physical world.
Okay, well, maybe by “the world”, John’s referring to people who don’t have a relationship with God.
Used this way, you have the church vs. the world.
That can’t be the case, though, because we just saw last week that Jesus died for the sins of the world ().
Not only that, but John himself wrote one of the most familiar passages in the Bible, and it specifically says God loves the world of human people:
For God loved the world in this way: He gave his one and only Son, so that everyone who believes in him will not perish but have eternal life.
So, used that way, we have to say that God loves the world, and we should to!
Okay, let’s go back to our passage. Clearly, we aren’t supposed to love the world, so what does he mean?
John gives us more detail in the next verse, so let’s read vv15-16...
The first and last parts get into our next question, but that chunk in the middle is what helps us understand what John is talking about when he says, “the world” in this passage.
The world John is talking about isn’t the physical earth we live in, nor is it the people we are around. Instead, this is the system that has set itself up in opposition to God.
We see it reflected in three different terms here.
These terms may not cover every conceivable sin, but they do cover the overwhelming majority!
John says that the world is characterized by the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride in one’s possessions.
Let me go ahead and say that this is one of the few places where I am going to disagree with the way the translators of the CSB rendered this.
Other versions call the third one, “the pride of life,” and that is a better translation of what the Greek says and what John is getting at.
To help explain each of these, I want to give you three ‘s’ words to remember them: satisfaction, stuff, and status.
The word “lust” implies a really strong desire. Although it is sometimes used in a good way in the New Testament, most of the time, it is negative.
The idea is that we want these things more than we want a relationship with God where God is honored.
If we love the world, that means we are wanting these things more than we want Jesus to be exalted.
All three of these areas can be good desires in the proper context, but outside of that, they are incredibly damaging, as we will see later on.
However, let’s first get a clear picture of what we are talking about.
First, we see the “lust of the flesh,” or the desire for satisfaction.
Flesh here is the idea of our physical body, so the desire of our physical body is to have a feeling of satisfaction.
Maybe the most obvious way this shows up in our world is the idea of sexual satisfaction.
God created sex, and in the context of a marriage covenant between a man and a woman, it is a beautiful and wonderful gift.
However, when our desire for sexual satisfaction goes outside that boundary, it becomes a lust of the flesh that shows we are more concerned about what our body wants than how God designed us to be.
We saw this two weeks ago when we looked at briefly and saw that those walking by the flesh are known for sexual immorality, moral impurity, and promiscuity.
This includes premarital sex, extramarital sex, pornography—any attempt to satisfy your sexual desires apart from a God-honoring marriage.
However, “lust of the flesh” is bigger than simply sexual immorality, which is why we are representing this with the word “satisfaction” instead of “sex.”
We have other physical desires that we strive after. For some, it is to feel comfortable, which leads us to be lazy. For others, it is a desire for food to comfort us, so we eat more than we should or differently than we should to make ourselves feel better.
We drink or we smoke or use drugs to numb the pain or give us a sensation that nothing else can touch.
Some go the other way. We want to feel strong, so we work out all the time. We want to feel thin and beautiful, so we starve ourselves with unhealthy eating patterns.
Paul talked about people who are ruled by a desire for physical satisfaction, and he described them as enemies of God:
For I have often told you, and now say again with tears, that many live as enemies of the cross of Christ.
Their end is destruction; their god is their stomach; their glory is in their shame. They are focused on earthly things,
Part of loving the world is living for satisfaction.
Is that you? If so, then you need to take a hard look at whether or not you have a genuine relationship with God, because John says if you love the world, you don’t have God’s love in you.
By the way, have you ever noticed that you are never really satisfied? Porn use gets worse and worse. So does overeating or laziness or working out or any other desire for satisfaction apart from Christ.
You will never be satisfied apart from a relationship with Christ. Even in a relationship with Christ, there are days where you get off track and start looking at life through one of these lenses again, and you find yourself empty again.
It isn’t because of a deficiency in Christ. It is a deficiency in your side of your walk with him.
Next, we see that we can also have a lust of the eyes. We will summarize this by calling it stuff.
This is the constant desire to accumulate more.
It is that thing we have described before as having your “wanter” stuck on.
You want the newest, the prettiest, the biggest, the fastest, the shiniest whatever.
You may not be able to express it, but your heart seems to believe that if you just had that one more item, you would finally be happy.
Ever have the experience of ordering something off TV or the back of a cereal box as a kid, only to be horribly disappointed when you got it?
We still do that as adults, don’t we? “If I just had that one more outfit, I would be happy.” “If I had a bigger house…If I had that car…If I just had those clubs or that jewelry or this phone or that book...”
Listen to me: one more thing will never satisfy you. You could have the latest, the best, the envy of all who see, and it will never satisfy the deepest needs of your heart.
Here’s what Solomon, one of the richest men in all history, said about that in the book of Proverbs:
Sheol and Abaddon are never satisfied, and people’s eyes are never satisfied.
You know what he is saying here? “Sheol” and “Abaddon” both refer to the grave.
Just like people never stop dying and the grave never seems to be filled, so too are people’s eyes never satisfied.
In fact, that same man would summarize his pursuit of pleasure and possessions this way:
All that my eyes desired, I did not deny them. I did not refuse myself any pleasure, for I took pleasure in all my struggles. This was my reward for all my struggles.
When I considered all that I had accomplished and what I had labored to achieve, I found everything to be futile and a pursuit of the wind. There was nothing to be gained under the sun.
Ecc 2:
Solomon tried these first two lusts, the desire for satisfaction and stuff, and he said that it was like trying to capture the wind.
By themselves, these desires were completely and totally worthless.
There is one more way the love of the world is demonstrated: the pride of life, or as we will say this morning, the desire for status.
Sometimes, this is interwoven with the other two, especially the desire for stuff.
The reason we want to eat right is to look good so others will see we are really worth something.
We want to have the nicest house or the nicest car or that position at church or that beautiful family so others will see we finally mean something.
We are chasing after status and significance, hoping that will satisfy, and it never will.
Let me ask you this question: what drives you to accomplish more? Is it so you can be in an even greater position to give God glory and honor, or is it so others will see what you have made of yourself?
Why do you care how your kids behave in public? Is it because you are concerned about their character or is it because you don’t want to be that mom or dad who can’t control their kids?
Why are you dating that guy or that girl? Why are you studying so hard in school?
If it is for you to climb a ladder or some kind so you can look down from the top and declare yourself king of the mountain, then you are in love with the world and the love of the Father isn’t in you.
That’s what the love of the world looks like: chasing after satisfaction, stuff, and status.
Does that define you?
“Yeah, but Sean, what’s wrong with wanting to do well in life or to live comfortably or provide nice things for me and my family?”
There is a place for each of those desires to be rightly aligned.
However, when they are what gets you out of bed in the morning or what keeps you awake at night, you are in a very dangerous place.
That’s the second question we want to answer this morning:
2) Why is loving the world wrong?
2) Why is loving the world wrong?
John gives us two main reasons why this is wrong.
First, the source of these desires is wrong.
You see, each of these sets of desires is all about you.
It’s about making you feel better, giving you what you want, or having others notice and respect you.
That’s not of God at all.
In fact, we were created for the exact opposite. We were made to give God glory.
Speaking directly to the desire for sexual satisfaction, Paul said this:
Don’t you know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have from God? You are not your own, for you were bought at a price. So glorify God with your body.
You weren’t made to be ruled by a physical desire. You were created to honor an immortal God.
Your material resources weren’t given for you to spend on yourselves. They were given to use to meet others’ needs and honor God. If you are taking down notes, jot down to look at later to see how God wants you to use your possessions.
Not only that, but you are called to live to make God famous, not yourself. If he gives you a platform to do that where you achieve status, remember that he only does so for you to reflect him.
That’s what the love of God looks like in you—a desire to live for God’s glory and the good of others.
Chasing after satisfaction or stuff or status is what the world does, not what God does.
Not only is the source of these desires wrong, but so is their outcome.
Loving the world won’t last.
How long have you stayed full after a good meal? How long after looking at porn do you stay satisfied? How long does it take before you feel the need to set a new PR or take a nap because you’re tired?
Physical satisfaction fades.
What about that shiny new toy or or that gorgeous new house? How long does it stay perfect?
Stuff breaks and wears out.
Can anyone in here name for me 10 individual gold medalists from the Olympics that just finished two months ago?
Who was the last CEO of Google, Inc.?
What about th
Status fades and no one will remember your name.
Live your life loving these ways, and you are living for a futile, empty life and an eternity separated from God.
However, the one who does the will of God remains forever.
Why? Because the only way to do the will of God is to place your trust in Jesus as your Savior and Lord.
Here’s how their
Once you do that, you have Jesus’ life in you. You have his love in you, and you no longer have to be a slave to your flesh. You don’t have to accumulate stuff to keep up with the Jones’, and you don’t really care what accolades the world heaps on you.
In fact, you are emulating what Jesus did.
Do you remember how Satan tempted Jesus?
Jesus had been fasting for 40 days. What did Satan tempt him to do? Satisfy his hunger by turning stones into bread.
Next, Satan showed Jesus the kingdoms of the world and offered him to give them to Jesus, both in their splendor and authority. He offered Jesus all the stuff and status to go with it, and Jesus refused.
Finally, he asked Jesus to put God to the test and prove he was Gods’ son, and again, Jesus refused.
He resisted the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life.
Yet these were just a taste of what was to come.
Eventually, Jesus would be sentenced to death on a cross for you and for me.
While on the cross, he refused to drink a concoction that would have eased his pain, rejecting the lust of the flesh.
The few items he had with him, his clothes, were divided up between the soldiers who put him to death. He hung exposed for the world to see because Son of God who created the world had no stuff to his name.
Instead of exercising his status as the true King of the Jews, and really the King of Kings and Lord of Lords, he allowed them to use that title against him as a mocking taunt.
As an act of obedience to the Father and love toward us, Jesus once again denied everything this world stands for to rescue and ransom us.
He is calling you to do the same.
If you are still chasing satisfaction, stuff, and status, then you need to turn to him and find the love you are longing for.