Sermon Tone Analysis
Overall tone of the sermon
This automated analysis scores the text on the likely presence of emotional, language, and social tones. There are no right or wrong scores; this is just an indication of tones readers or listeners may pick up from the text.
A score of 0.5 or higher indicates the tone is likely present.
Emotion Tone
Anger
0.12UNLIKELY
Disgust
0.13UNLIKELY
Fear
0.07UNLIKELY
Joy
0.63LIKELY
Sadness
0.5UNLIKELY
Language Tone
Analytical
0.63LIKELY
Confident
0UNLIKELY
Tentative
0.6LIKELY
Social Tone
Openness
0.78LIKELY
Conscientiousness
0.87LIKELY
Extraversion
0.17UNLIKELY
Agreeableness
0.71LIKELY
Emotional Range
0.61LIKELY
Tone of specific sentences
Tones
Emotion
Language
Social Tendencies
Anger
< .5
.5 - .6
.6 - .7
.7 - .8
.8 - .9
> .9
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”?
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:
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:
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:
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:
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.
< .5
.5 - .6
.6 - .7
.7 - .8
.8 - .9
> .9