God's Word For You is a free Bible Study site committed to bringing you studies firmly grounded in the Bible – the Word of God. Holding a reformed, conservative, evangelical perspective this site affirms that God has provided in Jesus Christ his eternal Son, a way of salvation in which we can live in his presence guilt free, acquitted and at peace.

 
 

THOUGHTS FROM JOHN’S LETTERS

CHRISTIANS AND THE WORLD

Throughout the New Testament (indeed throughout the whole Bible) there is a clear and continuing distinction between people of faith and ‘the world’. This distinction is expressed not only in the ultimate eternal destiny of these two contrasting groups, but in their values, their priorities and their mindset. Jesus and the apostles consistently call the Christian away from a life lived according to the way of ‘the world’ to a radical new way of thought and life that is appropriate for those who have fellowship with the Father and with the Son.

John 15:19 – ‘If you belonged to the world, it would love you as its own. As it is, you do not belong to the world, but I have chosen you out of the world. That is why the world hates you.’

John 17:14 – ‘I have given them your word and the world has hated them, for they are not of the world any more than I am of the world.’

Romans 12:2 – ‘Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.’

1Corinthians 2:12 – ‘We have not received the spirit of the world but the Spirit who is from God, so that we may understand what God has freely given us.’

Titus 2:11, 12 – ‘the grace of God ... teaches us to say “No” to ungodliness and worldly passions ...’

James 1:27 – ‘Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world.’

James 4:4 – ‘...don’t you know that friendship with the world is hatred toward God? Anyone who chooses to be a friend of the world becomes an enemy of God.’

Turning to Jesus Christ in faith means a turning away from ‘the world’ and the things the world values. In his first letter, John says:

‘Do not love the world or anything in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For everything in the world – the cravings of the flesh, the lust of his eyes and the boasting of what he has and does – comes not from the Father but from the world’ (1John 2:15, 16),

The noun translated ‘cravings’ and ‘lust’ in 2:16 is epithumia from the verb epithumeo which means to long for, to earnestly desire, to covet. Here John confronts us with the question: ‘What are you passionate about? What is the focus of your goals? What are you pursuing to give you a sense of worth and fulfilment? What is the centre of your life?’

Typically ‘the world’ gets its self-worth and its sense of identity from popularity, from power and position, from physical brawn or beauty, from possessions or wealth, from sex, from family, race or culture, including religion. It pursues these things, it desires these things, it values these things, because they give some kind of status or significance. But John says ‘the world and its desires pass away’ (2:17). These things can never give permanent satisfaction, permanent fulfilment. They are all uncertain. They are all fallible. They are all temporary. They are substitutes, sought because God, who alone can meet our needs, has been abandoned; God has been left out of life’s equation. In the supposed absence of God ‘the world’ avidly pursues meaning and purpose elsewhere. [The Old Testament book of Ecclesiastes ponders the emptiness of this quest for meaning and significance apart from God.] John states very clearly about a person who loves the world: The love of the Father is not in him – 1John 2:15.

Because of this the New Testament commands us as Christians to be radically different from the world, and to love the Father rather than the world. But how does this fit with the love of God for the world that is the motivation for the Father sending the Son into the world to save the world?

The things about the world that Christians are not to embrace (its godlessness, its rebellion against God, its self-conceit, and so on) are the very things that necessitated God’s saving action in Christ – John 3:16.

While John, and the rest of the New Testament, makes it clear that we are not to ‘love the world or anything in the world’, he also makes it clear that God loved the world, Jesus Christ loved the world – not its values, not its actions, not its mindset – but the people. Those who align with the Father and with the Son are also distance themselves from the mindset, values and priorities of the world, but at the same time, to love the people.

© Rosemary Bardsley 2022