Do Not Love the World

Love the Lord your God with all your heart and soul and strength and minds.

Love your neighbour as yourself.

Love your husbands and wives as you love yourselves.

Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.

Love not with words or speech, but with actions and in truth.

Love because he first loved us, but do not love the world.

Do not love the world, the scripture says.

The Bible talks a lot about love.

Jesus said in John 13, by this, everyone will know that you are my disciples if you love one another.

What Jesus means is when the world looks at us, those who follow Jesus, disciples of Jesus, they will know who we are by the fact that we love each other.

By the love, the radical self-giving love that we have for each other, the world will know us.

But do not love the world.

But John 3.16 says, God so loved the world that he gave his only son, but do not love the world.

We're stuck in this tricky kind of tension, where we are in one sense called to be people of incredible love, even for enemies.

But the scripture says, do not love the world.

So how do you reconcile these two ideas?

Throughout church history, people have found a line in different places.

Some people have drawn, some Christians have withdrawn from the world to desert caves or to far-off towns, separated themselves from the world so that they could only love each other.

And others have held in balance, do not love the world, but God so loves the world.

Love your enemy as yourself, pray for those who persecute you.

And they've forgotten the don't love the world bit, and they have embraced the world fully.

And they've said, God is love, and that means He is nothing but love.

But somewhere in between these two extremes is what the scripture says we are to do.

Do not love the world, yet God loves the world.

And we're supposed to love those who don't love us.

Today's question is the nature of the disciples' relationship with the world.

How are disciples of Jesus supposed to relate to the world?

Are we to love the world?

But it says don't love the world.

But we are called to love the world.

So how do you make sense of this tricky tension is our question for today.

And I think it's quite a relevant question at Christmas when it feels like a worldliness.

The world is just reaching out for us.

It is telling a different story of what Christmas means than what we believe that the scripture says.

So for us, followers of Jesus, to know how to relate to the world is really important this Christmas.

We're in a series, as you can see on the screen, in 1 John.

1 John.

The title is Christmas Light, meaning Christmas Light Singular.

Jesus is the Christmas Light.

In week 1, we looked at verse 1 of 1 John.

That which was from the beginning, which we've seen, which we've heard, which we've looked at, which with our hands have touched, has appeared.

We looked at the incarnation of the sun.

Last week, in week 2, we looked at verse 5.

God is light.

In Him, there is no darkness at all.

And today, we turn to 1 John 2 verse 15 to 17.

We are skipping a little bit of 1 John, and that's because there's only so many Sundays in December, and we want to make sure we hit the really good passages.

So please read 1 John at home so you don't miss the bits that we aren't covering together.

But I'm going to read for us again, 1 John 2, 15.

John says, Do not love the world or anything in the world.

If anyone loves the world, love for the Father is not in them.

For everything in the world, the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes and the pride of life, comes not from the Father but from the world.

The world and its desires pass away, but whoever does the will of God lives forever.

It's a tricky passage to understand how we are to take that and apply it to our Christian life.

How does the disciple of Jesus relate to the world?

How do we understand this passage?

I think maybe a helpful place to start is to pick out what the key words are.

The word which is repeated more times than any other word is what?

What word appears?

World.

The word world, the word world appears six times in our passage.

The word that appears also quite often is love.

Love appears three times.

Lust appears three times.

And in verse 17, John sort of plots the trajectory of God and the world into the future and he says one is going to pass away, but one will live forever.

So I think these are the key words that we're dealing with.

World, love and what it means to pass away or live forever.

We're going to do a bunch of definitions.

Exploring what these words mean as we seek to understand the disciples' relationship to the world.

So the first word we'll tackle is world.

And I'm very careful to say word and world because in the practice this morning at 6 a.m.

I was so jumbled up in my use of those two words.

The first word is world.

World is a big word for John.

The New Testament uses the word cosmos in Greek.

The Greek word cosmos comes into our English language as the word cosmos.

It appears 185 times across the New Testament.

Cosmos, world.

And what I find fascinating is, of those 185 instances of this word cosmos, word cosmos, which means world, 102 of those appear in the writings of John.

That is, the Gospel of John and the letters of John.

That's over half of the times that the word cosmos appears, John uses this word.

This is a big word for John.

1 John 2.15 says, Do not love the world or anything in the world.

John 3.16 says, For God so loved the world.

So what is the world?

Well, in the New Testament, the word world or cosmos has two main senses.

The first is what we might say world with a lowercase W, as in collective humanity.

Planet Earth, the place and people who live on this planet.

Lowercase W, world.

Matthew 26, Jesus said, Truly I tell you, wherever this gospel is preached throughout the world, and he means the planet, throughout the extent of the place that human beings live, what she has done will also be told in memory of her.

Mark 16, Jesus said, Go into all the world, go into all nations, go to the world and preach the gospel to all creation.

Paul says in Acts 17, the God who made the world, the planet and all the people who live in it, and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by human hands.

This is the first way that the New Testament uses the word world.

And God loves the world.

John 3, 16, God so loved the world because he loves persons.

God loves people and the world is made up of people.

That's the first sense in which the Bible uses the word world.

The second sense is what you might say world with a capital W, and that means world as a power, as an institution in opposition to God.

A power that is in rebellion against God.

Jesus says in John 15, if the world hates you, keep in mind that it hated me first.

If you belonged to the world, notice it's not just a place, but it's like a thing.

You belong to the world.

Jesus says, it would love you as its own, but as it is, you do not belong to the world.

But I've chosen you out of the world.

That's why the world hates you.

John 12, Jesus says, now is the time for judgment on this world.

Now the prince of this world will be driven out.

That's a different sense that we talked about from world in John 3.16.

The world is a power in opposition to God.

Dallas Willard defined world as socially organized flesh.

And if you get nothing else from this message, write that down, because that is gold.

Dallas Willard defined world as socially organized flesh.

Flesh, Paul talks about the flesh a lot.

It's desire, it's the part of us that is untouched by God.

Flesh, and when you get a bunch of fleshes together, they make laws and nations and cultures and systems, and we call that the world.

The world is socially organized flesh, and it is in opposition to God.

And this second sense, world capital W, is the sense, I think, that John means to use the word world.

1 John 2.15, Do not love the world or anything in the world.

He's talking about the power in opposition to God.

Which makes sense of the rest of verse 15, If anyone loves the world, then love for the father is not in them.

So John is talking about a love that is in contrast, in competition with love for the father.

If you love the world, there is no love for the father.

So that's the sense in which he's talking about love.

It's not saying, don't love people.

It's not saying, don't love collective humanity, lowercase w, world.

John says, don't love that which is in opposition to God.

And if you do love the world, then there's no love for the father in you.

These two are in competition with each other.

Jesus said in Matthew 6, no one can serve two masters.

Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you'll be devoted to the one and despise the other.

You cannot serve both God and money.

James writes in James 4, you adulterous people, don't you know that friendship with the world is not compatible?

It means enmity against God.

Therefore, anyone who chooses to be a friend of the world becomes an enemy of God.

We're talking about love for the world that is in opposition to God, that is opposed to the purpose of God.

Do not love the world.

So, that kind of makes sense.

Okay, don't love that which is in opposition to God.

You can't love God and that which is in opposition to God.

That's the definition of world.

The second key definition that we need to unpack is love.

What is love?

CS.

Lewis, the author, famously highlighted the four different words for love in the Greek language, eros, storghe, philos and agape.

And what he pointed out is, in Greek, the language that the New Testament is written in, there are four words to describe what in English we use one word for.

It's wild in English that I can love pizza and love basketball and love my wife and love my family and love my God.

And I'm using the same single word for all of those loves, even though I promise you, the very different levels of love between wife and pizza and basketball.

There's one word in English to equal four Greek words.

CS.

Lewis brought our attention to this.

The word that John uses here for love is agape, which means a self-giving love, sacrificial love.

Again, Dallas Willard defined love as to will the good of another.

He defined love as to elevate somebody else's good above your own is what love is.

So taking that and putting that into 1 John 2 in context, what does it mean to not love the world but to love the father?

Do not love the world or anything in the world.

If anyone loves the world, love for the father is not in them.

I think the best way that we can understand what love means here in 1 John 2 is to look at what it doesn't mean, to look at what the opposite of love is.

I said earlier that the word love, agape, in its verb form, appears three times in our passage.

And I think that John, the author, has shaped it in a certain way that there's another word which appears three times.

It's the word lust.

1 John 2, 15 to 17 says, love three times and lust three times.

Now, one of them is obscured in English.

The word desires in Greek is epithumia, which is the same word as lust.

Three times the word love appears, and three times the word lust appears.

And so as we seek to understand what love means, love for the world or love for the Father, we have to understand what lust means, because the antithesis of love is lust.

Love gives of the self for the good of the other, but lust takes of the other for the good of the self.

That's why love and lust are complete opposites.

Jesus said in John 15, greater love has no one than this, is to lay down one's life for one's friends.

John says in 1 John 3, 16, this is how we know what love is.

Jesus Christ laid down his life for us.

To love is to will the good of another.

1 John 4, 10, this is love.

Not that we loved God, but that he loved us.

And how did he show us his love?

He sent his son as an atoning sacrifice.

Love gives of the self for the good of the other, but lust takes of the other for the good of the self.

And that's why love is the greatest commandment.

A teacher of the law came to Jesus in Mark 12 and said, teacher, what's the greatest commandment out of 600 and something in the Old Testament?

Jesus said this, the most important commandment is this, here, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one, love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.

And the second greatest commandment is to love your neighbor as yourself.

There is no commandment greater than these.

Love is to give yourself for the good of another.

That's what Jesus defined love as.

And that's why it's the greatest commandment, because there's nothing greater than to give yourself for the good of another.

That is what God has done for us and what He calls us to do back to Him.

And so John says, do not love the world, but love the Father.

What he's saying is do not give yourself to the world.

Do not sacrifice yourself for the good of the world, because the world is opposed to God.

And if you give yourself to the world, you have nothing left to give to God.

That's what it means to love.

We know that what we love, we become like.

That's why it's so important to work out what you love most in life, because we become like what we love.

Psalm 115, but they're idols.

Talking about the nations, the idols of the nations are silver and gold made by human hands.

They have mouths but cannot speak, eyes but cannot see, ears but cannot hear, noses but cannot smell.

They have hands but cannot feel, feet but cannot walk, nor can they utter a sound with their throat.

This is the key verse.

Those who make them will be like them, and so will all those who trust in them.

We become like what we love, which is why it's so crucial this morning that we work out what we love and that we put our love on the Father, because we become like what we love.

Jesus said it simply in Matthew 6, where your treasure is, your heart will be also.

What you value most in life takes of you.

It takes your heart towards it.

We become like what we love, so do not love the world.

If you love work above all things, that will form you.

It will dictate your habits, your personality, your practices, the shape of your life.

If we love food above all things, that will form us.

Literally, it will form us.

If we love money above all things, it will form us because we become like what we love.

And nothing in this world is worthy of our becoming like than God.

So do not love the world.

Let's get our words straight.

I like pizza.

I like basketball.

I like coffee, but I love God.

We are called to love each other, to love our spouses, to love our enemies, but we don't love the world.

We don't love that which is in opposition to God.

We don't give ourselves for the good of that which is in opposition to God.

We can like things.

We could even like them a lot.

So it's such that we kind of use that English word love in an inappropriate way, but we do not give ourselves to anything but God, because the world is, all that is from the world is not from the Father.

What is in the world is not from the Father.

And the way that John finishes his passage, all that is passing away, which brings us to our third definition.

We've defined world as capital W, power in opposition to God.

We've defined love as to give of the self for the good of another, and so become like what we love.

Love is the opposite of lust.

Finally, we have to define pass away and live forever.

John says in verse 17, the world and its desires pass away, but whoever does the will of God lives forever.

He ends his little paragraph here, plotting the trajectory of love for the world and love for God.

And he says, only one of them remains.

One will pass away and one will live forever.

So what does it mean, firstly, to pass away?

The world and its desires pass away.

In the Greek, it's present tense, passing away.

It's not that the world will pass away in the future, as though the world will be stable, stable, stable, stable, stable, and then pass away.

John uses the present tense to say that right now, the world is passing away.

Even as we hold on to the things of this world, they are slipping through our fingers.

The world is passing away.

At Christmas, we might remember this particularly with the, I think they call it, planned obsolescence of items.

They don't make items to last.

They make them to break down after a couple of years, so you buy a new one.

We have this fan, Courtney and I, that I think it's 30 years old, it is still going.

This thing, I mean, I tell you, they don't make them like they used to.

This fan is older than both of us, and it still keeps us cool every night.

But even this glorious fan that I'm so grateful for will pass away.

It is passing away.

This world, as we know it, is passing away, present tense.

And so Paul says in 1 Corinthians 7, what I mean, brothers and sisters, is that the time is short.

From now on, those who have wives should live as if they did not, those who mourn as if they did not, those who were happy as if they were not, those who buy something as though it were not theirs to keep, those who use the things of this world as if not engrossed in them.

For this world in its present form is passing away, present tense.

Right now, the world is passing away.

I'm sure you know this quote.

The 20th century missionary CT.

Studs said, only one life will soon be passed, and only what's done for Christ will last.

This world is passing away.

And yet, I don't think that that leads us to trash the planet, to say, oh, well, it's all going to get burnt up and destroyed, so who cares what we do to it?

I think that that would be a terrible misreading of the story of Scripture.

We've been placed here to care for this planet.

Even though it's passing away, God is renewing through Christ all things.

We see in Scripture that it's not true that everything passes.

Not everything is passing away.

Something remains.

Which brings us to the second part.

The world and its desires are passing away.

Present tense.

But whoever does the will of God lives forever.

Literally, it's remains into the age to come.

It's not pass away.

It's not live forever.

It's remains.

The world is passing away presently, but those in Christ remain into the age to come.

And so we have this contrast that John gives us between passing and remaining, between temporary and eternal.

This is the contrast that John gives us.

And this contrast between temporary and eternal, between passing and remaining is, I think, so clear to us in this holiday season.

A couple of weeks ago, we had Thanksgiving.

It's not such a big thing here in Australia, but in the States, they had Thanksgiving.

And we have Christmas in two-ish weeks.

And so we're in this kind of holiday season where we gather together in family.

We get the people we love around a table.

We share a meal together.

We sit around a couch and we give gifts to each other.

We show our love.

We show our gratitude for each other by giving gifts.

And in that picture, which some of us have already experienced or we will experience in the next two weeks, is the most incomprehensible juxtaposition between the temporary and the eternal, between what is passing and what is remaining.

Because as we sit around the Christmas table sharing gifts, they are passing away in the present.

But the people you are with, if they are in Christ, remain for eternity.

We deal in Christmas with the very, very temporary presence that decay and break even within weeks, apart from the fan that lasted 30 years.

We have dealing with the temporary and the eternal, the value of a human being that we meet with.

This is the wild experience of Christmas, as we gather together as family and share gifts.

Something is passing and something is remaining, and that which remains is that which is in Christ.

Jesus said in John 15, I am the vine, you are the branches.

If you remain, it's the same word, remain in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit.

Apart from me, you can do nothing.

If you do not remain in me, you're like a branch that's thrown away in withers.

Such branches are picked up, thrown into the fire and burned.

Jesus paints two pictures like John does.

Something is passing and that is the world, that which is not in Christ.

But if we remain in him, we remain into the age to come.

We remain into eternal life.

So these holidays, when you're at your Christmas table, you're at the lounge giving gifts, just remember what is truly remaining in that room.

It's not the gifts.

It's not even the food, but praise God for good food.

It's the people.

If they know Christ, then you and they will remain into eternity.

That's what is important.

So what are you investing in?

What remains is that which is in Christ.

Paul says in Colossians 3, since then you have been raised with Christ.

Set your hearts on things above where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God.

And set your mind on things above, not on earthly things, because you died.

Past tense, you died.

And your life is now hidden, present tense, you died, and your life is now hidden with Christ in God.

So when Christ, who is your life, appears, you also will appear with Him in glory.

This world is now passing away.

But those in Christ remain, because we are hidden with Christ now, and our life is in Christ now.

So we've defined world as socially organized flesh.

That's what Willard said, as a power, which is in opposition to God.

We've defined love against lust.

Love gives of the self for the good of the other.

Lust takes of the other for the good of the self.

We become like what we love, and we've defined what it means to pass away and to live forever, to be passing away presently, or to remain in Christ into the age to come.

So stepping back as we finish, putting it all together.

This Christmas, as we celebrate with family the birth of Jesus, we give gifts of gratitude, we eat good food, what is the disciple of Jesus' relationship to the world?

1 John 2, 15 to 17, what does it all come down to?

What do we have to do?

The disciple's relationship to the world.

Actually, I don't think that that's the point.

I haven't wasted your time, I don't think, but 1 John 2, 15 is not about what we would do in response to God.

It's not about how great our love will be for the Father against the world.

But we remember at Christmas time that it's about what God has already done.

In the Christmas story, Jesus, in a sense, flips 1 John upside down.

Because Jesus took the world, he took that power which was in opposition to him.

He took it with the lusts of the flesh of humanity, he took it on himself, and he let it pass him away.

Jesus was dead under the weight of our sin, and then he rose again into eternal life that those who believe might remain into eternity with him, this Christmas.

John 3 16, God so loved the world.

What does love do?

It gives, God gave his unique son that whoever believes, whoever trusts, whoever depends in the finished work of Jesus would not pass away with the world right now, presently, but would remain into eternity with him.

That is the story of Christmas.

Not that we cleaned up our act, not that we forsook, forsaked all of the loves of the world and turned with gratitude to the love of the father, but that Christmas light came to us.

We were those living in darkness.

Isaiah 9 verse 2, the people walking in darkness have seen a great light.

On those living in the land of deep darkness, a light has dawned.

We were those people living in darkness.

We were in the world and of the world and for the world.

We lived in rebellion against God until Christmas light came down to us and showed us the way to know God again because of what Jesus has done.

And so what is the answer to the question?

There is an answer.

The disciples' relationship to the world.

Paul gives us the answer in Galatians 6.

Paul says, May I never boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ through which the world has been crucified to me and I have been crucified to the world.

That is the answer.

The disciples' relationship to the world is cross-shaped.

Everything comes in and through the cross of Jesus Christ.

And I know that it's not Easter, it's Christmas and we celebrate his birth, but you know this, there's no Christmas without Easter and no Easter without Christmas.

So we go to the cross and we know that it's, not that we so loved God, but that God so loved us, that he came to die for us in Jesus.

So let me read the passage one more time.

John says, Do not love the world or anything in the world.

If anyone loves the world, love for the Father is not in them.

For everything in the world, the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes and the pride of life, comes not from the Father, but from the world.

The world and its desires are passing away, but whoever does the will of God remains into the age to come.

This Christmas, can we remember what is important?

Can we remember what remains?

As we gather around our tables and our couches, we give gifts of gratitude and love and food.

That's incredible, but they don't remain.

The love of the Father remains in us and through us.

So I pray that you would receive the gift this Christmas.

The gift that is eternal life with God.

If you want to receive that gift, I'm gonna pray for you now.

And you can, in your heart, sign up.

You can apply yourself to this prayer.

So let me pray and then we'll worship together.

Lord Jesus, we thank you for this Christmas season and what it means.

We know that we were living in darkness until you came.

We didn't know you, we didn't want you, we didn't love you, but even still, you came down to us because God so loved the world.

And by what you did on the cross and when you rose again three days later, you made a way for all of the brokenness and sin of the world to be taken on your shoulders and thoroughly dealt with.

And so now you offer us eternal life.

You offer us peace and purpose.

And so I pray for all of us in this room, those who have received the gift, we receive it again with gratitude this morning.

But I pray especially for those who have not received the gift, who have not turned to you.

In repentance, Lord, we say we're sorry for the things we've done wrong.

We turn away from that.

We respond to your grace and we trust that what you did, Lord Jesus, is enough.

So help us, Lord, not to love the world as we gather for our Christmas lunches and dinners and family get togethers.

Help us to invest in what is eternal and what remains.

Because we pray it in the name of Jesus.

Amen.

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