Part 2: Wanting this world less - frees us to
love more
Our Lord’s beloved apostle, John, deals directly and concisely with some of humanity’s most difficult impediments to truly loving God in his first epistle to the churches. These barriers and fallacies ultimately cut off our intimacy with Jesus and our empowerment from Him, diminishing any ability to truly love others with His amazing love.
In just 3 verses, John focuses with laser like precision on our relationship to the world system that surrounds and influences all of us. Guided by the Holy Spirit in his writing, and by the wisdom gained through decades of walking out his own faith journey while leading many others also, he is able to pinpoint the main connection of this world to our own shortcomings.
These weaknesses are inherent in our fallen condition, distorted
and damaged faculties that cause us to be attracted to the wrong things,
succumb to their allurements, and make bad choices, based on our own internal
desires, focusing on whatever we can get out of this fallen global system for
ourselves:
1 JOHN 2:15 Do not
love or cherish
the world or the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, love
for the Father is not in him.
16 For all
that is in the world—the lust of the flesh [craving for sensual gratification]
and the lust of the eyes [greedy longings of the mind] and the pride of life
[assurance in one’s own resources or in the stability of earthly things]—these
do not come from the Father but are from the world [itself].
17 And this
world passes away and disappears,
and with it the forbidden cravings (the passionate desires, the lust) of it;
but he who does the will of God carries out His purposes and abides forever.
John defines our real problem immediately, by juxtaposing our loving and cherishing this world with authentically loving our heavenly Father.
The amazing thing about his presentation of this specific
contrast, is that he purposely uses the special Greek word agape in a way not typical of its regular use in the New Testament.
Agape usually denotes either God’s self-sacrificing love for us, or our willing, Spirit-empowered love given freely for others.
John tells us in these texts, that we can actually agapao this world system, which indicates
much more than mere affection or attraction. Various translators use terms such
as to cherish, or consider as precious, or give our hearts to, as phrases to
help us understand the depth and intensity of this kind of distorted love for
the world.
Simply put, John is saying do not surrender yourselves, in a kind
of worship of the world or even of the things that are in it!
This is a re-phrasing of Jesus’ own words to all His followers
that “you cannot serve both God and mammon (unrighteous gaining of riches as
your god).”
John describes our cosmos world
system in terms of human faculties shared by each person, which have been
twisted away from beholding and desiring all that the living God is and does,
to seek after selfish pleasure, purely human potential and position, or
personal power.
This incredibly complex interactive matrix of many millions of
individuals living by and for their own ends for generations, creates the
composite corporate reality of our societies and cultures developing over
centuries outside of purposeful and intentional involvement with God.
The sad and painful result of this corporate reality is a
multiplicity of deep and dark spiritual cesspools, filled with deceit and false
glamour to entice and entrap each of us.
When John states that these things do not come from the Father,
the beloved apostle draws a bright line between any desires we may consider
entertaining, which misuse these God given faculties for our own purposes in
pursuing what the world has to offer us, instead of being used for their true
purpose: glorifying our Father and passionately wanting fellowship with Him
through Jesus our Lord.
The strong warning concluding this section of Scripture that all
of these lesser forbidden things of the world and of our own sin natures will
pass away and disappear, also reminds us not to become caught up in the
fleeting and fatuous flirtations offered to us constantly by the world.
Unfortunately, we are trained by many ungodly experiences to instantaneously
welcome these temptations with our self-oriented senses.
Our battle is won as we turn quickly away from self-fulfillment,
not permitting any of these darts of the enemy to pull us aside, even for a
moment, from the true course that the Lord has laid out for each of us.
These darts can also become lodged in our hearts, sitting like
selfish time bombs triggered and ready to bring destruction at some later
point, if we don’t throw them off complete, to continue our faith race, with
eyes focused again only on Jesus (Hebrews 12:1-3).
When we turn away unto our Lord Jesus, we may consider His exalted
majesty, His manifold perfections, and His infinite power. All of these
attributes, and many more, are worthy of our meditations.
The Bible points us specifically to that special resting place,
about which mature members of the Body of Christ can confirm and testify, where
our thoughts of Jesus find great fulfillment, by affirming the love that is
resident in and through Him for all people.
When we are reaffirmed in this truth, we are also specifically
receiving again and again from the Spirit of God, the needed message that His
love is in the here and now for each of us, even as we are learning how to love
others first in the here and now!
All this also reminds us that we are made and then adopted by our
eternal God, to live forever with Him in His love and grace. This bedrock fact
re-energizes our willingness to do His will.
When we love imbued with our faith, and in the full knowledge of
His love, obedience is never a matter of fearful submission, fawning
pretension, nor of self-energized procurement of our salvation.
Our acceptance of the Father’s will is exactly the same as Jesus
displayed in all that He did, based solely in the true knowledge that God is
Love personified and epitomized (1John 4:8), and His greatest purposes are to
use us as His choice vessels to live in and show forth His love to so many
others that we come in contact with every single day!
When we choose daily to abide in Him, we are abiding primarily in
the very love with which He first loved us (1John 4:19), flowing into us as
peace and joy, and flowing through us over time as more faithfulness, patience,
kindness, gentleness, goodness, and self control in loving others (Galatians
5:22-24) in the Spirit, serving and considering them as better than ourselves
(Philippians 2:2-10).
It is this special kind of God’s loving kindness that rises up
with faith in our hearts, to overpower the sin nature remaining within each of
us, and to overcome the world’s influences and infections all around us!
--Neil Uniacke
Executive Director
