First Presbyterian Church
Wichita Falls, Texas
March 27, 2011
CARELESS COMMITMENTS THAT
CONSISTENTLY DRAIN YOU
The ABCs of Spring Cleaning: Part 3
1 John 2:15-17
(NIV © 2011)
15 Do not love the world or anything in the world. If anyone loves the world, love for the Father is not in them. 16 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. 17 The world and its desires pass away, but whoever does the will of God lives forever.
Robert Frost recounts hiking through a yellow wood one day. He says he stopped where ‘two roads diverged’ before him. ‘Sorry I could not travel both and be one traveler,’ he said, ‘long I stood and looked down one as far as I could.’ Then he considered the other road. ‘It was grassy,’ he noticed, ‘and wanted wear.’ Which way would he choose? Which path would he take? He paused before he made his decision. ‘Both that morning equally lay in leaves no step had trodden black.’ And then he made his choice. ‘I kept the first for another day,’ he said. ‘Yet knowing how way leads on to way, I doubted if I should ever come back.’
That’s how it is with some choices. You reach a point of no return, like a pilot whose plane is running low on fuel. Does he go on or go back? At some given moment, he can’t go back; his reserves are too low. He is committed.
Making choices is not always easy, especially when to choose one course of action necessarily rules out another. A woman with two suitors cannot marry them both. She must decide in favor of one, and, when she does, she decides against the other.
We like to keep our options open, but some commitments are exclusive. Like loving God or loving the world. You can’t do both.
‘Do not love the world,’ John says, ‘or anything in’ it (1 John 2:15). On first hearing these words, they sound a bit extreme. What is John requiring of us? What is he asking us to do when he says, ‘Do not love the world’?
Perhaps, we will understand him better if we know what he means when he talks about ‘the world.’ What does he have in mind when he says we are not to love the world? What is ‘the world’? What is it we’re not to love?
The Bible uses the term ‘world’ in three different ways. Many times, it simply means the earth. Acts 17, verse 24 says, ‘The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth....’ Here, obviously, the Scriptures use the term ‘world’ to refer to the planet on which we live, a very fragile planet by the way, for which we are to show our love by our stewardship of its resources.
Sometimes, when the Bible uses the term ‘world,’ it means all humankind. This is the meaning in John 3:16, where Jesus says, ‘For God so loved the world [that is, the human race] that he gave his one and only Son....’ If God loves all the people of the world, then we, too, should love them.
So, when John says, ‘Do not love the world,’ he is not talking about hating the planet earth or the people who live on it. He is using the term ‘world’ in a third way. He is referring to an invisible spiritual system that is opposed to God. When he tells us not to love the world, what he has in mind is Satan’s intricately coordinated scheme for opposing the work of Christ on earth. In 1 John 5, verse 19, in fact, he says: ‘We know that we are children of God, and that the whole world is under the control of the evil one.’
If you understand the ‘world’ this way, you can see why we are not to love it. We can’t love the ways of this world and still be very convincing about claiming to love God!
From time to time, when I was a kid, a group of us would want to play football, but we had an unequal number. So what we would do is: we would let one kid play quarterback for both teams. Usually, it was the kid who could throw best. And he would have to try to win as hard for one team as he would for the other.
That’s okay in a pickup game. But get into competitive sports and try it. When Philadelphia plays Dallas, you won’t find Jason Garrett agreeing to let Michael Vick run the plays for the Cowboys. He’s going to want Tony Romo in that spot. Why? Because he knows what Jesus said is true. ‘No one can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both....’ (Luke 16:13). Again, Jesus said, ‘Any kingdom divided against itself will be ruined, and a house divided against itself will fall’ (Luke 11:17).
John tells us that, when we love the world and its ways, it has three harmful effects. First, it squeezes out our love for God. In verse 15, he says, ‘If anyone loves the world, love for the father is not in them.’ It’s like oil and water; they don’t mix. And, if we claim to love God and the things that oppose God, we will have a divided heart.
Not only does loving the world squeeze out our love for God; it also squeezes us into its mold. John says, ‘...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’ (v. 16). What John is saying here is that the world has a threefold effect on those who commit themselves to its ways. It produces in them ‘the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life.’ Scripture shows this process at work in both the Garden of Eden, where Eve was tempted and failed to resist, and in the wilderness, where Jesus was tempted but did not give in.
Take the Garden of Eden. ‘The woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food’ -- this was ‘the lust of the flesh’ -- ‘and pleasing to the eye’ -- ‘the lust of the eyes,’ of course -- and also desirable for gaining wisdom’ -- ‘the pride of life.’ So she took the bait. She yielded to temptation.
Not so Jesus in the wilderness. When the tempter came to Jesus, he said, ‘If you are the Son of God, tell this stone to become bread’ – the lust of the flesh (Luke 4:3). ‘The devil led him up to a high place and showed him in an instant all the kingdoms of the world. And he said to him, “I will give you all their authority and splendor, for it has been given to me, and I can give it to anyone I want to”’ – the lust of the eyes (Luke 4:5f.).
Then, ‘the devil led him to Jerusalem and had him stand on the highest point of the temple. “If you are the Son of God,” he said, “throw yourself down from here. For it is written: ‘He will command his angels concerning you...; they will lift you up in their hands, so that you will not strike your foot against a stone’”’ (Luke 4:9ff.). This, of course, is the pride of life. Thanks be to God: through the power of the Spirit, Jesus successfully resisted the temptations of the devil.
In his paraphrase of the New Testament, J. B. Phillips rendered Romans 12:2 this way. He said, ‘Do not let the world squeeze you into its mold, but instead let yourself be transformed by the renewing of your mind.’
But that’s the outcome we see when we love the world, when we commit ourselves to its ways. It squeezes out our love for God, and it squeezes us into its mold. One more effect it has: It squeezes the life out of us. John says in verse 17: ‘The world and its desires pass away, but whoever does the will of God lives forever.’ The world, as a system opposed to God, is going down, and, if we insist on courting its favor, we will go down with it. But if we commit ourselves to God and his ways, that is, if we do the will of God, we will live forever.
So, what is it that you and I are to do? If we want to avoid careless commitments that consistently drain us, what steps do we take? Let me suggest four.
First, believe that Christ is worthy of your undivided love, that he deserves your full commitment. Because he does. Jesus himself tells us, ‘‘The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full’ (John 10:10). Why would you give your allegiance to something that is bent on destroying you? Why would you not give it to Christ, who has come to give you life?
My second suggestion is the mirror of the first. If you believe that Christ is worthy of your full commitment, refuse any longer to think that the world is. Does it deserve your undivided love? Hardly! In fact, in 1 Corinthians 7:31, Paul says quite bluntly, ‘...This world in its present form is passing away.’ It won’t last! Is that the star you want to hitch your wagon to?
Third: Consider how Eugene Peterson paraphrases verse 16 in The Message. That’s the verse about the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life. Peterson puts it this way. He says: Practically everything that goes on in the world—wanting your own way, wanting everything for yourself, wanting to appear important—has nothing to do with the Father.’
So, what if you did this? What if you stopped insisting on always getting your own way? What if you determined, instead of ‘wanting everything for yourself,’ to share what you have with others. What if you made it a pattern to show generosity and hospitality? And what if you checked your pride in the things you have and the things you have done, focused less on yourself and more on others? That’s the way of our Lord, who ‘did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life...’ (Mark 10:45).
And, finally, this is my fourth suggestion: Become a person with an undivided heart. Be that man or that woman with a wholehearted commitment to God.
Careless commitments that constantly drain you: that’s what love for the world is made of. We’re just careless. We think we can love God and at the same time serve those purposes in this world that oppose him. It doesn’t make sense when you think about it, but isn’t that the problem? We don’t always stop to think. We are careless about spiritual things. The world seduces us with its glitz and glitter, but it never tells us what it leaves in its wake. At best, disappointment; at worst, destruction.
What will you be committed to? How about love for the Father? You know where that leads. It’s a narrow path; I don’t deny that. But it will take you home. It will give you life. And it will last forever.
