One of the most relevant texts to Christians is the one found in 1 John 2:15. It says, "Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. If a man loves the world the love of the Father is not in him."
You don't need a PhD to know what this text is saying. The point is that the love of the world and the love of God are in competition with each other. A person cannot do a balancing act in this respect. If he has one, he can’t have the other. James 4:4 is the defining text. It says, "Don't you realize that friendship with the world is enmity with God? Whoever, therefore, will be a friend of the world is the enemy of God."
These texts remind us that we can't love God and love the world at the same time. History bears out that one of the biggest threats to the church is not legalism but worldliness. When worldliness gets into the church, spirituality goes out the window.
Just what is “the world”? Scripture uses the word world in three basic ways: 1) the word world can refer to the earth -- that is, the created order; 2) the word world can refer to the nations -- that is, the human community; and 3) the word world can mean the fallen world--things associated with the devil, who claims this world as his own. Therefore, this meaning of the word world indicates that which is anti-God.
The church is called to be thoroughly involved with the world in one sense, but to have nothing to do with it in another sense -- that is, the fallen world--its appetites, its priorities, and its lifestyles; in other words, the way fallen man thinks and lives.
The trouble is that in our own country we have become immersed in our own culture. Its paganism and humanism are in the warp and woof of our thinking. We recognize worldliness in India and in England, for instance, but we don't recognize it here. Jesus would probably tell us that this is because we have a cultural beam in our own eye. Not everyone would agree with me, but I am convinced that culture is not amoral. The components of any particular culture are either in harmony with the principles of truth or they aren't.
The people of God who most correctly understand the meaning of holiness are also most able to recognize sin in the culture when they see it. The people of God may live and move in the environment of the culture but they are not part of it.
The culture of this country in past generations was based on what we might call a Judeo-Christian foundation. Though residues of this old culture remain, a new culture is now taking over. It didn't happen all at once, but it began to take off in the 1960s. It used to be that we as a society taught our children what was right and what was wrong. They might not have always done what was right but they knew the difference. Certain things were right and certain things were wrong.
A clear standard of right and wrong gave society a moral compass to measure business ethics, community values, and morals, character, and social conduct. But these days by and large our society rejects an absolute standard of truth and morality, of right and wrong. Truth has become a matter of taste, and morality is considered a personal matter.
On one occasion, my son-in-law was telling a friend that he believed it is wrong for people to live together before marriage. His friends replied, "Well, if you believe it’s wrong, I guess it would be wrong for you." Today’s culture says, "If it feels good, do it, and “If it works for you, why not?" Instead of being taught right from wrong, children and adults are being shown the options and told to decide for themselves.
Back to the matter of the texts that tell us that love of the world is ultimately fatal to our love for God. This being the case, we in these last days should be seriously studying what it means when a person loves the world. How can I know if I love the world or not? Remember, it’s not a balancing act. The text says that a person who loves the things of the world doesn't love God.
We have divided ourselves up these days between liberals and conservatives, or between contemporary and traditional, between grace based and law based. And there are some who are trying to be somewhere in between. But in the judgment God does not divide us up as liberals and conservatives; rather, as sheep and goats. In other words, those who love God and those who love the world.
God is not going to judge us on whether we drove on the right side of the road in the United States or on the left side of the road in the United Kingdom, or whether we covered our heads when we went to church or uncovered them. The judgment will be about something much deeper. That part of culture has to do with nations and human community. But worldliness is a spiritual matter. It is anti-God. To be part of this aspect of the world in the final analysis will mean that we are on the side of the goats.
The church of today has made less of an impact on the world than the world has made on it. To a large extent, without even being aware of it, Christians are losing the ability to discern between right and wrong. This is due to the fact that Scripture is no longer recognized as the absolute standard for human conduct. Even in our church, though we may deny it, Scripture has to a large extent been laid aside in favor of public opinion. Though we still use the Bible to discover the true meaning of the Millennium, the Trinity, or where the dead go when they die, we are more and more resisting Scripture as having the last word in how we live.
Our faith is to be based on what they used to call a "thus saith the Lord." We spoke of ourselves as being the church that had the Truth. However, the meaning of truth has been turned on its head in our generation. Truth is now seen as a consensus of how the majority feels or believes. We have, if you please, democratized our faith. Remember, in a democracy every person's vote has the same weight, regardless of how well or how badly informed it is.
Morality is now literally established by Gallop Poll. In our own church, our priorities, and even our values, have been impacted by the ValueGenesis survey of young people. This survey has been instrumental in causing us to try to make our church and the interpretation of its doctrines more “user friendly”. The people who take surveys are now setting new directions for our church, because all ideas must be approved and made legitimate by the members, especially the Baby Boomers. And who knows what the Baby Boomers want better than the pollster?
We have, even in the church, allowed the people who take surveys to become our teachers, philosophers, and theologians. The public opinion surveys have been one of the doors through which the values of the world have become the values of the church. When the people who take surveys speak, we sit up and listen. Often a survey is even considered to be scientific. It is based on hard numbers and has a scientifically fixed margin of error.
I'm ashamed to say that often many so-called leaders are, in fact, not leaders at all but are people without personal convictions. Their morality and ethics tend to shift with popular opinion. We speak these days of "servant leadership." But make no mistake. A servant leader is not a person who serves by seeing which way the wind of popular opinion is blowing. Jesus is the perfect example of a servant leader, and He never once tailored His teaching to fit public opinion.
I remember being warned when I was young that in the last days a person would have to be thoroughly rooted and grounded in the Word of God or they wouldn't be able to get through all that was going to happen. I couldn't understand the issue here. Why were we being advised to believe the Bible? Wasn’t that taken for granted? Nobody I knew wasn’t “rooted and grounded in the Word of God”. In that long-ago generation, the Bible was the standard of belief and behavior; you either believed it or you didn't.
How could we have known then that in the last days the Bible would no longer set the standards of right and wrong? How could we have known that in the last generation right and wrong, true and false, would be a matter of public opinion? These days public opinion is both the judge and the jury of human conduct. The rightness or the wrongness of something is no longer an issue. The issue now is whether or not a person was justified in doing what they did.
The human race in this time just before Jesus returns finds itself once again at the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. The question that was put to Adam and Eve is the same that each of us must answer now. Our eternal destiny will rest on how we answer the question. And the question is, Will we let God tell us what is right and wrong, or will we insist on making up our own standards of behavior?
Who would have believed that it would come to this? I repeat, even in our church we are face to face with this question. At least up until now we have allowed God to tell us which day is the Sabbath, but we won't let Him tell us how to keep it.
If you think that the danger to the church today is legalism, please think again. Look around you. In many quarters the church is agreeing to turn a blind eye and a deaf ear to the Word of God, and there is an onslaught of worldliness which has not been seen since the days of Constantine the Great. In those days the church gave official sanction to the lifestyle of the pagans. It is time that we understood that light and darkness cannot be mixed. Truth and error have nothing in common. Love of the things of this world and love for God at the same time is a contradiction of terms.
There seems to be a conspiracy that tries to stifle anything that would attempt to separate truth from error. The mindset to accept sinners has caused many to accept sin. But the holiness of God is at war with sin, and those who refuse to come to grips with this fact and continue to love the world will be raised in the Second Resurrection. There is an almost overwhelming consensus that accepts the unacceptable and calls the abnormal normal. Friends, unless we dig in our heels and stand firm on a “thus saith the Lord”, we will be dragged, howbeit kicking and screaming, into a never-never land where the rabble rules and anything goes.
Holiness is not a word that is defined by a survey of people's ideas. Holy is what God is, and to know what holiness is, we must discover who God is. We will never learn what holiness is in the marketplace but only in a diligent and prayerful study of His Word.
But we need to take heed. We can have eyes and still be blind. We can have ears and still be deaf. The Word tells us that spiritual things are spiritually discerned. The key that opens the door to spirituality is repentance. This is why the preaching of the good news of salvation must always include a call to repentance.
A person’s theology. is a reflection of their personal morality. If you and I attempt to study the Word and to pray with anything less than a spirit of repentance, our prayer and study will simply tend to firm up and justify our disobedience. God did wonderful things for Pharaoh that should have brought him to salvation. But because he refused to repent, all of God's miracles only served to confirm and harden his heart. This is why repentance is the key. If we have known sin in our lives, if we are rationalizing or holding onto something that we know is contrary to the will of God, all our study and prayer will actually harden us, and we will be attracted to error like a bee is to honey.
God's call to those who would be His people is always a call to come out of the world and be separate from the world. First, God calls us, then He separates us, and then He sanctifies us. We must understand that we cannot be made holy as He is holy while we are still in the world.
My wife and I could not make a commitment to be faithful to each other until we had, in fact, separated ourselves from other men and women. I cannot be faithful to her and enjoy the same kind of relationship with every other woman, or she with every other man. For us to be faithful to each other we had to leave, if you please, the rest of the world -- the other women and the other men. We had to move in with each other. Our faithfulness to each other immediately impacted our lifestyles. When I made a commitment to be faithful to my wife, it affected not just my ideology or beliefs, but it affected my lifestyle.
And so, in a life of commitment to the Lord Jesus Christ, in our pursuit of holiness, our very lifestyle will be affected. A person who has committed his life to Jesus will live differently from those who don't. This is why the Bible says that those who are in the pursuit of holiness will eat, drink, and do everything else to the glory of God.
You may not agree with me, but I believe that it is important that people who love God rest differently from those who don't. In southern Asia, a snake charmer wears an orange turban and carries a little basket with him. In that part of the world you can often tell what a person does, what try or language group they are from, and even what their religion is by the way they dress.
If, in this country, child molesters and rapists all wore orange neckties, a person would think twice before owning an orange neck tie. Those who are honest with themselves will recognize that much of today's clothing styles, speech patterns, and even facial expressions are often being modeled after those who are effeminate, those who hate femininity, the anti-establishment people, or the otherwise immoral.
The way a person dresses is a statement as to who they are or who they wish they were. God has given us explicit instructions that those who are in pursuit of holiness will look different from those who aren't.
A son and daughter of God in pursuit of holiness take seriously what Scripture says in 1 Peter 3:3: "Your beauty should not come from outward adornment, such as braided hair, the wearing of gold jewelry, and fine clothes." In 1 Timothy 2:9-10, it adds, "I also want women to dress modestly, with decency and propriety; not with braided hair, or gold, or pearls, or expensive clothes, but with good deeds, appropriate for women who profess to worship God."
We should be aware that when this was written, a fashionable Roman woman used virtually every beauty aid that women use today. The apostles were not reinforcing the cultural norms of their day. They were, in fact, doing just the opposite.
By the way, a Roman woman began her day by arranging her hair and putting on her makeup. She painted her lips, applied black eye shadow, put on false eyelashes, coated her face with white powder, and put rouge onto her cheeks. She wore her hair in elaborate hairdos, complete with curls, bangs, braids--and some even wore wigs.
One Roman in those days commented to his female friend: "While you remain at home, your hair is at the hairdressers, you take your teeth out at night, and you sleep tucked away in 100 cosmetic boxes. Even your face does not sleep with you. Then you wink at men under an eyebrow you took out of the drawer that same morning." Humm. I wonder if they remained friends after that comment?
Roman women adorned the rest of their bodies as much as their faces. When going out, they would array themselves with jewels, often wearing expensive rings on every finger.
In contrast, the Early Church discouraged all of this and called upon Christians not to use cosmetics and to dress simply. It is interesting, though, that the Early Church did not try to legislate the type of clothing that Christians should wear. It simply emphasized the principles of modesty and simplicity. The application of those principles was left up to the individual Christian. Maybe we made a mistake in other generations in telling people exactly what to put on, and we never taught them the principles behind it all.
It is probably necessary to go through what we are going through in the church today. When the pendulum swung too far one way, the tendency was to tell people every little thing they must and must not do. Now the pendulum is swinging too far the other way, and nobody talks about what is right and appropriate anymore. We should not be surprised when the result looks a little like anarchy.
Friends, we are not making history, we are only repeating it. During the Dark Ages the Catholic Church held the people under absolute control. It controlled virtually every aspect of their lives. Martin Luther came along and helped to start the Reformation. His favorite text, "The just shall live by faith," were like metal cutters that cut free the chains of Catholicism that had for so long enslaved the people. When they were set free and told that salvation was a free gift and that they were saved by grace through faith, the immediate impact in Germany with spiritual anarchy.
Menno Simons, a contemporary of Martin Luther, warned: "Let everyone take heed how he (Martin Luther) teaches. For with this same doctrine they (the Lutherans) have led the reckless and ignorant people, great and small, city dweller and cottage dweller alike, into such a fruitless, unregenerate life, and have given them such a free rein, that one would scarcely find such an ungodly and abominable life among Turks and Tartars as among these people. Their open deeds bear testimony for the abundant eating and drinking, the excessive pomp and splendor, the fornicating, lying, cheating, cursing, the swearing by the wounds of our Lord, and the fighting."
Friends, I am perplexed. In fact I am more than perplexed. It seems that as our church hears more and more of the cross and of the grace of Christ, the short-term reaction, at least for many people, seems to be a throwing off of much that would pertain to a pure and holy lifestyle. In our freedom in Christ, similar to what happened in Germany, many seem to be living a life that can only be described as worldly.
When you cannot tell the difference between how a Christian dresses and how he talks and what he does in his spare time from what a person who makes no profession of Christ does, it means that the church has lost its identity and loves the world. And in time the love that they have for God will fade away. No, we are not making history, we are only repeating it. What we need now are not prophets, but historians. A person who knows history can tell you precisely where the church is headed in this day and age.
Back to the Romans. The upper-class Romans enjoyed a lot of leisure time. They filled their evenings and holidays with gluttonous banquets, theaters, and sporting events. Banquets sometimes lasted 10 hours. It was not unheard of for a banquet to consist of 22 courses, including such delicacies as pig utters and peacock tongues.
The Roman theater was borrowed from the Greeks. The favorite dramatic scenes were crime, adultery, and immorality. Lactantius, a Third Century Christian, wrote, “I am inclined to think that the corrupted influence of the stage is even worse than that of the arena. The subjects of the comedies are the de-flowering of virgins or the loves of prostitutes. Similarly, the tragedies parade before the eyes--the murder of parents and the acts of incest committed by wicked kings. Is the art of the mimes any better? They teach adultery by acting it out. How do we expect our young people to respond when they see that these things are practiced without shame, and everyone eagerly watching?”
Although it was mainly the upper-class Romans who attended the theater and banquets, the rich and poor alike enjoyed the arena. The games in the arena were designed to quench the Romans undying thirst for violence, brutality, and blood. The brutal chariot races were the favorite events. During the races, chariots would inevitably crash, catapulting their drivers onto the race track, where they would either be dragged to their death or trampled by another driver’s team. All the while, the crowd would go wild with excitement.
If you are still awake and thinking, it is not hard to see that these days we have all similar kinds of activities, though they have been modernized, such as racing cars and contact sports. So, are we saying that we shouldn't go to a football game or watch the Daytona 500?" I didn't say that. But I can say on the authority of the Word of God that as children of God we should avoid those things that tend to arouse our own violent natures.
The average Christian who persists in, as they say, going with the flow, is going to be lost no matter how much assurance someone has told them that they ought to have, because the flow is going in the wrong direction. The flow is going downhill. This world and its immoral, violent, and corrupt ways is going to be destroyed. Let us make no mistake about it. And it’s not just those who participate in events who are at risk. Christians who sit in the bleachers or in front of the tube watching violence, lust, passion, dishonesty, selfishness, and pride will in the Day of Judgment be declared guilty by association. In the eyes of the law, the driver of the getaway car is guilty, as well as the hold-up person.
God will not hold this generation of professed Christians guiltless who give moral--howbeit passive--support to the degeneracy of this age. Scripture says that without a holy life we cannot see God. And the fact is that God will not give us the gift of His holiness until we allow ourselves to be separated from the world and its sinful ways. The command of our God is to come out, be separate, and touch not the unclean thing. I don't know if you are aware of it, but Scripture says we are not to set an evil thing before our eyes. Another reference states that we ought not even speak of those things which they do in secret.
You may be thinking that you are above these problems because you watch only the news. But beware! The devil has snares especially crafted for you. The news has now become in some cases pornographic, complete with details and pictures. And what’s not pornographic is violent, lawless, and depressing. I fully believe that, although we feel we must be informed, we can be so well informed that we become thoroughly desensitized to evil.
Am I being extreme? Call 911 if you wish and have them carry me away. But I am more and more convinced that having a television in the home for the average Christian can make the pursuit of holiness a lost race. I won't say that you can't watch television. If you want to, go ahead. You can even be a member of the church in good and regular standing and watch MTV and X-rated videos. But if you and I are serious about the pursuit of holiness, we will begin to put two and two together. In the dead of winter, if the house is cold, try closing the doors and windows. If your boat is sinking, try plugging up the holes. If the mosquitoes are eating you up, spray on a little repellant. We need to recognize that much of what we are doing in our lives is making the work of the Holy Spirit ineffective at best, or at worst we may even be driving Him away.
God calls us to holiness. Holiness is not an option for a person who is being saved by faith. A person whose life is not diminishing in worldliness and growing in holiness does not have salvation. Or if they ever did they have opted out on the process. "Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. For whoever loves the world, the love of the Father is not in them." As individuals, and as a church we desperately need to find out what it means to love the world, or we will lose everything.
God calls His people in this day and age to know and experience what it means to live a holy life. “Just as He who has called you is holy, so be holy in all you do. For it is written, be holy for I am holy."
God is holy. Salvation is about holiness. May each of us dedicate every fiber of our being to our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ and the pursuit of holiness. The pursuit of a holy life is the most relevant thing that a Christian can do. I say relevant because we are not at the beginning of the end but at the end of the end. And when the last piece of the puzzle goes down, the person who has not discovered what a holy life is all about and is not in fact living a holy life will, to use the words of Jesus, end up weeping and gnashing their teeth.
Our holy God is calling us to separate ourselves from the world and its sinful lifestyles. He calls us to a new culture, to a holy life. Are you and I answering His call? Are you and I letting Him lead us into holiness?
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