Classic Sermon #6063: Strangers and Pilgrims

I want to talk about our relationship with the world, chapter 4, and in my Bible I have a heading that says, Friendship with the World, and the Apostle James rhetorically asks a question. And remember one thing: he is addressing Christians, Jewish converts who already know the Messiah, and he is addressing a congregation, or several congregations, under his apostleship and ministry. So this is a message for the church; it is not for unbelievers, so do not get too comfortable. This is for you and for me today. It says:

“...Where do the wars and quarrels among you come from? Do they not come from your passions, which wage war within your members? You covet and do not have; you kill and burn with envy and cannot obtain; you fight and wage war, yet you do not have what you desire because you do not ask. You ask and do not receive because you ask wrongly, to spend it on your pleasures. O adulterous souls, do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity against God?...”

There is the crux of our meditation. “...Therefore, whoever wants to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God. Or do you think that Scripture speaks in vain: the Spirit whom He has made to dwell in you yearns jealously for us? But He gives greater grace. Therefore it says, God resists the proud and gives grace to the humble....”

Up to this point, this is a fairly strong, fairly direct attack. To some extent it is negative and accusatory, but now comes the medicine; now comes the prescription for our lives. It says:

“...Submit yourselves, therefore, to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you. Draw near to God, and He will draw near to you. Sinners, cleanse your hands; and you who are double-minded—thank God there is no one like that here in this congregation—purify your hearts. Be afflicted, mourn, and weep. Let your laughter be turned to weeping and your joy to sorrow. Humble yourselves before the Lord, and He will exalt you....”

Brothers and sisters, we have talked about many different things. We have talked about the need to embrace truth as part of the process of sanctification: to marry the truth, to love the truth above all things, to welcome the truth in every way it manifests itself in our lives; not to go around in disguise, not to be deceitful, not to give our sins names that soften them and make them seem more attractive than they are, but to see things as they are in the light of the Spirit of God.

We have talked about the need to submit ourselves to the Word of God, which is the source of all truth. We have said that the Word of God must govern our lifestyle, must govern our values, must govern our ethical decisions, must govern our family structure, must govern our thought life, and must govern our interpretations of what is beautiful, what is good, and what is lovely. Even if we do not like what the Word of God says, we must yield and submit ourselves to the Word. The Word is the source of life for the people of God, and the people of God—you and I—need to be grounded in the Word.

We have talked about the need to submit ourselves to the discipline of a congregation and to establish long-term relationships, because the holiness of God materializes—let us put it that way; the word just came to me—the holiness of God takes concrete form and manifests itself through His Church, with a capital “C,” and through the congregations and churches found in different cities, countries, and places throughout the world. We cannot grow apart from the family of God. I do not believe in Lone Ranger Christians tucked away somewhere in a cave, cultivating a vain mysticism. I believe in the people of God there, loving one another, sometimes pulling each other’s hair, and dealing with one another like little brothers and sisters in a family, learning what it truly means to live the Christian life and embody the gifts and the fruit of the Spirit in the daily life of a congregation.

I believe that God manifests His grace through the life of the congregation, and that if we do not become permanently integrated into the life of a church and submit ourselves to His dealings over the long term, without jumping from one place to another, but instead saying, “Lord, I believe this is where I am going to grow; this is where I am going to stay. No matter what comes, I am going to grow,” then you see growth and you see God’s blessing. God wants to sanctify us and wants to express His holiness in us through congregational life.

That is why the Apostle says, “Do not forsake assembling together, as some are in the habit of doing,” but instead invites us to become part of the life, the routine—in the positive sense of the word—the program, and the ministry of a congregation, and in this way the character of Christ is brought to completion in our lives.

It is important, brothers and sisters, that we serve the Lord in the context of the family of God and of a particular church, and that we believe that where God has placed us, He has placed us to receive life, to prosper, to grow, and to bear fruit, for the glory of His name.

We also talked about the need to submit ourselves to God’s direct dealings, to the Spirit’s direct ministry in our lives, to God’s speaking, and to God’s deep dealings within us; not to close doors to Him, not to keep secret compartments from God, not to have safes to which only we possess the key. God requires full access to every area of our being, and only when we have reached the point of submitting ourselves completely to God without barriers, of abandoning ourselves completely to God’s love, ministry, dealings, and discipline—only when the Holy Spirit detects and discerns that all resistance, all pride, and all distance within us have been broken—can we truly prosper and grow in the ways of the Gospel.

And today I want to speak to you about one final concept in connection with this, and that is the concept of the world and the idea, brothers and sisters, that we must also reach a moment of crisis. The holiness of God cannot become a reality in our lives until we have reached the point of giving the world a certificate of divorce. I believe in divorce; I believe in divorcing the world. I believe in divorcing the world and declaring our total love for Jesus Christ alone, for God, and for the things of the Spirit.

I believe, brothers and sisters, that until that experience takes place within us—what I call a crisis experience, that confrontation within ourselves with the fact that the world cannot give us anything we need in order to please God, and that there is enmity, brothers and sisters, there is enmity between the life of the Spirit and the life of the world—we cannot move forward. They are incompatible substances; they are mutually exclusive. You cannot have the world in your heart and have Christ in your heart. You must decide which of those two Lords you are going to serve.

The Lord Jesus Christ says very clearly that a man or a woman cannot serve two Lords, because that person will end up loving one more than the other. And do you know what, brothers and sisters? The Lord does not believe in bigamy. The Lord is monogamous. The Lord says, “All or nothing.” The Lord is coming to seek one bride, not two brides. Nor will He seek a bride who is already married. The Lord wants you, brothers and sisters, to seal your heart completely against the attractions, offers, and seductions of the world. If you trace the word “world” in Scripture, you will find that it is normally a negative word. It is the word cosmos in the original Greek, which is the term we use for the cosmos when speaking of the universe; but in Greek, when the word cosmos is used, it refers to the world.

Now, what is the world? Well, in a basic, material sense, the world is this earthly sphere, this ball that spins and travels thousands of miles per minute through the universe and is part of the solar system. That is one concept of the world; God’s creation is another concept of the world.

But, brothers and sisters, in the terminology of Scripture—especially in the New Testament and in the language of the Apostle Paul and the Apostle John—the word “world” is a negative word. The world is that which opposes the interests of the Kingdom of God. There is total opposition between the Kingdom of God and the world, and the Kingdom of God has come to subdue the world and establish its superiority and sovereignty over the world.

The person who has not been redeemed by Christ, the person whose heart has not yet been surrendered to Christ, is a citizen of the world. To me, according to Scripture, the world is that culture, that accumulation of customs, efforts, and daily cares that do not submit to the life of God, that do not submit to the dictates of the Spirit. It is the life of culture and society outside the redeeming grace, transforming power, and lordship of God.

The world is that life which has not been redeemed. The world is society untouched by the Word of the Gospel. The world is that multitude of people you see in the great cities. If, for example, you go through Boston’s financial district, or you go to Times Square in New York City, you see those vast crowds. You get up at seven or eight in the morning, get on the train, and go to Park Street here in Boston, or to 42nd Street, to Pennsylvania Station in New York, and you see that crowd of well-dressed people with their briefcases, going to their banks, their industries, and their academic institutions. You look at their faces, and you see the vanity; many times you see those completely secularized faces, unaware of the life of God and unaware that Christ has come into the world to establish a new kingdom. They are decent people, people with good intentions, but those people have not subjected their will to Jesus Christ. That is the world. It is the people who get up in the morning to live their lives within time and space, who strive to have elegant clothes and big cars, to make a name for themselves here on earth, like the people of Babylon, to own houses, sometimes to be philanthropists, and to do “good” things, in quotation marks, but they do not do them in the name of Christ Jesus. That is the world.

It is not necessarily something criminal, something sexual, something base, or something immoral. The world is simply everything that refuses to submit the will to the lordship of Jesus Christ. That is worldly; that is demonic; that is carnal; that is animalistic, as the Apostle James says. And that unredeemed substance, that substance untouched by the life of God, cannot be part of our lives. Do you understand? That is a dead body; that is a graft which, when it tries to enter the body of Christ, is rejected because it does not have the same genetic identity, spiritually speaking.

My brother, we have to understand that the life out there, the life of that world with its interests, its vanity, its cares, and its merely historical, merely temporal desire for achievement, has nothing to do with us. When you and I enter the ways of God, we, in a sense, say to God—to that world—do you know what, brothers and sisters? Unfortunately, for many of us, that operation does not take place; that transaction does not occur. Many times we accept Christ and, let us say, marry a new lover. We have been married to the world for years; we have given our loyalty to the culture, to the values of the world, to the interests of the world—and then we fall in love with Christ too. How lovely! And we say, “I want to marry Him too,” but we do not first issue a certificate of divorce. Instead, we simply sign there, “I accept Christ,” but no revolution has taken place in our heart or in our mind.

We try to incorporate the values of the world and simply live with two lovers in the same house—or rather, bring the other lover into our house. And, brothers and sisters, there has been no separation; there has been no separation. And unfortunately, I tell you, the churches are full of people committing bigamy. And I have always said to the Lord, “Father, my desire—I do not want to minister in a church composed of adulterous souls, of double-minded people.” I see several people getting up, but it is not because I am saying anything unpleasant.

What I am saying—I hope my brothers and sisters did not feel bad; I am simply joking. But what I am saying, brothers and sisters, is that I do not want, I do not desire, to minister and pastor in a Laodicea-type congregation, where there are many well-dressed people with wholesome values and the desire to have an orderly, bourgeois life, and that is why they come to church—because the bourgeois person is respectable and the church is part of respectability, and that is why they go to church—but nothing has happened within them; there has been no explosion. Their innermost being has not been stirred by the presence and touch of the Spirit of God. They have simply stuck two things together there with chewing gum, and that is all. But the substances have not blended; there has been no inner chemistry.

That is why I believe the world is in the state it is in. Sometimes we go into neighborhoods where there is a church on every corner, and yet the neighborhood is full of crime, the community has been destroyed, and the very families in those churches are in utter disarray; and one wonders: Where is the power? Where is the authority of the people of God? What is happening? Is it that Christ has no power? Is it that the Word of God does not come true? Is it that God exaggerates and promises more than He can fulfill? Brothers and sisters, I simply believe that the conduit—which is us—has grown rigid, has become petrified; the conduit is clogged with substances. We have arteriosclerosis of the spirit; the blood of Christ, the life of Christ, is not flowing through us as it ought to flow. There are lukewarm churches.

When the apostle John, through the Holy Spirit, writes to the church of Laodicea—read it in Revelation chapter 3—He says, “You say, ‘I am rich,’ and yet you are wretched.” He says, “Oh, I have everything,” and He says, “You have nothing. Because you are lukewarm, I will vomit you out of My mouth.” He says, “I wish you were cold or hot, but you are neither one nor the other. You are neither with the devil nor with God, and you want to be with both; you make Me nauseous,” says the Lord.

And brothers and sisters, we must do everything possible to escape that kind of fate—the fate of a Laodicean-type church. We long for a church of men and women who have had a total experience with Jesus Christ, who have bowed their necks before the name of Jesus, who have acknowledged the lordship of Christ in every area of their lives, and who have said to the world, “I turn my back on you. I have nothing to do with you. I am going to live for my God and for the interests of the Kingdom of God.” A church, brothers and sisters, whose every longing and all of whose energies are consecrated to the interests of the Kingdom of God.

Brothers and sisters, we have already rejected our worldly nationality, and we have a passport that says, “Heaven, Kingdom of God.” We are working to establish a new Kingdom here on earth, to proclaim the Kingdom of Christ wherever we go, to declare, “The Kingdom of Heaven has drawn near to you.” And that can only be done by people who have a new nationality: the nationality of the Spirit.

We must say goodbye to the world, to the interests of the world, to the cares of the world: “I have nothing to do with you, and now I must live for the Kingdom.” My life, my energies, my emotions, my time, my talents, my money—everything is dedicated to building the Kingdom of God. I am continually planting sticks of dynamite wherever I go; I am leaving them there to blow up the world, so that the Kingdom of God may come and establish the order of Christ on earth.

My brother, Christ is looking for people who are radically committed to Him, but we cannot be radically committed to Him without first turning our backs on the world from which we came. That hymn that says, “This world cannot be my home”—speaking of the brother who loves the old hymns—that is a precious hymn. “This world cannot be my home”: that is the believer’s motto. The world can no longer be our home. And until you have reached that point of dying to the world, you do not know what it truly means to be a disciple of Jesus Christ. I am sorry to put it in such a radical way, brothers and sisters, but the Lord is radical about His affairs; the Word is clear.

The Lord says, “Anyone who loves father or mother, brother or wife more than Me is not worthy to be My disciple, is not worthy to be My disciple.” Where is your love? Where is your loyalty at this moment? Is it in your career? Is it in your marriage? Is it in your children? Is it in your social reputation? Is it in anything else? If your loyalty is not radically committed to Christ, to His claims, and to the success of the Kingdom of God on earth, then regrettably this applies to you: adulterous soul, double-minded man or woman.

The Word says that the double-minded man or woman should not suppose that they will receive anything, because such a person is like a wave driven by the wind, going from one place to another. The waves are driven by the wind and are in continual flux; they are never stable, unlike that sea of glass upon which the Lord’s feet are planted up above, completely stable.

Brothers and sisters, God is looking for single-minded people, monogamous people, people completely consecrated and committed to the Kingdom of God. We cannot look at anything else. If you turn to 1 John 2:15–17, the Word of God is very clear, brothers and sisters; the Word of God is utterly emphatic. It says:

“Do not love the world”—that is, do not love the cosmos, do not love this material, temporal affair—“do not love the world or the things that are in the world.” He is trying to be as comprehensive as possible. “Do not love the world or the things that are in the world.” Do not be materialistic; do not love the objects of the world; do not love the world’s agenda; do not love the world’s mentality; do not love the world’s program. And that word “love” means: do not put down your roots there; do not set your heart on it; do not fix your gaze on it; do not give it your loyalty; do not sign at the bottom of the page that says “world”; do not establish an intimate relationship with the world or the things that are in the world. “For if anyone loves”—there is that word “love” again, and it is important that we understand why that word is used—“if anyone loves the world, the love of the Father…” There is a contrast there between love for the world and the love of the Father; they are two different loves. The love of the Father cannot be realized in you; the fullness of the Father cannot be realized in you; the Father’s good intentions cannot be realized in you; the Father’s transforming grace cannot find its fullest expression in you if love for the world occupies your heart and spirit.

In other words, the presence of God cannot land within you if the runway is covered with love for the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him, because everything that is in the world—again, that concept of what is in the world, what exists in the world, what is rooted in the world—“because everything that is in the world, the desires of the flesh, the desires of the eyes, and the pride of life…”

Again, the desires of the flesh include everything passionate, everything emotional, everything biological, everything mental, everything cerebral. And brothers and sisters, let me tell you: when many of us hear the word “flesh,” we immediately think of sex—forgive the bluntness of the word. But brothers and sisters, the flesh is much more than that. The flesh is this material realm; it is everything—and here again I am speaking of the word “world”—that is not redeemed, everything that has not been touched by the life of God, everything that has not been kindled with the new life of the Holy Spirit, everything that does not give its loyalty to God and to the things of the Spirit. That is what is carnal; that is the flesh.

“The desires of the flesh…” A desire of the flesh can be a desire to do good without taking Christ and the values of Christ into account. For brothers and sisters, there are many people out there who love humanity, but they cannot love humanity as humanity needs to be loved because they do not have the love of God expressing itself through them. Human love is a treacherous love; it is an impoverished love; it is an inadequate love; it is a dull knife. That is why there are so many social workers, so many philanthropic organizations, so many social-welfare institutions that want to redeem humanity but must continually confess failure. And what they have been doing lately is turning back to the church and saying, “Well, we tried, but now…”—subtly, of course—“all right, come and help us.” What they do not want to do is confess, “Yes, we were wrong. Apart from Christ, we can do nothing.”

Now they are calling the church to come back. Foundations that once would never have thought of giving the church a cent are now calling churches to give them money so that they can work on society’s problems, because they are discovering that the church is truly the one doing the work in the cities of the United States.

For brothers and sisters, good intentions are not enough. As for love for the world, if the love you have for humanity has not been redeemed by Christ and does not have the life of Christ within it, then it is part of those passions of the flesh. If you hunger and thirst for a justice that is not God’s justice, that too is a passion of the flesh. For sometimes we think the flesh is limited to what is obviously immoral, evil, and harmful. That is not so. The flesh is everything that tries to do good or evil without taking the will of God into account and first asking the Father, “You tell me: What should I do?” That is the passion of the flesh—the striving, the striving after what is merely earthly and temporal.

“Everything that is in the world, the desires of the flesh, the desires of the eyes…” How many things, brothers and sisters! Again, the desires of the eyes are not merely the man who gazes at a woman and whose eyes follow her like Don Fulgencio in the newspaper cartoons. No, the desires of the eyes also include the woman who stands in front of a shop window and covets the fur coat, whose eyes grow wide and light up, who wishes she had it and is willing to sell her soul to the devil to have that blessed coat, and to kill a few squirrels or leopards or whatever they may be in order to have it.

The desires of the eyes include the man who stands at the car dealership and, in order to get that latest-model Audi or Saab, works eighty hours and steals from the time that belongs to the Lord because he longs to have and possess it, to become intimate with the gleaming metal of that car, to sit on its leather seats, idolize it, and worship that object instead of first rendering his tribute to the Lord and being content, perhaps, with a somewhat battered little car that will nevertheless take him to church in the name of the Lord.

Brothers and sisters, the desires of the eyes encompass all these things. When you worship the television more than the Lord, that is a desire of the eyes. Brothers and sisters, sin enters through the eyes. David coveted a woman because his eyes were filled with lust, and many of us covet objects; we covet things.

“The desires of the eyes and the pride of life…” That includes everything else. People who want to be seen in the right places; people who want the approval of others; people who are highly conscious of their image; people who are always seeking status, seeking to be appointed, seeking membership in the right country club in town, or seeking merely human achievements—that is vainglory. The woman who worships and loves her body and her beauty and is willing to do anything, sometimes even make a fool of herself, to display and promote her beauty—that is part of the pride of life: attaching too much importance to the things of the world.

Perhaps you will never be named in any book of records, but your name will be written in the Book of Life. Perhaps you will never be mentioned with praise and adulation at the city’s banquets, but when you arrive up there, you will hear, “Come, good and faithful servant. You have been faithful over a little; I will set you over much.” You are building for God’s eternal Kingdom, and you do not care so much about this vainglory, this vain glory of the world, because one day, brothers and sisters, those great buildings, those immense masses, those beautiful museums filled with works of art—the Bible says—will catch fire and melt, and all the elements will be dissolved to create new heavens and a new earth. And all of humanity’s inventions will be revealed as merely the efforts of a mad and limited person when we are able to travel through the reaches of the universe with the wings God will give us. We will not need airplanes. Airplanes will be primitive objects compared with what God will allow us to do. And we will travel like in Star Trek from one place to another without having to board any spacecraft, because the Lord Himself will be our transporter. We will not need radiators to warm us, because the glory of God itself will be our warmth. There will be no need for artificial lights, because the face of Christ will illuminate all creation.

We cannot love the vainglory of this world. We need to give ourselves therapy, and those things that seem so permanent, so solid, and so unquestionable—we must look at them through the X-rays of the Spirit and understand that they are destined to be destroyed, to be burned. Their time is numbered, and there is no appeal. At the blast of the trumpet, all these things will one day cease to be, and we cannot live by giving our loyalty to the vain and deceitful glory, to the mirages of the world. We must see the world for what it is. It is simply vainglory.

All those things—the desires of the flesh, the desires of the eyes, the pride of life—do not come from the Father but from the world. And the world passes away, along with its desires, but the one who does the will of God abides forever. Praised be the name of the Lord.

Brothers and sisters, what the Word of the Lord is telling us today is that we must now look upon the world with a certain disdain. And let me simply add a clarification; let me put an asterisk there, and I wish I had more time to develop this. It is this, brothers and sisters: this does not mean—listen to me—it does not mean that you are now going to go home, call your workplace, and submit your resignation. Please! Do not misunderstand me. Okay? Nor does it mean that you are going to leave your children and your wife behind and go off to Africa to preach the Gospel. It does not mean that we are going to run away from our responsibilities.

We are in the world; the thing is, we are not of the world. Those are two different things. Okay? Until Christ comes and carries us away in His flying saucer, we are going to keep working, we are going to keep striving, we are going to keep being good citizens, we are going to go to the ballot box and cast our vote for the officials who will govern our nation and our state, our city. We are even going to have a bank account, although only after giving the tithe. We are going to enjoy the good things God has given us—why not? A week ago, my wife and I were traveling through New Hampshire and contemplating the marvelous autumn foliage. That sounded nice, didn’t it—the state of New Hampshire. And we contemplated the glory of those colors, which make the trees look like illuminated Christmas trees when the sun strikes those leaves of so many different colors. I am even becoming poetic, and one sees the glory of God’s creation. I admire that, brothers and sisters. I enjoy that; I love that. And as we contemplated it, we listened to beautiful classical music. Glory to God for music, for culture. I love what God has allowed us to create. But I do not set my love on that, brothers and sisters; there is a difference. I know that all of it has its limit, that its time is numbered.

Brothers and sisters, we can strive, we can work, we can succeed in life. On the contrary, God has given us the capacity to be excellent, and we have to be better than the world; we have to be more intelligent than the world; we have to be more disciplined than the world; we have to be better workers than the world; we have to be more responsible than the world; and we have to be better citizens than the world. But our love is not in those things. We work, we strive, we enjoy the things of the world, but we pass lightly; we do not leave heavy footprints in the snow, because we are strangers and pilgrims who are simply passing through. We simply enjoy what He gives us while we are here, but on the day God calls us, our heart will not remain here on earth, because our heart is already in that city not made with hands, in that heavenly citizenship that God has called us to enjoy.

I leave you with a thought from Hebrews 11:13–16, where this great list of men and women of faith includes some who suffered great things here and yet lived with excellence before God. Their names perhaps have not been mentioned; the world did not know them because they were made of a different substance from that of the world, but they were excellent people. And look at what deserves God’s praise, and may you one day be worthy of that praise. Hebrews 11, verse 13, says:

“…These all died in faith without having received what was promised—that promise of God, that divine substance—it says, but seeing it from afar and believing it and greeting it, just as we greet the coming of Christ one day, and confessing that they were strangers and pilgrims on the earth, because those who say these things clearly show that they seek a homeland. For if they had been thinking of the one they had left—that is, the world—they certainly had time to return. But they longed for a better homeland, that is, a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, because He has prepared a city for them…”

Brothers and sisters, may you be a citizen today of that city God has prepared. May you see yourself today as a stranger and a pilgrim, and if your heart is not settled concerning that, this is the moment to decide.