Do Not Love the World or the Things in the World

In the life of every child of God, there is a continual battle between the call of the world and God’s call to submit to Him and live a life of holiness in keeping with the values of the Kingdom of God. This battle goes on continually. We must understand that this world is not going to love us, and we must not love this world, because there is a struggle to the death between those two poles of human existence.

The Bible says that whoever loves the world cannot be a friend of God; indeed, that person becomes an enemy of God. It says: “Do not love the world or the things that are in the world, because the world passes away, along with its desires; but those who do the Will of God remain forever.” The world, however, is the place where Satan reigns with his sinful values, which rebel against the Word of the Lord.

When we begin to walk in the ways of the Lord, we have to understand that we must say goodbye to the world; we must remain in continual enmity with it. That does not mean we cannot love our fellow human beings—quite the contrary. We must show others a life of warmth, grace, kindness, mercy, joy, and positivity. But we must also know that we are strangers and pilgrims, as the Word says. We are only passing through, and we take part in the world to the extent that we can and should and must take part in it, but our loyalty does not lie with the world; our love is not fixed on the world.

We do not cling to material things. We do not let the opinions or thoughts of others control us. We do not let what others say govern our decisions, the values we hold to, or the things we give priority to. We do not love money; we do not love things of passion or sensuality. We prefer the things of God to the things of the world. We invest our priorities and our money in things that benefit the Kingdom of God and advance its causes—and our time, our energy, and our talents as well.

Everything belongs to God, and this world is simply something we do business with out of sheer necessity. But we are only passing through, so to speak, and our final goal is to reach the Kingdom of God in victory.

Any Christian who loves the world, any Christian who shows attachment to the things of the world—a career or whatever else, the things that characterize the world—must understand that this is not in harmony with the values of the Kingdom of God and must seek that sense of consecration to the things of eternity.

I believe a fleshly, shallow, vain Christian is a living contradiction. We children of God must move farther and farther away from the demands of the world and look more and more toward the things of God so that we can truly please the Lord.

So we must be continually on guard when the world seeks to shape us, and this indoctrination goes on continually. The world will continually try to imprison us within its vision and its way of seeing things, and we must remain perpetually vigilant, renewing ourselves through the Word of the Lord, through fellowship with the saints, through gathering together, through meditating continually on the things of the Spirit, and through listening to good Christian music.

We can be culturally sophisticated people; we can be well educated and all the rest, but we hold all those things lightly in our hands because we know our loyalty does not lie there and that, ultimately, as the Word says, all these things will perish. The world passes away, along with its desires, its struggles, its cares, and its false loyalties, but whoever does the Will of the Lord remains forever.

The world is deceptive and fleeting. Without becoming obsessive about it, we keep that conviction in mind as a subconscious presence in everything we do, and we are always trying to resist the influence of the world. That is the attitude of a true child of God, a true woman of God who is mature and convinced of how things stand in eternity. God bless you; we will continue our study in our next meditation.