The difference between remaining firm in Christ or being swept away by sin is determined by what you love, so you cannot love the world.

Well, we’re getting to the point in our series in First John, when you will start to see some of the preaching team up here on Sunday mornings. And I am excited for you to hear the sermons that these guys have been preparing. We got together yesterday for our second workshop to share outlines with each other. And it was just a great time of learning together. A couple of months ago, we used the passage that I am preaching this morning as a group exercise. So we all broke down the argument together. And then they helped me develop the outline that I’m using today. So if this sermon is any good, you can thank them. And if it’s bad, feel free to blame them, actually. It’s fine. It’s totally fine. No, I’m very excited. Next week, Pastor James will be preaching his first Sunday sermon here at Calvary. And as part of that service, we are going to have a prayer of installation for him at all three of our services. So, please come and support him. I got to hear his sermon yesterday in full and you are not going to want to miss it. As I mentioned last week, the Apostle John is now directly addressing the people in the church who love Jesus. He’s writing this letter to them to remind them of who they are in Christ.

He’s telling us about our own identity. He’s saying, don’t forget this. You’ve been forgiven by Jesus. You know the eternal God. Sin has no actual power over you anymore. You’re in the father’s family. And he’s doing this because he’s concerned. False theology is on its way. If it hasn’t arrived already. Lies are going to try to work their way into the hearts and minds of these people that he loves so much. And so this letter is an attempt to anchor the people in the gospel that they already know, so that they can stand up against the waves that are coming, that will try to drive them away from Jesus. And John has one very simple, straightforward command for the church. This is the first command in the letter. John is going to use an imperative or a command seven times in this letter, but this one is the first. Do not love the world. Do not love the world. Now that requires definition and qualification. We have to know what we’re talking about here. But I want you to hear right up front this morning, church, the difference between remaining firm in Christ or being swept away by sin is determined by what you love. So you cannot love the world. We’re in First John chapter two, verses 15 to 17. Today we’re looking at three verses. John first gives us the command, and then he gives us three reasons why we need to follow it, which all have to do with how the world relates to God our Father.

It’s a simple structure, but there’s so much packed into these short verses. Let’s start with the command. Do not love the world or the things in the world. This is one of those seemingly simple phrases that becomes more complex the more you think about it. It’s like when Jesus says, love your neighbor as yourself. That seems simple, right? Love your neighbor as yourself. But then at the time Jesus said this, a lawyer piped up and said, okay, hey, not so fast, who exactly is my neighbor? And I might add, and how do I have to love him? And of course, Jesus defined his terms beautifully with the parable of the Good Samaritan, which effectively closed any loopholes that someone might use to hold on to their bias or their hate. In our passage this morning, we also need to define the terms. First of all, what is this world that we are not to be loving? Every college and NFL end zone I have ever seen has a guy holding a sign that says John 3:16 that he’s hoping that I will then turn to it in my Bible where I will read, for God so loved the world. That’s in John’s gospel. Same author here. So John says, God loves the world, but then he says that we are not to love the world.

What is going on here? Well, the word world in the Bible has a variety of different meanings, so you always have to look carefully at how it’s being used. John himself, earlier in this chapter, in chapter two, said that Jesus is the propitiation for our sins and that not only of ours, but of the whole world. So there in verse two, he’s clearly referring to the fact that Jesus is the one Savior for all people, no matter where they live in the world. That is very close to what John means in John 3:16. God so loved the world that he gave his only son, that whoever believes in him will not perish but have everlasting life. The people clearly are in view when he says the word world there. And just as clearly John is not telling us here in chapter two, verse 15 not to love people. If you look at the next verse, you’ll see that sinful desires and pride are listed as things in the world. So when John says, do not love the world, he’s referring to those things in the world that dishonor God, that pull us away from God. Now, I love the fact that he expands on this by saying, don’t love the world or the things in the world. See, what he’s doing is he’s making us look at the whole.

But then he’s also making us look at the parts. And the reason I love that is so that we don’t we don’t do the thing that all of us are inclined to do, which is to reject certain worldly things that we don’t like while secretly embracing and coveting certain sins that we find enjoyable or convenient. For example, someone might say that they hate the injustice of our world. I hate the injustice of our world. They want to see the end of the mistreatment of people. But at the same time, they also kind of want to bend the definition of God’s love to include the acceptance of ungodly sinful relationships or lifestyles. Or maybe someone wants to champion the rights of the unborn, but not the immigrant or the poor, or some other group that the Bible calls us to champion. Or maybe someone can rightly claim victory over sins in a particular area of life where they don’t struggle too much, but are very comfortable and happy with other areas of their sin, so long as they can keep them hidden and nobody brings them up. By saying the things in the world, John is drawing our attention to all the various individual sins that can become objects of our love. We can’t give ourselves a passing grade for not loving the world if there are certain sinful values and activities that we continue to love. It would be far better for us, church, far better this morning for us to listen to what John is saying and search our hearts and identify those areas where we need to end our love relationship with worldly things. And I’ll tell you this church, we can be sure of one thing. The world wants us to love it. The world wants us to love it. John is telling us not to love the world precisely because the world presents itself as something desirable, as something to love. If the sin of the world around us didn’t feel desirable to us, it wouldn’t be a problem at all. If yelling and arguing and winning didn’t give you a sense of satisfaction, you wouldn’t do it. If gossiping about other people didn’t give you a sense of superiority over those people, you’d avoid it. Listen to how lust and sexual sin is described in Proverbs chapter seven. This is verses 21 through 23. Listen. Listen to how it’s described. With much seductive speech, she persuades him. With her smooth talk she compels him. All at once he follows her, as an ox goes to the slaughter, or as a stag is caught fast till an arrow pierces its liver. As a bird rushes into a snare. He does not know that it will cost him his life.

You see, seductive speech persuades. Smooth talk compels. Earlier in Proverbs, this same sort of talk is described as dripping with honey. It’s sweet. It tastes good. The sin of the world does not present itself as undesirable, because if it did, we wouldn’t all struggle with it. We wouldn’t have a problem with it. The real problem is that worldly sin is compelling. We can make an argument for it. It can seem right to us. Last week I went to my daughter’s soccer tournament. And if you if you’ve never been to a soccer game before, here’s how it works. All the parents sit on the same side of the field. The teams are on the other side. We’re all on one side of the field, And then the parents of one team sit on one side of midfield, and the parents of the other team sit on the other side. And when I arrived to this game, there was already this huge crowd of people there and just filling the sidelines. And so I was looking for a familiar parent and I saw Jeremy Moreland already seated there on the sideline. And Jeremy and I had, the day before, we had sat next to each other and Jeremy and I thought, okay, Jeremy’s part of cavalry. He’s actually right there. So you can all look at him. And, and so here we are.

We’re sitting on the sideline. And by the way, I’ve already informed Jeremy that the cost of hanging out with me is that you might appear in a sermon illustration. So I go over, I go over, and I sit my chair next to Jeremy on the sideline. And we start watching the game. And I began to notice that every time our team did well, Jeremy and I would cheer, but nobody around us would cheer. And every time the other team scored, people started cheering wildly. And I realized Jeremy had misled me to the dark side. We were surrounded by the enemy, and we started laughing because our natural inclination when everybody around you is cheering is to start cheering. You’re like, yeah, oh, oh, no, no, actually that’s bad for us. That’s no good. And then the very opposite thing happens when you know our team does well. We start cheering and nobody around us is clapping. We’re like, ah, we should probably stop, right? Cheering in that moment meant something bad had happened. And as we sat there experiencing this very backward moment, Jeremy says, this is just like the world I want to cheer when I shouldn’t. And I leaned into him close and I said, you just made the sermon. See, when the world cheers, we want to join, don’t we? We want to join when things or people are excited about stuff and they’re embracing stuff and they value things. We want to cheer with them. Why can’t we love Jesus and love the world too? Why must we reject the impulse to participate and celebrate and value what the world finds commendable? Well, the first reason is that this love is incompatible with God’s love. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. This is one of those helpful, self-discerning sentences that John loves. We’ve seen this plenty of times so far in this letter. If your passion is to affirm and accept and embrace those things in the world that the Lord calls sin, that is evidence that you don’t have love for the Father. He’s not saying that you won’t profess love for the Father. He’s saying that you don’t actually love the Father, and you can profess all sorts of love for God. You can give yourself any label that you like. You can hang out with Christians. You can be around the church, you can participate in ministry. But if at the same time, you also love the sins of the world, that God tells us to reject and avoid, and you unrepentantly walk in that darkness, you don’t actually love God at all. Because those two loves are incompatible. They can’t co-exist in the same heart. There’s an encounter between Jesus and the Pharisees, and it’s recorded in John chapter eight.

He’s debating them over whether they’re Jewish background makes God their Father, and it’s a long and detailed argument. You should read it carefully sometime. It really is quite rewarding. But I’ll just point out one point of it. One part of this, this debate. At one point, Jesus explains why the Pharisees are rejecting him and he says this: If God were your Father, you would love me, for I came from God, and I am here. I came not of my own accord, but he sent me. Why do you not understand what I say? It is because you cannot bear to hear my word. You are of your father the devil, and your will is to do your father’s will. So Jesus says, you are either in one family with one father, or you are in another family with a different father. And the way to know which family you’re in is by looking at your own will and determining which father’s desire you want to do. In other words, who do you love? Who do you love? You can’t have two fathers. You can’t be in two households. You can’t be obedient to two different leaders. It’s not just that it’s hard to do that, he’s saying you can’t do that. You cannot have a passionate desire to love God the Father and also love your sin. If you love your sin, any talk of loving your heavenly Father is just that.

It’s just talk. Which means and this is the sobering part of this. Just like the Pharisees who thought they had God as their father but actually served their father the devil, there are a whole lot of people in the church today who don’t have the father that they think they do. There are people who sit in church every week who are actively looking forward to the sinful things that they’ll do with the rest of their week. There are people who feel confident that God is on their side, who also take that religious mask off the moment that they’re ready to do the sin that they actually love. And if that’s you, if that’s who you are this morning, hear what John is saying to you. You don’t love God at all. You don’t love him. The true God is not your father the way you think he is. You’re in a different family. Let’s look at the second reason not to love the world. For all that is in the world, the desires of the flesh and the desires of the eyes and the pride of life is not from the Father, but is from the world. So this short list of categories is how John sums up the things in the world. John says that these things are not from the Father, they are from the world.

This means these things do not come to us as heavenly gifts from our good Heavenly Father. They are not sourced in him. They’re not given by him. In the sermon on the Mount in Matthew seven, Jesus says that God the Father gives good things to those who ask him. In James chapter one, verse 17, James writes, every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights. So when the Bible describes what God the Father gives to his children, it’s always for their blessing and good, and it always leads to to growth and flourishing in Christ. In other words, the things that God gives lead us to godliness. And that’s true even of corrective discipline. In Hebrews 12, it says the Lord disciplines the one he loves. He chastises every son whom he receives. So correction is even part of the good gifts that God will give you. And we know this is true. Good parents give good gifts and good guidance to their kids to see them flourish, right? Our Heavenly Father does the same thing. In fact, he does so perfectly. He gives us exactly what we need. Good parents give good gifts. And so we will know a good gift from God when we see it, because it will lead us to become more like Christ and will be enjoyed for his glory. That’s how you know something is sourced from the Father.

This list here in verse 16 is the opposite of that. He gives us three categories of sin that are all sourced in the world. When something fits into one or more of these categories, you can be sure that it is not given to you by God. Okay, this is not a gift. If it fits in these categories, it’s not a good gift. And any attempt that we make to rationalize something from these categories is a is just a lie that we’re telling ourselves. We call it good. You’re just using a lie to rationalize something that you want. The first category is the desire of the flesh. What we’re talking about here is the sinful, God rejecting, God dishonoring bodily cravings. That’s what it’s talking about. What your body craves. Now, God designed our bodies, right? God designed us. He knows what we crave. He knows that we crave things like food and affection and friendship and happiness. The problem is that sin has broken our willingness to find all that we crave within the good creation that God has designed. Those things the way God has designed it. We’re designed by God to find all of our happiness, all of our fulfillment for life in him, in a relationship with him. But we’ve rejected God. And so the happiness that we’re meant to have in him, we now search for in other things.

Having rejected God the Father as our source, we need a new source, right? We need something else to give us the things that we’re looking for. And the world is happy to provide us with those things. The world provides us with all sorts of substitutes. But maybe the most diabolical thing of all is that Satan doesn’t own any stuff. Satan doesn’t have his own things. Our enemy can’t create anything. He’s not a creator. All he can do is get us to use the stuff God created in a God-rejecting way. So for example, sex is designed by God to be enjoyed in a God-glorifying marriage. He made that Satan has no ability to give a good gift or create a good gift, like sexual intimacy or the institution of marriage. He can’t make those things. And so his only tactic is to tell us the lie that sex would be better if you separated it from marriage. That’s right. That’s why he’s called the father of lies. It’s all he’s got. All he’s got is words. And so he uses the words to break apart the things that God has made. And so we take that lie. We take that lie from him, and we make it part of worldly wisdom. We say, yeah, you know, we don’t have to keep these two things together. We can break them apart. God is trying to limit our happiness by keeping these things together.

So that’s what we do with all of Satan’s lies, and then we shape a world around our own design that says sex and marriage have nothing to do with each other. And we break God’s mold thinking that our reformation of God’s stuff, our reconfiguration of all the things that God has supplied us, we think our packing it together in our own way is a better formation of God’s stuff. And the result of that? The cheapening of sex, hookup culture, the slaughter of millions through abortion on demand, no fault divorce destroying the home, single moms and absent dads, the degradation of women, pornographic addiction, body image, depression, human trafficking, sex tourism, the rise of pedophilia, rape, the MeToo movement. I could go on and on and on and on. One lie. One lie. One lie that leads to thousands of splinters of sin, resulting in endless heartache. And by the way, the world knows this. The world knows this. Even if they won’t admit it. Even those who don’t know the Lord would look at this list that I have just rattled off here, and they’d say there’s so much in there that is evil and must be changed. I mean, how many worldly people look at human trafficking of girls and cry out against it? How many applaud when pedophiles are caught and arrested and put away? So many people, right? So many people. And yet many of the same people balk at the idea that these awful things are sourced in the same lie that says sex outside of marriage is permissible and good. And what they want to do is they want to arbitrarily draw a line between what they consider to be good and evil desires of the flesh, not even seeing the irony that the fact that the believing that they have the authority to draw that line is itself a desire of the flesh. And then there’s the desire of the eyes and the pride of life. And I’ll do these together briefly, because there really is a lot of overlap between these different categories. The desire of the eyes is just like it sounds. I see something I want, I covet it, I don’t care if it’s mine, I don’t care if whether God wants me to have it. I just I just want it. And the pride of life is the stuff I already have. It’s the things that I have accumulated for myself and I privately hold on to them. I say I display these things, I enjoy these things. And for both categories, it’s not just tangible things, right? It includes things like cars and houses and money that we might sinfully gain for ourselves. But it also can include honor and status and power and authority. And if you combine all three of these categories.

What you get is a is a kind of sinful progression. My cravings cause me to look for the things that I want to accumulate for myself, stuff that will give me happiness apart from God. And here’s where that progression is going. It’s the third reason not to love the world. And the world is passing away along with its desires. But whoever does the will of God abides forever. Why can’t we love the world? Well, you can, but it’s a sinking ship. People who follow their own sinful impulses to build a life of happiness apart from the good design of God, will eventually find out that they have charted a course for their own destruction. The sinful world is passing away. John here is talking about the final judgment at the return of Christ. When Christ returns, sin will be vanquished for good. Satan will no longer have any power to lie or to mislead us, and the sinful impulses and desires themselves will be exposed for what they are. Truly paths that lead to destruction. The words won’t drip honey anymore. They won’t sound good to us anymore. They will no longer persuade us or compel us. But there will be a whole bunch of people who will have built their life on, made entirely out of cravings and impulses, and they will receive the same final judgment, along with the rest of the creation that has rejected the creator.

Those who will come through this judgment and into eternal life, John says, are those who do the will of God. Now John is not saying, do enough of God’s will and you’ll make it through the judgment. There’s a reason he phrases it this way. The key word here is will. This is the only time in this this letter that this word is used. Making it stand out. Making it be pretty important. God’s will is what God desires. It’s set against all the other desires in the passage here. So John is saying all the desires in this world and all the people who have those desires and used them to make a life apart from God, they are heading for death. But those who have desires that align with God’s desire, God’s will, will remain. Or in this case, abide, forever. They’re going to be saved through that judgment. So what is God’s will? What does he want? What does he command of us? Well, this word will summarizes everything up to this point in the letter. It is God’s will that we would know him who was from the beginning, Jesus Christ. It’s God’s will that we would see our sin and our need for a Savior. It is his will that we would confess our sin and trust in Jesus as our substitute sacrifice, our propitiation.

It’s his will that we. That we would then abide in Christ by walking in the same way that he walked. It’s God’s will that we would walk in the light as he is in the light. It’s God’s will that the love of Christ would bind us together and that we would love each other. So what that means is our will must be God’s will. Our passion must be God’s passion. We should love what God loves. So what do we do with our impulse to love the world? What do we do with that? Because we’re going to leave church here this morning. You can’t stay here, by the way. Lights are going out eventually, right? You can’t stay here indefinitely. I mean, isn’t it great to have a church community where we can come together on Sunday mornings and connect with one another and commune around the gospel and connect with those who love Jesus and have the same spirit. And we’re filled up and we grow. That’s a wonderful thing to have. But it cannot happen always. Joel has to go home eventually, right? But even if we could gather all the time, even if it was possible for us to do that, we shouldn’t. We have been sent on a gospel proclaiming mission to a world full of people who we are called to love, and they live in a world of sin that we are not to love.

So, in a sense, what we do on Sunday mornings, what we do in our shepherding communities and in our Bible studies, is we fill our tanks with God’s love so that we can take it to a world that needs it. And so that means very soon we will all be once again on the wrong sideline. We’re going to be surrounded by people who are loving and cheering for things that we are called to reject. How do we keep our love for the Lord strong when the things of the world crowd in and try to capture our love? Well, I’d suggest that the answer is as simple as this. If Christ is your greatest treasure, if he is your greatest treasure, the most prized possession that you have, then you’re going to do everything you can to be near him, and you’re going to reject anything that would take you away from him. The more your love grows for the Lord, the more your joy and delight in this world comes with walking in his light. The more that is the source of your joy, the more you will hate the darkness. If Jesus is your greatest treasure, if you prize him above everything else, then you would protect his central role in your life at all costs, and you would want everything good in your life to come from him.

That’s where you would receive your joy, your goodness. You’d be looking for God’s gifts in your life, and you would use those gifts to honor him and everything that comes at you that draws you away from him. You would fight against that. You would take up arms against that. If anything tried to abduct you away from your greatest love, you’d do everything in your power to destroy that enemy and be with the one you love. Friends, that means that we don’t need a list of rules for what we need to do this week. You don’t need a list of commands to make sure that you can live your life you’re supposed to, according to the rules of Christianity. What you need is for Christ to be your greatest love. You need him to be the greatest love of your life. If you’re struggling with sin, you might need some barriers and disciplines in your life. That would be a very wise thing to do. You need some people to come around you and help you to make some better choices in your life. No question about that. But what you ultimately need is for greater love in your heart for Christ. How do you grow in love? How do you do that? How do you do that with anyone? Well, you have to spend time with them, right? You need to cultivate the relationship with that person.

If you want to know Christ in communion with the Father, so that he’s your greatest love, so that God is your greatest treasure, it’s going to take a lot more than a than an hour-long service 2 or 3 times a month. I’ll tell you that, right? You don’t love anybody and then just see them sometimes. Right? You don’t grow in your love and then just check in every once in a while. You commune with, you walk with through life. Spiritual disciplines that develop our hearts delight in the Lord is a different topic for a different sermon. We can’t go into it all this morning, but I want to leave you with this. If you want to walk daily in the light of Christ, you will need to develop your relationship with him daily. It’s going to have to be a daily thing. Yes, come to church. Glad you’re here. Glad you came this morning. Yes, go to Bible study. But you cannot rely entirely on others to help you develop your love for Jesus. You’re going to need to be in relationship with him daily on your own. And that means you’re going to need to know his word. And that means you’re going to have to be in prayer. And you’re going to have to cultivate, commune with the Lord on your own every day. Seek him as your greatest treasure. Love him as your greatest companion. Would you pray with me?

Podcast (sermons): Play in new window | Download