New Theses for a New Reformation #2 Worldliness

We must believe that the love of the world is hatred of God.

Whatever happened to worldliness? Time was when worldliness was a front and center concern to most Christians. Eventually it became the exclusive domain of fundamentalists. Now, only cranks are worried about worldliness. Cranks, and the apostle John. John tells us, “Do not love the world or the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him” (I John 2:15).

There’s a scary thought. John isn’t merely telling us that it’s a bad thing to love the world. He isn’t merely calling us to stop loving the world. He is reaching a conclusion about the state of our souls, if we love the world. Loving the world means we are outside the faith. How do we escape?

We think we escape by defining down what worldliness actually is. When it was only the fundamentalists who had this worry, worldliness meant smoking and playing cards. Now, if we think about it at all, we think it must mean committing adultery or embezzlement. As long as we avoid the really bad sins, we seem to reason, we have evaded the charge of worldliness. We may not be sleeping with someone but we have taken the world as our lover. We may not be funneling funds into an offshore account, but we are still serving mammon.

The devil is an anti-Christ. He is not only against Christ, but presents himself as an alternate Christ. He takes all that is wrong and false, and seeks to disguise it as good and godly. How strange then that the evangelical church has taken as its approach to the world the strategy that seeks to copy the world as much as is possible. We think that the more like them we can be, the more of them will become us. To put it another way, to borrow from that demon Screwtape, via C.S. Lewis, we are thinking we are making our way in the world, when all the while the world is making its way into us.

One of two words translated as “church” in our Bibles, ekklesia, means when translated literally, “the called out ones.” We are called out of the world, called to be a distinct people, a peculiar people. We are called to be a city on a hill. Our Master has told us that we are not better than our Master. He was hated by the world, and if we are His, we too will be hated.

When we hate the world enough to be set apart, ironically, we demonstrate sufficient love for our enemies to call them to come out from among them, to enter into the kingdom of God. When we love the world such that we are just like them, we hate them enough to leave them in the darkness. When He is our delight, when it is His blessing that we seek, when we have given up everything that He would be our own, to have the Pearl of Great Price, then we can be of good cheer. For then we, in Him, have already overcome the world.