Christian Living

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There are many enemies of Christ and His Church and we who call Jesus Lord are in a state of war. Battles are joined, prisoners taken and prisoners set free. Some battles are grand in scale and envelope whole geographical regions, others are like community guerilla warfare and others like personal hand-to-hand combat. All Christians will fight in these battles until the Final Battle is won.

So, like any good warrior, we must know our enemies, anticipate their tactics and be on the offensive. Most of them, if not all, are subsumed under three familiar concepts: the world, the flesh and the Devil. Though separate ideas, they are in fact related to each other and co-dependent. They share a common goal of destroying God’s creation overlooking nothing that bears the imprint of God.

Because the entirety of creation is the target, consider first the idea of the ‘world’. This word in the Bible is translated from the Greek term kosmos and has a twofold meaning. It refers to the planet we are on and the universe in which it’s placed and, more importantly, it refers to that which is under the dominion of hostile spiritual forces following the leadership of Satan. In short, the battles we fight are not against the natural realm, but the supernatural (Eph 6:12). The immediacy of sense perception often deceives us into thinking the enemy is what we see in front of us, usually another human being, a group of one kind or another (think politics or religion) or even whole nations. The fact is the real enemy can’t be seen as a soldier can see his opponent because it is a spiritual warfare. Forgetting this, or not taking it seriously, is to risk defeat. We can be very confident of victory, however, because our Champion has already overcome the world (John 16:33). He has provided us with weapons appropriate for spiritual warfare (Eph 6:13-17) and we have the power of the Spirit’s indwelling which is “greater than he who is in the world (1 John 4:4).

An obvious but sometimes overlooked truth is that effective warfare requires that we not fraternize with the enemy. James in his intensely practical letter says that being “friends with the world is to be the enemy of God” (James 4:4). John adds to this by telling us to “…not love the world or the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world-the lust of the flesh, the lust of eyes, and the pride of life-is not of the Father but is of the world (1 John 2:15-16). The sobering part of this imperative is the word for ‘love’ that John uses. It is from the Greek word agape, which is precisely the love we are to give to God and our brothers and sisters in Christ. Thus, the point of these two writers is that being friendly with the world and loving the world is tantamount to not loving God and far worse, being the enemy of God.

Given all this, is there such a thing as a ‘worldly’ Christian and, if so, what characteristics might they have? Referring again to 1 John 2:15-16 we can say that at least the possibility of being a worldly Christian exists since he tells his readers, who are Christians, to “not love the world” and we get some clues as to what they might be like should they be caught in this trap. In the broadest of strokes, a worldly Christian is someone who has bought into the culture and morality of secular, ungodly society. They start out with fervent faith and commitment to the Lord but like those seeds that are choked off by the thorns (cares of this world and deceitfulness of riches) they eventually became unfruitful (Matt 13:22) and hardly distinguishable from unbelievers.

More specifically, loving the “things in the world” refers to giving oneself over to what the world produces, considers valuable and what it generates as the latest fad, whether in fashion or attitude. In every instance these things, whatever they might be, appeal to lust and pride in the form of desiring what is forbidden (lust of the flesh), seeking after and focusing on anything other than God (lust of the eyes) or narcissistic self exaltation, self-righteousness and disobedience (the pride of life). Embracing these three elements is to repeat what brought about the fall of humanity in the first place; they were effective then and remain so today.
Therefore, a favorite tactic of the Enemy is getting us to think the world provides for us, that our jobs, our businesses, our finances, our food, our shelter depend on it and therefore we had better pay attention to it lest we lose our livelihood. But just the opposite is true; we don’t have to depend on the world for anything. Jesus said we are in the world but not of the world (John 17:14-16). He said He would take care of us Himself (Phil 4:19) and never leave us nor forsake us (Heb 13:5, Matt 28:20). After all, it would be cruel of Him to tell us to have no allegiances to the world, resist its temptations, and then abandon us to our own devices. So the Bible is filled with promise after promise that God will take care of us so that we owe the world nothing. Knowing this gives us confidence to overcome the world and walk in the freedom of serving Jesus.

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