The World's Ways

You are listening to a message from Thrive Community Church, a church located in Southwest Florida. For more info, visit us at thrive-fl.org. We have a trio of things that are working in opposition to God's will in your life, in mine, and in this world, and they are the devil, the world, and the sinful self, and they run on lies. Lies that we not only believe or fall for, but we want to fall for, and we live them out. And that is the basic problem. But we're going to start with 1 John 2. 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. For all that is in the world, the desires of the flesh and the desires of the eyes and pride of life, is not from the Father, but is from the world. The world is passing away along with its desires, but whoever does the will of God abides forever. So what in the world? What does the Bible mean by love not the world? I thought it says as well, the Gospel of John says, for God so loved the world. So which one is it, right? Well, the question is, what does the word world mean in this text? And by the way, just like in English, have you ever noticed that, here comes the Greek. Is that what somebody said? Yes. Here comes the Greek. Have you ever realized that the word run in English can mean about a million different things? You know, you can run a campaign, you can run to the store, and actually most of you when you run to the store don't actually run physically to the store, but you get in your car, right? Your nose can run. I think they mean different things. The same is with the word cosmos, which is the biblical word used here, the Greek word cosmos. It's where we get the word cosmos or cosmology. It can mean three different things specifically in the Bible. The first is the one that is used more or less for all the earth or all the cosmos praises the Lord. So all of creation. It means the whole kit and caboodle. So everything. Then there's the second way, which is that the people of the world are called the world, in the sense that for God so loved the world, the people within the world, the whole of his creation. And the third way, though, is the one that we're focusing on today, and that is how we understand the system that the world is set up like now. After the fall of Adam and Eve. And that, as Eugene Peterson in one of his books says, it's really more like an atmosphere or a mood that the world's in. It's how society has a default attitude, which is in opposition to God, wanting to deify itself rather than to glorify God, and wanting to kind of take control away from God. That's kind of what we mean by the world in this. Abraham Heschel in his book, The Prophets, puts it this way. Modern interpretations see history as the arena in which man reigns supreme with the forces of nature as his only possible adversary. Man is alone, free and growing stronger. God is neither either non-existent or unconcerned. It is human initiative that makes history, and it's primarily by force that constellations change. Man can attain his own salvation. That is the attitude of the world. That's what you aren't to love or get involved in, in that sense. Kind of, we're going to do it our way. We're going to have it our way. We together will do what we want. We're going to define it. By the way, the Greek word kosmos is also where we get the word cosmetic from. We like to put on a pretty face. But underneath much of what the world is doing, there are false motives, base desires going on. We talk so much in a kind of surface way while we let our jealousies and our envies and our rivalries kind of run the show underneath. That's what Jesus actually is talking about when he's in the Sermon on the Mount saying, hypocrisy, you hypocrite. It's putting kind of lipstick on a pig, as people say. It's that we're trying to look good while we've got something else going on underneath. Kind of doing some good things for bad reasons. Different motivations. So in our society, we recast rebellion as freedom of expression. We make up lust and call it love. We cover over vengeance and call it justice. We masquerade oppression as law and order. We spiritualize things by saying, you know, I think the Lord really wants me to, when we really mean I want to. It's just the way the world is, you might say. That's the way the world works. And then we've got to work the same way because that other side is doing that. So we better do it too, even then some, to make sure that we're counteracting them. And in the process, we're just acting like the world. John Mark Comer summarizes the world system. He says, in summary, I would define the world as a system of ideas, values, morals, practices, and social norms that are integrated into the mainstream and eventually institutionalized in a culture corrupted by the twin sins of rebellion against God and the redefinition of good and evil. You know, so the Bible from the beginning to the end has a narrative, a sto...