In this final part we will look at the third enemy in the battle for our souls – the world.
Summary
‘The brutal honesty about normal’ – In various ways, society often blurs moral lines because of popular opinion or desire. And we all come under pressure to conform. The idea of a world which is ruled by the evil one, which tempts us away from the way of Jesus and which is hostile to God and us, as Christians, is a clear theme of the New Testament. Bear in mind that the word used for the world in the NT can just mean the earth, our humanity (the object of God’s love) but also this sense of a social and cultural system that is anti-God. It is where people give in to their flesh and these base desires become normalised. The world is a society which tries to live independently from God and which redefines good and evil based on these disordered desires. It is the sin of Adam and Eve ‘gone viral.’ And it spreads like a virus – it operates as a social contagion, spreading by the herd instinct in society. The socially accepted becomes ‘true’. But ‘crowds lie.’ 1 John 2:16 lays out the three lusts that are intrinsic to the world – the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes and the pride of life. These distorted desires are not just tolerated but celebrated in our time. But the wisdom of the world is foolishness to God. This does not mean that we are against everything society values but the early church grew because of its difference from the world. Our way of being different will not fit with either the right or the left, as politics becomes the new religion, each side locked in a kind of holy war. Much of what we call culture is what Jesus called the world and is an enemy to the soul. We are not against the people of the world, we are for them by being against the system of the world.
‘A remnant’ – for decades the church has not warned of the dangers of the world. But the pull of the world is even greater now in our ‘post-Christian world.’ This age wants some of the fruits of Christianity in the West without acknowledging God. There is a danger of us getting ideologically colonized by the world, through the influence of ‘soft power’ – by persuasion rather than coercion e.g. by Hollywood and advertising. We have to ask ourselves, where are we being assimilated into the culture? The biggest danger is when our faith gets blended or mixed with the cultural values. This worldliness then becomes self-justifying – an ‘echo chamber for the flesh.’ Our spiritual disciplines are the weapon against this and a most basic discipline is participation in church community as a counterculture to the world, ‘an alternative society’. The church needs to be fine about not fitting in with the culture. Being part of a church includes the Sunday meeting – as a deprogramming from the culture – but is much more than that. It needs to be ‘a thick web of interdependent relationships between resilient disciples of Jesus’. In our time, church must be a community of deep relational ties, of holiness (especially in relation to sexuality) and of order and stability in a culture of chaos and anxiety. We do this by together developing a rule of life and by consciously joining a remnant, or creative minority, that lives as exiles in this world and offering a beautiful resistance to the world.
For Reflection/Discussion:
- Where do you see the moral lines being blurred in the culture and the church being affected by this?
- How can we show that we are for the people of the world while being against the cultural system of the world?
- How do you see spiritual disciplines being weapons in the ‘beautiful resistance’ to the world?
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There will be a brief post to cover the Epilogue coming soon