View source for What makes worldliness so seductively

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What makes worldliness so seductively insidious is that it makes us feel warm and secure with what is actually dangerous spiritual error. This terrifyingly comfortable delusion is strongly opposed to God and his ways and must be avoided at all costs. There can be no more compromise between God and the world than between God and the devil:

James 1:27 Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world.

James 4:4  . . . don’t you know that friendship with the world is hatred toward God? Anyone who chooses to be a friend of the world becomes an enemy of God.

1 John 2:15-16 Do not love the world or anything in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For everything in the world – the cravings of sinful man, the lust of his eyes and the boasting of what he has and does – comes not from the Father but from the world.

John 7:7 The world cannot hate you, but it hates me because I testify that what it does is evil.

John 14:17 the Spirit of truth. The world cannot accept him, because it neither sees him nor knows him. But you know him, for he lives with you and will be in you.

John 15:19 If you belonged to the world, it would love you as its own. As it is, you do not belong to the world, but I have chosen you out of the world. That is why the world hates you.

John 17:14 I have given them your word and the world has hated them, for they are not of the world any more than I am of the world.

Am I the only one who finds those last two Scriptures disturbing? Does the world hate us or are we enticed by its approval?

Respected theologians and the revered leaders of God’s people considered Jesus not just weird, but a dangerous heretic. Jesus was ostracized not merely by the ungodly but by devout, clean living folk who devoted their entire lives to serving God. He was despised by the very people everyone would expect to be the most spiritually discerning. Even his most loyal followers were repeatedly shocked, offended and perplexed by his unorthodox views and unexpected behaviour.

To be truly of God is to put yourself at odds not merely with those we tend to label as worldly but with almost everyone.

Luke 6:26 Woe to you when all men speak well of you, for that is how their fathers treated the false prophets.

Matthew 10:22,24-25 All men will hate you because of me, but he who stands firm to the end will be saved. . . . A student is not above his teacher, nor a servant above his master. It is enough for the student to be like his teacher, and the servant like his master. If the head of the house has been called Beelzebub, how much more the members of his household!

Matthew 10:36-38 a man’s enemies will be the members of his own household. Anyone who loves his father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; anyone who loves his son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me; and anyone who does not take his cross and follow me is not worthy of me.

Almost from birth, we have each been unavoidably, unconsciously mesmerized by the supernaturally evil power called the world. Had we spent our entire lives hidden in a monastery, cut off from all non-Christian education, entertainment and influence, I don’t believe it would have protected us from the world, any more than such a lifestyle would protect us from the devil or the flesh. Manipulated by evil spiritual powers, worldly influences would get to us through other Christians. Not only are non-Christians affected by the world, all Christians and their beliefs and teachings are likewise vulnerable, just as all of us are exposed to temptation. We must continually be alert to the possibility of it infecting the presumptions – the truths we consider too certain to even question – of us all.

When Jesus warned against the yeast/leaven of the Pharisees (Matthew 16:6,12) he was saying that the misguided thinking of respected Bible teachers spreads like wildfire, wreaking havoc in every direction. A speck of yeast in just a part of the dough multiplies until every part of the dough is irreversibly changed (Related Scriptures: Corrupting Leaven

1 Corinthians 5:1-2,6-7 It is actually reported that there is sexual immorality among you, and of a kind that does not occur even among pagans: A man has his father’s wife. And you are proud! Shouldn’t you rather have been filled with grief and have put out of your fellowship the man who did this? . . . Your boasting is not good. Don’t you know that a little yeast works through the whole batch of dough? Get rid of the old yeast that you may be a new batch without yeast – as you really are. For Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed.

Galatians 5:8-9 That kind of persuasion does not come from the one who calls you. “A little yeast works through the whole batch of dough.”). 

“Their teaching will spread like gangrene,” wrote Paul (2 Timothy 2:17). To Christians in danger of slipping from correct doctrine, the Apostle warned elsewhere, “Do not be misled: ‘Bad company corrupts good character’ ” (1 Corinthians 15:33), implying that we are all vulnerable to being corrupted by the mistaken thinking of people around us.

My teaching is sure to be infected by it and I spread my infection to everyone who reads my writings. I passionately long to strip worldliness from my teaching but, like everyone else, I am too much under the spell of those aspects of worldliness that have snuck up on me, and too infatuated with them to recognize them as being erroneous.

It is largely because of this that just about my every webpage has a link to a warning that my teachings are sure to contain spiritual error. In my best attempt to maximize reading of that warning, I have titled the link My Shame, hoping it will so arouse people’s curiosity that they will click on it and read it. That does not remove the danger, of course, nor my responsibility for spreading the error, but being alert to the danger is far safer than being ignorant of it. Imagining that we are beyond the possibility of being blinded by worldly thinking is an example of pride that comes before a fall.

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