I am not, by any stretch of the imagination, a sports fan. I hate football, I absolutely loathe racing, and I can think of a hundred things I would love to do more than watch a basketball game. I don’t know who’s coaching who, I don’t know what players have what stats, I have no idea who’s going to the finals, and I don’t care. I don’t watch ESPN, I don’t wear jerseys, and I find that the majority of athletes who most people love are self-obsessed jerks. But despite that fact, there is one sport which has always held a special place in my heart, and that’s baseball.
I have an ingrained childhood love for baseball, as far as I’m concerned it’s the only “team” sport still in existence, though that is slowly fading away as well. To me, baseball isn’t about the individual players and making predictions. The heart of baseball, in my mind, is having a passionate devotion to your team, regardless of whether the talking heads are predicting a good season or not. Every game your team is in, they’re going to win, or they’re supposed to win anyway.
Now, having grown up in the family I did, that team for me is the St. Louis Cardinals. I’ve said more than once in my life that they are “God’s team,” and I have an initial distrust of anyone who willingly admits to being a Cubs fan. For me, to disown the Cardinals would be akin to saying “I hate puppies,” or “the Fourth of July is a crappy holiday.” It goes against the core of my being.
I watched the season unfold in 2004, but of course the height of the year was the playoffs. I couldn’t contain myself as I watched Sox come from behind with that historic series and overturn the Evil Empire that is the New York Yankees. It was a poetic victory. There were the years of animosity between the two teams; there was the arrogance of the Yankee players versus the passion and good humor of the Sox. And ultimately, it was just fun to watch a bunch of clean cut punks get taken down by what looked like an unruly band of pirates. It was amazing.
But, of course, the games didn’t end with the playoffs; no, there was a World Series yet to come. And, of course, who did my new heroes the Sox face in that 2004 Series but my beloved Cardinals, the “team of my youth” if you will. What do I do? Who do I root for? How to I deal with this unfortunate dilemma. One evening, while having dinner with my parents and brothers, I made the mistake of saying “the Red Sox deserve a win, it’s been so long for them.” I still don’t think my dad’s forgiven me for my divided loyalty that season.
I learned an important lesson that year, one which relates to what John has to speak to us about this morning, and that is this: when the games on, you can’t love both teams. When it comes to a game, you can be apathetic, or you can love one team, but you can’t love ‘em both. You can’t say at the top of the inning “way to hit Big Papi,” and at the bottom of the inning say “quit whining about your ankle Schilling, ya whimp.” It just doesn’t work that way. You can’t hope for both teams to win.
In our passage this morning, John is speaking to a community of people devoted to God which had been infiltrated by a group of people seeking the approval of the non-Christian world. “It doesn’t work that way,” he tells them. “The way the Christians live is diametrically opposed to the way the non-Christian world lives.” The core of the Christian life, namely, having faith in God in Christ, goes against the core of worldly life, namely having faith in what your flesh and eyes desire, and in your possessions. It echoes Christ saying that a slave cannot serve two masters, for he will end up loving the one and hating the other. “In the same way,” He says, “you cannot serve both God and Mammon,” or the god of money and possessions.
John tells us:
15(Z) Do not love the world or the things in the world.(AA) If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him.
So, this first verse is difficult for me, as I’m sure it is for most people. I mean, on the one hand it instantly resonates, and something instinctively tells you that the things of “the world,” this vague concept of something out there, something inherently selfish in nature, are opposed to the way God wants things. And I ought to start out with an initial clarification, to love the world as John is putting it here is different from being tempted by the world, or having desires, or sinning and messing up on a daily basis. As we’ve covered several times already, John tells us that if we deny we have sin in our lives we’re lying, but if we continue to confess our sins Christ continues to forgive us and purify us. What John is talking about here is not individual sins, but a devotion to the world. There is a sense here that to love the world is to be completely defined by this love, to have it be the main characteristic of what makes you who you are, and not that you are just from time to time seduced by it.
But I have to wonder, is the world, i.e. everything we experience from day to day, what is sinful, all of it, all of our day to day joys? Is that what John means? I don’t think so. I mean, God created the world, He created it good, He loves it, and He came in the flesh to redeem it, all of it. Throughout the Scriptures we see people praising all the good that’s still left in the world, despite the sin and evil which seems to often be so prevalent.
Instead, I think “the world” is kind of like a Christian code-word or catch-phrase for all the things that are “corporately sinful,” things that are sinful and involve other people either joining in on the fun or being the motivation behind it. William Barclay put it this way, he says: “to John the world was nothing other than pagan society with its false standards and its false values and its false gods.”
Now why does John write this, where does this fit in the story? Well, as we had talked about last week, those who had infiltrated the community John was writing to wanted to create a version of Christianity that was “respected” by the Roman society which it was surrounded by. They wanted to adapt the teachings of the Church to philosophical and religious contexts already present in the Roman world.
Of course, today many Scripture scholars refer to the teachings of Jesus as “radical;” which is a word I think communicates well the truth of the situation, even though many of those same scholars miss the spiritual depth of what they’re saying. Of course, radical being derived from the Latin word for root, the teachings of Jesus were “radically different,” they were “rooted in something else” than what the surrounding world was rooted in. And this teaching of Christ, this life of faith in God, was meant to work its influence upon the world, not the other way around.
Of course the Church today still struggles with this very same issue; what does it mean to say we are “in the World but not of the World?” So often, regardless what stripe of Christian you are, whether Methodist, Baptist, Lutheran, Presbyterian, Fundamentalist, Evangelical, or Liberal, all branches are affected in some way or another by this desire to make Christianity “respectable” by the standards of the world. One of the most popular phrases amongst Christians of any type is “well I’m not ‘that kind’ of Christian.” Sometimes those distinctions are necessary, of course, but I think, often, we use it to appease whoever it is we’re talking to who when they see a conflict between Christianity and “the ways of the world.” We want to tell people “well God doesn’t really expect you to give up that…” or “no, you can still go on about your business in this particular area… and still be a Christian.”
We do this when we’re speaking, as well, to all stripes of people. If their rich we’ll say “no, God doesn’t really mean you have to use your money to help others,” yet if politically liberal we’ll tell them “Christianity just boils down to liberating the oppressed.” We truncate Christianity, we take the bits and pieces we know will appeal to whomever we’re trying to attract to our pews and leave out the rest. Of course, this results in “a form of godliness, but lacking it’s power.”
On top of all that, this group, as I had mentioned last week, had the tendency to sometimes take what would be called in theology an “antinomian” approach to ethics. Antinomian is just a fancy Latin phrase for “against the law.” Hence, some of these folks tended to believe that it didn’t really matter what you did in life, sin as much as you want, it doesn’t hurt your spirit, because all that God cared about was whether you had that “secret knowledge,” the Heavenly password if you will. So long as you knew to say “the eagle flies at midnight” when St. Peter looked through the slot in the door, you were in. Pursue whatever sorts of sinful passions your body desired, it was evil by nature anyway, they thought, and you can’t do anything to change it.
And this, of course, is also a struggle for believers in our day to day lives. We know that we are saved by Christ’s work on the cross alone- by grace alone through faith alone. Nothing we do can earn us salvation; we can never be “good enough” to be saved. So, in the end, what does it matter if we sin or not? Well, as always, I think it comes down to what you’re putting your faith in. Are you putting your faith in God, or are you putting your faith in the things you can own? Not only that, but if we know that God has given us His Spirit that we might be able to “put to death the misdeeds of the flesh,” as Paul says, are we going to put our faith in Him and His way of living, or are we going to put our faith in ourselves and our way of living?
I use this analogy frequently, but it’s like going to a Doctor. It’s one thing to believe that the Dr. is telling you the truth when he gives you a certain diagnosis. It’s quite another to put faith in him and go under the knife. You may believe that Christ is exactly who He says He is and that you are exactly as He says you are- sick in your very soul. But it’s another matter altogether to put faith in Him to cure you.
John then gives us a quick summation of the things which are “of the world,” he says:
16For all that is in the world—(AB) the desires of the flesh and(AC) the desires of the eyes and pride in possessions—is not from the Father but is from the world.
John says these things are “not of the Father,” hence the impossibility of loving both them and Him. But how does that work? How can something exist which wasn’t made by God if God made everything? Well, think of it this way. Imagine a wooden chair. You know it’s a chair, I know it’s a chair, most people who see it know it’s a chair, and that’s what the manufacturer intended it to be. Now take away one leg. Is it still a chair? Well, it might be a bit wobbly, but it probably still looks like a chair; but I’m pretty sure the manufacturer is no longer responsible if you hurt yourself sitting in it. Then imagine taking away all the legs. Still a chair? Well, sort of. You could, in theory, still sit on it. It still sort of looks like a chair, if it’s a chair with a back to it. Now, take off the back, slap some paint on it, nail it to a wall and call it a painting. Is it still a chair? Not really. You could say it used to be a chair, or that it’s part of a chair I guess, but it’s not really a chair anymore unless we’re going to completely change the meaning of the word to suit a strange piece of home décor. Now it’s something different.
In a similar way, that’s how the things of God become things “not of God.” We change them, we warp them, we bend them out of shape, until, in a way, they’re something completely different. One of the most obvious examples, even though it’s a taboo subject to speak about from the pulpit, is sex. We’ve taken this God given gift which is intended to unite two people in a spiritual union until death, and meant to create new people, and we take the pleasurable aspect of it, twist it around, so that we make it only about the pleasure, finding a hundred new ways to make it more pleasurable and only pleasurable, and in the end we’ve completely bent it out of shape.
In the same way, these three categories which John lists, desires of the flesh, eyes, and pride in possessions, each contain an unending list of things which God has given us as good gifts but which we twist and warp and bend. And once we’ve mutilated them beyond all recognition, we cling to them desperately, we become obsessed with them. Inevitably we put our faith in them, we trust them to meet our needs and make our lives worthwhile. We rely on them and expect them to give us an eternal joy. But John says:
17And(AD) the world is passing away along with its desires, but whoever does the will of God abides forever.
This life is temporary, and these things are temporary. There is only one thing which is eternal and that is God Himself. He offers us eternal life, these offer us only passing comfort. Thus, if our allegiance is to Him, we’ve “put first things first,” we have our priorities in order, and we can receive those things of secondary importance, the joys of life, as they are, temporary joys, but if we lack them we can still find our contentment because we have all we need in Him.
This all flows from that first of the Ten Commandments. God tells us “I am the Lord your God, and you shall have no other gods before me.” Now, what does it mean to have a god? To have a god is to look to something for all your blessings, happiness, and life. When we read the story of Exodus, with Moses going up the mountain and receiving these commandments, then coming down the mountain to find the people worshiping a golden calf that they themselves had made, we think “how stupid. You’ve got the real God, the real creator of all that is, active in defending you and providing for you, saving you from your enemies and promising all sorts of blessing for you. But instead, you want to worship something which you have created, which you know is not in fact a god, which can’t do anything but sit there and look pretty. Are you crazy?” And yet we do the same thing.
We fashion from our lives, the works of our hands, these false gods, these things that we put our trust in. Instead of recognizing them as the created gifts which we have been blessed with by the creator, we confuse them for God Himself. We begin to believe that these are the things which truly make up life, which sustain us, which give our lives meaning, instead of recognizing that it is God who sustains us and gives our lives meaning, often through these things.
Think of it like food. Food is a blessing from God, for which we give Him thanks and enjoy. But say you were to hold on to that slice of bread, stick it in a shadow box, and start to worship it as the thing which sustains you. What would happen to that piece of bread? First it would get stale, then it would begin to grow mold, then it would start to fall apart, and eventually it would be little more than dust at the bottom of the box. In the same way the things of this world are also passing away, they are temporary, and not meant to be clung too. And we, likewise, may waste away with them if we do cling to them.
Instead, John says, he who does the will of the Father will abide, will live, forever, eternally. And what is the will of God? Jesus tells us in John chapter 6 verse 29: That you believe on Him whom He has sent (i.e. have faith in Jesus Christ). Thus John tells us in the next section, starting at verse 21:
21I write to you, not because you do not know the truth, but because you know it, and because no lie is of the truth. 22Who is the liar but(AO) he who denies that Jesus is the Christ? This is(AP) the antichrist, he who denies the Father and the Son. 23(AQ)No one who denies the Son has the Father. Whoever confesses the Son has the Father also. 24Let(AR) what you heard from the beginning abide in you. If what you heard from the beginning abides in you, then(AS) you too will abide in the Son and in the Father. 25And this is the promise that he made to us[d]—(AT) eternal life.
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