Do Not Love The Things Of This World!

Avoid worldly pleasures and seats of pow'r;
Do not love the things this world can provide;
Sing praises to God ev'ry worship hour,
And dwell with joy among the Christian tribe!
Help adorn the Bride* for her royal Groom**,
Your constancy a glory to our God;
The meanest tasks for Him more noble loom;
Better to sweep for Him than wield earth's rod***!
He values most what carnal men despise,
And hates their proudest tokens of esteem;
What this world calls trash, God values most prize,
Their trophies bitter balm to the Supreme!
Be not found with the getters and spenders;
Cast your earthly lot with church attenders!

*Bride = the church; **Groom = Jesus; ***earth's rod = ruler of earth

The best and simplest way to describe how Jesus taught believers to live is to despise this world and everything in it; not the people---love them. In His Sermon on the Mount, contained in Matthew 5-7, in effect, He told them to live opposite to the way that is most popular in their world, and John told us the same thing.

"Do not love the world or anything in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father [God] is not in him. For everything in the world---the cravings of sinful men, the lust of his eyes and the boasting of what he has and does---comes not from the Father but from the world. The world and its desires pass away, but the man who does the will of God lives forever." (1 John 2:15-17) [Brackets added]

By the term "world" John is speaking of man-made activities and attractions, which are invariably perverted by Satan to draw people away from following God. The Christian is taught to avoid these popular pursuits and to remain immersed in worshiping God; prayer and Bible study; telling others the good news of the gospel. In other words, he is to be like a fish swimming upstream against the swift current of popular culture; thus, he will be noticed by the lost multitude going downstream, and his counter life style will be the most powerful way to witness to them, trying to persuade them to join him.

There is no age that needs this commandment more than today, for technology has inundated us with television, cellular telephones, MP3's, video games, computers, DVD's, CD's, and you name it; if we don't have it yet, it's coming soon. I am persuaded that this generation of people are moving farther from God each day, as a direct consequence of the technology explosion. Television alone is the greatest purveyor of evil, followed by moving films. When Clark Gable, as Rhett Butler speaking to Scarlett O'Hara in the 1939 movie, "Gone With The Wind", said, "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn!", it unleashed a cyclone of public profanity that has so desensitized our culture that entire families, Christians and non-Christians alike, can sit in front of a TV set in their living room watching a movie so laced with vulgarity that it would make a brothel madam blush!

Do you have a favorite TV show? What about "Survivor"? That show is a perfect example of what John had in mind. Of course, he did not have a clue to the technology that dominates today's culture, but he was an apostle of Jesus, who taught him the sinful nature of the minds of men. You may think you can watch such things without their having an effect on you, but I have a news flash for you: If you can watch a single episode of Survivor without blushing at the profanity, sex, and sinfulness portrayed as an approved technique of behavior, and you are a follower of Christ, you have already been affected. How can you witness to lost people that their life styles are wrong when yours is no different?