Exhortation

John says, “Do not love the world or the things in the world,” and we immediately scurry around to find rationalizations and escape routes.

Is John saying that cigarettes and beer and symphony orchestras and dancing and watching movies and art museums and playing video games are inherently sinful? Didn’t God Himself love the world enough to send His own Son to die for it?

We don’t want to retreat from engagement with the culture and political life around us. We don’t want to be Gnostics. We don’t want to be Mennonites pietists and or prairie muffins.

When we’re honest, we recognize that these objections and rationalizations often – not always – reduce to a single fundamental objection: We don’t want to be uncool. We don’t want to stand out. We want to do whatever feels good, whatever makes us happy. But that’s precisely the attitude that John tells us to avoid.

Against all our rationalizations and justifications, John’’s warning is stark: Do not love the world, and he adds that those who do love the world don’t have the love of the Father. He poses an either/or: Your love can be oriented in one of two directions, toward the Father or toward the world, and there is no third way.

Of course, we must and we will define what John means by “world,” but at the outset we must vigorously resist the temptation to define John’s warning out of existence. We must resist the temptation to turn “Do not love the world” into “Do it your way.”

We have often flirted with the world, conforming to its desires and demands instead of living with steady devotion to the Father. And flirtation is precisely the right word for it: James says, “You adulteresses, do you not know that friendship with the world is hostility to God? Therefore whoever wishes to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God.”