The ways of God vs The ways of the world
Pastor Rollan Fisher
HOW people are looking for meaning is by following the ways of the world when they should be following the ways of God.
Focus: We will find rest in Jesus when we choose the ways of God over the ways of the world.
The Love of God
The Ways of the World
The Way of the Cross
1 John 2:15-17
Do not love the world or the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world— the desires of the flesh and the desires of the eyes and pride of life —is not from the Father but is from the world. And the world is passing away along with its desires, but whoever does the will of God abides forever.
The Love of God
The love of God must be our highest aim when trying to find purpose and fulfillment in life.
When John speaks of loving not the world, he is not in this context speaking of the people of the world, but the ways of the world.
The love of the ways of the world compete with the love of the love of God and his ways.
If you love the ways of the world, it pushes the love of God out of your heart.
The Ways of the World
In the end, the ways of the world take life rather than give it.
The desires of the flesh speaks of wanting to be satisfied by purely carnal appetites and material things.
This can include: sex, its media substitutes, alcohol, different types of drugs, food (think emotional eating), etc.
It is at the root of hedonism and is by definition has no hope of permanent satisfaction.
In this case you will never have enough and will never have arrived.
The desires of the eyes speaks of having an inordinate desire for the things that you see to satisfy you.
It can be a man or a woman, a material possession, a home or anything upon which you can place your hopes of momentary or sustained happiness.
Proverbs 18:11
A rich man's wealth is his strong city, and like a high wall in his imagination.
It all has to do with lust, which is why the NIV translates the word:
1 John 2:16-17 (NIV)
For everything in the world—the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life—comes not from the Father but from the world. The world and its desires pass away, but whoever does the will of God lives forever.
Lust is an inordinate desire for something that does not belong to you with the blessing of God.
It is making good things ultimate things.
This is at the root of covetousness.
In this case, nothing that you have will ever be enough as long someone else has something that you do not.
The Biblical antidote to this is contentment.
The pride of life speaks of desiring to have what we have and what we have accomplished determine our worth rather than God who made us and Christ to whom we belong.
In this case, nothing that you ever do will be good enough, because there is always someone to whom you can compare yourself who is smarter, stronger, more beautiful, has more, etc.
In our flesh, we all want to boast, whether privately or publicly, of what we have and what we have done.
We all want to be recognized and appreciated.
People look for work where this can be the case.
Recent commercials for Workhuman*…
This is the sneaky one, especially in our culture.
We want to see the results of our labor and be encouraged by it.
The walk of faith is continually sowing into that which you do not yet see.
This is challenging when you are sharing the gospel and making disciples, whether in your home or outside of it, looking for change in people’s lives.
We were built for a sense of reward for our efforts.
We look for where we can get a hit of dopamine.
This is why the internal pull towards things like pornography without the effort of relationship, making money and having material rewards has such a strong internal pull on people’s hearts.
*To love God and find rest in Christ, you must continually sow into what he says is good and right by faith, even when you don’t feel it.
Breakpoint article written 10/29/21
In Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis described faith as “the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted, in spite of your changing moods.” His is a crucial observation for a world that often pits reason against faith. Lewis understood that faith must always be guarded against the assaults of changing emotion.
Lewis powerfully illustrated this point in The Silver Chair, the fourth book of The Chronicles of Narnia series. The story opens with Jill Pole, a typical English schoolgirl, being called suddenly (and even more strangely than anyone before her) into Narnia. Aslan, the Great Lion, gives her the task of rescuing Prince Rilian, son of Caspian, who had been missing for ten years. To help her, Aslan gives Jill signs to recite and remember, along with this dire warning:
“Here on the mountain, the air is clear … as you drop down into Narnia, the air will thicken. Take great care that it does not confuse your mind.”
Jill learns quickly just how true his warning is. Eventually, having left the surface of Narnia and descended to the depths of the underworld, she, Eustace Scrubb, and Puddleglum the Marshwiggle find Narnia’s lost prince. He’s so deeply enchanted by the Witch’s dark magic that he can no longer tell madness from reality, truth from lies. It’s only in the full grasp of his “madness,” which actually turns out to be his moments of lucidity, that the prince unknowingly invokes the final sign given to Jill: he calls on the name of Aslan.
In that moment, Lewis masterfully portrays the fog of doubt and deception. Under the Witch’s enchantment, it’s not clear who is a friend and who is an enemy. In fact, the three adventurers feel sure that the prince will attack them the moment he is free, but as Puddleglum reminds them in a moment of powerful courage, they’ve sworn to obey the words of Aslan. Only that better commitment, which might be called the right ordering of their loves, sees them through. They cut Rilian loose and break the Silver Chair, destroying the power of the Witch's curse.
Lewis, of course, knew what it was to struggle with doubt. “Now that I am a Christian,” he wrote, ‘I do have moods in which the whole thing looks very improbable: but when I was an atheist, I had moods in which Christianity looked terribly probable.” That’s why faith mattered to Lewis: it grounds us in reality, even in the face of danger or uncertainty.
Today, a generation of young people are debilitated by feelings of meaninglessness, doubt, and depression. They consistently hear that their feelings are their best and highest guide; they’re encouraged to look inside and follow their hearts. Aslan’s advice is better: “Remember the signs.” In other words, only by looking to fixed, sure reference points outside of ourselves, can we orient and know the way forward.
When the Witch returns to the cave, attempting to deceive Jill, Eustace, and Puddleglum again, she offers us a dialogue that could substitute for modern textbooks on epistemology.
“What is the sun?” the Witch asks the children, who have been underground for so long, all they have is a vague memory of things like Aslan, the sun, and the overworld. “It’s like a lamp,” one offers. But the Witch laughs this off. “Your sun is a dream, and there is nothing in that dream that was not copied from the lamp.” In other words, “the lamp is the real thing; the sun is [just] a children’s story.”
Materialism offers the same argument. Because the idea of God helped us survive, goes the argument, people came to believe in him as real. But all we’re doing is taking concrete things around us and inventing fairy stories about their origins. Just as the sun can be forgotten in a subterranean kingdom, Christians can sometimes feel as if there is no immediate proof of God’s existence.
GK Chesterton addressed this default appeal to materialism. “As an explanation of the world, [it] has a sort of insane simplicity… we have at once the sense of it covering everything and the sense of it leaving everything out.” Materialism’s explanation for love, goodness, evil, and personhood is comprehensive, but ultimately guts these things of any real substance.
Likewise, in The Silver Chair, the sun, Narnia, and Aslan are real: in fact, they’re the most real things of all. It’s the Witch’s kingdom that is the shallow copy. In the end, only Puddleglum the Marshwiggle can hold on to the truth, which leads him to stomp out the fire and break the Witch’s spell for good.
The solution to doubt is, then, according to Lewis, faith. Not blind belief, but a commitment informed by reason, goodness, and imagination. What God has told us in the light of day and which we then know to be true, we should not doubt in the middle of our darkest night.
The only way forward is to, in the words of Aslan, “Remember the signs!”
The Way of the Cross
We will finally find rest and satisfaction in Jesus when we choose the way of the cross over the ways of the world.
The way of the world is self-indulgent, while the way of the cross is self-denial.
The way of the world is never truly satisfied because it is in pursuit of an unattainable life.
The way of the cross leads to great fulfillment because it leads to resurrection life in Christ.
“If you want to change the world, go home and love your family.”
-Mother Teresa
“I think I can understand that feeling about a housewife’s work being like that of Sisyphus (who was the stone rolling gentleman). But it is surely in reality the most important work in the world. What do ships, railways, miners, cars, government etc. exist for except that people may be fed, warmed, and safe in their own homes? As Dr. Johnson said, “To be happy at home is the end of all human endeavour”. (1st to be happy to prepare for being happy in our own real home hereafter: 2nd in the meantime to be happy in our houses.) We wage war in order to have peace, we work in order to have leisure, we produce food in order to eat it. So your job is the one for which all others exist…”
-Letters of C.S. Lewis
So where should my focus be?
What is worthy of love and pursuit while I live in this world?
Value the things that God values.
Pursue work with a Biblical worldview to cultivate the earth, society and give glory to God.
Second City Church - Pastor Rollan Fisher.
