Defined by the God We See: Community

[Audio available here.]

“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 in possessions—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.” [1 John 2:15-17]

As you can see on the bulletin, this morning’s sermon is on community, and it might not be immediately obvious why we are going to spend time in 1 John 2 to talk about community. But if you hang with me, there are some crucial things I think we need to know and believe about God’s community called the church, but we need to see the realities in this text before we understand them.

John’s command in this text is very simple. Verse 15—“Do not love the world or the things in the world.” It is simple in the sense that there are realities called “the world” and “the things in the world,” and there is a reaction that the Church is supposed to have—do not love them. So what is that we are not supposed to love? Well, in the next verse he clarifies what he means by “the things in the world”—the desires of the flesh and the desires of the eyes and pride in possessions…” We talked about these kinds of things last week in the sermon on purity; this is pretty basic stuff—most Christians know that they are not supposed to lust and be prideful.

But John also tells us not to love “the world.” What is “the world”? This is not quite as straightforward as lust and pride. Thankfully John uses the word “world” often in his letter. One helpful clue to what he means by “world” comes at the end of the book, where he says, “we know that we are from God, and the whole world lies in the power of the evil one” (5:19). So one way to describe “the world” is the realm where Satan rules—the place where Satan’s ways are followed instead of God’s ways. Where women go to Oprah or Dr. Phil for guidance instead of God’s word. Where men spend their time at bars instead of fulfilling their God-given roles to nurture their families. Satan uses whatever he can to keep people under his sway and outside of the Kingdom of God. It is the same as how we would describe a part of town a gang controls; billboards are marked with the gang’s symbols and corners are controlled by their dealers and pimps. It is their realm of influence. And so when John talks about “the world,” he doesn’t mean planet Earth as much as the realm of Satan’s rule.

As we think about community this morning, I want us to focus on the reason why God commands us through John not to love the world. In verse 16 he says that the things in the world—the desires of the flesh, the desires of the eyes, and pride in possessions—did not originate with our heavenly Father. He did not create them, and certainly does not endorse him.

Now, hopefully your instinct is to say, “I thought the Bible says that God made everything; how can there be anything God didn’t make?” I believe the answer comes when we see the connection between the world and the things in the world. We saw that John talks about the ‘world’ as the realm where Satan rules. According to verse 16, this ‘world’ is where the ‘things of the world’—lust and pride—come from. The world produces lust; it gives birth to pride.

Think back with me to Genesis, where we read of the way Satan interacted with Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Notice that Satan did not create a different garden for Adam and Eve to live in. He didn’t offer them a new commandment; he simply distorted God’s word. That is Satan’s only power—deception. He takes the truth God has spoken and the things God has created, and he perverts them.

It’s like when you go to the carnival or state fair and enter into the house of mirrors. Have you ever been in one of those? It is a building you walk through where there are mirrors all over the place, and few of them are normal mirrors. Some make you look very short, while others make you look very tall. Some make you look very fat, while others make you look very skinny. The mirrors are shaped so that they distort reality. They take small features and make them look big, and take big features and make them look small.

This is what Satan does with God’s truth and God’s creation. He takes the most glorious, worthy, valuable being in the universe—God—and makes him look very small. He takes things that, compared to God, are very small—like making more money, looking more beautiful, having more clothes, driving a nice car—and makes them look big. He does not create anything new; he merely distorts the way we perceive what God already created, so that we get things backwards. We worship the creation rather than the creator.

Can you see how this results in lust and pride? Lust is craving after something that is not good for us to have. Fredrick Buechner calls lust “the craving for salt of a man who is dying of thirst.” We think “I have to have that!” about the very thing that will hurt us. Pride is misplaced confidence. It is putting trust in my abilities instead of God’s abilities. It is boasting in my possessions rather than God’s possessions. Lust and pride get everything upside down; they flow from a distorted view of reality. This is why John says that they come from the world—from the realm of Satan’s distorting rule.

Understanding lust and pride as the result of Satan’s perversion of creation helps us to understand why John tells us in verse 17 that “the world is passing away along with its desires.” John’s Revelation tells us that Satan will one day be thrown into the lake of fire and will no longer deceive anyone. That is, God will walk into the house of mirrors with a sledgehammer and shatter all the mirrors Satan has set up to distort God’s truth and creation.

But that day has not yet come. In fact, we live in a time where many people think that the distorting mirrors are telling the true story. They make money, power, comfort, security, success in business, and entertainment the really big things in life, and keep God a really small thing in their life. They think we make too much of God by submitting every part of our lives to him.

Now, here is the part where we get to the church. John has something different to say about the church—that is, the community of those God has redeemed from the world. Listen to what he says in verse 17—“the world is passing away along with its desires, but whoever does the will of God abides forever.” We who refuse to look at the mirror but look at the thing itself—we who live our lives in light of how great God is and how small this world’s pleasures are—we will abide forever! That is, we will continue living in fellowship with God, doing his will, long after he has shattered the mirrors.

In light of this, one way to describe the church is God’s eternal community. The church is the only grouping of people on the planet that will exist after the return of Christ. Countries that have been around for thousands of years will be no more. Universities that have been educating for hundreds of years will be no more. Hollywood, which has been making movies for decades will be no more. The church community will still be thriving long after these institutions are forgotten.

Another way to talk about this is that God’s community lives the lifestyle of the future. Those who live in lust and pride are leading a lifestyle that will soon fade away. We live a lifestyle that will last forever. The world is built on lies and deception, and only yields sorrow, futility, and despair. The life of following Jesus is built on God’s eternal truth, and will continue in the New Heavens and the New Earth. The so-called pleasures of Satan’s realm will be over at death—60, 80, 100 years from now. The true pleasures of God will be even sweeter in 60 thousand, 80 million, and 100 trillion years from now.

You want to freak out you coworker tomorrow morning? Ask him or her casually as you refill your coffee, “Ever thought about what you’ll be doing in 100 trillion years?” It’s a legitimate question; in fact it’s what we are asking when we share the gospel. And one way to maintain our fervency in evangelism is to remember that current allegiance to or rebellion against King Jesus will determine where your coworker will be in 100 trillion years.

I think the most crucial application question we can ask ourselves is this: how does the church think about herself and the world around her, when that world is under the influence of Satan and passing away? Or I could rephrase the question using the carnival illustration: how does the church thrive in the hall of mirrors?

Let me explain my concerns behind this question. I see the pendulum swinging to two possible extremes regarding how the church relates to the world. One is that we might see the distorted images in the mirrors Satan has set up and actually believe them, even though we know better. That is, we might hear the Supreme Court ruling against God or listen to a brilliant professor bash Christianity or see a preview for a movie that exalts sensuality and violence—and believe that they are in the majority and we are in the minority. We might believe that our lifestyle that pursues purity and submits to God is abnormal, since the world thinks that it is normal to sleep around and take God out of parenting and treat all human beings as if they are basically good, when the reality is that these ways of thinking and living are on a collision course with the wrath of God.

The upshot of this is that we might become ashamed of the church; that we might hear the world marginalize us and believe that we really are in the margins; that we might forget that we are God’s eternal community living God’s eternal lifestyle, and forget that the ferocious lion we see in the mirror is really only a helpless kitten.

On the other hand, my concern in the opposite direction is that when we realize that the ferocious lion is just a little kitten, we might become arrogant to those outside the church and laugh at them for being afraid when they saw it. The goal of the Church is not to prove that we are right and the world is wrong. Do you remember why the church exists? It is on the back of your bulletin: we exist to glorify God. We exist to walk through the hall of mirrors with eyes fixed on our great God, undaunted by the out-of-proportion images around us. And as we pursue our God, we plead with tears to others, “Don’t be fooled by those images: they are only lies! That’s not a lion; it’s just a kitten! Those mirrors will soon be smashed; there is nothing there of any eternal significance. Turn your eyes to God—you can do that forever!”

This is not only what we say to the world; it is what we say to each other. When God saves us, he places us in community. He gives us the gift of the Holy Spirit, by which we are connected to Christ for salvation and connected to one another in the pursuit of sanctification. And the Spirit works in our midst to make us more and more like the perfect, eternal community that we will be in the New Heavens and New Earth.

He works in our midst now as we walk through this hall of mirrors. And when a sister is shrieking at the distorted mirror of loneliness, the Spirit uses the community to turn her eyes back to God and remind her that it was a distortion. And when a brother stumbles curiously toward the mirror of lust, the Spirit uses the community to remind him of the beauty of Christ and the smallness of sexual sin. And when one of us finds a mirror that makes us impressed with ourselves the Spirit uses the community to remind us that God is the only one who is eternally impressive—who will still be impressive after the mirrors are smashed.