Do Not Love The World. Live From The Love You Already Have

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All right, let’s pray real quick.

God, I do, once again, thank you. We thank you for your presence. We thank you for the way that we can fall on you when we can’t stand. It’s a beautiful image. You are our hope and our stay, our present help in time of need. You are the lifter of our head. You are the one in whom we have our forgiveness, our healing. You renew our life, God.

And so we are grateful. Would you turn our hearts and our minds, our wills, to who you are now? Would you open our eyes to all that needs to be seen? And as we are opened up to your presence and your love and your light, would we step into that light and that life that you offer?

In Jesus’ name, amen.

Amen.

I want you to picture a loving parent. Their daughter is grown, maybe 18, 19 years old, and they’ve decided to go overseas, to work abroad, to be on their own, to grow in independence. And as a gift of love, the mother hands her daughter a phone, not to replace their relationship, right, but to sustain it, to keep connection across great distance.

Call, text, share pictures. Let’s FaceTime. Let’s stay connected.

And that gift comes from a parent whose love was never rationed. There was always enough. There was enough time. There was enough attention. There was enough delight in her. A home full of love. She never had to earn this love.

And imagine the daughter lands on the other side of the ocean, and the phone starts teaching her a different story than the one she had grown up with. She scrolls, and as she scrolls, the message starts to form beneath all of the other messages:

You don’t have enough. You aren’t enough. You don’t belong. You’re not safe.

Someone else’s body, someone else’s house, someone else’s relationship, someone else’s career, someone else’s following. That’s what you need.

And all of these things are always slightly out of reach of what she actually has, and they’re always better than what’s in her hand. So she starts comparing and competing, comparing her life to her friends’ highlight reels, right? Feeling behind, feeling unsafe, unanchored. And the ads sharpen the ache that she has.

A newer phone would connect me better. It would connect me better to my parents, would connect me better to other people. Or this new thing, or this new whatever, this would ease the loneliness I feel. It would increase the connection I long for. This next thing would make me enough.

And so belonging, safety, security, significance, all of this, it goes on the market. And in the market, scarcity rules. There’s not enough to go around, right?

And so she picks up more shifts at work, not to live but to keep up. Less sleep, more hours. One rung—she’s always trying to climb to the next. She starts to resent her friends who have more. She starts to guard what she already has and protect it. She starts to measure the people around her as competition rather than as community and as kin.

And meanwhile, left unread are the messages from her mother and her father: I love you. How are you doing? There’s enough here for you. There’s always been enough. There’s no quota. There’s no competition. There’s just enough. A love given, meant to be shared and received.

So the world she’s living in and the world her parents speak from are two different worlds. They’re based on two different economies. One runs on scarcity and demands that she produce her worth. The other runs on abundance, on enough, and asks that she just receive that as a gift.

Our text today, verse 15, John says, “Do not love the world or anything in the world. If anyone loves the world, love for the Father is not in them.”

Now, we hear this, “Do not love the world,” and sometimes we go to, well, what does that mean? Am I not to love and enjoy a beautiful sunset, or a really good meal with really good friends, or the taste of coffee, or the way a flower opens up to the sun? Am I not to enjoy or be attached to these things?

I don’t think that’s what John is talking about. In fact, I don’t think this can mean that we are not to love and enjoy God’s good creation, because doesn’t God himself love his created world?

In Genesis 1:1, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” And what does it say seven times, the number in Hebrew of completion, of wholeness, of perfection? Seven times: it is good, it is good, it is good, it is good. God thinks the created material world is good, really good.

And in John 3:16, the verse we all know that football players will have under their eyelids, right, this season: “For God so loved the world”—the world, the same world that we’re talking about—”that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him will not perish but have everlasting life.”

So I don’t think John means we aren’t supposed to love and enjoy the world and the laughter we share and the people we can share our life with. He’s using the term “world” to speak of God’s good creation under the influence and in the bondage of the powers and principalities.

He’s speaking of the world, the fallen world, the way that it’s been infected by sin and that system of sin we talked about last week—a sin that is bigger than the sum of its parts, right? The powers and principalities, a system that includes people and philosophies that are in rebellion to God and that are walking around deceived, believing that the world is actually the point.

And this is where it returns to our phone story. What John is talking about is the world given as gift from a loving God to facilitate loving connection with God and with other people, to be a context of a shared life of love.

The world is a gift. The world that John says, “Do not love,” is a world distorted and made to be the point, the end. So it’s as if the gift becomes the pursuit rather than facilitating the pursuit—the relationship with God. Does that—is that making sense? Am I following? Are you following?

The gift we pursue as an end to itself. And when that happens, we forget the very lover of our soul, the very source of life, and that gift that the world is meant to connect us to that which gives us life. When we pursue the gift and forget the giver, we get cut off from life. Death, decay, violence, scarcity enters.

So John says there are three things the world preys on, the world nurtures in us and appeals to. The enemy uses this: the desire of the flesh, the desire of the eyes, and the pride of life.

Now, I want to camp out on the third one, the pride of life. The word “life”—we need to slow down here. In Greek, John had two different words he could have used here. One is zoe and the other is bios.

All right, so here we go. Zoe is the word John uses everywhere else in the letter when he’s speaking of the life that God brings, the eternal life that we have, the shared life of love that we have in community and in kinship.

It’s a word John uses everywhere else for the life that God gives, the life that lasts forever, the life that is on the inside, that speaks to who you really are deep down in God.

But that’s not the word he uses in verse 16. He uses the word bios, from which we get the word biography.

All right, what is a biography? The bios is your life as a story other people can see and read, your highlight reel. All right? Not who you are. It’s the life you’re building so other people will notice and see.

So the pride of bios means something like this: the pride you feel when you build the kind of life that others envy, or the kind of life that other people can see, the kind of life that you’ll gain admiration for.

Reminds me, when I was in college, I would write in my journal, and it was always a mixed-motive, kind of bad kind of thing, because I was always thinking, man, if I get famous, I better watch out. Like, I will write these letters because I kind of want to publish my journals, you know? And so you start writing in a curated way to say that this someday will be in my biography, the great biography of the life of Jesse, right?

Okay, so this is the bios desire. This is the desire. And so once you see that, the third one fits the other two: the desire of the body, the desires of the eyes. They fit within the pride of life, the bios, the life we’re trying to build.

And it appeals to presenting this kind of life that others can see and from which we can get what we most want: significance, belonging, security. If I have what others can see and see as value, I will be worth something.

So the desire of the flesh isn’t about—let’s just walk through these—the desires of the flesh. This is kind of the physical appetites that we have: food, shelter, sex, things like that.

Now, what this is not saying is that those desires are bad. This is speaking to the overindulgence of those things, to, again, making the gift rather than the giver the point.

And so the good gift of food, the good gift of sex, the good gift of beauty becomes the pursuit in itself. And it’s more about wanting to feel good right now, no matter what. It’s more about going to those things for our source of comfort and provision and belonging. I want to soothe the ache, and I will pursue whatever soothes or numbs the ache.

So this is gluttony. This is excess. This is hedonism. It’s letting your desires or physical appetites run the show.

So then there’s the desire of the eyes. The desire of the eyes is different. It’s not about feeling good. It’s about wanting what you see. A biblical word is covetousness, right?

I want my neighbor’s wife. I want my neighbor’s car. I want my neighbor’s job. It’s coveting. I want this. You see it, you want it, not because you need it, but because it’s there. It looks good and someone else has it.

And this is where comparison lives. It’s the engine behind the app, right? The advertisements that we see on social media showing you always the next thing that you want, that you need.

So put these together: the desire of the body, the desire of the eyes, and the pride of life, the bios. You get this: the flesh wants to feel good. The eyes want what they see in order to be seen.

Okay, we want what others can see so that we can be seen, admired, safe.

So the bios is the life that you build out of chasing these things, a life where the whole point is what it has gotten and what it looks like from the outside.

And so this is what’s happening in my little sister, daughter, and phone story, right? It’s not only that she wants comfort or wants what she sees on her feed. It’s that she wants to start building something. She starts to need to build something, a bios, a life that proves that she is worthy and valuable and needed—a better phone, a better photo, a better story to tell, a better biography to build.

And so the scarcity economy isn’t just selling stuff, right? It’s telling a story about who you have to become, and you need to get it as quickly as you can because there is not enough to go around.

And that story never finishes because you never have enough, because you always need the next thing. Because there’s always someone better looking. There’s always someone with a better body. There’s always someone with a better job. There’s always someone with a better phone. There’s always a new phone coming out, by the way. It’s just a different color. It’s not different, right?

But I felt badly. My daughter was so excited. I got an Apple Watch because of my heart, and that’s what they say, you know? So—but it also—it’s not a bios, okay? It’s for my heart. The doctor said, “You need a new Apple Watch because it can take your EKG.”

Well, my son also has a Fitbit. And my daughter, she’s like, “I want—I want a watch.” And she found this watch on Amazon that’s like an Apple Watch replica. Twenty bucks. It looks—yeah, yeah, yeah.

And this is where my brain went, and I think it reveals both the culture we live in and my own fears and anxieties. But, like, I’m like, she’s going to get that, and someone’s going to make—she’s so excited. She’s so excited to get this Apple Watch, and she’s going to get made fun of. Like, someone’s going to say something bad, like, “It’s, you know, it’s not real.”

And what is that? It’s not real. Even if it works, it’s not the real thing. Well, what’s the real thing? Whoever has the most advertising dollars to, like—this is what?

Actually, the fake one doesn’t give you significance. It doesn’t build a good enough bios, a good enough biography, right? You need the real thing. You don’t need shoes. You need Air Jordans, right? Whether they’re better or not, you need the most expensive thing because it gives you status, admiration, prestige, clout, right? This is the world we live in.

Okay, so we see one more time the use of the word bios in John. And it’s later, 1 John 3:17: “But if anyone has the world’s goods and sees his brother or sister in need, yet closes his heart against him, how does God’s love abide in him?”

The word that’s capturing the world’s goods is that word bios. It’s goods. It’s stuff. It sees a brother in need and it shuts the door on him. It’s the same word.

So you see, here’s the progression of a world system that thrives on scarcity, that thrives on the lie that your life is about the pursuit of the biography, the world itself apart from God. It starts with scarcity. It feeds greed, the need for more.

And it moves then from greed to competition because you have to protect what you have. And so you then begin to see your neighbor as competition rather than community, and then you’re willing to even go towards violence to protect what you have.

And this is where, as a nation, as an individual, as a family, it’s a progression that leads to competition that is based on scarcity.

Well, here’s the good news. We are free from a bios life. We have been redeemed, and God, the light of the world, Jesus, has come into the world and exposed this whole system based on scarcity and the world for what it is.

He is offering something completely different. He’s not offering—he’s not saying you must have a humbler life or a smaller life. He’s saying there’s a different kind of life that is built on love, community, shared life, generosity, belonging, significance, security that is rooted in love.

It is a life, not a life we build and defend, but a life we’re given and we receive and share. That’s the kind of life we’re to build. A life built on the conviction that God’s love is enough and God’s love has been freely given, not earned.

And this releases us, secure in that belonging and significance and security that we so desperately desire is already ours. We’re free to live a life of love towards neighbor, even towards enemy. We are released to live a life of love because we know that our deepest longings are already fulfilled in Jesus.

So that’s the choice sitting beneath these verses: “Do not love the world or the things in the world. For anyone who loves the world, the love of the Father is not in them.”

I think this means we’re not receiving the love that is already ours, that we are distracted. We’re focused on our phone, the world, and refusing the connection that that phone actually facilitates.

The world is a place where we experience the love and joy of God.

So I struggle with this. I imagine you do as well.

I often live from a motivation to be seen, to be known, to be important, to be significant. I struggle with wanting to build a biography that gets admired.

I’ve shared this with you before, I believe, but I remember writing in my journal several years ago when we first moved into our neighborhood, and I wrote, “Do I want to live in the International District because I love the International District, or because I love to be known for loving the International District?”

See the difference there? One is zoe, one is bios. One leads to death, dissatisfaction, and emptiness. The other leads to life and wholeness.

And I’m realizing more and more, the more I live there, the more life happens, the more gray hairs I get, that the true joy isn’t found in the accolades for achievements. It’s found in actually the shared life with God, relationship with God, relationship with you, relationship with my neighbors. That’s where the life is.

So in each of these arenas, the question underneath the question is the same. John is asking, am I building a bios here? A life to be seen, admired, secured, protected, held on to, hoarded? Or am I living out of zoe? A life of love already given, freed to be shared.

Generosity.

I’ll just give you a couple ways to think about this. I don’t know how Holy Spirit will invite you into this zoe and where he’ll expose where you’re building bios, biography. But maybe it’s in your marriage.

When you disagree with your spouse, is it that you’re trying to be right, or you’re trying to understand and love your spouse? Trying to win the argument or trying to love your spouse?

Do you talk about your marriage differently in public than you live it in private? Bios might be at work.

Is your affection for your spouse tied to how they may look and feel or to who they actually are? Actually, I should say, is it tied to how they make you look and feel, or how they are, how they actually are?

How about in parenting? Am I raising my kids to become people who feel loved and are people who love others? Or am I raising them to be people whose achievements make me look good?

Do I care about how my kids act because they reflect on me? Or because they’re growing into human beings?

When my child struggles or fails, does it feel like my own worth is on the line?

That’s a good question to ask. Do I brag about them more than I simply delight in them?

How about in your work, your vocation? Am I working from a security I already have in God, or am I striving to prove I’m enough through the title, through the promotion, through the output, through the recognition I get?

Do I see coworkers as competition for credit or as neighbors to love and support? If I never got the recognition I’m quietly hoping for, would I still have peace?

Those are good questions to ask. What’s at work? Bios or zoe? A life of love already given, already there to be enjoyed.

I just want to end with this. I want to end where John begins because it is important that he begins here.

Notice what he says before this challenge not to love the world. He declares what is already true of the community. He declares what Christ has already done.

By the way, this word, “children,” “dear children,” and this is what he uses to name the whole community—adult, old, young, men, women. This is a term of endearment that he uses throughout the whole letter.

So he’s not just talking to little kids. He is talking to little kids, not just little kids. He’s talking to children, people who are loved, a community of love.

And look what he says. Look, your sins are forgiven. They’re already forgiven for his name’s sake. Not because of anything you built or earned or did. Your sins are forgiven in Jesus.

Guess what? You already know the Father, the giver of every good and perfect gift, the one who gave you the beautiful world in which you live, the one who gives you life. You know that God. You know him already, the one who is from the beginning.

You have direct access to the Creator of the universe. He’s your Father, Abba, Father.

He says, you are strong. You feel weak and powerless against what the world promises to give you and deliver you and tempt you with, the enemy that prowls around like a lion seeking someone to devour. But you are strong.

And guess what? The Word of God already abides in you, the very Word of God, the living, active, breathing Word of God that gave you life, that sustains you, is already at work in you.

That’s awesome.

And guess what? Because those things are true, because you’re forgiven, because you know the Father who was from the beginning, because you have been loved and cherished, and you’re strong, and the Word of God abides in you, you have already overcome the evil one.

You’ve already overcome it. You’re already victorious.

So he starts here, and this is the economy of abundance that God’s shared life begins with. And this is the only way we move in the world, and we are not of the world.

It means we enjoy the world as gift and context for a shared life of love with God, ourselves, others, and all creation. But we don’t make it the object of our worship.

Do not love the world. Do not worship the world. Do not put the world as an idol that will give you your significance, your belonging, the security, your sense of identity.

Receive it as a gift from the one who has already given you all that you need. You are not powerless.

So that is the promise for those who have given their life to Jesus.

In Colossians 1:13, Paul says, “He has rescued us from the dominion of darkness, from this worldly system, and brought us into the kingdom of the Son he loves.”

You’ve been transferred. You’re children of light.

Some of us need to accept what God has already freely given and step out of the dominion of darkness and into the kingdom of the Son, whom God loves, and receive the power of forgiveness, the victory over evil, the Word of the very living God abiding in you.

And that’s the invitation. It’s always invitation. Choose Jesus.

But Paul says in Romans, if anyone confesses with their mouth that Jesus is Lord and believes in their heart that God raised him from the dead, they will be saved.

And that pursuit of the things that just leave you empty and leave you more hungry for community, more hungry for admiration, more hungry for security, feeling more and more unsafe, more and more uncertain—that pursuit, that death-dealing system of the world, will no longer have power over you, and you can step into life.