While
I process John 3:16 as a message of hope to the world, praying that my series
on this verse will win someone to Christ, it is also a message to me as a child
of God. It is a message to the church. The message is this, that since God so
loved the world, and gave himself for us, there is an element where the church
is to love the world in the same way.
Now,
how would I say this? For the church as a whole we could say: “For the church so loved the world, that we
gave ourselves to proclaim Jesus to every nation, so that whoever believes in
him should not perish but have eternal life.”
For
individual Christians we could say: “For
the child of God so loved the world, that each one gave themselves to make Jesus
known in every relationship, so that whoever believes in him should not perish
but have eternal life.”
Now,
it must be stated that there are two opposing ways to love the world. There is
the way to love the world as God so loved the world, and there is the way to
love the world that is contrary to everything to do with God.
When
we say that the church ought to love the world as God so loved the world, we
mean we are to have the redemptive love for the world that wants sinners to be
saved. When we say that the church ought not to love the world, we mean we are not
to love the sin that is in the world.
The
right way of loving the world is as people who so love God, that we also love
sinners who need God. We know that the love of God is filled with mercy, and
comes to seek and to save the lost, and so we go out with the same love, the
same mercy, as branches of the vine of Jesus Christ, seeking to save people
from sin.
The
wrong way of loving the world is to consider the world desirable, and to
consider the pleasures of the world as superior to the pleasures of knowing
God. The church becomes a place that shows love to sinners in such a way that
they feel we accept their sin, and approve of their sin. We are in love with
the world and its ways, rejecting the heart of God for the salvation of
sinners, and rejecting the true love that would feel longing to see sinners
saved.
So,
when Scripture says, “Do not love the world
or the things in the world,”[1] it means, do not fall in love with the world, do not delight in the
world, do not prize, and value, and long for, the things of the world. Do not cherish,
and adore, and desire, the world, or the things of the world.
When
Scripture adds, “If anyone loves the
world, the love of the Father is not in him,”[2] it is not saying that we shouldn’t love the world the way God so
loved the world, but that we shouldn’t love what the world is. We should not be
“in love” with the world.
Paul
gives us a very clear description of the wrong way of loving the world. He
wrote, “For Demas, in love with this
present world, has deserted me and gone to Thessalonica.”[3] In two previous letters, Paul had described Demas as one of his
companions in ministry,[4] and as one of his “fellow
workers.”[5] Somewhere along the way, it became apparent that Demas was “in love with this present world.” It wasn’t
the love that Paul had for the world, willing to endure anything to make Jesus Christ
known to everyone he met, but the love of the world, or the love for the world,
that caused Demas to desert Paul and head off to do his own thing.
One
of the sad things with Demas is that Paul doesn’t say that Demas left the
church and headed off into riotous living in the world. He just says that Demas
had a certain kind of love for “this
present world,” that moved him to desert Paul. Paul’s love was willing to
lay down its life for the world, in order to see people saved, while Demas was
far too much in love with the “present”
world that he was not willing to suffer and die for the cause of Christ.
James
speaks of the outright, personal, love-affair kind of love for the world that
is so contrary to the love of God. He wrote the church and said, “You adulterous people! Do you not know that
friendship with the world is enmity with God? Therefore whoever wishes to be a
friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God.”[6]
This
makes it very clear that loving the world does not mean in a friendship kind of
way. It does not mean loving the world as we would love a friend. It does not
mean feeling friendship with the world, or feeling like the world is friendly
towards us.
James
is speaking from the heart of God, telling us that friendship with the world is
adultery. It is having an adulterous affair with a different lover, someone
other than our spouse by covenant relationship. Loving the world as a lover, as
if it is someone we have an intimate relationship with, is adultery. To love
the world like that is to make ourselves enemies of God.
This
is what John meant when he told us “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.”[7] Don’t be like an adulterous lover who falls in love with someone who
is your spouse’s enemy. Don’t fall in love with this world that hates your
spouse. Don’t be like a husband who falls in love with a woman who hates his
wife, or a wife who falls in love with a man who hates her husband.[8]
When
we put together James’ reproof against loving the world in an adulterous way,
with Paul’s testimony of Demas falling in love “with this present world,” we have an all-encompassing warning. Do
not love the world system, the world dynamic, the world character, the world’s
dreams and aspirations, the world’s love of sin, because that kind of love of
the world is hatred towards God.
At
the same time, don’t love the present age, the immediate physical, material
world, so that you are willing to desert your loving participation in the
redemptive activities of the church in favor of the comforts of this present
life.
In
other words, there is no room for outright love of the world that shows we love
the world in preference for God, like an adulterous-hearted person who
exchanges covenant relationship with one’s spouse for the affections of an illicit
lover. And, don’t let yourself prefer the comforts of this present physical
life, the earthly safety of our bodies, that we would desert the kind of work,
and ministry, and people, that lay down their lives to save the world.
You
see, when Demas deserted Paul, it didn’t mean that he loved the world in the
adulterous way, where he loved the sin that was in the world. It meant that he loved
his present physical life more than he loved being with God. He didn’t want to hang
around Paul any longer because Paul kept getting in trouble, and that trouble
had increasingly looked like Paul would be put to death for his trouble. Demas
was not ready to die for the cause of Christ, so he deserted Paul. He loved his
present earthly, worldly, material life, more than he wanted to be with Christ.
Being with God in heaven wasn’t important enough, and so he had to get away
from Paul and all the dangers Paul was facing.
This
is what Demas knew about Paul:
For to me to live is Christ, and to die is
gain. If I am to live in the flesh, that means fruitful labor for me. Yet which
I shall choose I cannot tell. I am hard pressed between the two. My desire is
to depart and be with Christ, for that is far better. But to remain in the
flesh is more necessary on your account.[9]
When Paul wrote that Demas had deserted
him because he was “in love with this
present world,” it was in contrast to Paul who was in love with a “far better” world. Because of Paul’s
love for Christ, living in this world was all about Christ, and dying for Christ
was “gain." If he lived in this present
world, he could see that it would continue to give him “fruitful labor.” However, his greater personal desire was “to depart and be with Christ.” Paul
knew that remaining in his physical body, his flesh, was “more necessary on your account,” but it wasn’t necessary on his
account.
What
distinguished Paul’s love for the world from Demas’s love for the world, was
that Paul was in love with God, and so the redemptive love of God flowed
through Paul to everyone he met. Demas, on the other hand, was not in love with
God in that way that prefers being with Christ in heaven over earthly
satisfaction, and so Demas deserted his “fellow
workers," and went away to safer climes.[10]
All
this to say that our love for the world is distinct from being in love with the
world. The redemptive love for the world that seeks the salvation of Worldlings
is far different from the selfish, sarky, and sinful love of the world that
seeks our own pleasure and comfort above the salvation and eternal safety of people
who are dying in their sins.
Which
brings us back to the main point, the way that we, the church, emulate the same
love for the world as our Father had for the world in providing redemption. Do we
have the equivalent love as Jesus had for the world in laying down his life for
our sins? Do we love the world the way the apostles endured all things for the
sake of saving people from their sin and its judgment?
While
John 3:16 encapsulates the love of God for the world in such beautiful,
familiar, and concise words, John expressed the same thing in different words
when he wrote to the church, “In this the
love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the
world, so that we might live through him.”[11]
How
was the love of God “made manifest among
us”? In the same way John wrote in his gospel account, “he gave his only Son, that whoever believes
in him should not perish but have eternal life.” [1]Or,
as John says here in his letter, “that
God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him.”
So, the
characteristic of the love of God towards the world is that God gave his Son
for a distinctive purpose. It was so that “we
might live through him,” or, that we “should
not perish but have eternal life.”
In other
words, to love the world as God loves the world is to seek to bring a dead
world to life, while to love the world in an adulterous way is to seek to
derive our own sinful and sarky pleasures out of the world instead of Christ.
The disloyal love wants to leave the world the way it is because we enjoy the
world, while the true love for the world has such a growing disdain for the
unrighteousness of sin that we want to see people saved out of the world’s condemned
condition.
Now, let’s get
personal. Is our love for the world characterized by fear of losing
relationships, fear of rejection, fear of criticism, fear of losing worldly
comforts, or is it characterized by giving ourselves for the salvation of the
lost? I’m not talking about the likelihood that we get butterflies in our
stomachs when we share about Jesus, but we share about him anyway. I’m not
saying we need to have perfectly fearless love that has no feelings about the
dangers, and the world’s hatred, and the changing climate of our present age
that is making it increasingly dangerous to be a Christian.
Rather, I’m
talking about what we choose to do. Are we moved by love for people in their
lost condition that makes us willing to share Christ even when we are afraid to
do so? That would be laying down our selves, and our self-interest, and our
right to play it safe, because we really would prefer that the person we are
talking to would be saved from perishing, and would have the eternal life that
is all about knowing God now, and knowing him forever.
The love of
God is a giving love, not a self-protecting love. It does not give itself to
the world in order to please the world in its sin, but in order to save the
world from its sin. Only when we love in that way that desires to save people from
sin, and from the wrath of God against sin, can we know that we are extending
the same love to the world as we have received from God.
Whenever we
celebrate God’s wonderful gift to the world, that he gave us his Son so that we
would not perish but have eternal life, let us also be the peacemakers[12] that
pour this same love into the world through our own giving of ourselves. Jesus is
the vine, and we are his branches.[13]
What we receive from him, we send on to others.[14] Jesus
came redemptively, and he sends us out to proclaim his redemptive work.
The apostle
Paul, who constantly longed to be with Christ in heaven, lived his earthly life
as a constant expression of the love of God. In his words, “Therefore, knowing the fear of the Lord, we persuade others.”[15]
That’s just the way of it. If we have reverence and awe for the love of God,
and the God of love, we seek to persuade others so that they can be saved from
perishing, and into eternal life.
Paul
continued, “Therefore, we are ambassadors
for Christ, God making his appeal through us. We implore you on behalf of
Christ, be reconciled to God.”[16]Jesus
came to reconcile people to God. The church, as his ambassadors, lives as “God making his appeal through us.” We
do not fall in love with the world and live in bondage to the evil one. Rather,
we “implore" people "on behalf of Christ,” to “be reconciled to God.”
After all, “God so loved the world, that he gave his
only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal
life.”[17]Let
us go and do likewise.[18]
Unless
otherwise noted, Scriptures are from the English Standard Version (The Holy
Bible, English Standard Version Copyright © 2001 by Crossway Bibles, a division of Good News Publishers.)
[1]
I John 2:15
[2]
I John 2:15
[3]
II Timothy 4:10
[4]
Colossians 4:14
[5]
Philemon 1:24
[6]
James 4:4
[7]
I John 2:15
[8]
Jesus said that the world would hate the church because it hates him, so loving
the world means loving an entity that hates our Savior, our head, our husband (John
15:8-19; 17:4; I John 3:13). And, it actually means loving an entity that hates
the church, us, the Christians who fall into love affairs with the world.
[9]
Philippians 1:21-24
[10]
“Climes” just popped into my head as a useful word. It refers to a location
with a distinctive climate. In the spiritual sense, Demas preferred a climate
of worldly safety, to Paul’s climate of stormy relationship to the world. Demas
did not love the world so redemptively that he would endure whatever storms
came from the world’s hatred. He sailed off to places that felt safer, and more
comfortable.
[11]
I John 4:9
[15]
II Corinthians 5:11
[16]
II Corinthians 5:20
[17]
John 3:16
[18]
Luke 10:25-37 illustrates this in the parable of the Good Samaritan.
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