INTRODUCTION:
Have you ever heard to saying, “You
are what you eat”? It’s true that what you put into your mouth affects
your intelligence, health, and appearance. Recently researchers fed rats a diet
with lots of fat and then put them in a maze to see what effect all that fat
made on their performance. They found that the rats on the high-fat diet were
dumber and slower than rats that ate a healthy diet.
I read an article under the headline: “You
are what you think.” A study at University of California, Berkley and
Yale University found that negative stereotypes affect old peoples’ physical
abilities and fitness. How we think impacts our moods and emotions, our choices
and self-confidence.
Actually, that idea is in the Bible. In
Proverbs 4:23—in the Good News Bible translation reads—“Be careful how you think; your life is shaped by your thoughts.”
Another saying is, “You are what you wear”
In a psychology experiment, 58 subjects were assigned to wear either a white
lab coat or street clothes. Then they were given a task to do that had nothing
to do with clothes.
The subjects wearing the white lab coats made
half as many errors as the subjects wearing street clothes. The researchers
explained that wearing white lab coats made people identify with doctors, and
doctors are serious, competent people.
Another study found that wearing formal
business attire increased the ability at critical thinking, an important aspect
of creativity.
A military man in his
dress uniform behaves more responsibly than one wearing fatigues. That is why
when we soldiers went to town, we had to wear our dress uniforms.
This is one reason why
pilots, nurses, policemen, firemen, and airline captains wear uniforms.
So we have three sayings that each contain a
bit of truth—“You are what you eat,”
“You are what you think,” and “You are what you wear.”
But I have another saying like those other
three. But this one states a truth that comes out of the Bible.
This year a book was published with the title,
You
Are What You Love. What we really are, deep down in our hearts is
shaped by what we love.
Love can become a habit, and, according to the
book, the way to change what we love is to change what we worship. This book was
not written by a psychologist but by a theologian. I would like to read that
book because I think that saying is more important than the other three.
A couple of weeks ago, in our Bible Study, we
discussed we discussed a passage from 1 John that begin like this:
“Do
not love the world or the things in the world. the love of the Father is not in
those who love the world…”
I. So what does St. John mean by “love of the world”? And why is love of the world a sin?
A. I looked up the Greek word for world in my
Greek dictionary, and found that that word, which is kosmos, has 8 different meanings. I will give you a few of the
meanings of “world” in the Bible.
“World” can mean the universe. In Ephesians
1:4 we read, “God chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world.”
“World” can mean all the people in the world:
You know John 3:16: “For God so loved the world
that he gave his only Son…”
“World,” in the Bible can mean the scene of earthly joys and possessions. Jesus
said, “What will it profit a man to gain the whole world and lose his own soul?” (Mark 8:36).
B. Or “world” can mean the world as that which is the enemy of God—and that
is the meaning of “world” in the verse I read from 1 John.
The world, in this bad sense, means all the
bad influences in our world that seek to destroy our souls.
This is what St. John is writing about when he
writes in chapter 5:19: “The whole world
lies under the power of the Evil One.”
II. After John writes, “Do not love the world or the things in the world, he names three
great temptations: “For all that is in
the world, the desire of the flesh, and the desire of the eyes and the pride of riches, comes not of the Father, but from the world.”
A. The
desire of the flesh includes our natural appetites—what gives pleasure to
our bodies: food, sex, and relaxation—all good and useful God-given appetites
that can be perverted.
The lust of the flesh may involve us
physically in gluttony, sensuality, and sloth.
B. The
desire of the eyes is all that allures. It could be riches and possessions
that serve no purpose self-satisfaction.
However we may resist, our eyes lead us to
covet forbidden things, unwholesome things, temporary things, things that draw
us away from God and eternal values.
C. But the most dangerous of the three worldly
temptations John names is, in my translation, “the pride of riches.” The word is also translated “the pride of life” (KJV) or “people boasting of their superiority” (Christian Community Bible),
or “everything in the world that people
are so proud of” (TEV).
It is not a sin to want people to think well
of us. But when we want others to see us as superior, it turns into pride, which is the first of the seven
deadly sins.
D. Few of us would want to admit to such ugly
impulses as those John names here, but they are in all of us, even though we
may not see their danger to our souls.
III. After St. John names these great
temptations he writes: “And the world
and its desire are passing away, but those who do the will of God live for ever…those who do the will of God live for ever.”
A. The way to live for ever is, John tells us,
is to do the will of God.
Love for the world will carry us to
destruction, unless we lay hold on Christ by faith and obedience—and so join
our lives to the eternity of God.
Almost everyone wants to live on after we die
on earth. But if our master passions in this life are food, and possessions,
and sports, and amusements, and trivial pleasures—what is there in us capable
of surviving the death of our bodies?
What is there in us capable of participating
in God’s eternal world of Glory?
According to St. John, it is doing
the will of God that fits us to live forever.
B. Most of the work done for Jesus through the
ages was done by people long forgotten. But their work lives on in the lives
they blessed. Someone said, “The
smallest work done for Jesus lasts forever, whether it abide in men’s memories
or no” (Alexander MacLaren).
Every one of us has come to faith through a
long chain of believers, each one of whom passed the faith to others. And that
chain of believers extends back in time to the original followers of Jesus.
And we have become part of that chain. If we
have done the will of God, we will have a part in passing the faith on to those
who follow us.
There will come a time when all the people who
knew us on earth will be gone and no one living will remember who you or I were.
But whatever we have done for Jesus will last
for ever in the lives of those we have blessed—even if they don’t’ remember us.
C. When St. John writes that those who do the
will of God will live forever, he doesn’t mean that we earn eternal life by our
obedience. But he does mean that those who are united to Jesus by faith and
obedience will live forever.
I say, “united to Jesus by faith and obedience,”
because the New Testament always assumes that faith means commitment, and
commitment means living for Jesus.
That is what St. John means by “those who do the will of God live forever.”
CONCLUSION
I read in an old book—it was written in the
18th century—that one winter, an ice palace was built in St. Petersburg, in
Russia. Its walls, roof, floors, and furniture were all colored to seem to be
made of proper materials, but in reality, the palace and everything in it was
really just ice. It must have been impressive, but when spring came, all that
remained was a pool of water.
There is a Latin phrase, Sic transit Gloria mundi, which means, “Thus passes the glory of
the world.” It is sad when humans, who have the potential to live forever,
spend their lives building ice palaces, when, by living for God, we can build
something we can enjoy forever.
I have read that the ancient Greeks were
gloomy people because they had little idea of blessedness after death. They had
a proverb: “The world’s a stage. Life is
the side entrance. You came. You looked. You departed.”
That proverb expresses the temporariness of
life without God. But with Christ in our life, we become sharers of his eternal
life. We are not like those without God, to whom death is a terror.
If we have faith, we can look forward to the
life to come with joyful anticipation.
This world is a world of illusions. Our world
has the values of things all mixed up. It is as if one night someone got into a
hardware store and exchanged the labels of everything, so that when we enter in
the morning we find that lawnmowers are two for a dollar, and nails are $100 a
box, a chain saw is 50¢, and paint stirring paddle is $250.
A dying woman said to her pastor: “You hear in
sermons about this world being a tricky, shallow place, but you never believe
it until you stand at the door and look around just before you go out.”
When we come to the door, ready to make our
exit from this world, we won’t be thinking about the money we’ve made, or the
house we lived in, or the car we drove, or the honors we received.
If we have lived for God, we will be able to
think back to what we’ve been able to do for others, and be thankful for those
who have loved us, and remember that God has been with us every step of the
way.
We’ll be able to look forward to the welcome we will
receive from our Lord Jesus when we fall into his arms--as we enter into life
with the saints and angels.
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