Paul K. Christianson
Perhaps these are the questions many of us ask in common. In my recent visits to Trinidad, New Zealand and Australia, I have been impressed that “worldliness” is not just an American problem—but a universal one. But in James 4:4 we are admonished, “Do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God? Whoever therefore wants to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God.”
True Christian living, holy living, requires a new affection, rather than a love for the things of the world. Do you remember your first love for the Lord, a love which seemed to deal our “worldliness” a deadly blow? Soon, however, we discover that for all that we have died to sin in Christ, sin has by no means died in us. On occasion its influence surprises us and even appears to overwhelm us in a flood.
We come to the realization that our “new affection” for the things of God must be renewed constantly throughout the whole of our journey. If we lose this first love we will find ourselves in grave spiritual peril.
We substitute worldly things for it. Favorites here are activity and learning. We become active in the service of God and measure our spiritual growth in terms of positions achieved or influence, or we become active socially, in moral or political crusades, and measure growth in terms of involvement.
We may recognize the intellectual fascination and challenge of the gospel and devote ourselves to understanding it, or in terms of the influence it gives us over others. But no position, influence or involvement can expel love for the world from our hearts. Indeed, they may be expressions of that very love.
Still others of us make the mistake of substituting rules of piety for living affection for the Son of God: “Do not handle! Do not taste! Do not touch!” Such disciplines may have an air of sanctity about them, but in fact they have no power to restrain the love of the world in our hearts.
The root of the matter is not on my dinner plate, or in my community, but in my heart. Worldliness has still not been expelled.
It is all too possible, in these different ways, to have a form of godliness (how deceiving our hearts are!) without its power. Love for the world will not have been expunged, but merely diverted. Only a new love is adequate to expel an old one. Only love for Christ, with all that it implies, can squeeze out the love of this world. Only those who long for Christ’s appearing will be delivered from Demas-like desertion caused by being in love with this world.
How can we recover the new affection for Christ and His kingdom that so powerfully washed away our life-long worldliness, and in which we crucified the flesh with its lusts? What was it that created that first love in any case? Dear reader, do you remember?
It was our discovery of Christ’s grace in the realization of our own sin. We are not naturally capable of loving God for Himself; indeed, we hate Him. But in discovering this about ourselves, and in learning of the Lord’s supernatural love for us, love for the Father was born. Forgiven much, we loved much. We rejoiced in the hope of glory, in suffering, even in God Himself.
This new affection seemed first to overtake our worldliness, then to master it. Spiritual realities—Christ, grace, scripture, prayer, fellowship, service, living for the glory of God—filled our vision and seemed so large, so desirable that other things by comparison seemed to shrink in size and become bland to the taste.
The way in which we maintain “the expulsive power of a new affection” is the same as the way we first discovered it. Only when grace is still “amazing” to us does it retain its power in us. Only as we retain a sense of our own profound sinfulness can we retain a sense of the graciousness of grace. Let us remember the height from which we have fallen, repent and return to those first works.
It would be sad if the deepest analysis of our Christianity was that it lacked a sense of sin and of grace. That would suggest that we knew little of the expulsive power of a new affection. But there is no godly living that lasts without it.