When Love Becomes a Problem

The United States does not always come in first place. A few years ago, UNICEF surveyed twenty-one of the most developed nations and measured how youth related to other youth, spent time with parents, used alcohol and/or drugs, and perceived their own happiness. Tight-knit nations—like Sweden, the Netherlands, Denmark, and Finland—ranked the highest when it came to young people feeling secure and happy. The U.S. came in next to last, with the United Kingdom at the bottom of the list. UNICEF’S operating thesis was that “stable, supportive family and social relationships are far more important to kids’ well being than how much expensive junk they have piled up in their rooms.”

 

William Falk of The Week magazine editorialized on these findings:

 

It would be comforting to shrug off the report as pure anti-American bunkum. But as the parent of a teen and a tween, I cannot. I’ve seen firsthand the emptiness that haunts so many middle-class kids. From an early age, they are taught that life is a pitiless pursuit of individual gratification and success, requiring above-average brains and above-average looks. There is no sense of context, or community, or higher purpose. It’s hardly surprising that so many of them are taking antidepressants, ADHD meds, or other pills. Many more hide their sadness in eating disorders, drugs, or meaningless hookups. In our rush to give our children everything, I’m afraid, we have forgotten to help them answer a question that won’t be ignored: What is this all for?[1]

 

To use a Scriptural phrase, our problem is that we have spent our money on bread that does not satisfy. Thankfully, in 1 John 2:15-17, we are presented with an alternative. Listen for God’s word to you…

 

Do not love the world nor 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 lust of the flesh and the lust of the eyes and the boastful pride of life, is not from the Father, but is from the world. The world is passing away, and also its lusts; but the one who does the will of God lives forever. (NASB)

 

In order to understand this passage properly and apply it in our lives, we must first understand the meaning of several key words in this passage.

 

The first word we must examine is the word “love”. The Greek word here is agape. In his book Love Has Its Reasons, Earl Palmer explains the background to this important word…

 

Agape is a word used only sparingly in classical Greek. In fact, the noun form has been found in only four separate places in all of the known classical Greek writings…. In a general sense, agape comes close to meaning “good will.”

 

The New Testament writers … seized hold of this bland, little-known, imprecise word agape and loaded it with their own meaning…. Agape, then, derives its definition from the Old Testament view of God’s strong and faithful love, and from its function in the New Testament text, not from Greek culture and thought.

 

The Analytical Greek Lexicon defines the verb form of agape in this way: “to love, value, esteem, feel or manifest general concern for, be faithful towards, to delight in, to set store upon.” Agape describes God’s unconditional love for humanity.

 

In his book Hidden in Plain Sight, author and pastor Mark Buchanan writes about a woman named Regine. Regine was from Rwanda and came to faith in Jesus Christ while reading her sister’s Bible during the genocide that ravaged her country. When she fled to Canada for refuge, she met her husband, Gordon. They decided to return to Rwanda to show the love of Christ to the people who had once been her enemies. Regine told Mark Buchanan this story of agape:

 

A woman’s only son was killed. She was consumed with grief and hate and bitterness. “God,” she prayed, “reveal my son’s killer.”

 

One night she dreamed she was going to heaven. But there was a complication: in order to get to heaven she had to pass through a certain house. She had to walk down the street, enter the house through the front door, go through its rooms, up the stairs, and exit through the back door.

She asked God whose house this was.

 

“It’s the house,” he told her, “of your son’s killer.”

 

The road to heaven passed through the house of her enemy.

 

Two nights later, there was a knock at her door. She opened it, and there stood a young man. He was about her son’s age.

 

“Yes?”

 

He hesitated. Then he said, “I am the one who killed your son. Since that day, I have had no life. No peace. So here I am. I am placing my life in your hands. Kill me. I am dead already. Throw me in jail. I am in prison already. Torture me. I am in torment already. Do with me as you wish.”

 

The woman had prayed for this day. Now it had arrived, and she didn’t know what to do. She found, to her own surprise, that she did not want to kill him. Or throw him in jail. Or torture him. In that moment of reckoning, she found she only wanted one thing: a son.

 

“I ask this of you. Come into my home and live with me. Eat the food I would have prepared for my son. Wear the clothes I would have made for my son. Become the son I lost.”

 

And so he did.[2]

 

That is agape love.

 

Now, here is the amazing thing: God tells us there is something we should not love. There is something to which we should not give our unconditional allegiance. That thing is “the world”. Love becomes a problem when that love is set on the wrong object.

 

This leads us to examine what John means by “the world”. John uses the Greek word, cosmos. It is the same word that is used in John 3:16. “For God so loved the world (the cosmos), that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believes in him should not perish but have everlasting life.”

 

This raises the question: if God loves the cosmos, why cannot we love it as well? The answer is because the word “cosmos” has different shades of meaning throughout the New Testament. In John 3:16, “cosmos” refers to the human beings that God loves in the world. In 1 John 2:15 it refers to the world system itself that is set against God. God wants us to love the world that he has created. God wants us to love other human beings. In both cases, God wants us to love his creation and individual human beings without condition. God wants us to work for the good of creation and other human beings. However, God does not want us to love the world system that is set against him and his purposes.

 

Once again, John sees matters in black and white. If we give our unconditional allegiance to the world system, then the love of the Father is not in us. We cannot at the same time love God and the world system that is against God.

 

In his book, Living Peacefully in a Stressful World, author Ron Hutchcraft describes a visit to Fort Sumter, in Charleston Harbor, South Carolina:

 

As the tour boat approached Fort Sumter, I wondered whether the guides would be dressed in blue or in gray. Sumter had been a Union fort in Confederate territory when the Civil War began. It had changed hands several times.

 

We were greeted at the gate by a “soldier” wearing a blue coat and gray pants! This uniform wouldn’t have worked very well back in 1861. It would have gotten its wearer shot on both ends![3]

 

What John tells us is that we cannot simply go on wearing a blue coat and grey pants. We must decide which commander we are going to serve. Will it be the world system, or will it be the Lord Jesus Christ?

 

John goes on to spell out three major characteristics of what we might call worldliness: the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life. Let us look at each of these in turn.

 

First, we must define the word “lust”. In Greek, the word is επιθυμια. The word means “earnest desire” or to heap desire upon desire. Tom Wright translates this word in 1 John 2:16 as “greedy”.

 

Second, we must define the word “flesh”. “Flesh” is not the same as body. John is not talking here about the greedy desires of the body. “Flesh” refers to our sinful nature as human beings. Thus, John is simply saying that the greedy desires of our sinful nature belong to the world, not to God.

 

What does John mean by the lust of the eyes? Our physical eyes are, obviously, the portals through which we view the world. There is nothing wrong with our physical eyes; God created them. There is nothing wrong with our bodily desires; God created those too. However, when we make the satisfaction of our physical desires, wanting more and more, more than what is necessary of this world’s goods, in order to satisfy our physical desires, then there is a problem.

 

Finally, John designates a third characteristic of worldliness that he calls: “the pride of life”. The word in the Greek means boasting. Furthermore, the word for “life” is βιος; Βιοσ refers to physical life as opposed to ζοε that stands for the spiritual life. Thus, the pride of life refers to boasting about all the things of this physical life, boasting of what one has and does.

 

Tom Wright sums up the meaning of this passage in this way:

 

So the command ‘not to love the world’ refers not to the physical stuff of this world, but to ‘the world’ as it is in rebellion against God: ‘the world’ as the combination of things that draw us away from God. The flesh, the eyes, life itself—all can become idols, and like all idols they demand more and more from those who worship them… We must celebrate all the goodness of the world, all God’s goodness to us within his creation. But we must not worship it. We must thank God for it—and pray and watch for the day when it will be transformed by the royal appearing of his son.

 

One of my family’s favorite movies in recent years was The Devil Wears Prada. The movie tells the story of Andrea Sachs (played by Anne Hathaway), a journalism graduate who takes a job as second assistant at a prestigious fashion magazine, Runway. Caring nothing for fashion, Andrea finds herself working for Miranda Priestly (played by Meryl Streep), the ultra-demanding, diva-like editor of Runway. Andrea not only survives, but she begins to thrive in her role; she changes in both appearance and values. She even manages to outperform and outmaneuver the more tenured first assistant, Emily.

 

Near the end of the film, Andrea has to face up to her transformation, and she does not like what she sees. In one scene, Miranda and Andrea are riding through the streets of Paris after a recent fashion conference that saw Miranda stifle the career of a loyal coworker, Nigel, in order to bolster her own career. Both women are well dressed. Miranda, wearing a fur coat, holds sunglasses in her gloved hand.

 

“I never thought I would say this, Andrea, but I really…” Miranda pauses and turns to Andrea with a look of pride. “I see a great deal of myself in you. You can see beyond what people want and what they need, and you can choose for yourself.”

 

Andrea shakes her head in disagreement. “I don’t think I’m like that.” She looks away and continues, “I couldn’t do what you did to Nigel, Miranda. I couldn’t do something like that.”

 

“You already did. To Emily.”

“That’s not what I…no, that was different,” Andrea says defensively. “I didn’t have a choice.”

 

“No, no, you chose. You chose to get ahead. You want this life. Those choices are necessary.”

 

“But what if…this isn’t what I want? What if I don’t want to live the way you live?”

 

“Oh, don’t be ridiculous, Andrea. Everybody wants this. Everybody wants to be us.”

 

Miranda puts on her sunglasses, smiles, and exits the limo to face a crowd of photographers.[4]

 

The movie provides a keen depiction of the pull of this world system on even the most ordinary person. Not a one of us is immune to the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life.

 

However, after all this, you still may be asking: but why does God not want us to love the world? What is so dangerous about the world anyway?

 

Your reaction to this sermon may be very much like my response when I first committed my life to follow Jesus Christ. I was thirteen years old. I “went forward” in response to an “altar call” at Calvary Memorial Church, a congregation whose building was situated at the corner of one of the busiest intersections in Philadelphia: Roosevelt and Cottman. A man named Dr. Daugherty, a layman in the church, took me aside into a Sunday school room with windows looking out on the bustling city life. The only thing I remember that Dr. Daugherty said to me that day was this… Pointing out through the windows to the city beyond he said, “This world has nothing to offer you.” At the time I thought, “Well, maybe this world has something to offer me.”

 

That may be your reaction today. Why does God not want us to love the world? Personally, I like the way C. S. Lewis answers this question. In a sermon entitled The Weight of Glory Lewis says,

 

It would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.

 

The reason God wants us not to set our affections upon, or fall in love with, this world system, is because God has so much more to offer us. John puts it this way, “The world is passing away, and also its lusts; but the one who does the will of God lives forever.” In other words: Why hitch your wagon to a train engine that will not take you to your final destination? Why invest in that which will not last, especially when God promises you a life that will go on forever, each moment better than the one before? Why spend your money for that which is not bread?

 

In 1 Corinthians 2:9, Paul, quoting Isaiah 64:4 puts forward a startling promise,

 

No eye has seen,

no ear has heard,

no mind has conceived

what God has prepared for those who love him.

 

Given the wonder, the glory, the beauty and richness of this world that God has created, and the amazing imaginative abilities God has given to human beings, that sounds like a fantastic promise to me, one that I do not want to miss the fulfillment of.

 

The question in the end is this: will we choose to set our affections on this world system, which is but a corrupt version of God’s good gift, or will we fall in love with the God who promises us forever? The choice is ours.

 

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[1] William Falk, The Week (3-2-07), p. 5; submitted by Ted DeHass, Bedford, Iowa

[2] Mark Buchanan, Hidden in Plain Sight (Thomas Nelson, 2007), pp. 187-189; submitted by Lee Eclov, Vernon Hills, Illinois

[3] Ron Hutchcraft, Living Peacefully in a Stressful World; reprinted in Men of Integrity (Nov/Dec 2002)

[4] The Devil Wears Prada (Fox Pictures, 2006), directed by David Frankel; submitted by John Beukema, Chambersburg, Pennsylvania