The world is complicated and the Bible tells us that evil has gained strength in these last days. There has never been another generation like this one. Today you can drive only a few miles in any city that you want to and be attacked with lust by the media in countless ways! No other [...]
The world is complicated and the Bible tells us that evil has gained strength in these last days. There has never been another generation like this one. Today you can drive only a few miles in any city that you want to and be attacked with lust by the media in countless ways! No other generation has had to deal with such an onslaught of wickedness and we are becoming desensitized to such evil. What are we supposed to do about all this?
1 John 2:15-17: “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.”
Let us keep in mind that when the word of God says “do not love the world” it is speaking of worldliness or the ways of the world. Remember that “God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son . . .” So we are to love the people of the world and not their ways or the sin which they live in.
Unfortunately, the modern Church, in general, seems to have gotten that backwards and have begun loving the worldliness and disliking the people of the world. The Church tends to be so appalled with the people who sin and yet that is what sinners are supposed to do: They sin! We are to be the rescue for the sinner. We are to despise the sin and rescue the sinner because of our great love for them. Yet, to be so appalled by sin that we express ourselves in over reactive ways can separate us from the sinners we should desire to save from their sins.
The apostle Paul had the same problem with the Corinthian Church and he needed to set them back on the straight and narrow course of life in the anointing.
(1 Corinthians 5:9-10 NASB) “I wrote you in my letter not to associate with immoral people; I did not at all mean with the immoral people of this world, or with the covetous and swindlers, or with idolaters, for then you would have to go out of the world.”
When writing to the Corinthian Church the apostle Paul uses the Greek word, (sunanamignumi), which is here translated as “associate with.” He is using a common idiom of the time; this word has to do with being “mixed up with,” almost like mixing up a batch of something that is to be baked. In other words, he says, “Don’t get mixed up with Christians who are involved in sin. However, when it comes to your presence in an immoral world, don’t take yourself out of the mix!”
So then, we ought to judge the worldliness out of the Church so that there might be a place of refuge for the world to come into. Yet there is always the danger that we will be paying so much attention to our behavior that we draw even more inward and focused upon the sin within the Church. There is a healthy balance that must surely come to us! Whereby the obvious sin of a brother in Christ should be corrected or that brother should be separated from the Churches fellowship and the people of the world should be loved and saved from the grasp of sin and invited into fellowship with the Church.
I don’t think that this is as hard to understand as some try to make it. You have a maturing brother or sister that is in fellowship with the Church body and he or she is corrected about their lifestyle of sin and they do not repent. They know better and still do not remove themselves from the place where sin so destroys their lifeline to the kingdom of God. We ought to simply rebuke them and let the Church know that they are not “of us” even though they came in and went out from us. For some reason the modern Church does not want to follow this simple procedure and thus the worldliness and sin builds up in its midst. The next thing we see is that the divide between the Church and the world widens and there is fear of the world instead of despising the sin that so quickly robs us of life.
The brother or sister that sins should be treated with enough respect and love that they would be rebuked and separated in order to try and save them, that is, before they fall into a pitiful state and lifestyle. But we fear hurting them so much that we let them die the choking death of their sin and even let it spread in our midst by making it obvious to everyone that we allow and maybe even nurture sin. The answer is simple enough, “If your brother sins, go and show him his fault in private; if he listens to you, you have won your brother.” (Matthew 18:15 NASB)
I am not in any way suggesting a cold-hard-line of applying the law of behaviors to our relationships but the fact is that too many people in the Church are struggling with sin and they simply need to be reproved and told to repent. Almost all of them will and they will live better for it. You see I’m not talking about being embarrassed to hang out with people who sin but what I am saying is that we ought to be a rescue to them. It hurts to sin. It always does. Almost no one has to be convinced of that fact. The help that we can give to one another in our reproofs of disciple should be the way of life to us and we will be changing everyday into His glorious likeness.
All the time we have a focused love toward the world and are trying desperately to save everyone who would desire to be saved from the grasp of sin.
