On August 23, 1973, Jan Erik Olsson—who was out on parole from prison at the time—attempted to hold up a bank in Stockholm, Sweden. When the police showed up, Olsson took four people as hostages—three women and one man—and a stand-off between Olsson and the police began—a stand-off that lasted six days. During these six days Olsson terrorized the hostages in several ways.
- He fired his Russian automatic assault weapon at them.
- He put nooses around their necks and threatened to hang them.
At one point during the lengthy standoff, Olsson called Sweden’s Prime Minister to say that he would kill the hostages. Then he put one of the hostages, Kristin Enmark, on the phone and in light of all that had happened, she said something very surprising. She said, “I am very disappointed in you Mr. Prime Minister. I think you are sitting out there playing with our lives.” Despite Olsson’s threats to kill her, Enmark had apparently decided she felt safer with him than she did with the authorities. And she wasn’t the only one who felt that way. All four hostages actually resisted rescue attempts and later refused to testify against their captor. They raised money for his defense. One of the other women actually became engaged to Olsson. Since then whenever you a hear news of a hostage who identifies more with their captors than their rescuers, their condition is referred to as “The Stockholm Syndrome.” Many years after the incident in Stockholm, Enmark summed up what had happened to her and the other hostages. She said, “It’s some kind of a context you get into when all your VALUES—the MORALS you have—CHANGE in some way.”
Psychologists explain, “In hostage situations with a high level of life-threatening stress and positive human interaction, people’s ego-defensive mechanisms come into play. This causes them to deny what is happening and regress to a different emotional state. The hostage will eventually transfer his hatred and begin to think, ‘This guy doesn’t really want to hurt me.’ Then the hostage begins to love his or her captors and hate the policemen.”
I share this story because something like the Stockholm Syndrome happens to many Christians. Their views on reality are altered such that they come to believe that this fallen world is actually their friend. Their moral base—their values change such that the loyalty they once gave to God they now give to those who work against His eternal kingdom. And sadly this is not a new thing. In fact, John addressed this same problem in his letter to 1st century churches. Let me put it this way. In our text for last Sunday John talked about the RIGHT kind of love—love for God—love for others. Now he warns his first century readers—and us—that there is a WRONG kind of love—a love that God HATES—a love for what John calls, “the world.” Take your Bibles and turn to 1st John 2:12-17 and let’s read John’s warnings together.
12 – I am writing to you, dear children, because your sins have been forgiven on account of His name.
13 – I am writing to you, fathers, because you know Him Who is from the beginning. I am writing to you, young men, because you have overcome the evil one.
14 – I write to you, dear children, because you know the Father. I write to you, fathers, because you know Him Who is from the beginning. I write to you, young men, because you are strong, and the Word of God lives in you, and you have overcome the evil one.
15 – Do not love the world or anything in the world.If anyone loves the world, love for the Father is not in them.
16 – For everything in the world—the lust of the flesh,the lust of the eyes,and the pride of life—comes not from the Father but from the world.
17 – The world and its desires pass away,but whoever does the will of God lives forever.
Using Warren Wiersbe’s commentary on this text, I want us to note four reasons John gives as to why we are NOT to love “the world” —four reasons we should work against this spiritual form of the Stockholm Syndrome.
(1) First—John says we should not love the world because of what the world IS.
The Greek word that we translate as “world” here is “kosmos” and in New Testament times it could be translated in three different ways. It could refer to the PHYSICAL world—the planet earth. Dr. Luke uses it this way in Acts 17:24 when he says: “God made the WORLD and everything in it.” “Kosmos” can also refer to the HUMAN world or MANKIND. We see this use in John 3:16 when Jesus said, “For God so loved THE WORLD that He gave His only Son….” But John’s warning in our text is not about loving either the world of NATURE or the world of MEN. And this makes sense because there is nothing wrong with loving this beautiful world that God created. It’s very appropriate for us to look at creation in a loving way because it reflects God’s power and wisdom—not to mention HIS LOVE for us. And of course we are to love PEOPLE—ALL people—as well. In God’s Word we are repeatedly commanded to love others. So that’s NOT what John is talking about either.
No—in this context, “kosmos” refers to a SYSTEM—a set of values—a way of thinking. And—we use the word “world” in the “system sense” all the time. One example is ABC’s WIDE WORLD OF SPORTS — a television show that ran for nearly 40 years. I’m sure you older people remember its popular theme song, not to mention its familiar introductory statement about “the THRILL of victory and the AGONY of defeat.” Well, the WORLD of SPORTS is not a separate planet. And it’s more than a group of people. It’s an organized system, made up of a set of ideas, activities, purposes, rules, etc.
Other examples of this kind of “world” include the WORLD of finance or the WORLD of politics or the WORLD of fashion. Behind what we can see in sports, finance, fashion, or politics is an invisible system that we cannot see and it is this system that “keeps things going” in that particular “world.” Well, as I inferred a moment ago, the WORLD system that John is talking about here is a way of life that ignores God and His rule. Think of it as the pagan—anti-God—social order—everything that opposes Christ’s work on earth. If you’re still not getting it, just think “Las Vegas” or think about the kinds of things that go on in Ocean City on the Boardwalk late at night on the weekends and you get the idea.
John uses “kosmos” in this way two other times in his little epistle—and in so doing he tells us WHO is behind the scenes, running things in this WORLD system that we are NOT to love. In 1st John 4:3 he says, “This is the spirit of the antichrist, which you have heard is coming and even now is already in THE WORLD.” And in 1st John 5:19 he says, “The whole WORLD is under the control of the evil one.”
Do you see why our Heavenly Father would inspire John to warn us NOT to love the world? I mean, the leader of the WORLD SYSTEM John is talking about is our adversary—satan
himself. Remember, Jesus called satan, “the prince of this WORLD” in John 12:31. Paul called him, “the god of this WORLD” in 2nd Corinthians 4:4.
The long and short of it is that a Christian is a member of the HUMAN world and he or she lives on the PHYSICAL world but he does not belong to the SPIRITUAL world that is satan’s system for opposing God. Loving THAT world is like loving the ULTIMATE hostage-taker. It’s like loving the enemy—an enemy that hates us and all we stand for as Christians. Do you remember Jesus’ warning in John 15:18-19 when He said, “If the world hates you,keep in mind that it hated Me first. If you belonged to the world, it would love you as its own. As it is, you do not belong to the world, but I have chosen you out of the world. That is why the world hates you.”
This leads to the second reason we are not to give our love to it…
(2) …because of what the world DOES to US.
In our text John warns that loving the world can actually negate or supplant our love for God. Look at verse 15, “Do not love the world or anything in the world.If anyone loves the world, love for the Father is not in them.”You can see this principle in the fact that the more we become in love with the world system—the things of the world—well, the more we begin to resist obeying God’s loving laws. We start living like the world says to live instead of how God says to live.
The fact is LOVING the WORLD is a subtle form of idolatry. This helps us understand why this command not to love THE WORLD is one of the relatively few times John uses the imperative mood in his writing. That’s how serious he is. With this in mind, Wiersbe gives us a great DEFINITION of worldliness. He says it is: “anything in a Christian’s life that causes him or her to lose their enjoyment of the Father’s LOVE or their desire to do the Father’s WILL.”
To help you better understand this “competing/negating love deal” let me ask you husbands out there:What would happen if you said to your wife, “I love you—but you need to know I love another woman as well. And I’m going to keep doing that.”That wouldn’t work would it? Of course not—and it won’t work in our relationship with God either. Our hearts don’t have room for two all-consuming passions. We can’t love both the world and God. They are mutually exclusive—and satan know this. So he tempts us—draws us into worldly loves—all the time drawing us further and further from God.
Our adversary has three main tools in this endeavor. They are the same tools he used SUCCESSFULLY to tempt Eve in the garden—and the same tools he used to UNSUCCESFULLY tempt our Lord in the wilderness. John cites each of these tools in verse 16 when he says, “For everything in the world—the lust of the flesh,the lust of the eyes,and the pride of life—comes not from the Father but from the world.”And before we go any further, let’s stop and talk about that word “lust” a bit because it actually applies to ALL THREE DESIRES. In the Greek language, “lust” is a compound word which takes the normal word for desire and puts a prefix on it that INTENSIFIES it. Literally, it could be translated “hyper-desire.” Lust begins with a healthy desire but it kicks it up several notches, taking it to an unhealthy extreme.
Now—there’s nothing wrong with desire itself. In fact, most of our desires are God-given. They are part of our “programing.” For example, the desire to eat, to drink, to work, to play, to build, to enjoy physical intimacy—to procreate, to achieve, to conquer—these desires are all natural to human beings. What our adversary does is take these natural desires and pervert them, corrupt them, or exaggerate them, so that they become unnatural and sub-human.
In his sermon, Deep Desire, Bryan Wilkerson calls these lusts: the desires TO DO, TO HAVE, and TO BE. Let’s look at each of them beginning with the desire TO DO—or as John calls it, “the lust of the flesh.” That word “flesh” refers to the SENSUAL side of our nature. So we might label this desire “pleasure.” Once again, as Wilkerson points out, there is nothing wrong with pleasure in and of itself. There is nothing wrong with enjoying our senses. In His wisdom and love God gave us taste buds and ear drums and nerve endings so that we could experience the world in a physical way—in a way that brings us pleasure. Biting into a crisp apple, drinking ice-cold Arizona green tea after a long run, the feel of catching a wave just right as we body surf at the beach in Ocean City, a hug from your grand-daughter, a pat on the back from a good friend, a kiss on the lips from someone you’re crazy about—these things FEEL GOOD and there’s nothing wrong with them when they are experienced as God intended them to be experienced. But our adversary—and those in this fallen world who serve him—well, they take these desires and twist them into something they were never meant to be. I mean, there’s nothing wrong with food until we eat too much of it. There’s nothing wrong with alcohol until it altars our perceptions and behavior or until we can’t live without it. There’s nothing wrong with a kiss on the lips as long as the person you’re kissing is rightfully yours to kiss. When the pursuit of pleasure—when the desire TO DO—takes over our lives—when it drives us to do things that are hurtful to ourselves or to others—when it eclipses our love for God—and our willingness to obey Him—then we’ve crossed the line into worldliness and sin.
The second tool of our adversary that John mentions is the desire TO HAVE—or “the lust of the eyes.” This desire is not directed toward sensation and experience but toward MATERIAL OBJECTS—things the world tells us we have to have. It short, it’s the desire for POSSESSIONS.And—once again—there’s nothing wrong with material things, whether they be clothes or houses or cars or toys or tools. I mean, the Bible never condemns anyone for desiring things or having things. We meet plenty of wealthy, Godly people in Scripture, and Jesus had plenty of wealthy friends and acquaintances. But when you decide you have to have a particular thing—when you’re prepared to spend reckless amounts of money to get it, when your happiness or identity depends on it—when you want it just because someone else has it or because the TV tells you that you have to have it—then the desire to have has given way to lust—and having “it” has become more important than having God—and that is sin.
The third worldly desire is the desire to BE or as John puts it, “the pride of life.” This is the pursuit of success, achievement, and recognition and again, there is nothing wrong with pride in and of itself.I mean, there’s nothing wrong with taking pride in a job well done, or feeling good when you achieve a milestone, or reveling in the affirmation of others—when it’s rightly deserved and received. God placed within us a desire to pursue excellence and accomplishment.
But when our pursuit of success compels us to bend the rules, when we need to beat everyone else to feel good about ourselves—when we find our identity and worth in our accomplishments, when we look down on others who’ve attained less than we have—when we forget that God and not self is the source of every good and perfect gift—when people’s approval becomes more important to us than God’s—we have slipped into sin.
Now—chances are one of these three LUSTS has posed or does pose a particular problem for you right now—pleasure, possessions, or pride. I’m not going to ask for a show of hands but listen—when any of these begin to demand time or money or attention that rightfully belongs to God—when they tempt us to compromise our convictions or to neglect people or our part in furthering God’s kingdom—then we are falling in love with the world—and it’s only a matter of time before the world becomes your “god.”
Now—please understand—our adversary uses these three tools very wisely by doing so GRADUALLY. I mean, he would never come to you or me and blatantly urge us to become prideful and conceited about our successes. He didn’t come to me when I first became a pastor and whisper, “You are the best preacher on the planet and you should act that way. No pulpiteer even comes close to you Adams!” No—satan is too smart to do that. He knows how I would have responded back then if he did that. But he would come to me from time to time and say things like, “That other preacher mispronounced a Greek word…or he talked too long…or you know a better illustration than the one he’s used.” If I’m not careful, I’ll buy into that kind of stuff and little by little I’ll become prouder and prouder until I care more about the acclaim of others than I do about making God proud. I’ll care more about my acclaim than about furthering God’s eternal kingdom.
I imagine you’ve heard how to boil a frog. Just in case you haven’t—if you throw a frog into a pot of boiling water, he’ll hop right back out but if you put him in a pot of lukewarm water and then warm it gradually then he’ll stay right there enjoying the Jacuzzi like temps but it will get hotter and hotter and soon it will be too late. Before you know it you’ll have a boiled frog. Yummy! All kidding aside—that’s the way satan tempts us with these three lusts—gradually—so we must always be on our guard—always asking God to examine our hearts for any offensive way of thinking.
Before we move on to the next point, let’s do a little self-examination here. Be honest with yourself. Of these three desires which one do you struggle with the most. Which one are you struggling with now? Say a silent prayer—asking God to deliver you from that love—to open your eyes so you see where you are going—and to guide you back to the right kind of love.
The third reason John says we are not to love THE WORLD is…
(3) …because of what a Christian IS.
John begins this part of his letter by referring to us—his readers—as little children. And, he’s talking to all Christians no matter what their physical age—which understandable for someone nearly 100 years old. But John also calls his readers “young men” and “fathers” —so what he’s doing is reminding us that as Christians, no matter what our physical age, we are all at different levels of spiritual maturity. Some of John’s readers—some of you—are new believers, still rejoicing in their forgiveness. Some are seasoned believers, mature in their knowledge of God.
And others are just hitting their stride as followers of Christ, full of zeal and strength. Well, like a wise parent, John says that no matter where we are on the spiritual growth journey—no matter how “old” we are in our faith—we must remember that we are SONS OF GOD. And we must act like His children. We must make sure our desires don’t make people question our spiritual parentage—wonder whose kids we are. You see, the sad fact is worldly believers act more like sons of the devil than sons of God. Our life must give evidence of our true parentage.
And, as we continue some self-examination…this is a good time for us to ask ourselves, “Whose child am I behaving like? Who do I resemble more: the world or God?” That great evangelist of yesteryear, Billy Sunday, once said, “Talking about a worldly Christian makes about as much sense as talking about a Heavenly devil.” And he was right—we must not love the world because we are NOT the world’s children. We are SONS and DAUGHTERS of God.
So, to review, John says, we are not to love the world because of what the world is, because of what the world does to us when we love it, because of who we are, and finally, we must not love the world…
(4) …because of WHERE the world is GOING.
Look at verse 17. John says, “The world is PASSING AWAY!” In other words, this world that so many love—this world that so many give their lives to—this world is not permanent. In fact, the only sure thing about this world system is that it’s not going to be here forever. One day it will be gone—and the pleasant attractions in it will be gone. It’s all passing way.
Truly wise Christians know this. They don’t love the world—instead they choose to live for something far better. As Hebrews 11 says, they know, “…they are strangers and pilgrims on the earth. They long for a better world—a heavenly one.”
In this text John is contrasting two ways of living—a life lived for ETERNITY and a life lived for TIME. A worldly person lives for TIME—lives for the pleasures of the flesh, but a dedicated Christian lives for the joys of the Spirit—joys that are ETERNAL. A worldly believer lives for what he can see, the lust of the eyes; but a spiritual believer lives for the unseen realities of God
This is what Paul is talking about in 2nd Corinthians 4:18 when he says, “We fix our eyes not on what is seen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.” A worldly minded person lives for the pride of life, the kind of worldly fame that appeals to men—but a Christian who does the will of God lives for God’s approval. They know this world is passing away but the person who does God’s will abides forever.
And listen—the world IS passing away. So are its values and those who are characterized by its values. So it is foolish to pin your hopes on the world system, however attractive it may appear or however rewarding. It’s all temporary. I mean, the knowledge of today will be the ignorance of tomorrow. If you doubt this then remember—if Aristotle, Galileo, or Isaac Newton were alive today they would have to go back to school. The powerful nations of yesteryear are now nothing more than something for historians or archaeologists to talk about. Nothing in this world lasts.
What you know, what you acquire, and what you achieve will be dust and forgotten in years to come. Only God, His kingdom and those who are rightly related to Him will never fade throughout all eternity.
Charles Dutton is a popular character actor on TV and in movies. I’m sure his face is familiar. But, as a young man, he spent seven years in prison for manslaughter. While there, he developed an interest in acting and even participated in some prison plays. Upon his release, he got small parts on Broadway and hit it big in the Broadway production of “The Piano Player.” His career broadened to television and movies. After his Broadway success, he was asked in an interview, “How did you make the remarkable transition through those prison years to Broadway?” Dutton said, “Unlike the other prisoners I never DECORATED MY CELL because I wanted to be reminded every day of my sentence—that it was TEMPORARY.” Dutton never regarded his cell as his permanent home. He focused on a future, unseen home.
Well, this world is not our home. To love it—to “decorate our cell”—is folly because it is passing away. According to the Chicago Tribune on March 3, 1995 a thirty-eight year old man who was walking to his temporary job at a warehouse in Rosemont Illinois tried to get there by cutting across eight lanes of the Tri-State Toll Way. He made it across successfully but then the wind blew his hat off. The hat flew back across the northbound lanes and he turned around, retraced his steps and chased it. While doing this a MAC truck struck and killed him. We think, “How foolish—to die for a hat!” But this man’s actions are no more foolish than loving the temporary things of this fallen world.
And understand—the problem with things like pleasure, possessions, and pride isn’t so much that they are wrong. It’s that they’re not ENOUGH. As I said, for one thing they don’t last. Pleasure is fleeting. Possessions lose value. Earthly accomplishments are soon forgotten or surpassed. They don’t last. But the other thing we need to remember—the other reason it is foolish to give your life for these lusts—is that they’re too SHALLOW. I mean, they cannot satisfy the deepest desires of our hearts. You see, it’s not just PLEASURE we’re looking for; it’s JOY. We don’t need more STUFF; we need CONTENTMENT. It’s not ACHIEVEMENT we’re after; it’s SIGNIFICANCE. And these things—JOY, CONTENTMENT and SIGNIFICANCE—they can only be found, ultimately and eternally, in relationship with God, which is what John is getting at when he writes, “The one who does the will of God lives forever.”
According to C. S. Lewis, these desires—to do, to have, to be—are merely the rumblings of a much DEEPER DESIRE. It’s a desire so deep, so profound, even Lewis couldn’t find a word for it. He talks about it in his writings, this inconsolable longing for something more. Sometimes he describes it as BEAUTY, other times as JOY, but by his own admission, none of those words quite gets it. The closest word he could find was the German word “sehnsucht.” It’s hard to DEFINE, but we know it when we FEEL it. “Sehnsucht” combines the ideas of WANTING something and MISSING something. It describes a deep yearning for something that we can’t NAME but know to be TRUE.
In his book The Weight of Glory, Lewis describes it as “the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never visited.” It’s the longing for every good and perfect thing all at once. It’s the longing for God and His Perfect Kingdom. And until that deepest of all desires is satisfied, nothing else will ever be enough. Like Mick Jagger says, we can try and try and try, but we “can’t get no satisfaction,” in this WORLD—because no earthly pleasure or possession or achievement can ever satisfy the deep longing of our souls. As Augustine put it, “The human heart was made for God and our hearts are restless till we find our rest in Him.” But once that desire is satisfied—once we have turned to God and aligned ourselves with his good and eternal purpose for our lives—we can experience earthly things as they were meant to be experienced—in relationship with Him.
LET US PRAY