If not, I invite you to turn with me to the second chapter of 1 John. So, John's first letter, his first epistle. Not the book of John, but 1 John chapter 2. There are times when the Lord clearly directs my heart towards the message. There are other times where He clearly directs my heart away from the message that I thought I would preach. And that's happened a couple of times this week before I was able to get myself out of the way and able to see what the Lord would have for us. And I'm glad that He does that, that He's patient with me, that He's patient with us. that He helps us, that He's mindful of us, and that He is able to prove Himself. I have just three verses I want to read here in 1 John 2, verses 15 through 17. John's writing, and he says, Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, The lust of the eyes and the pride of life is not of the Father, but is of the world. And the world passes away in the lust thereof, but he that doeth the will of God abides forever." And we'll stop there just with those three verses here in 1 John chapter 2. I love simple scriptures like this one. For the expositor of the Word of God is what I strive to do in preaching. There's not a big lift here. Some might say the scripture here means what it says, and it says what it means. These are not words to trifle over. They're not words for us to somehow try to read into them some deeper or hidden meaning. The scripture is plain. In fact, if we were to probably more rightly look to the translation here that says, love not the world, the participles and the presence of speech that is here in the original language is a present one. It doesn't just mean to love not the world tomorrow. It means stop loving the world today. That's the commandment that is found here in 1 John 2, verse 15. It is the commandment of God to stop loving the world. I have half a mind to just stop right there and dismiss us. Stop loving the world. There is an imperative here. A commandment. An instruction. That is not just calling us out of the world. It is commanding us not to love the things of the world. Now, there's probably a place here where we would interject and say, Oh, yes, we're in the world, but not of the world and all these sorts of things. And surely we know that God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son that whosoever believeth in Him would not perish, but have everlasting life. And all of those things are true. But listen to the commandment of the Lord when He says, Stop loving the world. Yes, we are to take the Gospel message into the world, but we are to have no part of it. This world is not for us. We have been predestined to heaven. You know what that means? You ever predestined something before? You have, whether you've known it or not. If you've ever put a piece of mail into your mailbox, dropped it off at a mailbox, taken it to the UPS store, whatever it is that you've done to send something to someone else, when you wrote the address on the front of that package, you predestined it for somewhere, didn't you? And so God has done with His people. He has a new address for us, a new name for us, and we've been and predestined for heaven. We have been made therefore strangers and sojourners here in this world. We find no home here in this place where all we see is so much around us that is troubling and wicked, yet we know that all we are is pilgrims who are passing through. We have no place in this world. It is not for us. So stop loving it. As I was looking at these Scriptures, what became plain to me was that it is this issue, this sin, that is the root of all of our troubles. What ails us today as a New Testament church in 2023 is the sin of worldliness. And we try to define that sometimes and we struggle to define worldliness. And I think the reason why we struggle to define it is that we're afraid to because we know that when we begin to define worldliness, what it will reveal to us, it will become a mirror in which what we see is that we are guilty of the sin of worldliness. But I remember what someone told me, a teacher told me in elementary school one time, if the shoe fits, wear it. My purpose today, the purpose of the Scriptures, is not to somehow pacify us as though we do not struggle with this sin, but it is to commend us and to be reproved to us to stop loving the world. We would do well to hear it. Further, not just to hear it, but to be obedient to it. to stop loving the world. Because what happens when we're faced with this sin of worldliness, we begin to look at it, and we do that classic thing like we do where we begin to compare ourselves to the rest of the world. We say, well, we really aren't that bad. Yet what we fail to realize is that because of our worldliness, because of our love for the world, that we have so grieved the Holy Spirit that He has no part of our lives. And then we sit around and we wonder and we say, why do we have no power in our services? Why do we have no power in our worship? Why do we not see the power of God falling on lost souls, bidding them in conviction to the altar to be saved? Yet we go home and we turn on television programs. that within minutes have so grieved the Holy Spirit that whatever presence of His we felt in service earlier, it is so far from us that it's been removed in a way that we won't feel it again until next week. Derek, you are preaching hard things. I'm just telling you what the Scripture says. And it says stop loving the world. So what's worldliness look like? I'm going to give you a couple of tests as we go through this. Then we're going to look at what the scripture says regarding what worldliness looks like. You want some tests of whether or not you struggle with the sin of worldliness. I think there are three places that you can look and see how you are living to see whether or not you're dealing with the sin of worldliness. How do you spend your time? How do you spend your talents? How do you spend your treasure? Those classic three will reveal to you. You say, Derek, I don't know if I'm struggling with worldliness or not. Can you show me your schedule? I think I can help tell you. Can you show me your bank account? I think I can help reveal it to you. Can you tell me how all your talents, all the Lord's blessed you with, all the gifts and abilities that you have, what you spend them doing? I think I can tell you whether or not you struggle with worldliness. But I'll tell you this much. If behind me was a screen, that revealed to you how I spent every minute of the last week. And behind me was a screen that showed you all my bank account transactions. And behind you was a screen that showed you all of what I've done in terms of my talents and abilities. And it was projected for all the world to see. I would run out of this church in shame. And you would too. Why? Because we're all guilty of this sin of worldliness. And so John has said, well, stop loving the world. Then he's described it in three ways. He says, for all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, the desires of the body, the lust of the eyes, the desire of the mind, and the pride of life. the desire of the vanities that we so often find ourselves regarding. They are not of the Father, but they are of the world. And I want to briefly just look at these through the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes." I suppose we should look at them together. We see that the same activity is involved here in both of these words, that it both involves this lust, one being the lust of the flesh, the lust of the body, one being the lust of the eyes, or as I'll refer to it, the lust of the mind. In fact, I saw a thing this week that just enamored me. It was like a CT scan of somebody and you could see their eyes. You could see their eyes moving. Listen, our eyes are the window into our minds. They are the window into our souls. In fact, men smarter than I have revealed to us that our eyes are the window into our soul. I suppose we should be very careful with what we see, shouldn't we? Lust of the flesh. Lust of the eyes. First we see this desire to satisfy the pleasures of the flesh. Now I want to talk just a quick minute about this word lust. So I think we hear it and we kind of know what it means but we miss it because normally lust is connected to this sexual desire and so we kind of just root it away in that and we kind of miss what it's really talking about. But the word lust, if you kind of dig into it a little bit, try to peel it back to really see what's intended by the word, what you will see is that there is a passionate desire towards something. It doesn't have to be a sexual lust. It is a passionate desire towards something. And the problem with that is anything that we place a passionate desire on that is not of the Lord, we are heaping to ourselves idols. You might say, well, there's nothing that I have like that. Do we want to do the test? I don't want to, right? But we have those desires, those passionate desires of ours. And we see them first in the flesh. And again, the sexual appetites of the flesh, yes, there certainly is those, but it's really about the appetite, that passionate desire for all luxuries of life. That's how Matthew Henry described it. It is all the luxuries of life. Now, Have you ever sat in a really expensive car? I mean, I'm talking, you get in it, and it just smells expensive. You know what I'm talking about? Listen, I've sat in some, I'm not owning any, but I've sat in some, right? And you get in and you can just feel it, right? We know what luxury means, right? There's something to it that is of an excessive nature. Now listen to me though when I talk about this. The luxury is not the sin. It is not a sin to own an expensive car. It is a sin for an expensive car to own you. For your passionate desires to be placed upon something that it consumes you. Listen, if you're kissing your car goodnight and worshiping your car, You got a lust of the flesh problem. Alright. I don't think there's anybody that probably falls under that. Maybe you do and if so, we'll talk. But I hope you're seeing by the example of what I'm describing to you. Because there is this idea, and we're going to get to this here in a minute when we talk about pride. There's this idea that it's just nice stuff that's the problem. That if you don't have nice stuff, then you don't have to worry about it. That you don't have this lust of the flesh problem. You're misinterpreting what the scriptures are saying. It's not the stuff. It's not the object. It's the heart. And our heart betrays us when it starts becoming this passionate desires of ours to obtain it, as I believe we'd see elsewhere in the scriptures, to obtain it upon, or to consume it upon our lusts. You see in this. And so we have this tendency of the flesh where we set our passions on it. We have this lust of the flesh problem. And that is this first place of worldliness that we see John talking about. And don't we see this expressed? Teenage boys, I'm going to step all over your toes for a second. You want to see, maybe this even gets into the lust of the mind a little bit. You want to see what a teenage boy has his passionate desires of his heart. All you need to do is walk into their smelly rooms. And you'll find probably somewhere in there a screen, and probably somewhere in there some console on which they can play games. And they will stay up to untold hours of the night, past the point of tired, past the point of exhaustion, consuming the passionate desires of their heart on a video game. And I see some of these boys, they're just like, Derek, would you confess this? Listen, I've been there, all right? I've been a teenage boy, too. My parents probably tell you all about that. When we start talking about these things, if you're honest with yourself, you'll start seeing them. Right? You'll start seeing them in your own life. It's easier for us to poke fun at the young boys or poke fun at this car example. But listen, if we were just to sit for a while and talk about what you struggle with in this area, we'd get somewhere quick, I assure you. That's between you and the Lord. But I don't want you to think that you're immune to this problem. Because you're not. This is what worldliness looks like. This is how it draws us in. And what happens is our adversary, he's very cunning in what he does, because he starts just pulling us in a little bit at a time, and unless there is something that pulls us out from that, we will find ourselves consumed by it. absolutely consumed by it. It will ruin relationships. It will ruin homes. It will ruin marriages. It will ruin jobs. What will take place is the adversary will use this lust of the flesh, this lust of the mind, and he will completely mess up our lives. He'll wreck us. He'll wreck the church through it. So we must be incredibly mindful of these things, the lust of the eyes, the lust of the mind. When we see these things, I want you to think for a moment of the mind and of these passionate desires that we have to satisfy our curiosities, to satisfy our opinions, to satisfy our biases, to satisfy our preferences, to satisfy our psyches. Listen, Satan has learned how to prey on us. You see, our bodies, they have these wirings, and these hormones, and these chemicals and things that they release, and there's certain things of life that cause that to happen. And God's wired us that way for a reason. Listen, when you get scared, and that adrenaline gland triggers, and you get that rush of adrenaline, it's so that you can get up and hightail it out of there, to stay alive if you need to. God's wired us this way for a reason. But what's happened is that we have so succumbed to how Satan has perverted our minds that what was purposed for God and how they were wired is being rewired by the world. I don't know if you saw it this week, but they released statistics about depression and things and young people. And my goodness, I'll probably present those to the church at some point. They've skyrocketed, especially amongst young ladies. Yet we wonder why there's a rise in anxiety and depression and all sorts of these things. Satan has grabbed a hold of the minds of young people and he is consuming them and destroying them by it. Will we pull them out? You say, Derek, what's this look like? You've probably heard of the term dopamine, right? It's that that the body secretes or that chemical that Makes us feel good. Right? You get that dopamine rush. Probably the easiest way to think about this if you've ever gone to a casino or seen it on a movie or something and there's a slot machine there and you pull the handle and you get the rush of pulling the handle and those little gizmos start turning in there and there's the excitement of that. And whether or not you win or not has nothing to do with it. The dopamine was released when you pulled the handle and started seeing the gadget spin around. So what happens? Win or lose, you pull the handle again. Why? Because you like that rush of dopamine. That's how gambling becomes addictive. Did you know that? That's how all these things become addictive to our minds. Because there's something about them that triggers in there that feels good. And so Satan knows that and he's devised these ways to consume us and addict us to things that will shipwreck our lives. So John rightly cries out to us, the Scriptures rightly cry out to us, God cries out to us when he says, stop loving the world. Now some of you say, well Derek, listen, I don't mess with casinos. I don't have that problem at all. You are lying to yourself. How many of you here have a phone on you right now? Okay. How many of you have social media programmed on that phone right now? I'm not going to attack social media. I want you to know that. I'm just going to show you the adversary's devices. You ever have social media pulled up on one of those? You have Facebook, Twitter, something like that pulled up. How do you get it to refresh? You pull down on it, don't you? And all of a sudden, you pull down on it, that little wheel starts spinning, and that dopamine starts dripping. You've pulled the handle. The wheel's spinning, the gadgets are spinning, and you're waiting to see what pops up. Listen, y'all carry casinos around in your pockets, in your purses. You don't think you're immune to this? Listen, Satan's built up addictions in this way. Addictions to social media, addictions to phone, addictions to gadgets, addictions to stuff that are consuming our minds. that are tearing apart the minds of young people and pulling them into deep depressions and deep anxieties. And if we get back to the root, we see the sin of worldliness. Do you see this? Do you believe what I'm telling you? The Scriptures have instructed plainly and clearly, ok, don't get much more plain than this. Stop loving the Word. And then we get to the pride of life. And I'm going to camp out here for a minute. Because if there is anything that our adversary is using, let's say he's using the lust of the flesh, he's using the lust of the mind, but what he's building even them on is this mountain of pride. And he just takes us right up to the top of it and we get perched there and we feel awfully good about it. I'm going to say this as your pastor here at Faith Church, if there is anything that's at risk of harming us here at Faith Church, it is pride. It is pride. I'm going to show you what that looks like here in a minute, but for a second we need to talk about this idea of pride. Because I think one way in which Satan has used this worldly pride to take us and to begin to sift us like wheat, like he desired to do with Peter, that what's happened is we've gotten this idea twisted in the world. Can I tell you something about pride? Pride has nothing to do with your bank account. Pride has nothing to do with your social status. It has nothing to do with your friends or who you're friends with or who you're not friends with. It has nothing to do with what job you have. Pride is principally a heart issue. It's a heart issue. Pride's not a stuff issue. It's not what you have, what you don't have issue. It's a heart issue. I've seen a lot of prideful rich people, and I've seen a lot of prideful poor people. I've seen a lot of prideful famous people, and I've seen a lot of prideful people that the world knows nothing about. It has nothing to do with any status, with any accolade, with any fame, with any job, with any of that. Pride is a hard issue. At the root of that pride issue, if you just want to simply look to what it is, it is when you become a lover of yourself above anything else. You know, I've been prideful and I've been made humble. Pride has this tendency to enjoy itself there in our pride. It has this tendency to want to remain there because when you feel like you're at this pinnacle, it feels safe to you as though no one can knock you off. And for that reason, it makes humility a really scary thing. The most fearful thing I've ever prayed in my life was for God to humiliate me. How do we use the word humiliate? We use it in talking about embarrassment, don't we? What's humiliate actually mean? It means to be made humble. So what happens is oftentimes for us to be made humble, it takes us realizing some shame for it to happen, and that makes us really uncomfortable. So rather than dealing with this pride problem, we just find ourselves lifted up higher and higher in pride. And here's the problem with that. There's a couple problems with that. One, is that the Proverbs have instructed us well when it says that pride goes before destruction. You keep lifting yourself up in pride, you are going to realize and reap what is being sown when you watch the life around you get destroyed. But not only so, is that God has seldom use for the prideful heart. You want to be used of the Lord, you will not be used of the Lord when you are lifted up in pride. You want to be spiritual, you will scarcely be spiritual when you are battling with pride in your heart. Because pride elevates us in a way that we try to claim the position of God and God is going to have nothing to do with that. Why would He? He's God. He has no equals. He has no rivals. You trying to build yourself up to be one is of scarce importance to Him and you will surely fall. So let's talk about pride for a second. What happens with pride is it ties up our heart to look with scorn. Listen to what I'm saying here. So look with scorn and disdain towards another. Don't you say that again? Pride ties up our hearts to look with scorn and disdain toward another. If that doesn't break your heart to the point of repentance, I don't know what will. I love my brothers and my sisters and anytime I've ever looked at you with scorn or disdain in my heart, shame on me. Anytime you've ever looked at your brother or sister with scorn or disdain in your heart, shame on you. It was a lot easier when it was about me than it was about you, wasn't it? That's what pride does. Makes it a lot easier to see somebody else deal with it than for you to deal with it. Something that I found about when I get messed up in pride, I told you I was going to try to give some tests to help you explore this for yourself. Something I found out about myself when I get messed up with this sin of pride is that where God suddenly reveals it to me is in what I'm saying. Whether outwardly, with what I'm actually saying, or just my thoughts, and what I'm saying in my head, the Lord will reveal to me that what's happening is that I've gotten twisted up in this mess of pride. And how I begin to see that, here I just said it, how I begin to see that is suddenly my speech, what I have to say, I becomes the prevalent word. You getting this? When all of a sudden, how you're talking, what you're saying, I, me, becomes the focal point of it. You've probably talked to people this way. You get really excited. You just had something good happen to you. You just want to tell everybody about it. And you say, listen to this good that happened to me. And that person looks you back in the eye and said, I had the same thing happen to me one time. Right? You get that? That's pride. That's what it looks like. That's what it feels like. That's a very small example. And you walk into somebody's house, and you say, well, I would fix that crooked picture. You're looking at disdain about their being OK with that crooked picture. Daddy, those are small things. Oh, they are terribly small things. Could you imagine if I started talking about the big things? Listen, these little elements of pride, Satan will use them to divide us right in half. If he doesn't use them to divide us in half, what he'll do is he'll just start skirting around the edges, just trimming a little bit from this corner, from that corner, from this part over here, from that part over there, and he will completely mess up our church. He'll completely mess up our unity. And listen to me for a second, when I give you a warning as your pastor, I see him doing it. I told you a couple weeks ago that as a competitive person, that when I see I have an adversary in Satan, it just makes me want to poke him in the eye, right? I want to beat him. Right? And so I'm warning these things to you to bring us in closer together that we might stand against our adversary. That we might vanquish him. Now let me tell you something about that. We're going to see in a second. We will not vanquish him. We won't. We're not as strong as he is. We're not as cunning or as clever as he is. We don't stand a chance on our own. But greater is He who is in us than is in the world. God has already declared victory over the adversary. He's already declared victory over that serpent. And so when we look to Him, we can indeed kick Him to the curb and say, Satan, you have no part of this place. Just as we have no part with the world, Satan has no part with us. You see in this, I've got to give this warning. It tears me up inside to give it. We're a very blessed church. God has blessed us. With so much. So many wonderful, wonderful brothers and sisters, you all have talents that God's given you to use for his cause and for his kingdom. He's blessed you with abilities. He's blessed you with hearts of love. He's blessed you with with with minds to work. He's blessed you with desires to serve. And we're made up of different people, from different backgrounds, from different walks of life. You know, I talk to some of you about the things you've seen and experienced, and man, every time I do, I'm just taken aback with how your experience has been different than mine, and what you've seen and done, and how you've explored those things, what God's brought you through, and how you've experienced those. And it's wonderful that God has brought so many different kinds of people into His church. Isn't that wonderful? Now just think about that for a moment. The world loves to talk about diversity and all those things. Listen, we're a diverse group of people. And it ain't got nothing to do with outside characteristics. It's just who we are. We are a diverse group of people. And Satan is preying on that diversity. He's preying on it in our country. Don't you see how he's dividing the country? Is that not evident to all of us? I mean, he's doing a wicked good job. And you know what's shameful about that? Is we fall right into his trap, right? We stand up on the red side or the blue side, we see how loud we can shout, and he will hear us. I mean, we're just as bad, aren't we? You see how I made that both Republican and Democrat? Both sides. No matter which side you're on, we're all guilty of that. He's as violent and desiring just to split us right in half. And if he's desiring to split a country in half, don't you think he's desiring to split us in half? And I'm just gonna warn you about what I see him doing. He is creating, guys, this is just shameful. And shame on us if we let this happen. I'm giving you the warning. If you guys wanna run me out of here after this, you can. But I'm telling you this out of love. and because I love you and this people and this church so much. He is desiring to split us on grounds of financial class stuff, just like he has throughout history. Oh, shame on us, church, and we let it happen. It ought not to make a lick of difference how much someone has or doesn't have. It just doesn't matter. And we must. must each come humbly before the Lord with regards to these things. Listen, if that bothers some of you, you take it to the Lord. You pray about it. But He's shown these things to me. And listen, I'm compelled by a duty to Him. Because here's the deal, church. I'm going to stand in judgment of us. And I cannot and I will not wait for division to come when it's obvious that it's being approached and we're being approached by Satan. And at the source of that, again, it doesn't make a lick of difference what you got or what you don't got, because at the source of it, it's not about the outward things. It's about pride. It's about pride. Listen, y'all. I'll just take you through my life. Listen, I've been like Paul. I've abased, I've abounded, I've known both. Whatever God has for me tomorrow, whether that's abundance or whether that's to be amazed, it's His business and I'm going to trust Him through it. I'm not worried about those things. I'm worried about His kingdom. And I'm worried about His people. And I'm worried about those lost souls. You know what troubled me when I got down on my knees a little bit ago? I didn't hear any prayer requests for the lost. We've forgotten. Hear my warning well. Hear this rebuke well. Hear this command of the Lord well. To stop loving. The world. Turn with me over quickly to the book of James. I'm going to read 10 verses. And Brother Cory, if you get a song, I'm going to open the altar. And if you need to come repent, I want you to do that. I'm going to read these 10 verses. James 4, beginning at verse 1. It says, From whence come wars and fighting among you? And this is talking to Christians. This isn't about global wars. This isn't about political battles or countries being at war with each other. It's about conflicts. Conflicts among God's people. It says, Do they not come from here, even from your lust that war in your members? You lust and you do not have, so you commit murder. You are envious and you cannot obtain, so you fight and you quarrel. You do not have because you do not ask. You ask and you do not receive because you ask with wrong motives, so that you may spend it on your pleasures. You adulteresses, do you not know that friendship with the world is hostility toward God? Therefore, whoever wishes to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God. Or do you think that the Scripture speaks to no purpose? He jealously desires the Spirit which He has made to dwell in us. But He gives, listen this is the good part, but He gives a greater grace. Therefore it says God is opposed to the proud but gives grace to the humble. Submit yourselves therefore to God. Resist the devil and he will flee from you. Draw near to God and He will draw near to you. Cleanse your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded. Be miserable and mourn and weep. Let your laughter be turned into mourning and your joy to gloom. Humble yourselves in the presence of the Lord, and He will exalt you. Let's get a song. Listen to me today, my friend, my brother, my sister, my fellow church member. We struggle with worldliness. We've been called today to stop loving If we were to go on, we would have seen that John makes this an issue about two things. He makes it first about a salvation issue. He says, the one who loves the world, the love of God's not in him. Listen, if you're a lover of the world, if your life is consistently marked by a love for the world for which you have not repented and regularly repent of it, what that tells me, based upon all that I can see and all that I can judge against the Scriptures, is that the love of God is not in you, that you've not truly That's what the Scripture says. So we see John first tell us this is a salvation issue. But next we see it become a kingdom issue. Because it's about eternity. That the child of God who loves the world, and rebukes or turns His back on the world, and repents of the world, and does away with His longing and desire for it. Now behold, eternity is in the bounds. So it's a kingdom issue. And so I call out to the kingdom of the church. I call out to God's people. And I say, what will you do with this command? What will you do with this reproof? What will you do with this rebuke? And let me warn you about what Jesus said. And lest you repent, you shall all likewise perish. Let's sing, Brother Cory.