Pleasing God with R. C. Sproul, “The Battle With the World,” 3

The Christian’s Struggle With the World, the Flesh, and the Devil

I'm sure I'm going to have some interesting responses from our last session together when we considered the difference between the superficial external kind of righteousness that characterized the lives of the scribes and the Pharisees and the authentic kind of righteousness to which we are called.

Some people are going to write in and say, R .C., I was so involved in that lecture that for me time actually stood still, or others will write in and say, you people are as hypocritical as the Pharisees you were talking about because you use a clock up here that's obviously a phony because it reads the same time all the time.

Did you notice that? I'm sure all kinds of people will and will send in letters. Well, I want everybody to know that that's a real clock. It's an authentic clock. It's just a broken clock, that's all.

But this much we can say for it, it tells the correct time twice a day, every day. Martin Luther said that the Christian in his struggle for obedience has many obstacles to overcome, but basically we're involved in warfare that takes place not on one front or two fronts, but on three fronts, and that the triad of enemies that confront the Christian are, as Luther maintained, the world, the flesh, and the devil.

That's a very famous quotation from Luther, and of course Luther understood that when he made that list of the world and the flesh and the devil, that though he distinguished among those three particular enemies, he understood that all three of them were intimately related one to the other, that the spirit of the flesh of which the Bible speaks is that part of our nature that is enraptured by and seduced by the spirit of this world, and this world is the arena over which Satan has a particular level of influence and even at times a kind of dominion.

And so though we distinguish among these three, we don't want to separate them one from the other, but we will look at each one of these seriatim, and in this session we're going to consider the Christian's struggle with what the New Testament calls the world.

The World as a Place and as a Fallen Perspective

Now obviously the term world in the New Testament is used in more than one way, and sometimes, in some cases, the term world simply refers to this planet. There's nothing pejorative, nothing negative about the term when it's used in that way.

It's simply a geographical location. This place is distinguished from Mars or Jupiter or the heavens above, but also the term world is used in the New Testament to refer to the fallen sphere of this planet to a kind of standpoint or perspective that is anti-God, that is more man-centered than God-centered.

Let me read a brief portion from the gospel according to St. John to see how Jesus makes this kind of distinction with respect to the world. I'm going to pick it up in John chapter 17, verse 12. By the way, as I read this brief portion of John's gospel, let me remind you that this comes from a very lengthy segment of the discourse in the upper room that Jesus had with His disciples the night before He was killed, and it also includes a passage of expressions that Jesus makes in the longest recorded prayer that comes from Jesus in the New Testament.

This is the record of what is called the great high priestly prayer of Jesus or Jesus' prayer of intercession. It's the only time that you are prayed for in the New Testament because Jesus prays not only for His disciples who are with them in that moment, but speaks and prays and intercedes for those who would believe in future generations through their teaching.

Now notice what He says in verse 11 of chapter 7. That's where I'll pick it up. He said, Now I am no more in the world, but these are in the world, and I come to thee. Here you see world clearly refers to this place, doesn't it?

He said, I'm about to depart from this location, from the world, but now, Father, I'm praying for my friends and my disciples who are going to stay behind here active in this world. But yet He goes on to say, Holy Father, keep through Thine own name those whom You have given Me that they may be one as We are, and while I was with them in the world, I kept them in Thy name, and those that You gave Me I have kept, and none of them is lost but the son of perdition that the Scripture might be fulfilled.

And now I come to You that these things that I speak in the world that they might have joy fulfilled in themselves. I have given them Your Word, and the world has hated them because they are not of the world even as I am not of the world.

Now do you see how the term world is beginning to take on that slightly different nuance to refer not simply to geographical location but to one's standpoint or perspective with regard to the things of God?

The world is that sphere or that group of people who has no affection for the things of God. The world exists in this regard in antithesis and opposition and tension over against the kingdom of God, and so He says, I pray not that You should take them out of the world but that You should keep them from the evil.

They are not of the world even as I am not of the world, so sanctify them through Your truth. Thy Word is truth. That is a loaded statement, isn't it? Jesus said, I'm not asking, Father, that You take them out of the world.

Oh, how I wish we would listen to the prayer of Christ at that point, because in every generation of Christian history there is always that pull and that tug within the Christian community to so disassociate ourselves from anything that smacks of this world that we withdraw into isolation in order to keep ourselves pure.

If we would only read carefully, for example, the gospel according to St. Luke, for in Luke's gospel we see a motif that is hammered home again and again by Luke in terms of the teaching of Jesus over against once again the Pharisees.

One of the doctrines that emerged among the Pharisees was this doctrine, salvation by segregation. Remember one of the things that the Pharisees became so incensed about with Jesus was that Jesus, in their opinion, contaminated Himself by spending time with publicans and tax collectors and sinners, the things that the Pharisees wouldn't go near.

I remember once walking down the street in conversation with a friend of mine who was an Anglican priest, and he was rather proud of his consecration into the priesthood. And we were in the streets of Philadelphia, and this little boy came, he was selling newspapers or something.

He was kind of like a street urchin. He was filthy dirty. You know, he had ice cream or something all over his face, and his shirt was dirty, and he had tattered clothes on. And he came on, and he grabbed ahold of the priest's sleeve and began to tug at it saying, Mr., Mr.

And, you know, he was trying to sell him a magazine or something, and he was tugging on his sleeve. And suddenly the priest turned around and threw the boy's hand off his hand and said, How dare you touch the arm of a priest of God?

And I wanted to stop right there and look at my friend the priest and say, How dare you act as if the arm of a priest were untouchable by a human being? I mean, Jesus would have embraced that boy on the street.

He would never buy in to this idea of so radical separation from the world that one sort of manifests a spirit of contempt to the very arena that is the focal point of God's redemption. Jesus said, I don't ask that you take them out of the world.

Jesus was not starting a new community of Essenes. Do you remember the Essenes whose work were found in the Dead Sea Scrolls? These were people who drew apart from civilization to live in total isolation so that they could keep themselves pure for the coming of the Messiah.

And while they're hiding down there in the caves along the Dead Sea, the Messiah came, and they missed Him. They were so busy keeping themselves out of the world that they missed the Messiah when the Messiah came to the world to redeem the world.

And so Jesus said, I don't ask that you take them out of the world, but that you keep them from evil. That is, that you preserve them while they are living out their faith and living out their life in the midst of the world.

Do Not Be Conformed to This World

Well, I think that's consistent with what the Apostle Paul teaches in his grand climax in the practical application of the book of Romans after this expansive development of heavy doctrine and theology.

You remember how he begins the twelfth chapter where he said, I beseech you therefore, my brethren, by the mercies of God that you present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service, and then what does he say?

And do not be conformed to this world, but be ye transformed by the renewal of your mind. Let's take a look at those two words, conformity and transformation. We see the same root in both of them, the word form, which refers to structure or system, and the only difference really that we find in these words is with the prefix, right?

The prefix con means what? Chili con carne means beans with meat, right? So that con here means with, so that to conform is literally to be with it, to be a part of the leading acceptable structures of the current world system.

I remember when I was in about sixth grade, I think, my mother took me downtown Pittsburgh to buy a pair of shoes. I don't know why this sticks in my mind, but while the clerk was trying on these fancy shoes for me, and I used to get to look in that little green x-ray machine, you get down to see your toes at the end of the shoes.

I don't think they have those things anymore, but that was a big deal when I was a kid. That was high tech, and this shoe salesman was very nice, and he was talking to me about school in sixth grade, and I looked at him, and he said, well, how are everything going in school?

And I half came out of my chair, I said, well, I said, I'm the most popular boy in my class. My mother was absolutely horrified. I mean, as soon as that man went away, she took me aside, and she said, you can't talk like that to people.

She says, that's terrible. That's so egotistical and arrogant and rude. You must never, never talk like…and she gave me this big lecture on the virtues of humility. But you know what? I didn't care, because my goal in life when I was in sixth grade was not to be humble.

My goal when I was in sixth grade was like every other sixth grader's goal in this world, and that was to be what? The most popular person you could possibly be. Why? Because when we enter into adolescence and into our teenage years where we finally realize that there's a world out there beyond our parents and our uncles and aunts and so on, and that there's a society where we are being evaluated and judged and accepted or rejected, popularity with our peers at about age 13 becomes one of the most important passions of our lives.

And if we don't receive a certain measure of popularity that is so crushing to the human spirit that it can carry in our psyches the rest of our lives, everybody wants to be liked by other people. But we learn as children, as I learned when I was in the sixth grade, that if I was going to be popular, there was a price tag to be paid, and the most important price for popularity was conformity, that I, if I was going to be Mr. Popularity in my school, I had to know all the words to the latest songs, the latest hits on the hit parade.

I had to know the batting averages of the Pirates and so on. I had to be able to do the things that you do to prove that you're really a man. I had to listen to the dares and accept the dares and see if I could swipe something from the drugstore without getting caught and get involved in the games that you play at night where you're getting chased through the town by the police and make sure the police don't catch you.

And I went through all those games because that's what you had to do to be popular. And I can remember that the lecture I would get from my father all the time as a teenager was, son, you know, it takes more courage to say no than it does to say yes.

Did you ever get a lecture like that? Or the one the principal used to always get, young man, don't you know that you're stabbing your mother in the back, you know, with all this kind of stuff. And I said, but don't you understand?

I'm not trying to please my mother. I'm not trying to conform to what my mother's values are. This is where I'm being judged, this arena of my peers. And so as kids we play all of these games in order to achieve the great sought-after goal of popularity.

But, of course, that's, you know, that's only one of those short-term adolescent phenomena that as soon as we become adults we put away childish things and we don't worry anymore about being popular, do we?

You know, they say the only thing that's the difference between men and boys is what? The price of their toys. The games change, and the price tags change, but the goal of being accepted by our peers is something that pulls at us every day of our lives.

And so the seductive power of this world is to conform, to conform to it. Well, what is it that we are being drawn to conformity? The Germans have a word for it. You know how the Germans, the Germanic languages, they'll just take two good concrete nouns and just squash them together and make one word out of them.

No offense, Olga, to the Dutch language, would never think of doing anything like that. But the Germans take two words and they stick them together and get the word zeitgeist. You've all heard the word geist, I'm sure, in the English language because you've heard of poltergeists, and poltergeists are kind of little ghosties that go bump in the night.

Well, zeit is the German word for time, and geist is the German word for spirit. And so this compact word, zeitgeist, means literally the spirit of the times or the spirit of the age. And what the Germans mean by the zeitgeist is basically this, what's in right now.

What is fashionable? What is acceptable? What is it that we do? Now in the nineteenth century, a man became very important not only as a literary figure in Germany but as a philosopher, and he emerged as one of the most important critics of his own generation, and his name was Friedrich Nietzsche.

And you know that Nietzsche is famous for his declaration of the death of God and for his advocacy of what he called biological heroism, by which he would seek for the construction of a super race, and Hitler ran with that and took it to an extreme.

But Nietzsche complained of the decadence of nineteenth century Europe, and in that complaint said that basically the vast majority of people live what he called by the dictates of a herd morality. That is, Nietzsche's criticism was this.

He said for the most part people are like sheep, and they just follow uncritically and without any courage whatever is expected from them in their contemporary situation. In other words, they become slaves to the zeitgeist or the spirit of the age, and that's why he called for Superman, the Übermensch.

He said the Übermensch will be known as a person who will leave the herd and dare to think for himself. In other words, the Superman of Nietzsche would be the ultimate nonconformist. Now at least that much the New Testament has in common with Nietzsche's nihilism.

Both call us to a kind of nonconformity. It's not the same kind of nonconformity, I hasten to add. But Paul says, do not be conformed to this world. Now if ever there was a passage of Scripture distorted by Christians, that's it, because we look at that, and we only read half of the passage, and we say, oh, well what God wants from us is if we're going to be really righteous, we're going to be known for our nonconformity.

Do you realize on the one hand how difficult it is to be a nonconformist, as I've already indicated? We're so pulled to acceptance by the group and so on. On the other hand, do you realize how easy it is to be a nonconformist of a kind?

What happens, what tends to happen among Christians is they say, well, we're going to show the world that we're different, and what we're going to do is that we're going to show how different we are from the world by refusing to participate in the world's worldliness, which means we won't dance, and we won't wear makeup, and we won't go to movies, and we won't play cards.

I remember when I went to my first job as a teacher at a Christian college, and I was hired to teach the Bible, and before the school opened, they had a picnic on the beach, and some students pulled out a deck of cards and started playing bridge, and the dean came over and confiscated the cards, and that was my initiation to discover to my horror that the only card game that this group of Christians were allowed to play was Rook, the Christian card game.

I said, Rook? I said, Rook? I quit playing Rook when I was eight, and I said, what are they going to do when they find out that their Bible professor plays in duplicate bridge tournaments? It never occurred to me that there was anything spiritual or unspiritual about contract bridge.

Imagine it. It's absolutely incredible that that kind of thing emerges in a subculture, but what happens is that we look around, and we see things that people in the secular world do, and we want to make sure that we don't appear any way like secular people, so we set up these artificial forms of nonconformity.

Ladies and gentlemen, the kingdom of God has nothing to do with Rook. Those are superficial types of nonconformity. If you want to be a nonconformist in the biblical sense, be somebody whose word can be trusted.

Be somebody who will do what's right even if it costs them money. That's different. It's not that if everybody in the world is wearing white hats, we start to wear red ones. That's not the nonconformity that the New Testament is talking about, but we read the rest of the verse, and we see that we are not simply to be nonconformists for nonconformity sake, but we are to be transformed, and here the prefix means everything.

To be transformed means to go over, above, beyond the structures of the present world. When I first became a Christian, the fellow that led me to Christ made a statement to me in the first two weeks. I said, what does it mean to you to be a Christian?

He said, what it means to me is to be a Christian is that I'm going to outwork you, I'm going to outfight you, and I'm going to outlove you, and that's what he understood, that to be a Christian meant a call to excellence, a call to excellence that went beyond the standards of what was acceptable in the world.

Most Christians today take their ethical guidance from what's legal or what's accepted in the rest of the world, or we want to have the civil magistrates enforce the Christian ethic. I say, wait a minute.

The Christian ethic's the same no matter what the Supreme Court does or what the Supreme Court says. I don't march to that drumbeat. We have a Lord who gives us our ethic and His commandments. He said, obey my commandments.

That's our responsibility.