Beginning — Norman Meeten

See you all again. And a particular pleasure to see Gary, because I laughed the last time I saw him, he looked nearer death than life. In fact, I wondered whether I was going to see him safely back to Ireland or not.

But he's very much alive and recovered very quickly from his brief expiry on Malta Airport. I did wonder whether he'd actually died or not on me. But he's here, praise God, and it's lovely to be with you all.

Looking forward to these days together with you, we've already been well padded out. No doubt we'll put on a few kilos before the end of the week, unless we exercise very, very great discipline. But let's trust the Lord to feed our hearts.

That's why we come, really. It's not material things that we look for. One of the things that always challenges me when I'm in places overseas is the fact that they come for the Lord. There isn't much else to come for.

In the Cameroons, we were in a half-built house on the first floor, sitting on long planks, packed on stools. They were quite narrow planks, and I tell you, when you've been sitting there a couple of hours, you knew that they were narrow and hard and very uncomfortable.

But they come and they rejoice and they love the Lord. Their faces just give them away, they're radiant. Despite all the hardship and difficulty that they've gone through in the last 12 months, things that you and I probably would never have to face, they were triumphant.

Hallelujah, there wasn't a groan, there wasn't a gripe, there wasn't a complaint, there wasn't a regret, just joy unspeakable. It's a gratitude to God for all his faithfulness and love to them, who's brought them through and caused them to triumph in the midst of adversity.

We seem to accumulate so many problems, we have so many aches and pains and groans and complaints when we have so much. Let's go on. Now, tonight I'd like you to turn with me into Mark's gospel, chapter 1, and I want to read the first 15 verses.

Mark’s Gospel and the Beginning of the Gospel

Mark's gospel is a very simple gospel and probably the informant behind it was Peter. Peter was a very down-to-earth, basic sort of man, a fisherman by occupation, who learned most of his lessons by making huge mistakes, and how many of us haven't made mistakes?

The important thing is if we make mistakes, that we learn from our mistakes and don't go on making them, but discover the good in which the Lord has in them for us. Peter learned his mistakes, and by the time he got down to writing his letters, he discovered some very real things in God.

Praise his name. The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. As it is written in the prophets, Behold, I send my messenger before thy face, which shall prepare thy way before thee, the voice of one crying in the wilderness, Prepare ye the way of the Lord, and make his past great.

John did baptize in the wilderness, and preached the baptism of repentance for the remission of sins. And they went out unto him all the land of Judah, and their Jerusalem, and were all baptized of him in the river Jordan, confessing their sins.

And John was clothed with camel's hair, and with a girdle of skin about his lungs, and he did eat locusts and wild honey, and preached, saying, There cometh one mightier than I after me, the lachet of whose shoes I am not worthy to stoop down and unloose.

I indeed baptize you with water, but he shall baptize you with the Holy Ghost. And it came to pass in those days that Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee, and was baptized of John in Jordan. And straightway coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens opened, and the Spirit like a dove descending upon him.

And there came a voice from heaven saying, Thou art my beloved son in whom I am well pleased. And immediately the Spirit driveth him into the wilderness, and he was there in the wilderness forty days tempted of Satan, and was with the wild beasts, and the angels ministered under him.

Now after that John was put in prison, Jesus came into Galilee preaching the gospel of the kingdom of God, and saying, The time is fulfilled. The kingdom of God is at hand. Repent ye, and believe the gospel.

Amen. Now turn to the last chapter of Mark's gospel, and verse 15. Jesus said unto them, Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature. He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved, and he that believeth not shall be damned.

And these signs shall follow them that believe. In my name they shall cast out devils, they shall speak with new tongues, they shall take up serpents, and if they drink any deadly thing it shall not hurt them.

They shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover. So then after the Lord had spoken unto them, he was received up into heaven, and sat on the right hand of God, and preached everywhere the Lord working with them, and confirming the word with signs following.

Amen. The opening words of this gospel say the beginning of the gospel. The last chapter, the last uttered words of Jesus, Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature. Amen. Now that's our great commission, that's our great commitment, that's the whole purpose of gathering together, and being the people of God, trusting him to minister to us, he might go out and minister to others in the fullness of time.

Jesus as the Substance of the Gospel

That we should preach the gospel. The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. The moment Jesus appeared on the public scene, he began to preach the gospel of the kingdom of God, and he said that we were to repent and believe the gospel.

Now the gospel in one word is Jesus. That's the substance of the gospel, and the four gospels that we have recorded for us in this lovely book are simply portraits or biographies of Jesus, taken from four different angles, giving us a much more enlarged picture than we would have if we were only to have one gospel.

That's why it's good to read these lovely gospels comparatively, or in parallel, one with the other. One will enrich the other and give you a larger impression of the Lord Jesus. Praise his name. The beginning of the gospel.

I believe the reason why many people never go on, and why many people collapse again and again in their spiritual pilgrimage, is because they never get the beginnings of the gospel really settled in their hearts.

They don't clearly understand the beginning of the gospel. I sometimes think in our own circles we tend to build castles in the air, and assume that people know what they don't know. That they are in what they are not in, and are trying to live a life up here when they haven't got it sorted out down here.

And so they keep falling flat on their face again and again, and come to the point where they ask, is it real? Does it work? Can it work? Bless his name. So I thought on this first night we would look at some of the lovely truths related to the beginning of the gospel.

The first thing of course is, in one sense, not the beginning, because it began a long time before this. Because if you read your Bible properly, you discover that God preached the gospel to Abraham. And if you study the character of Abraham, you'll find all the glorious truth of the gospel wrapped up in his biography.

It's a wonderful exercise. God preached the gospel unto Abraham. He preached it out there. The church was established in the wilderness. And it meant there was a great anticipation, a great preparation.

And when we open up this lovely gospel of Mark, we see that it's the fulfillment of prophetic utterance. God had been preparing the way before John, the great preparer of the way, came to earth. The two quotations which we have here in the beginning of Mark's gospel, one comes from Malachi chapter 3 verse 1, and the other one comes from Isaiah chapter 40 verse 3.

And they are just two of many quotations that you will discover as you read through the gospel narrative, telling us that God had anticipated, prepared for this great moment in time, when the reality of the gospel would come in the reach of every man and every woman.

They'd yearned for it. They'd longed for it. They'd lived with the hope that one day it would all happen. And of course, there's many people who still live in the terrible darkness and deception of believing that it hasn't happened, that Jesus hasn't come.

And Paul refers to them in his second letter to the Corinthians by saying that when they even read the gospel, when they read the scriptures, they read it as one having a veil over their eyes, and they do not see.

And there are many people, beloved, who read this book, who profess and call themselves Christians, who still have veils over their eyes, and they do not see. They do not understand. Jesus said, they hear, you hear, but you don't hear, and therefore you don't understand.

Glory be to God. May God open our eyes and cause us to see, and if it's to see afresh anew some of the great fundamental truths of the gospel, to come to our hearts with greater clarity, and to find it out working in our lives in a greater reality.

Lots of people have tremendous revelations, and they claim great clarity, but the important thing, does it work out in reality? It's the thing that exercises my heart. You can have tremendous revelations, tremendous illumination, great visions from heaven, but unless there is a practical application, and outworking those truths in daily living, that revolutionize the lives of men and women, but what's the use of it all?

We only confound our terrible position. Amen. I'm so glad that the prophets came, that they spoke, and there came a day when the great prophetic utterances of the gospel began to find their fulfillment.

The Gospel in Creation, Prophecy, and Pentecost

And of course, the first great prophecy that relates to Jesus, you find right back in the third chapter of the book of Genesis, verse 15, where it says, the seed of the woman will bruise the serpent's head.

There is the gospel. The book of Genesis is a magnificent exposition of the gospel. It's all there, because it's all related to the beginning, as it was in the beginning. That's how John's gospel opened up.

In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God. John's first epistle opens up, and he's saying, well, in the beginning. You know that quotation in Matthew's gospel where Jesus is talking about the human relationships, and he said, it was not so in the beginning.

You know, many women were baptized in the Holy Ghost on the day of Pentecost. That was the beginning. That was the beginning of the gospel. Perhaps you don't believe that, but that's when the gospel really began.

All that is foretold in the gospel record finds its realistic beginning on the day of Pentecost. And then later on, when Cornelius and his household got baptized in the Holy Ghost, Peter said, what happened to them is what happened to us at the beginning.

Now, I want to ask you, beloved, what happened at the beginning? What happened at your beginning? That's the important issue. I remember what happened at my beginning. Now, there was a great prelude to it, but I know when it really began, when God spoke me out of death into life, when he brought me out of sin into righteousness, when he brought me out of darkness into light, when he brought me out of the kingdom of Satan and transplanted me down into the kingdom of the son of his love.

That's when the real beginning took place. But prior to that, beloved, there was a great build-up. That's the Lord. And that's why we get this lovely phrase twice here. In verse two it says, Behold, I send my messenger before thy face, which shall prepare thy way before thee.

And then in verse three, the voice of one crying in the wilderness, Prepare ye the way of the Lord. Make his paths straight. Preparations. There is a great preparatory work of the Spirit of God. Lots of people think that the first time they hear the gospel and respond to it, beloved, that's it.

Not necessarily so. It can be so. But even prior to that, beloved, in the life of most of us there's been a long preparation. There was a preparation for the coming of Jesus. Amen. There's a preparation of the work of the Spirit in the life of every man or woman to bring them to Jesus.

And if we overlook and neglect, beloved, the preparatory work of the Spirit of God in a person's life, then as I say, we're building castles in the air. We're building on sand. In the realm of a natural, beloved, if you're going to build a house, there has to be preparation.

Does there not? You've got the story in the scriptures about the wise man who made preparation and the foolish man who failed to make the right preparation. You get also stories of Jesus about the man who went to war and made no preparation to guarantee the victory.

Or another man who planned to build a house and didn't make preparation. He didn't make estimation as to how much it was going to cost him to put the roof on and get it all fixed. You've only got to go to Italy or Sicily, beloved, and see many people in the natural who set out like that.

They started building. There are skeletons all over the place. Buildings that started but have never found completion because they didn't make the right preparations for one reason or another. And that's true in the spiritual realm.

Many people haven't made real preparation. Now John the Baptist, beloved, was the great preparer of the way. Now he was the last of the great prophetic line. Jesus referred to him as the greatest of the prophets.

I often say you wouldn't have estimated him as the greatest, but Jesus did. He lived shorter life than any. He prophesied a shorter message than any, but he was the greatest. He was the last of the long line.

And of course within that line, beloved, there had come Moses who had brought the law and that's a part of the prophetic work of God. Paul speaks of the law in the Galatian epistle in particular and also in the Roman epistle as being a schoolmaster that brings us to Christ.

The law also which shuts us up until Christ comes. Isn't it a wonderful thing? You know that's bad psychology but it's magnificent theology. You're not told to shut people up these days. You're not told to inhibit people these days.

You're not told, beloved, to discipline your children these days. I knew a couple who went out to China, they're back in England now, but before they went out, beloved, one day they were out and their little girl, I relate this to someone only today, came back to my mind.

It's years ago when they talked to me. They went out one day and they've got a young child who was very difficult to handle and one day she'd driven them almost to the brink of their resources. The mother, I think it was, or the father, I'm not sure which, took it, ran behind the bush, down with its pants and walloped its bottom.

They were reported to the authorities, beloved, and they had this person, that person, the other person on their back for months. Now, they'd be the last people, beloved, to advocate brutality. No, they did observe, beloved, the importance of the law to bring a sense of discipline and uprightness into the life of their family.

The law is a schoolmaster to bring us to class. You know, if you had gone to the preachings of, for instance, Charles Grandison Finney, or if you've gone to the preachings of George Whitfield, or Jonathan Edwards, or even the Westwoods, you would have found that for weeks, beloved, they would preach the law.

He would go to a place and for a solid week he'd preach the law until people came to a place where they were so aware of their inability to come anywhere near God's standard that they cried for mercy.

It says that when Edwards preached, beloved, it was just through ground-opening controversy and terror. They preached the law, they prepared the world. We preach love, amen, and so we should. But we never understand the love of God, beloved, until we understand the law of God.

For the culmination of the law is to love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, with all thy soul, with all thy mind, and with all thy strength, and love thy neighbour as thyself. This is the fulfilment of the whole law.

It's not the destruction of the law. Read the Roman epistle. It's not the destruction of the law. It's not repudiating the law, amen, but it's imparting to a man or a woman the ability to live in the fullness of the law, that the law of God might be fulfilled in us.

We'll read in Romans chapter 8, that magnificent chapter on life in the Spirit. Glory to his name. Moses, beloved, was one of the great preparers of the world. He introduced the law, the prophets, one after the other, and then it comes to this magnificent man, John.

Glory to his name. He came preparing the world for Jesus. Many people have problems of getting through to Jesus. Perhaps it's because the world hasn't been prepared. The road hasn't been cleared. The obstacles could have struck the way.

John the Baptist, Repentance, and Conviction of Sin

Listen, this is the first thing that John the Baptist said. It says in verse 4, John did baptise in the wilderness and preach the baptism of repentance for the remission of sins. And they went out unto him all the land of Judah and there of Jerusalem and were all baptised of him in the river Jordan contesting their sins.

This is a great clarity work of the Spirit. That's why the first work of the Spirit, beloved, is to convince or convict a man or woman of sin, sin of righteousness, sin of judgment. And where there's no conviction of sin, there's another great man.

There's no genuine conversion because there's no realisation or understanding for a need of conversion, for a need of salvation, for a need of responding to the gospel. Amen. A person who has no sense of this, you cannot slide into the gospel, beloved.

You cannot slide into the kingdom of God. You have to understand what you need to be saved from. That's why when John came he preached repentance. You don't often hear repentance preached in our midst these days.

Repentance. Lots of people love to quote that scripture, love covers a multitude of sin. Amen. But the greatest of the prophets, beloved, here is saying repent. Repent. You'll find later down in the chapter, beloved, that Jesus also said repent and believe the gospel.

Now Jesus' definition of repentance was greater than John's. We'll come to it in a little while. But John is dealing, beloved, with sin. You know, lots of people excuse themselves. We take up that lovely verse that appears in the second chapter of the epistle to the Ephesians.

Where it talks about the prince of the power of the air working in the children of disobedience, among whom we all had a manner of life in time past in the lust of the flesh, fulfilling the desires of the flesh and the mind, and were by nature the children of wrath even as others.

And we use that as an excuse, beloved, for not being prepared to face up to our moral responsibility of acknowledging where we have sinned. Now, the sense in which you and I don't need the Holy Ghost to tell us where we've sinned, we know.

They knew. They knew where they'd broken God's law. And he said repent, repent, and unless that preparity work is done, beloved, you won't come to Jesus. John was preparing the way, removing the stones, getting rid of the obstacles that stood between man and Christ.

He said repent. Now, lots of people say if I confess my sins, God is faithful and just to forgive me of my sins, and will cleanse me from all unrighteousness. Have you ever looked at that scripture? I think it's in Matthew's gospel, if I can find it, sorry.

Where he's talking about forgiveness, if anyone else, yes, yes, here we are. It's in chapter six, in the Sermon on the Mount. It says, for if we forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you.

But if you forgive not men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses. Amen. If you and I don't repent, beloved, and put those things right which we know to be wrong in our life, and if it's an issue between you and God alone, it's something that you have to confess and repent to him if it involves you and another person.

It involves you confessing to God and to that other person. If it involves you and the church, beloved, you have to repent in your own heart and repent before the church. You can't sweep sin under the carpet.

You can't lightly dispense with it and say, oh, it's covered up, I've said sorry for it. Repentance was a very radical thing, but when they came out there into the wilderness, and remember in Matthew's Gospel, beloved, he said that they would bring forth truth meet unto repentance.

It wasn't just skimming over the surface, it wasn't an excusing of the situation, it wasn't just covering up of things that had been done wrong and just passing them off as if they didn't matter. God was putting his finger.

Repentance, beloved, is a very personal thing. It can also be a thing that implicates another person or other persons. And you can't pretend. And if you harbour, and if I harbour, beloved, something against another brother or another sister, or if I'm not willing to forgive this one or that one, then God says, I want to know the joy of forgiveness.

Not that God's ability to forgive, beloved, is conditioned by my behaviour, but my ability to receive and enter in to the reality of what it means to be forgiven, beloved, will be conditioned by the way that I behave.

He says, repent. You read all the Gospel preachers, beloved, you start with John, you go on to Jesus, you go on to Peter, you go on to Paul, beloved, they all begin by preaching, repent, repent, repent.

Beloved, are we harbouring anything in our hearts? Is there any issue? Now, this is where the Spirit of God does have to come. No preacher, beloved, can point the finger. No other person can come to you and say this, or that, or the other.

Although the Scripture said, if thy brother had aught against thee, first say to thy brother. Today, if you've got aught against him, if you know that someone's got something against you, you go to that person, have it out with them.

Amen. That's the radical nature of repentance. Beloved, in the past twelve months amongst our fellowship, not only talking about here, I don't know much about here because I'm not here very much yet, but over in the United Kingdom there have been divisions, there have been misunderstandings, there have been breakdowns in relationships, breakdowns in marriages, numerous.

And this is one of the reasons, it must speak. Because a breach of fellowship, beloved, a breach of relationships can only explain, beloved, by sin or patience. Now we can cast it all on fame, we say it's the devil's fault, the devil's having a heyday.

Of course he's having a heyday, beloved, but he can have a heyday when men and women give him the ground and the opportunity to have a heyday. When the devil came to Jesus, he found no place in him. And the reason why he has a heyday, beloved, is there must be some place that he's taking advantage of to reap heaven.

In the lives of individual men and women, in the lives of couples, in the lives of churches. Amen. And we go on, smoothing it over and stroking the feathers and molly-calling it all, beloved, and calling it something other than sin.

Many people, beloved, absolutely stuck because they've never faced up to sin. Not just general sin, but sin in particular. Something that's lodged, it may have been there, may have come from years ago.

There was once a time in my life when I asked the Lord, I'd be reading a book by Corrie ten Boom called Defeated Enemies, and I was never aware of having dabbled in the things of darkness, in the things of the occult.

Never. And I read this book and I prayed after reading that book, and there's no point in reading a book, beloved, unless what you read, if you find it any fine, is not going to be applied unto your life and worked out in reality.

So I prayed after reading that book. I said, Lord, show me if at any time in my life, deliberately, inadvertently, or ignorantly, I got involved. And the Lord showed me immediately, as if it were yesterday, two occasions in my early childhood when I was involved.

In two situations. And they were so vivid, I could have described to you every single detail of the room in which they had happened. And once God showed me that I could no longer blind blame the devil, beloved, I had to acknowledge it was sin.

I'd done it. I'd been involved in it. I dabbled. Not willfully, not deliberately. If you like, ignorantly. I'd been drawn into it. But once God showed it to me, beloved, I had to confess it. I had to repent of it.

I had to take my moral responsibility for it. You know, we can say the sins of the fathers were visited upon the children under the third and fourth generation. Yes, that's what the scripture teaches.

But once God shows you, beloved, you can no longer blame your mother, or your father, or your grandfather, great-grandfather. We can use these sort of scriptures to excuse ourselves, instead of being prepared to face up to the personal responsibility as a moral creature, beloved, for our own sin.

And that's what the scripture says, ultimately, we will have to do. Your father won't be able to answer for you, beloved. Your elders won't be able to answer for you in heaven. No one else will be able to answer, beloved.

We'll all stand before the judgment seat alone. Glory be to God. I want to ask you, beloved, at the beginning of this conference, are you prepared to expose yourself to the Lord and say, Lord, reveal to me, speak to me, convict me, show me?

Show me anything in my life that has given occasion to the enemy, either to frustrate your work in me, or make my life a hindrance in the work of the lives of other people, or in the church at large. Is there anything that I'm harboring, known or unknown?

Anything that I have not dealt with, I have not come to you with, and allowed you to deal with? John said, repent. Now, when Jesus later on talks about repentance, you can see it, we won't get there tonight, probably, but when you see later on in verse 15, it says, and saying, the time is fulfilled, the kingdom of God is at hand, repent ye.

I believe the gospel of Jesus was speaking of repentance in a much greater, greater, a much deeper way. John was dealing specifically with sin. Amen. And he was being very specific. Sin. Paul deals with this subject in the Roman epistle, beloved, he starts with sins and then he goes on to sin.

And when Jesus comes to it, beloved, he's dealing with sin. When he says, repent, he says, repent of being you. A much more radical thing. But if the problem hasn't taken place, beloved, you'll never come to terms with the reality of you.

Amen. So we start with sins. Glory be to God. God doesn't condemn us because we've committed sins. We're condemned, beloved, because we reject the solution that he provides for us in the person of his Son.

John’s Baptism and Jesus’ Baptism in the Holy Spirit

Glory to his Son. Prepare ye the way of the Lord. He preached a baptism of repentance. That's how he's baptised, beloved, different from the baptism of the Lord Jesus. Paul makes this very clear in the nineteenth chapter of the Acts of the Apostles when he came to Ephesus and he asked them under what baptism, in verse three he says, in chapter nineteen of Acts, verse three, and he said unto them, unto what then will ye baptise?

And they said unto John's baptism. Then said Paul, John journeyed baptised with a baptism of repentance, saying unto the people that they should believe on him which should come after him. That is on Jesus Christ.

Paul made it quite clear, beloved, that the baptism of John was quite different from the baptism of Jesus whether you take the truth of water baptism or baptism in the Holy Ghost. And those who are married in Christ Jesus, they're not two separate things, they're one.

Glory to his name. But John begins, beloved, with sins. Repent for the remission of sins. And they came from all Judea and Jerusalem. They all were baptised in the river Jordan, confessing their sins.

They wanted to make a clear breath. Isn't it a wonderful thing, beloved? I'll tell you, forgiveness of sins is the most wonderful thing. Someone was saying this to me, saying to this at tea time, when she first heard the gospel and realised that she could have her sins forgiven and completely washed away, blotted out, as far as the east is from the west, to be remembered by God no more.

She said that was absolute joy in her heart. She'd never heard the likes in her life before. She never believed that she could be sure that her sins were forgiven. They had to go on and on and on and on.

I want to tell you in the name of Jesus, beloved, every single sin that you've ever committed can be forgiven. Now, you will never be able to recall all the sins that you have committed. There are sins of commission, there are sins of omission.

There are sins, beloved, that come into the realm of the conscious, and there are sins that belong to the realm of the unconscious. And I want to exhort you tonight, beloved, don't start digging around and start psychoanalysing yourself until you get into such bondage that you don't know how to get out of it.

But open yourself up to the Lord and say, Lord, show me, if there's anything in me which is blocking me and the ongoing work of your Spirit in me, if there's anything in me that's injuring another brother or another sister, any unresolved issue that I'm not being prepared to face up to because I don't want to take the blame for it.

Well, take the blame for it, beloved. Anything in me that's causing me to be an atron in the church, that's reaping in the great new Israel of God. Terrible thing to be in a camp. See, sin was very trivial, but sin never is trivial.

It's just a little bit of profit, a little bit of gold, a little bit of silver hidden under his tent, beloved, that ransacks the whole nation. And Joshua went pleading with God, God said, get up off of your knees and get shit out of the camp.

In other words, deal with it. Don't play with it, don't apologize for it, don't care about it, get it out. Amen. I wonder what we'd do if we had some of these Old Testament prophets amongst us tonight.

Amen. It's a wonderful thing, beloved, to know that your sins can be forgiven if we confess our sins. God is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and will cleanse us from all unrighteousness. Glory to his name.

But the condition, beloved, is if we confess. A little word. Not a comfortable subject. You probably won't want to invite me for the first evening of conference ever again. Amen. But if we don't get clear and clean, beloved, at the beginning, all the rest of the week will be useless.

The beginning of the gospel, that is a gospel. There has to be a preparation, there has to be a close-up of seeing why John preached in the way that he did. Let's see the second thing that he teaches.

He's a remarkable man. No wonder Jesus called him the greatest of the prophets, as John was clothed with camel's hair and with a girdle of sin about his loins, and did eat locusts and wild honey. How would you like it?

He presented a lifestyle which was a challenge for the whole materialistic disposition of the age and generation in which he lived. Gary's already lamented, beloved, the fact that the world is sweeping in.

The standards have been down. The principles, beloved, are being compromised with. Qualities of morality and uprightness are becoming variable rather than ultimate, seeing God. Of course, because many women have lost sight of the ultimate, beloved, that they no longer have any standards.

Anything goes. Go with me into the great apostle of love. Praise God. Here he is in chapter two of his first letter, verse 15, 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.

All that is of 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 passeth away, and the lust thereof, but he that doeth the will of God abideth forever.

Love not the world. James has a little word about it too. In chapter four of his letter, where he says, writing to the church of his day, he said, Ye adulterers and adulteresses, know ye not that friendship of the world is enmity?

Whosoever will be a friend of the world is an enemy of God. Strong words, aren't they? You expect them from James. Perhaps you didn't expect them from John. You can also hear them from the lips of Jesus in the context of his prayer in John chapter 17.