Between Legalism and Worldliness, Part 2
Another time when I was working in the drive-through, I heard a familiar voice ordering a Frappuccino over my wireless headset. I checked the video monitor to make sure it was my friend and then said, “Are you sure about that? Those have a lot of calories.” The other partners looked at me with shock, but I continued, “At least order it without whipped cream.”
Over the headset, we heard the customer slowly respond, “No, I really want the whipped cream on that.”
My friend pulled up to the window looking a little offended, but when he saw me standing there with a big grin on my face, he burst out laughing. That was so much fun, I pulled similar stunts on other friends.
The headsets were not just used for business, of course. Whenever things slowed down, the partners would crack jokes, tease each other, and talk about whatever. I worked with a lot of non-Christians, so the conversation wasn’t always squeaky clean. Profanity doesn’t bother me much, but the gossip and crude remarks would grate on me after a while. I had to keep the headset on, so I was forced to hear many conversations I would have been happier without.
What I heard may be mild compared to what you have to deal with on a daily basis, but I struggled with knowing how to respond. Would I sound judgmental if I asked them to cut back on the gossip? Would I weaken my witness by laughing at a hilarious but crude joke? How clean did my jokes have to be? I don’t think any of us want to be thought of as self-righteous Christians who can’t enjoy a good joke, but when are we in danger of loving the world?
Loving the World
My Grams (Grandma Kelley) grew up in a conservative Pentecostal denomination in the 1930s. She told me she was almost kicked out of her Bible club because she went to a movie theater. The issue wasn’t the movie she watched—simply going to the cinema was taboo. If I remember correctly, wearing lipstick may have also been involved. Is it any surprise that to me, “hating the world” has become synonymous with not going to the movies or wearing lipstick? (Not that I wear lipstick.)
These days, I hear a lot of sermons about legalism but very few about worldliness. I’ve shied away from preaching about worldliness for fear of appearing legalistic. Yet I’m learning that the best reaction to one extreme isn’t the other extreme—it’s balance. Furthermore, if we believe that God’s commands are for our joy, we can approach what he says about worldliness with the expectation that it will lead us to more joy, not less.
Worldliness is a real thing, and the Bible has strong things to say about it. “You adulterous people, don’t you know that friendship with the world means enmity against God? Therefore, anyone who chooses to be a friend of the world becomes an enemy of God” ( James 4:4).
“Adulterous people” brings to mind the Old Testament picture of God as a righteously jealous husband. Both the Old and New Testaments tell us that God has no interest in an open relationship. We have to choose between God and the world. He will not share us with another lover.
Clearly, we are supposed to hate the world, but problems arise when we don’t clarify exactly what we mean by the world. We need to take a closer look at what this word means because if we aren’t careful, we can end up hating the wrong world.
Just yesterday I listened to a well-known pastor give a stern admonition to “culture-embracing evangelicals” based on 2 Timothy 4:10: “Demas, because he loved this world, has deserted me.” This pastor warned against falling in love with the things of the world and abandoning Jesus. His message was either a biblical call away from complacent Christianity or an unbiblical call to obsessive Christianity, but I’m not sure which. Why not? Because he wasn’t careful to define which world he was talking about.
The Bible frequently talks about the world (Greek, kosmos), but it doesn’t mean the same thing each time. Did your pastor ever tell you Greek is a wonderfully precise language? That’s a myth we perpetuate to make our sermons sound more authoritative. Greek can be every bit as ambiguous as English, if not more so. In both Greek and English, many words do double or triple duty. Think of all the different meanings for the word run: to jog, to operate, to function, to campaign…or even a place you keep chickens.
Likewise, the Bible uses the world in several different ways. It means things like creation, the earth, culture, the things of this life (like food and clothing), and people. Or it can mean the realm that is ruled by Satan and is hostile to God.1 That is why the Bible can say, “For God so loved the world” ( John 3:16) and yet commands us, “Do not love the world or anything in the world” (1 John 2:15).
How are we supposed to know which world a Bible verse is referring to? As with English, the answer is usually obvious from the context.
Do not love the world or anything in the world. If anyone loves the world, love for the Father is not in them. 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 (1 John 2:15-16).
John isn’t talking about hating the culture, cheeseburgers, music, jokes, or clothes. “Everything in the world” means the “lust of the flesh” and all that stuff. We are warned not to get too attached to the things of this life because “this world in its present form is passing away” (1 Corinthians 7:31), but those things are not in any sense bad.2 God will gladly give you these things (in the right times and the right ways) as gifts from a loving Father. But he will not share your loyalty and fidelity with false gods and corrupt desires that compete with him.
Worldliness is giving your heart to beliefs, priorities, and spiritual powers that are opposed to God. (For the sake of clarity, I will use the words worldly and worldliness to refer only to that which opposes God.) So long as we live on this planet, surrounded by this worldliness, we will feel a constant tug on our souls to be unfaithful to our Savior, to sleep with the enemy, as it were. Being faithful to him requires constant attention and help from the Spirit.
The point is that every time we see the word world in the Bible, we must think about which meaning the author is using. Just because something is earthly doesn’t mean it’s worldly. Learning to enjoy earthly things but hate worldliness is central to being radically normal. Obsessive Christianity avoids many earthly things for fear of worldliness. Complacent Christianity loves both earthly and worldly things without discerning which is which.
Finding the Good in the Bad
Let’s talk about how to distinguish between earthly and worldly things. In chapter 13 I mentioned avoiding even the appearance of evil. That might sound a little obsessive, but isn’t it the pinnacle of holiness? Doesn’t radical obedience include avoiding not only sin but also things that look like sin? The funny thing about that expression is that it doesn’t exist in any of the modern versions because it’s a poor translation.3 Here’s a better translation: “Do not quench the Spirit. Do not treat prophecies with contempt but test them all; hold on to what is good, reject every kind of evil” (1 Thessalonians 5:19-22).
There’s a big difference between rejecting every kind of evil and rejecting anything that looks evil to anyone. When you think about it, Jesus did a lot of things that appeared sinful to the Pharisees (including healing on the Sabbath and hanging out with sinners), but he never sinned.
Paul demonstrates a moderate approach here—don’t accept everything, but don’t reject everything either. Rather, test and carefully examine it. Paul is specifically talking about prophecy, but this principle applies to nearly every area of life. We use the expression “Don’t throw out the baby with the bathwater” to say much the same thing. Biblical Christianity assumes that everything is good unless God says it’s bad. “For everything God created is good, and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving, because it is consecrated by the word of God and prayer” (1 Timothy 4:4-5).
If it’s sin, reject it. If it’s not, you may embrace it with prayer and thanksgiving. Of course, it would be far simpler to hold on to the good and reject the evil if everything fit neatly into those categories. Ever since the Fall, sin has contaminated every nook and cranny of this world, so we have to be diligent to test everything. To learn how to do that, let’s focus on how we approach one earthly thing that can be extremely worldly—entertainment.
Watch What You Watch
When I was a freshman at Bible college, students were not allowed to have TVs in their dorm rooms, so the TV in the student lounge was pretty popular. One evening, as a bunch of us were watching The Simpsons, an older and wiser senior came in. Right about then, something really funny but irreverent happened, and I laughed really loud. The senior spun around and said, “Would you laugh at that if your pastor were here?”
“You don’t know my pastor,” I thought but didn’t say. Instead, I just kind of shrugged, and he stormed away muttering something about worldliness.
Growing up, my family had a TV but no cable. We were stuck with whatever stations our coat-hanger antenna could pick up. Even with the limited selection, my parents had a list of shows we were not allowed to watch, such as He-Man and The Smurfs. I used to laugh at that list until I had daughters and saw some of the stuff Grace and Sarah’s friends watched. I wonder if they’ll laugh at me someday because I don’t let them watch Bratz. I now have more respect for the challenges my parents faced as they tried to protect us from worldliness without being legalistic.
As I mentioned, in my grandparents’ day, all movies were considered taboo by many Christians. By the time I was born, G-rated movies were acceptable, but the idea of a Christian watching an R-rated movie was scandalous. Now many pastors routinely use R-rated movies for sermon illustrations. As much as I want to dismiss the archaic “no movies” rules as silly legalism, Philippians 4:8 gives me pause. “Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things.”
I’m hard-pressed to think of any movie that’s only pure, noble, and excellent. Is any amount of worldliness like a drop of poison that contaminates an entire glass of milk? Does one sex scene make the whole thing off-limits? Or can one good teaching point excuse any amount of depravity? And where do we find answers to questions like these? Records of the apostles’ favorite movies are sketchy at best.
Live theater and sports were the most popular forms of entertainment in Paul’s day. Many Jews and Christians avoided these events because of their immorality and brutality. Athletic events were dedicated to pagan gods, and participants competed in the nude. Ancient theater was filled with sex and potty humor. These forms of entertainment presented challenges to ancient Christians similar to the challenges modern entertainment presents for us.
What do you think Paul would say about sports and theaters? He never tells believers to avoid plays or athletic competitions. Instead, he uses more sports analogies than I do and even quotes from a pagan play.4 If he wanted his readers to completely avoid these events, he could have easily said so. But instead, he looked for things of value in them.
What about Philippians 4:8? Didn’t that imply that early Christians should have avoided the theater and sporting events? Actually, that verse is an example of testing everything and holding on to the good. The Greek words Paul uses seem to indicate he was alluding to pagan philosophy.
In all probability the apostle is here acknowledging that there was much good in pagan life and morality, and he urges his friends…not to be blind to this fact, nor to repudiate it. He asks, rather, that they recognize and incorporate all that is good in natural morality into their own lives, to pay heed to quite simple but solid truths, even if they first learned them from pagan sources. For as Justin Martyr put it a century later, “The truth which men in all lands have rightly spoken belongs to us” (2 Apol. 2.13).5
Paul’s point in Philippians 4:8 is the opposite of what I used to believe. “Think about such things” doesn’t mean “don’t look at anything bad.”6 Rather he wants us to follow his example, to learn how to find and meditate on noble and true things, even if we find them in unlikely places.
I’m not saying Christians can watch whatever they want as long as they can find some valuable piece of wisdom hidden in it. Many movies are so filled with worldliness that trying to find the good in them is like wandering through acres of stinging nettle to find one stalk of wheat. Think carefully about what you fill your mind with because it will affect you.
Above all else, guard your heart,
for everything you do flows from it.
Keep your mouth free of perversity;
keep corrupt talk far from your lips (Proverbs 4:23-24).
Now take this biblical principle of testing everything, keeping the good, and rejecting the evil (2 Thessalonians 5:19-22) and apply it to other areas of your life—the TV shows you watch, the music you listen to, the games you play, and the books you read. Can you find noble and true things in them? Do they have any redeeming value? How are they affecting your soul?
No one can give you a nice, neat list of what you should or shouldn’t allow into your heart. A radically normal Christian thoughtfully chooses movies based on content (not their rating) and then wrestles with what’s good and what’s worldly. That seems much more edifying than mindlessly watching anything on TV as long as the bad words are bleeped out.
One more thought. Think about how much of your time you spend being entertained. I recently overheard a woman who told another that the video she rented was a waste of a dollar and then laughed because…who cares about a dollar? As I see it, she wasted a lot more than a dollar—she wasted two hours of her life. If you and I want to accomplish some of the great stuff I talked about in chapter 5, we just might have to use our time a little more carefully.
The Easy Way Out
Looking back to the previous chapter, I believe legalism is so popular because it’s much easier than carefully evaluating what’s earthly and what’s worldly. Not better or more fun, but easier. By simply following a list someone gives you, you can feel safe and secure. Likewise, worldliness is pretty easy—just plow thoughtlessly into everything the world (in the bad sense) has to offer. It’s also a lot of fun…at least until you start suffering the consequences. It’s also easier to mock legalistic Christians than to pursue righteousness.
Going to the extremes of legalism or worldliness might be easier, but either will lead you over a cliff—away from God and toward misery. Legalism will leave you wondering if you’re doing enough. Worldliness will isolate you from the Source of joy. Balancing on the narrow path between them and relying on grace isn’t easy, but it is good.
So far, I’ve been writing with the assumption that life is going pretty well (except when we mess it up with sin). But what if things aren’t going well? How do radically normal Christians deal with undeserved pain and suffering?