Adapted from a sermon on 1 John 2:15-17
The big idea
The Bible is not full of contradictions. But it is full of moments where, if you read carelessly, it looks like it is.
1 John 2:15–17 is one of those moments. John has spent the early part of his letter talking a lot about love – love one another, love your brothers and sisters, God is love. Then he hits us with:
Do not love the world.
So which is it? Love or don’t love? While we’re at it: the gospel says we’re saved by grace, not by what we do – so why is 1 John so packed with commands?
Short answer: these aren’t contradictions. They only look like them on the surface. Beneath the surface there’s a beautiful, costly call to stop chasing the wrong things and start chasing the only one worth chasing.
The passage
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. The world and its desires pass away, but whoever does the will of God lives forever.
To love or not to love?
John 3:16 and 1 John 2:15 are written by the same author and he uses the same Greek word translated “world” in both verses.
So how can John write God so loved the world and do not love the world without tripping over himself?
In John 3:16, the surrounding verses talk about whoever believes. Whoever means people. The “world” God loves is the world of people – humanity in rebellion, the people God still, astonishingly, gave his Son for.
In 1 John 2:16, the surrounding word is everything. The “world” we’re told not to love is the system. The pattern. The pull. The priorities and pleasures of a culture lived away from God.
So no contradiction. Love the people God loves. Refuse to love the system in revolt against him.
Grace or works?
Saved by grace. Always. Full stop.
A fundamental of the gospel is that you cannot earn your way into right relationship with God. You can’t behave your way there. Salvation is a gift, paid for at the cross, received by faith.
So why does 1 John read like an instruction manual?
Because it’s written to people who are already saved. Look at the verses just before our passage:
I am writing to you, dear children, because your sins have been forgiven on account of his name… I am writing to you, young men, because you have overcome the evil one.
John isn’t telling Christians how to earn anything. He’s telling Christians how to live in the light of what’s already been earned for them. Obedience flows out of salvation. Not into it.
With those two cleared out of the way, we can actually hear what John’s saying.
What’s wrong with the world?
John gives us three things to be on guard for:
1. The lust of the flesh
2. The lust of the eyes
3. The pride of life
Three windows into what loving the world actually looks like.
1. The lust of the flesh
The Greek word translated “lust” (Ἐπιθυμίᾳ) here doesn’t just mean sexual desire. It’s broader and hotter than that – it means to burn for something. To want it past the point of healthy desire.
And the flesh has plenty of healthy desires. Hunger, thirst, rest and sex. None of these are evil. God invented all of them and called them good.
But healthy desire and burning lust are not the same thing.
One commentator put it well:
instead of just satisfying their hunger, people gorge. Instead of just satisfying their thirst, they get drunk. Instead of resting, they either go slack with laziness or burn themselves out chasing leisure. Instead of revelling in the joys of marriage, they wreck their bodies and minds chasing thrills. – from StudyScriptureOnline
In 2008, Amy Winehouse swept the Grammys – five awards in a single night for Back to Black. She had access to anything the world could offer her.
Three years later she was dead in her flat in Camden. Twenty-seven years old. The drugs and alcohol the world had peddled to her as joy, as escape, as thrill, they didn’t satisfy her. They drained her like a vampire.
It’s easy to point at someone like Amy Winehouse and say: that’s what the lust of the flesh looks like. It’s much harder to look in the mirror.
But, if we truly want to walk as Jesus calls us to walk then look in the mirror we must:
– What pleasure do you chase with a burning, can’t-stop kind of energy?
– What do you reach for the moment you feel uncomfortable?
– What did you tell yourself “just one more” about last week?
Pleasure isn’t the enemy. Pleasure, in its right context, is a match, it’s meant to spark gratitude and worship toward the God who invented it. When pleasure starts burning bigger than that, it stops pointing to God and starts replacing him.
But remember – 1 John 2:13 already declared it over you:*you have overcome the evil one. Past tense. These things don’t have to master you.
2. The lust of the eyes
We’ve been a species in trouble with our eyes since chapter three of the Bible.
Eve, in the garden, saw that the fruit was pleasing to the eye.
David, on his roof, saw Bathsheba – and a chain reaction of lust, deceit and murder started right there.
The eyes are a doorway. Whatever you let through them shapes what you want, what you imagine, what you reach for. And the world has never had it so easy to flood that doorway.
If I were giving this message ten years ago I’d be talking about the temptation to open a browser and search for porn. The principle hasn’t changed – but the delivery has. Now temptation is the default content of a thumb-scroll. TikTok, Instagram, YouTube Shorts – algorithms tuned to escalate, to dangle, to keep you reaching.
Whether it’s a screen, a book, a billboard or just the next thing flickering at the edge of your vision – the world is forever showing you things that look good. The lust of the eyes is what happens when you decide you have to have it above all else.
Jesus put it about as starkly as it can be put: it would be better to lose your eye than to let those images travel through that window and into your heart.
There’s a word for what’s happening underneath both the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eyes: idolatry.
Tim Keller said this:
The true god of your heart is what your thoughts effortlessly go to when there is nothing else demanding your attention.
And:
An idolatrous attachment can lead you to break any promise, rationalise any indiscretion, or betray any other allegiance, in order to hold on to it… To practice idolatry is to be a slave.
— Tim Keller, Counterfeit Gods (I highly recommend this book. If you click this link and buy it, please note that I get a little kick-back from Amazon as an affiliate – if that’s not your vibe, no pressure. I still recommend the book, pick it up from wherever you can).
Whatever your thoughts default to when nothing else is competing for them, that’s the throne. The question isn’t whether you worship. It’s what.
3. The pride of life
The Greek behind “pride of life” (ἀλαζονεία) carries the idea of boasting beyond the truth. Empty self-display. The flex – in modern vernacular.
Why is the flex such a deadly thing? What’s so dangerous about wanting status?
Because pride is what tries to put you on the throne in God’s place. Pride was Satan’s original sin. Pride is the engine of every other sin – every lie, every betrayal, every refusal to repent has pride in the boiler room.
C. S. Lewis, in Mere Christianity:
Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it than the next man… It is the comparison that makes you proud: the pleasure of being above the rest.
Few human beings in history have flexed harder than Rameses II – pharaoh of Egypt, on the throne for sixty-six years, victorious general, builder of more statues and temples than any pharaoh before or after him. By any sane reckoning, one of the most accomplished men who ever lived.
What’s left of him today? A few weathered statues. A shrivelled mummy in a museum.
The poet Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote one of the great poems in the English language about a fallen statue of Rameses, known by his Greek name, Ozymandias:
I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
Or take the testimony of an ancient king of Israel — traditionally Solomon, in Ecclesiastes 2:
I denied myself nothing my eyes desired; I refused my heart no pleasure… Yet when I surveyed all that my hands had done and what I had toiled to achieve, everything was meaningless, a chasing after the wind.
Pride buys you a kingdom of sand. In the moment, it feels like the whole world. In the end, the wind takes it.
Lewis again:
As long as you are proud you cannot know God. A proud man is always looking down on things and people: and, of course, as long as you are looking down, you cannot see something that is above you.
The world is passing away
So that’s the diagnosis. The “love of the world” John warns against is a deadly combo: burning for the flesh, burning for the eyes, puffed up by pride. Left unchecked, it owns us.
How does John close the loop?
The world and its desires pass away, but whoever does the will of God lives forever.
The Greek there for “pass away” (παράγεται) is present continuous. Not will pass away – is passing away. Right now. As you read this.
I’m not a financial advisor. You probably shouldn’t take stock tips from me. But here’s a sure one:
The world is depreciating. Already in liquidation.
The will of God – believing his Son, living in the light of that, is appreciating eternally.
Pour your life into the first and you hold shares in something trending to zero. Pour your life into the second and you hold shares in eternity itself.
What is the will of God? Same writer, different book — John 6:40:
For my Father’s will is that everyone who looks to the Son and believes in him shall have eternal life.
That’s the deal. The world dangles things that look like joy and act like vampires. Christ offers something the world cannot give and cannot take away.
Lewis, preaching on a Sunday morning in Oxford in 1941:
It would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.
That’s it. Our problem isn’t that we want too much. It’s that we’ll settle for so little.
So what do you actually do this week?
None of what follows earns you anything with God. Your ticket to heaven was bought at the cross – full price, paid in full, with your name on it.
Jesus extends his hand to you in your bankruptcy and your lust and invites you to inherit everything that’s his.
But these three practices, done quietly and honestly, will help. Pick one. Or pick all three.
For the lust of the flesh – fast something for seven days.
You pick what. Food, screens, alcohol, sugar, the snooze button. Whatever you suspect is starting to own you. If by Wednesday you’re irritable, jittery, mentally bargaining, you’ve just learned something important. The thing owns you more than you own it. That’s the moment to say, Jesus, I want you more than I want this.
For the lust of the eyes – audit your inputs.
Open your phone. Look at your screen time. Look at what’s on your home screen. Look at the apps you tap without thinking. What is your gaze being trained to want?
If you spend ninety minutes a day on TikTok and Instagram and three minutes in scripture and prayer, you are training your eyes to covet. You are not in danger of becoming worldly. You are already there.
The fix isn’t always white-knuckled deletion (though sometimes it really is). The deeper fix is feeding the eyes on something better: the word, the face of Christ in the gospels, the company of believers who are visibly growing.
For the pride of life – kill it where no-one is watching.
Pride feeds on visibility and starves in private. So pick one practice this week that nobody will ever know about:
– Give money no-one will know you gave.
– Pray for someone who’s hurt you. Don’t tell them.
– Apologise to someone for something you did to wrong them – even years ago. No big speech. No request for forgiveness. Just walk up and say sorry.
Then keep going.
Because the world really is passing away. And the One you’re saying yes to lives forever.
