Worldliness

Republished, with permission, from Voice magazine, Jan./Feb. 2013.

“Why do people in churches seem like cheerful, brainless tourists on a packaged tour of the Absolute?” That profound question was posed by one author thirty years ago.¹ Do you think such an assessment could still be made three decades later?

We live in an entertainment saturated society. And the danger of living in such a society is to prefer a more fun-filled deity, trivializing the one true God and minimizing His holy standards, happily entertaining ourselves with illusions of Christianity. No sense of awe, little reverence, lots of laughs. The problem is that all of this is so corrupt and unbiblical, soon (and quite predictably) the punch lines start to grow old, smiles are replaced by yawns, and yawns lead to carelessness, heresy and moral defection.

The New Testament warns us to “offer to God acceptable worship, with reverence and awe, for our God is a consuming fire” (ESV, Hebrews 12:28-29). It seems all too often that talk of the consuming fire of the Lord God Almighty gets extinguished by entertaining, happy god-talk.

Gimmicks, fads, and feel-good faith is replacing the real thing in the lives of all too many Christians. Knowing Christ and His Word has been replaced by the notion that ministries must be based on philosophies that are entertaining or therapeutic. The solid foundation of truth has been obscured by the bright lights of the stage and overlooked for style, image and hype. The end result is that we have fallen prey to the insights and mindset of the world of entertainment, swallowing powerful myths such as the desperate need for fun and relevance-at-any-cost.

We need a clear understanding of who we are and where we live and where we’re headed.

You don’t hear much preaching against worldliness these days. Having grown up hearing negative references to “the world,” “worldly” and “worldliness” on a fairly regular basis, the absence seems odd to me sometimes. On the other hand, where worldliness is still a frequented topic, the term seems unclear, disconnected from biblical intent—or both. Whatever happened to worldliness?

More than one phenomenon is occurring.

First, we have a problem of omission. In some cases, this is due to nothing more than uncertainty by pastors and teachers as to how to handle the subject effectively. But sadly, in many ministries, the neglect is due to philosophies of ministry that embrace worldliness as the number one way to “reach people” and achieve “relevance.” What has happened to worldliness in these cases is that—as a pulpit and classroom topic—it has been shelved.

Second, in some ministries, the terms “worldly” and “worldliness” occur rarely from the pulpit simply because they occur rarely in Scripture. Though references to “world” abound in the Bible, “worldly” occurs only twice in the KJV (Titus 2:12 KJV, Heb. 9:1 KJV). The 1984 NIV uses it ten times (Luke 16:9 NIV; Luke 16:11 NIV; 1 Cor. 3:1 NIV, 1 Cor. 3:3 NIV; 2 Cor. 1:12 NIV, 2 Cor. 1:17 NIV; 2 Cor. 5:16 NIV, 2 Cor. 7:10 NIV; Titus 2:12 NIV). Still, the term “worldliness” does not occur in the Bible at all. So, what has happened to worldliness in these ministries is that it is being handled biblically using different language.

Though the book is a few years old now, it remains an important contribution to the subject of worldliness in our time. Bob Hayton’s review comes to us by way of fundamentallyreformed.com.

Any book entitled Worldliness: Resisting the Seduction of a Fallen World promises not to be your average book on the shelf of today’s Christian bookstore. The subject of worldliness, or love for the values of this fallen world, is not a popular theme.

The contributors of this book, start off by asking if 1 John 2:15 (“Do not love the world or anything in the world”), is really in most Christian’s Bibles. All of us are guilty of worldliness. But how do we go about avoiding this sin? C.J. Mahaney explains:

Some people try to define worldliness as living outside a specific set of rules or conservative standards. If you listen to music with a certain beat, dress in fashionable clothes, watch movies with a certain rating…surely you must be worldly.

Others, irritated and repulsed by rules that seem arbitrary, react to definitions of worldliness, assuming it’s impossible to define. Or they think legalism will inevitably be the result, so we shouldn’t even try.

…Both views are wrong. For by focusing exclusively on externals or dismissing the importance of externals, we’ve missed the point…. the real location of worldliness is internal. It resides in our hearts.

The book goes on to try to navigate between these two extremes and call today’s church to a healthy carefulness about how we interact with the world at large. With chapters on movies, music, money and modesty, the book aims to guide believers as they think critically about the myriad of choices facing us in today’s culture.

The goal of these articles (Part 1, Part 2) is to challenge misconceptions about the world and worldliness by taking a fresh look at our authority, the Scriptures themselves. I’ve argued that the biblical concept of worldliness encompasses much more than the matters of fashion, entertainment, and material possessions that we fundamentalists tend to focus on when we use the term.

What Is Written

The meaning of “worldly” is a matter of some controversy. This is true even among people strongly committed to Christian living as defined in Scripture. Most agree that “worldly” means being like the world and that being like the world isn’t good. But from there, confusion multiplies.