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It’s a joy to be here again and to be able to open up the word of God with you. Let’s uh start out with a word of prayer.
Well, Father, we know that we are but sinners.
And Lord, even though we are not better than the world around us, we have gotten for some reason an extra share of your grace.
and we are your children, Lord. You love us and we are thankful that that love can never be sundered.
And this morning as we come before your word again, we pray that your Holy Spirit would speak to us through your word.
That we would become encouraged, that we would fight the good fight, that the evil one would be defeated in our lives, and we would live lives glorifying to Christ.
Christ’s name we pray. Amen.
If you haven’t already, um, from the scripture reading, I would ask you to please turn your Bibles to First John chapter 2. This is on page 12 18 of your pew Bibles.
1 John chapter 2.
A few weeks ago, our family was eating dinner at our dinner table. And for those of you who have been over our house, um you know that our dining table is black. It is a slab of blackwood. Um and as we were eating, one of our kids, I don’t know which one, I can’t remember, um pointed to the table and said, “Look, daddy and aunt.” So, I looked closer and though I couldn’t at first see it because the table was black, I’ll never forget what looked like a clean surface was actually moving and the table with the dinner on top was crawling with ants.
And that traumatized me. That made me vow to never get a black table again.
So, after we all finished freaking out, we um I went into the closet. I got one of those amps. You know those amp baits?
Those um those liquid ones and um has the sort of the nectar that sort of smells sweet but is laced with a slow acting poison.
And these things are incredible. If you’ve ever seen one of these things at work, within minutes, hundreds of ants are swarming this bait. It was impressive.
And I thought to myself, in the same way, Satan has littered this world with bait for us, bait for humans.
Sweet smelling lures, but with poison hidden inside.
Last week we saw in verses 12 to 14 of this chapter that Satan referred to here as the evil one has been given permission by God for a temporary time to rule over the earth.
And Satan rules through an evil world system. He set up this system, rigged it against Christians, and has erected false philosophies, heresies, false religion, false systems of thought to hinder the process or hinder the progress of the gospel. And this false system is indeed with us today.
Satan has flooded this world with lures and temptations as part of this false system to cause the people of God to stumble and to make them useless as soldiers for the kingdom of God.
But here is the good news. The good news is that as believers, you are no longer compelled to go after these lures.
In fact, believers uniquely have been given the ability to resist the bait, to identify the bait, to see past the tricks of Satan, and to resist the devil.
He just, the Apostle Paul just told us this last week at the end of verse 14.
If you remember, he tells us that even young men in the faith are strong and that the word of God abides in them and they have what?
Overcome the evil one.
That means all true believers and listen to this. All true believers who have acknowledged their sinfulness before God. who have repented of their sins and who have believed in Jesus Christ as the sinless son of God, who lived a perfect life, came to the earth, lived a perfect life, died on the cross to pay the penalty of the sins for all who would believe, and then was raised on the third day. If you believe that, all people who believe that are believers who have been transformed from being a slave to sin, as Jesus calls it in John 8:34, into overcomers, as we saw in our last passage, and since believers are no longer slaves to sin, true and lasting victory, listen, is possible.
in your life. And in fact, in fact, we saw last week that it is actually expected that you will achieve true and lasting victory over sin. This is the normal process of maturation for a true believer.
Now, I know what you’re thinking.
You are thinking, “I want to overcome sin.
But I don’t know how.
Well, that is what the Apostle John is going to tell us today in verses 15 to1 17 of 1 John chapter 2. And in fact, what he will do is he will expose for us Satan’s entire playbook so that we can break these cycles of sin that we seem to be continually suckered into falling for Satan’s bait and that we can live the most victorious life that we can to the glory of God.
Are you interested?
If so, let’s look at ch at verse 15.
This is the apostles John’s entire counter strategy against Satan in a nutshell.
Do not love the world.
Do not love the world.
This statement comes as an abrupt change of tone from what he was doing in verses 12 to 14. You may have noticed in verse 12, John was calling them little children.
You are strong. You are overcoming the evil one. But now his tone suddenly changes to a tone of urgency.
If he were writing this today, This might be all caps.
And that was weird. Um, he may have he may be writing this in all caps and in bold face.
This is an abrupt change of tone. And this is John’s one nonnegotiable.
This is the one thing that we as Christians cannot compromise on.
If we do, no matter where you are in your Christian growth, this will derail you.
This is the main threat.
Remember, Apostle the Apostle John here is definitely talking to believers.
He’s not talking to non-believers. These are the same people that he just called little children.
It is therefore very possible for you and I, even Christians, to harbor in our hearts a love for the world.
So make no mistake, this is a warning for everyone in the room today. So let’s get specific. What does world mean here?
Clearly, this does not mean that we are not to love the people of the world.
After all, Jesus himself tells us even to love our enemies.
And Jesus in fact demonstrated that love on the cross. And it does not forbid loving God’s creation because 1 Timothy 4:4 tells us everything that God created is good. And 1 Timothy 6:17 tells us that he has given all things for us to enjoy.
Rather, this is a reference of course to Satan’s evil system. The evil world system that we talked about that Satan has set up.
This is the rebellious system that is installed in this world against God.
The backward system of values, the godless philosophies, false religions, systems set up to confuse the world from the true gospel and the glorification and normalization of sin.
Christians who love the world want to appease and to fit in with the world and to adopt the world’s values in open rebellion to God’s commands.
Why would Christians do this?
Well, the answer is in that next phrase, the things in the world.
That is one loves the world so that they can acquire the things of the world.
You see, the things of the world are the lures.
That’s the sweet bait for Christians.
And in order to acquire these fruits, we are tempted to compromise with the thinking of the world.
What does that look like? One commentator puts it this way. The compromise looks like this. You court the world’s favor.
You follow its customs. You adopt its ideals.
You covet its prizes.
And you seek its fellowship.
So what are these things? Well, it could be sex, status, money, cars, houses, clothes, looks, social media likes, titles, girlfriends and boyfriends, connections to powerful people.
These very things are the very things that wicked people in the world are climbing over themselves, devouring themselves to get.
But you might notice that these things that I mentioned are not necessarily evil in and of themselves.
And this is an important point.
John says, “Do not love the world.” But he does not say do not have the things of the world.
So we need to be clear. It is not a sin to have the things of the world if God blesses you with them and if you gain them in an honest way.
And in fact, the Apostle John later in this very book makes the assumption that Christians will have some of the things of the world. In 1 John 3:17, he explicitly instructs those who have the world’s goods to share with his brother in need.
And how would you share if you do not have?
So, you may ask this question.
Well, I have some of the things of the world. We all have some of the things of the world.
How can I tell if I love them?
How can I tell if I love them? Well, this is the question you ought to ask yourselves.
Are you willing to step outside of God’s boundaries to acquire and keep them?
If you are, then you have fallen for the poison.
You have now made this thing a idol in your heart and you have pushed God off the throne and put this thing in its place.
Look back at chapter 15 at chapter 2 verse1 15. If anyone loves the world, the love of the father is not in him.
Now, don’t get confused. This is not saying that the father no longer loves the believer. It’s the opposite of that.
It’s saying that the person who loves the world no longer loves the father.
This is talking about your devotion, not your salvation.
Your love has grown cold for God. when you love the world.
And how could it not? Jesus himself told us in Luke 16:13 that no one can serve two what? Masters.
He will hate the one and love the other or else he will be devoted to one and despise the other. This means that loving the world is nothing less than spiritual adultery.
Just as you cannot say that you love your spouse while you are cheating on them, you cannot love God while loving the world.
But true Christians, hopefully everyone in this room, if you are in that state, you will be very, very uncomfortable.
And this may be why you are depressed, why you are anxious, why you are distressed.
because God will not allow his children to be in that state for very long. And your feeling that way may be for you the discipline of God.
Now, John is going to drill down even deeper into this truth for us. But before we get there, let me just mention, and I want you to think about this and and and look up and think about this, that it is tempting for us, I’ve done this, too, to listen to a sermon like this and think to ourselves, “Boy, that person next to me really needs to hear this.
My wife, my husband really needs to hear this.
No, this is written for you. This is written for all of us.
We all struggle with this. None of us is immune.
After all, first John chapter 1 vers8 tells us told us that if we say we have no sin, we are what? We are deceiving ourselves and the truth is not in us.
You may appear to others as externally righteous. You may be good at putting up an act when you come on Sundays.
But what do you do when you go home?
1st Samuel 16:7, “Man looks at the outward appearance, but the Lord looks at what? The heart.” In the end, really, only you and God know if you love the world.
So then, this passage is a call for all of us to examine our hearts for what we truly love.
So, now let’s get down to the nitty-gritty of this. What ingredients are on the label of Satan’s Christian bait?
Here’s the outline for the rest of our time. We’re going to see Satan’s three best strategies for keeping believers spiritually weak.
That’s what he wants to do. Satan’s three best strategies for keeping believers spiritually weak.
Let’s look now at verse 16.
For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh. Let’s stop there for now.
The lust of the flesh.
This is Satan’s first strategy to incite in you a temptation to sin.
He wants to incite in you a lust for the flesh. And this is of course what you think it is. This of course is talking about sexual lust which manifests as pornography, adultery, promiscuity.
But the word lust is not limited to that just means strong desire.
So this is talking about any sensual desire.
You could have a lust for excessive food.
Today, many of us have a lust for leisure and rest, which manifests as slothfulness or laziness.
Some of us have a lust for entertainment, and that manifests as an addiction to movies and social media and YouTube.
Or it could be a lust for partying and substances or drugs and on and on.
In Philippians 3 19, the Apostle Paul puts it in maybe a little bit of a humorous way. He tells us that certain people in the world make their belly their god.
Their god is their stomachs.
And these people are slaves to their appetites.
We can do that. Following your appetite in an unrestrained way leads you to foolish sin. Just like Esau who for a bowl of stew gave up the blessing of God.
Yet that is what we do.
Satan loves the strategy because it is so effective. The reason it is so effective is because it taps into what we think of as necessary and good desires that seem to us to be legitimate.
We can easily deceive ourselves. And some of these are legitimate. Food is actually good.
Sex, believe it or not, is good and necessary. Otherwise, none of us would be here.
Even YouTube, I’m sure, is good for something.
But these are good in God’s timing, when enjoyed within God’s boundaries, and when consumed with an attitude of thanksgiving.
And when you can say with the Apostle Paul that even in plenty or in want, you can be content, you can glorify God either way.
Yet, we know that Satan is a master at nudging God’s otherwise good gifts to be just slightly outside the boundary.
and this whispers in your ear. You just need to compromise a tiny bit. And this always sounds reasonable in the moment.
It’s just a quick glance at pornography.
No one will know. I’m not hurting anyone or it’s just a few drinks to take the edge off. Otherwise, I’ll look uncool in front of my friends and co-workers.
And listen, the moment we are willing to sin to satisfy our flesh, we have now made this thing an idol in our hearts.
As a side note, I think that the lust of the flesh is especially effective in our consumerdriven culture in America.
We here are used to convenience and abundance. If you’re hungry, you can order Door Dash. If you’re bored, in the palm of your hand is all the entertainment of the world.
Everything is on demand. And therefore, we never have to deny ourselves anything.
And I’m convinced that many of us have failed to build up the muscles necessary to resist the lust of the flesh. In fact, Galatians 5:24 says this, “Those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its what?
Passions and desires.” And I think you need to ask yourself as a Christian, in what sense have you crucified the flesh in any of your passions or desires? And the answer is none.
There is an issue in your life.
I’m not sure many of us have. And no wonder then we can be so susceptible to the lust of the flesh.
But while the lust of the flesh is a strong desire to consume, Satan’s second strategy, the lust of the eyes is a strong desire to possess to possess.
At the root of the lust of the eyes is the false philosophy of materialism.
You see the nice fancy things of the world and you are impressed. You spend all your time then and all your energy and all your money chasing these things.
And maybe you play a little fast and loose with your accounting so you can get there faster and you leave in your life no room for God.
You can think of this as the insatiable desire to have what God has not given you or what rightfully belongs to others.
The scripture has many words to describe the lust of the flesh. Some of them are these envy, greed, covetousness.
In fact, this is exactly what was forbidden in the 10th commandment. You shall not coveret your neighbor’s house.
You shall not coveret your neighbor’s wife or his male servant or his female servant or his o or his donkey or anything that belongs to your neighbor.
You see, it is okay if you go into your neighbor’s house to admire your neighbor’s house, even to want to improve your own situation.
There’s nothing wrong with that.
But you cross the line when in your heart you start to whisper to yourself, “Why does he get a house like that and I don’t?
And then you leave an opening for Satan who then uses that thought to turn your heart from loving your brother and rejoicing with him to resenting your brother and even hating him because he has something you don’t.
This is the lust of the eyes. And left unchecked, the lust of the eyes will actually remove from you the capability to love entire entirely altogether.
As you know, every wedding we’ve been to, 1 Corinthians 13:4 says, “Love is patient, love is kind, and is not jealous.
you won’t be able to love anyone because in everybody’s life almost always you can find something to be jealous of. The problem isn’t other people. The problem is your heart.
And not only does this type of covetousness make you hate those you ought to love, it curses you to be forever discontent no matter how much God blesses you.
It’s a curse because no matter how much you have, somebody will always have what? More.
And that is why we live in the most prosperous time ever in human history.
Yet people are more depressed than ever.
In fact, social media platforms like Instagram in particular, it is an envy generating machine.
It’s well known that these platforms are are linked strongly to depression, anxiety, body image problems, and other problems, especially for teenage girls.
And it’s because it is explicitly designed by the smartest designers in the world to stir within you the lust of the eyes.
We should be very careful then as Christians if we spend too much time on these platforms.
Well, the lust of the eyes then is hating your brother for what they have.
The pride of life is looking down on your brother for what they don’t have.
Here we come to Satan’s third weapon, the weapon, the boastful pride of life.
It’s translated in other Bible translations. because we have the NAS in front of us. But other translations will translate this possessions or property, pride of possessions.
And the sense here is having a a hotty or a prideful attitude towards others because they have less stuff than you.
They have less prestige than you on that social ladder. And boy, you think about it. Satan has a trick for if you are poor and he has a trick for if you are rich.
This is materialism again but from the other side.
And this is maybe the most American temptation of all to spend your time and your effort and your energy climbing the corporate ladder, climbing the social ladder, accumulating a healthy bank account. All so that you can sit back, relax in style with a selfsatisfied smirk.
For this person, having more stuff makes you begin to think you are better than others. And instead of giving glory to God, you begin to think that your wealth maybe says something about you and your glory.
King Nebuchadnezzar is a good example of this.
Daniel 4:30 he says, “Is this not Babylon the great which I myself has built as a royal residence by the might of my power and for the glory of my majesty?” Satan’s trick is a very subtle one. It is to take something that is objectively a good thing.
Wealth is always a blessing of God. And then he turns your focus subtly away from God and onto the blessing so that you now begin to trust it and love it more than you love God.
and you have turned God’s very blessing to you into a stumbling block.
You have kicked God off the throne of your heart and you have replaced him with your bank account.
Money then for you is something to be hoarded, something to be looked at and be satisfied with and spent on yourself instead instead of spending on God’s purposes.
You just want to sit on your throne and enjoy the spoils of your riches away from the unwashed masses, trusting in them to keep you safe and secure. And this, isn’t this the American dream?
And it turns out it was also the first century Jewish dream. So much so that Jesus tells us a whole parable about this in Luke 12, the parable of the rich fool.
The man in Jesus’s parable is so wealthy that he has a problem, a big problem, and that is he doesn’t have any more places to put his wealth. He’s run out of storage for his wealth.
And now his overriding concern is not how he can use his wealth to advance the kingdom of God, but how he can build bigger barns to hoard more of it. And he says to himself this in Luke 12:19, soul talks to himself, talks to his soul, you have many goods laid up for many years to come. Take your ease, eat, drink, and be merry.
That is the attitude that God condemns.
Because then in the next verse, God calls this man a fool.
He won’t even get to enjoy it. God is going to take him out that night.
And the lesson that Jesus wants us to understand is that if your life is aimed at accumulating and hoarding wealth, that is your love. Then Jesus is warning to you. It’s the same warning that he gives to this rich fool. In Luke 12:21, he says, “You are a fool who stores up treasure for himself and is not rich towards God.” And Jesus then looks you in the eye and asks you point blank in your finances today, the ones sitting in this room, are you generous towards God or are you only storing up for yourself?
And just as an aside, even the poorest among us, even the poorest among us are unimaginably richer than the man in Jesus’s parable.
He had to store up grain to make sure he didn’t run out. We have no such problems.
In general, we are not here worried about having not having enough food. In fact, our problem sometimes is we have too much food and don’t know what to do with it.
Our biggest problem is worrying about whether we should upgrade to the $800 Android phone or the $1,000 iPhone.
So then I ask you as wealthy Americans, have you been rich towards God?
You see the choice here is clear. You have two choices. You can either be concerned with the things of God or you can be concerned with the things of the world.
Don’t kid yourself. You can’t do both.
And this is what the Apostle John tells us in our next verse in 1 John 2:16.
He says, “All that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, lust of the eyes, boastful pride of life, is not from the father, but is from the world.” It’s very simple. You can have the things of the world or you can have the things of God. And you have to choose.
And just in case you are on the fence, you don’t know which one is the better choice, look at verse 17.
The world is passing away and also its lusts, but the one who does the will of God lives forever.
All these things we lust after, all these things that seem so important to us now, they are temporary.
They are already, even now, passing away.
Don’t live your life pursuing the world’s lusts.
Would you invest all your money in a stock that you knew was going to crash?
Of course not.
Instead, you ought to commit yourself to doing the will of God because these treasures, John tells us, are worthless.
And this verse is not actually to be read as a threat that if you don’t do the will of God, you won’t live forever.
Actually the the idea here is that listen you are going to live forever.
That should change your value system.
Do you realize that you’re going to live forever? Why are you concerned about temporary things?
See John is giving us now here the true secret of resisting the temptations of the devil. This is it. We are to remember we forget this don’t we? We are to remember that we as believers will live forever.
As eternal creatures, we ought to be looking for eternal things.
As eternal creatures, we ought to look not at the things that are seen, but at the things which are not seen. For the things which are seen are temporal, but the things which are not seen are eternal. 2 Corinthians 4:18. And what are these things? What are these things we can look forward to as eternal creatures? Guaranteed eternity.
Well, for of course we know we’re going to live a life without sin, life without death, a life with perfect contentment, happiness, excitement, fellowship, joy, peace, and a closeness with God that would never fade.
But you know what else there’s going to be? We we don’t talk about this enough.
Sometimes we can read that list and it can kind of like glaze over our eyes because doesn’t really necessarily mean anything to us. We don’t see it yet.
So think about it this way. As much as you think you will enjoy the lust that you lust lust after here, heaven will have things better than that.
Heaven will have things that are superior to that in every way.
After all, Jesus already assured us that we will have immeasurable riches in heaven.
But do you believe him?
Do you believe him?
I think one of the most effective lies that Satan has ever told that has made our way made its way into our culture and seeped into our minds even as believers is to convince us that heaven is going to be like sitting on a cloud playing a harp.
And it just seems so boring.
It seems so boring.
And these lusts, by contrast, seem so interesting.
But nothing could be further from the truth. After all, it is the same God who created this world that’s going to create the next world.
And do you think that the new world is going to be inferior to the old one? Yes or no? No.
If you upgrade your phone, do you expect that to be worse than the one you just had?
Of course not.
Literally, God has been preparing for you good things that you can’t even dream of now.
And literally, everything will be better in any in every way. These passing lusts John is telling us here, friends, that is the cheap stuff.
That’s the cheap stuff. That is simply not good enough for people like you who will live forever. It’s not good enough for you. Don’t settle for them. They’re disposable trinkets.
These are things of the world which are passing away. They are temporary and they won’t satisfy you the way you think.
Finally, to close our time this morning, I just want to show you one last thing.
I want you to turn in your Bibles, if you will, to Matthew chapter 4.
Matthew chapter 4.
This will be on page if you are using your pew Bible.
If having reflected on these three weapons of Satan, you realize that you are in fact struggling with these.
And by the way, at some point, you know, no one here is sinless.
We all struggle with these things in one way or another.
I believe this may help you. Chapter 4.
This is the temptation of Jesus.
Let me read for you. Then Satan was led up by the spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. And after he had fasted 40 days and 40 nights, he then became hungry.
And the tempter came and said to him, “If you are the son of God, command these stones become bread.” What kind of temptation is that?
Lust of the flesh.
But he answered and said, “It is written, man shall not live on bread alone, but on every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God.” Then the devil took him into the holy city and had him stand on the pinnacle of the temple and said to him, “If you are the son of God, throw yourself down, for it is written, he will command his angels concerning you, and on their hands they will bear you up so that you will not strike your foot against a stone.” And here the tempter wants Jesus to throw himself down so that he could be lifted by the angel servants for all the holy to see how great he is.
And this is the pride of life.
And Jesus said to him, “On the other hand, it is written, you shall not put the Lord your God to the test.” Again, the devil took him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their glory.
And he said to him, “All these things I will give you if you fall down and worship me.” This is the lust of the eyes.
All you see can be yours.
You see, Satan has been using this same playbook since the Garden of Eden really to trap the people of God for thousands of years.
And when Jesus came, Satan gave it his best shot. He took out his best weapons, the best tricks he knew.
Did it work?
Verse 10. Then Jesus said to him, “Go Satan, for it is written, you shall worship the Lord your God and serve him only.” Then the devil what?
Left him.
My friends, Jesus overcame Satan and in the process he showed us how to do it.
And Jesus used as his weapon what the word of God. God’s word exposed the lies of Satan for what they are. And that is how we fight back too.
We need to know the word of God.
So if you’re taking notes, write this down. How can you overcome the evil one?
Two things. One, we saw two strategies.
First, look at eternity. Remember, you’re an eternal creature where the best is yet to come.
And second, when in the middle of temptation, remember God’s word to expose Satan’s lies.
And after that, after that, if you still find yourself struggling, then perhaps these last words in our sermon from Jesus will give you some comfort. And these are the words that Jesus himself told his own disciples before they themselves were to undergo the greatest temptation of their lives.
Right before Jesus’s crucifixion in John 16:33, Jesus says this to his disciples.
And by the way, the disciples all fell to this temptation.
So Jesus says this to encourage them.
Then Jesus says this, “These things I have spoken to you so that in me you may have peace.
In this world you will have tribulation, but take courage.
I Jesus have overcome the world.” Friends, Jesus has done for us the hard part.
He’s showed us by example how to do it.
And by the power of his name, you too will overcome the world.
Let’s pray. Father, we are so grateful for your word. The power of your word is enough to rebuff even the most powerful, time-tested, proven schemes of the devil.
And Lord, we know that even if your apostles fell to the schemes of the evil one at various points in their lives, we are not immune.
We are not so arrogant as to say that we have everything figured out.
And yet, Lord, we have the assurance in your word that victory is within our grasp. And in fact, you have done it and you have showed us how.
Lord, we want as Christians to live lives glorifying you. We want our lives to be shining testimonies of your grace and your power and your love. And in order to do that, we must overcome the evil one.
We pray Lord that this passage of scripture will equip us to do so. And where we have been defeated in the past, we will now by the power of your name find victory. In Christ’s name we pray.
Amen.