A Clear and Confusing Command

Well, good morning. Grace to you and peace be multiplied through Jesus Christ, our Lord.

1 John chapter 2 is where we're going for our text today.

Hunched over his desk, pen, knife, and hand, Thomas Jefferson sliced carefully at the pages of Holy Scripture, removing select passages and pasting them together to create a Bible more to his liking. The Jefferson Bible. A book he could feel comfortable with. What didn't make it into the Jefferson Bible was anything that conflicted with his personal worldview.

Hell? Can't be. The supernatural? Not even worth considering. God's wrath against sin? I don't think so. The very words of God regarded as leftover scraps. That account of Jefferson comes from one of Pastor and Author C.J. Mahaney's books.

Mahaney goes on to say, "No true Christian would be so bold as to attempt to create his or her own Bible, blatantly omitting whatever they don't prefer. But if we are honest, we too may have to admit that we have a Bible of our own making, a metaphorical one, perhaps, but a cut-and-paste job just the same.

For if we ignore any portion of God's word, whether intentionally, conveniently, or deliberately, we too are guilty of Jefferson's offense." He goes on to write, "Here is one verse I find easy to ignore. It's the simple, provocative words of 1 John 2:15."

Our text today will be 1 John 2, verses 15 to 17. The title of this message is A Clear and Confusing Command. A Clear and Confusing Command. In 1 John 2:15, John writes, "Do not love the world or the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him.

For all that is in 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 is passing away and the lust of it, but he who does the will of God abides forever."

Dear God, I pray that you would bless the truth of your word to our hearts today. Help us to take, to receive, to apply to your honor and your glory. We pray in Jesus' name. Amen.

Have you ever been in a situation where someone gave you a clear command to do or not do something, but what exactly they wanted from you was unclear?

That's a tough place to be, especially if you want to please the person who is giving the command. This can happen to us as parents. We tell our child that we want them to do thus and so. It's just as clear as can be. But for their young minds, they don't have any sort of understanding of what that big word means, whatever word we used.

In one of his creation lessons, Ken Ham talked about how he and his wife had moved to America from Australia, where they had grown up, and they were having children. And somewhere around the time that they had one of their babies, they hired a nanny to come and help them out with the responsibilities of the house.

And he talks in there about how they hired this young lady to help them. And one day, Mr. Ham had the baby. The baby was fussy. And so he said to the nanny, he said, "Would you nurse the baby?"

Now, Ken's request was very clear, but for the young lady, it was confusing and seemed even impossible. And as Ken realized that she was not going to comply with his request, things took an even weirder turn. And he said, "Well, okay, fine. I'll nurse the baby."

And the nanny was very perplexed.

As you may have guessed, in Australia, to nurse the baby simply means take care of the baby. Would you take care of the baby?

In many ways, I believe that John's statement in our text seems very similar to Ken's directive. John's statement, "Love not the world. Do not love the world," is very clear, and yet it can be potentially confusing.

So while the potential for our text is to be puzzling, the purpose of the message is to be, I trust, crystal clear, or at least clarifying for us.

Through the message today, I want you to get real about pursuing God love so that you get clear about rejecting world love.

I want you to get real about pursuing God love so that you get clear about rejecting world love.

In looking at our text today, I'd like us to consider three main thoughts. First of all, notice that we have a clear command. We have a clear command. Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. Could John have stated it any more plainly?

And even though I have purposefully not used the word up to this point, the thrust of this message is worldliness. It is addressing the matter of worldliness and being worldly. But what is that? What does it mean to be worldly? What does it mean that there is worldliness?

Is it even an issue these days? How would you describe it? It swirls around out there. We hear it occasionally, perhaps. Maybe we hear it more than we like. But how would you define it?

We live in days, as was mentioned this morning in the devotional, we live in days when people question whether truth is knowable. But we also live in days when many in the church question whether worldliness is definable.

At this point, I can imagine some biblical referee blowing his whistle, "Tweet!" for the flag on the field and says, "Wait, wait, wait. Time out."

The words worldly and worldliness are not used in the Bible.

Thou, time to move on. Not one time will you find these words in scripture. Okay, well, I guess we're done today.

But is that the point? I have heard people use that rationale, even from this pulpit, to speak dismissively about a word because it's not in the Bible. But is that the point? You realize that there are quite a few words we use that aren't in the Bible. You're not going to find trinity. You're not going to find discipleship. You're not going to find responsibility or problem or solution or a host of other words.

But that's not the point, is it? The question is, does the Bible convey this idea, this ideal, or this reality?

Does the Bible have anything to say that indicates there is a reality of the possibility of worldliness or worldly out there?

It clearly does. And yet there are various reasons why we might be confused. Perhaps for a younger person, the question arises about John's writings. John seems to be a bit schizophrenic. In his gospel in 3:16, he says that God so loved the world that he gave his Son. Now here in his epistle in 2:15, he says, "Do not love the world."

And you think, well, if I could just dig down to the Greek, then I could see. But the words that he uses for love and world in both verses are the very same. God so loved the world, love not the world.

Ooh. How do we make sense of that? How do we bring these together?

Of course, one thing that really helps is context. What is the context of John 3:16? Jesus is speaking about loving the inhabitants of the world, those who will live forever somewhere. Here in our text, John is talking about not loving the ways of the world, those things which will come to an end. They have an end point, the world systems, the ideologies, the philosophies.

Maybe another reason why we find worldliness somewhat confusing is because of how different parts of the church have tried to define worldliness in the past. And a lot of churches and denominations have taken very valiant stands to define, to delineate, to explain, this is definitely worldly and this is godly.

Probably one of the standard statements back in the day, if we're going to go back 100 years or so, is don't drink, smoke, or chew, and don't go out with girls that do.

That's very basic. I'm trying to think about girls that drink, smoke, and chew. Yeah, very basic indeed. But there are a lot of other things that were termed worldly in previous times. Women wearing jewelry, makeup, wearing pants, going to the movies, getting tattoos, buying or selling on Sunday, going to carnivals.

A lot of things were defined as worldly. And what's sort of confusing then is a lot of those churches and denominations, most of them actually, ended up chucking the whole thing. And now when you talk to them, they look back on that period of their church history.

That was interesting. That was quite an experiment. Maybe a little embarrassed.

Maybe even indignant that such a thing even happened.

Worldliness in many parts of the world seems to have gone out of style.

James Hunter has observed that many of the distinctions separating Christian conduct from worldly conduct have been challenged, if not altogether undermined. Even the words worldly and worldliness have, within a generation, lost most of their traditional meaning.

This past week, I was with my brother and I asked him, how would you define worldliness? And he kind of jokingly said, well, it's whatever everyone else is doing that I'm not.

Maybe that's the concept we have sometimes. I know in preparing for this message, it was good for me to wrestle through my understandings of what does it mean to be worldly or to consider worldliness.

And I would look forward to hearing from you, brothers, sisters, on how you would define this matter.

I believe that the words worldly and worldliness and the realities that they represent are just as important and vital as they've ever been.

I found Webster in his 1828 dictionary to be helpful. So this is almost 200 years ago. He defined worldliness as a predominant passion for obtaining the good things of this life, covetousness, addictedness to gain, and temporal enjoyments. And then he defined worldly as secular, temporal, pertaining to this world or life, in contradistinction to the life to come as worldly pleasures, worldly affairs, worldly estates, worldly honor, worldly lusts.

And then he furthermore denoted worldly-mindedness as a predominating love and pursuit of this world's goods to the exclusion of piety and attention to spiritual concerns. Now, some of you are big into English, and especially I know Dad Martin, you're an English teacher and all that. When you talk about something with the L-Y letters on the end of that word, what does that often signify?

Worldly, meaning, I'm putting you on the spot, Dad.

Worldlike. Worldlike. When you see the word worldliness, that L-I in there is shorthand for likeness. Worldliness is worldlikeness. Worldly is worldlike. So when you talk about somebody who's saintly, they're saintlike. If they're godly, they're godlike. And I find that to be very helpful in trying to understand and sharpen my picture of these ideas.

So when it comes to adopting or resisting worldliness, I think we could draw a Venn diagram of three sets or three circles. So you have these three circles here.

And where all three of them overlap, we'll put a big, a capital W. That stands for world. World. How do I know if I'm in danger of becoming worldlike? That's what I want to find out. That's what I want to know.

John says there's a danger. How do I know? I think one thing that we can test by is if I start liking the world. If I'm liking the world, whatever is out there, the systems, the financial aspect, the vehicles, whatever, if I'm liking it, I'm moving toward worldlikeness.

Okay?

If I want to, I'm liking it, oftentimes there's another step after that, and that is I decide I want to be like the world. I want to be like whatever the latest fads and fashions are or whatever the latest mindset is.

That's me. I'm on that bandwagon. So I'm liking it. I want to be like it. And there's a third one, and that is I want to be liked by. I want to be liked by the world. To me, you don't have to have all three of these to be worldlike.

You can have one, two, or all three. But that is a clear challenge or a clear warning that I am moving toward worldlikeness. The Christian professor and author David F. Wells defines worldliness as that system of values in any given age which has at its center our fallen human nature, which displaces God and His truth from the world, and which makes sin look normal and righteousness seem strange. That's worldliness. Anything that makes sin look normal and righteousness seems strange, that, brothers and sisters, is the danger of constant media exposure.

Television, internet, radio, you name it, the thrust of the world is to make sin look normal and righteousness look strange. We talked about some of that strangeness in Sunday school this morning in this whole issue of makers at home or keepers at home.

In his book, Respectable Sins: Confronting the Sins We Tolerate, Jerry Bridges addresses worldliness. He says, "The sin of worldliness is a preoccupation with the things of this temporal life. It's accepting and going along with the views and practices of society around us without discerning if they are biblical. I believe that the key to our tendencies toward worldliness lies primarily in the two words, going along. We simply go along with the values and practices of society."

That's a very real possibility and danger for every one of us, that we will get to the place where you just decide, I'm going to go along. I'm going to float. I'm not going to be sober, which I think means self-aware, evaluating, discerning, thinking, contemplating where these things are going.

Now, John gives us a general description of what he means by the world further on in verse 16 of our text. He says, "For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eyes and the pride of life is not of the Father, but is of the world." I like how the New Living Translation renders verse 16, "For the world offers only a craving for physical pleasure, a craving for everything we see, and pride in our achievements and possessions."

Whoa. Pride of life, further defined as pride in my achievements and my possessions.

We live in a culture that is big on possessions. We're swimming in it, that mindset. Is there a danger for us? There sure is for me.

I believe that these three worldlike descriptions give us a good basis for determining what the world is like and how we can be not like the world and not love the world. So we have a clear command, love not the world.

We can know what world love and worldliness mean. And I'll use those two terms interchangeably. World love and worldlike, I believe, are interchangeable. Secondly, notice how we have a clear contrast. A clear contrast. He says in verse 15, "If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him." Impossible. Cannot be. Those two cannot coexist.

Love of the world and love of God are at opposite ends of the spectrum. Adam Clark put it bluntly. He said, "The love of God and the love of earthly things are incompatible. If you give place to the love of the world, the love of God cannot dwell in you. And if you have not His love, you can have no peace, no holiness, no heaven."

Another writer said, "The word world stands in contrast with God and the love of the world with the love of the Father and the things of the world as the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eyes and the pride of life in contrast with the things of God as revealed in the gospel. Therefore, no one can be a servant of God and have His love in him if he loves the world either as a whole or worldly things in particular."

I think that's an important contrast or a definition to make. If he loves the world either as a whole or worldly things in particular, the love of God cannot be in him.

If we know what worldliness is, it means that we can identify it in ourselves as well as in those who are around us. And that's one of the things that C.J. Mahaney was writing about in his book, just a small volume called Worldliness. He says, "So often we're ignorant of the signs, the symptoms of worldliness. People can be attending church, singing the songs, apparently listening to the sermons, no different on the outside than they've always been. But inside, that person is drifting. He sits in church, but is not excited to be there. She sings the songs without affection. He listens to preaching without conviction. She hears, but does not apply." Here's the reality, brothers and sisters.

World love will squeeze out God love. Only God love is powerful enough to resist the constant pressure of world love upon us.

You cannot be worldly and godly at the same time. And the reality is the pressure is constant and it's unrelenting and it's insidious and the devil never lets up. That's why we need each other. That's why we need God's word. That's why we need the Holy Spirit within us.

We're not always conscious of it. I'm not always conscious of it. And that's why it's so insidious. But I believe that Paul had this in mind in that verse that we know so well in Romans 12:2 when he said, "Do not be conformed to this world." Don't be conformed.

Why? Because the pressure is constant. But be transformed by the renewing of your mind that you may prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God.

You may be aware of the fact that the word he uses for world there in Romans 12:2 is different from the one that John uses in 1 John 2:15 and John 3:16. The word that he uses in Romans 12:2 is the idea of the age.

And I like to think of it this way. I'd like to think of us as a brotherhood. So here we have some sisters.

And we have some brothers.

All right. So these six stick figures represent our brotherhood. We have brothers and sisters. Now, we're going through life and we are being challenged with this thought that we are not to conform to this world. Or you could say, we are not to conform to the spirit of the age. Hmm. The spirit of the age, what is that?

Well, I think there is an overarching spirit that is always present in every age, but how it manifests itself will vary from time to time, culture to culture, people to people. And so the specific applications that we make in order to remember who we are in the midst of an overarching spirit of the age will differ.

How we live here will probably differ from how people live in Zambia. All right. But we have to live here because we all have a context in which to live. How can we live in relation to the ongoing oppressing pressure of the spirit of the age? Well, we have to identify it first of all.

So I'm going to say that I think the overarching spirit is rebellion. Rebellion is the overarching... That's when the systems of this world started. When the choice was made in the Garden of Eden, suddenly there was a difference between godlike and worldlike.

And it all happened because of rebellion introduced by Satan and then by Adam and Eve. From that overarching spirit come a lot of things in various societies. It's not the same one in every society, but let's think about some of the pressures of our own society. So we have lawlessness. That's where the whole defund the police comes from. That's where we have uh individualism. I'm my own person. Nobody's going to tell me what to do, even somebody in government authority.

We have uh materialism. Materialism. We have consumerism. I am defined by what I purchase and I spend. And materialism, I'm defined by what I lay up and what I store up. And we have gender issues. I can decide myself who I am, what I am, and the pronouns that you will use for me.

So this is a representative picture. It's not all the pressures, but these are some of the big pressures that we are swimming in, that we are facing in the world. The world that we live in, but we are not of.

I like the German word zeitgeist. Zeitgeist. I'll put it up here because it may be a little unfamiliar. Z-E-I-G-T-E. Z-E-I-T-G-E-I-S-T. Is that right? Zeitgeist means spirit of the age. Spirit of the age. And so in 2021, where we find ourselves at the end of November, what is the spirit of the age that is pressing in upon us? These are some of the big ones. And I would say the overarching one is rebellion, which fuels, of course, lawlessness and individualism and all of that.

We do not get to choose if we will love. We only get to choose what and whom we will love. Okay? Because God has created us first and foremost as lovers. We either love God or we love the world. It's just those two options.

So we're looking at this and we're thinking about, am I worldly? Am I going worldly? Am I becoming worldlike? I think it's important to think about these pressures coming down on us. And when we're looking at people's lives, it is tempting to say, oh yeah, so-and-so is worldly. So let's draw the cross here.

This, the cross represents godly, godlike, okay? Then we have the world here. And let's draw, I'll draw Europe so that we're not ethnocentric here. And we'll include the rest of the world. And so you have the world here.

And we'll say that here's one person who's close to the world. Here's another person who's close to God, godlike. And maybe that's me, okay? One of these is me, one of these is you. Which one of us is more godly, close to the cross? Which one of us is more worldly, close to the world here? How do we know?

Well, it's easy to look at a person's life and say, oh yeah, okay, they're wearing bright red shoes. I think they're worldly. Then you can look at the next person and you can say, well, they're driving an old beater. I think they're godly. All right? That's godly.

The problem is that doesn't give the whole picture, does it? It's like one of my professors in college said years ago. He said, do not judge a person by one issue, but by the direction of his life. So what are we looking for? We're looking for multiple decisions and asking ourselves, which way are those decisions pointing? You can have somebody who appears to be very close to godliness, godlikeness, who is actually pointed toward the world. And you can have a person who is looking like the world and yet their ongoing decisions indicate and show that they are tracking a trajectory toward godliness.

I remember some years ago our family were in Canada on the mission field and believe it or not, we were sheltered on the mission field. We lived in a residential school where all the Indian students were flown in and we went to school with them and all the staff and all the students. It was about a hundred of us. You know, all of our ladies wore dresses, all of our boys wore pants. It was all just a nice little community. Talk about communal living. That school closed down and my dad was offered a potential job at another residential type school in another province. And I remember that we traveled out there to that province to visit this school.

And that school was a little more worldly than our school had been. And our family was there with the director and his wife having supper. And my sister was about six years old or so. And the director and his wife had a young girl who was two.

And the girl, they wore pants on her the entire time we were there. And my sister who was six had no paradigm for girls wearing pants. That's how sheltered we were. It just... And so I remember being at supper and we were mortified to death, just about, that she kept calling the girl he. Now, hey, mommy, he... No, no. She, she. Okay?

What was even worse is the little girl's name was Isabelle and my sister called her Jezebel.

Out of the mouths of babes. You know, for children, things are just so black and white, aren't they? I think it would be helpful for us to approach the passage before us with a childlike heart. Love, not the world.

We can detect worldliness. Not by judging on one issue, but by looking at the overall trajectory of one's life, including obviously our own life, first of all.

Paul makes it clear that he was able to judge when somebody was worldly. In 2 Timothy 4:10, he says, "Demas has forsaken me, having loved this present world."

Well, unfortunately, there are those who, if we were to talk to them about worldliness, they'd turn up their nose and say, "Ah, you know, don't bother me about it. It's none of your business. It's not a problem." I'm glad that our brotherhood here has not been designed that way. We have been designed as a brotherhood to interact one with another about these issues.

And I know that we don't want to become a checklist church. We don't want to have just a list that, check, check, check, now I go do my own thing. I understand that. I appreciate that. Just conforming outwardly, but leaving the inward untouched.

But nor do we want to drift with the churches out there who seem to have no concern about world love or worldlikeness. I was at a camp meeting some years ago when a respected teacher and preacher, Dr. Alan Brown, made this statement. He said, "Any attitude or action that is not in harmony with God's word is worldliness.

If God speaks to me and I don't change, then I am worldly."

If God speaks to me and I don't change, then I am worldly. And is it possible, brothers and sisters, that God might speak to us through the brotherhood?

We agree that He speaks to us through His word. He speaks to us through His spirit.

But if that word comes through His bride, am I willing to change? That's the question, brothers and sisters. That's the question.

I want you to get real about pursuing God love so that you get clear about rejecting world love.

World loveness is a real issue.

Because not only do we have before us this clear command and a clear contrast, third and finally, we have a clear consequence. A clear consequence. The Apostle John didn't write what he wrote so that he could kill our joy.

He wrote it so that we could experience joy forever.

He says in verse 17 that the world is passing away and the lust of it, but he who does the will of God abides forever. That's the beauty of it. And that's also the horror of world loveness. Embracing love of the world ends up completely destroying the one who embraces it.

Separates us from God's love and disqualifies us forever from our opportunity to be with Him. It's an awful outcome.

To enter into God love is to enter into something enduring, eternal, everlasting. And so many people today think they can have it both and. Both world love and God love. I can synthesize these. I can bring them together. I can live them out of my life. You can't. It's impossible.

I can assure you of several things. One of those is that worldliness is nothing new. And secondly, it's just as repulsive to God today as it's ever been.

Charles Spurgeon, who preached 150 years ago, yeah, worldliness was back then too, he had this to say. He said, "The ungodly man will not convert the ungodly man will not convert the ungodly man. And what is more to the point, the worldly Christian will not convert the world. If you are of the world, no doubt the world will love its own. But you cannot save the world. If you are dark and belong to the kingdom of darkness, you cannot remove the darkness. If you march with the armies of the wicked one, you cannot defeat them. I believe that one reason why the Church of God at this present moment has so little influence over the world is because the world has so much influence over the Church.

Nowadays, we hear nonconformists pleading that they may do this and they may do that, things which their Puritan forefathers would rather have died at the stake than have tolerated. They plead that they may live like worldlings. And my sad answer to them when they crave for this liberty is, do it if you dare. It may not do you much hurt for you are so bad already. Your cravings show how rotten your hearts are. If you have a hungering after such dogs' meat, go dogs and eat the garbage.

Worldly amusements are fit food for mere pretenders and hypocrites. If you were God's children, you would loathe the very thought of the world's evil joys. And your question would not be, how far may we be like the world? But your one cry would be, how far can we get away from the world? How much can we come out from it?

Worldliness and world loveness are detestable because they disqualify us and disconnect us from God, the love of God and the life that is available in Him.

If we belong to the world, we cannot be godly. And if we belong to God, we will not be worldly. Jerry Bridges asks and answers, how then can we deal with our tendency toward worldliness? He said, it is not by determining that we will not be worldly, but by committing ourselves to become more godly.

What is the only power that will resist world loveness? It is God loveness. That's the only power that can resist.

And what does God loveness consist of? I'm sure you're familiar with 1 John, but over and over again, he interweaves love of God, obedience to God, and love of the brotherhood in one big experience. You can't pull one strand out and leave the others go.

Love for God, obedience to God, and love for the brotherhood are a package deal.

The book that we're studying for our small group, Side by Side by Ed Welch, has a powerful passage in the second chapter. He says, though we live before God, we are not always conscious of God. When a teen violates a parent's directions, it doesn't always feel like an act of rebellion against the parent. It typically feels simpler. The teen just wants to do what he or she wants to do. The disobedience is nothing personal, but it is personal.

The same is true for us. When we sin, it is against God. Even if it doesn't feel that way, then there is more conscious bad behavior. He goes on to say, a man had to choose between cocaine and his wife. And the man said, well, it was clear to me that there wasn't a choice. I love my wife, but I'm not going to choose anything over cocaine.

And Welch says, there is the hard inaction. That man loves his desires above his wife. That's clear. You know it. He knows it. And it is bad. Now, peer just a little further in and you discover that he loves his desires above the Lord. He has committed to manage his life his way rather than submit to the Lord. He won't be conscious of that, but he might acknowledge it when he hears it.

We can say, I love the brotherhood, but are my actions demonstrating and backing that up?

Up till now, I've been fairly general. I'd like to start poking and probing a little bit and get a little more specific. We obviously are part of a brotherhood who have agreed to certain agreements.

Now, we are not interested in having some thick rulebook, some manual, some checklist, but we are interested in walking together in unity in God loveness. That's our interest.

And I find that one of the benefits of having brotherhood agreements is that even though people like John talk in the general, and it's good they do because that makes it timeless, I still have to live life in the specifics.

And what I do specifically reveals where I'm at in reality. I can say all day long, I love the brotherhood, but if I'm doing things that don't love the brotherhood, I don't love the brotherhood. I love me.

Now, when I think about it, God sees things that I don't, and you as sisters and brothers see things that I don't, that's the value of walking together. Because there are things that I have done in my life that I didn't do purposefully to be worldlike, but it was.

And it was in interacting with others that I realized, this is like the world. Oh, okay. Now I can change. Now I can become more Godlike. So I have here this, I would call it the cliff notes of the brotherhood agreements for Shippensburg Christian Fellowship. Brother Harvey gave these out several months ago to all of us brothers at Brothers Meeting.

And I want to just hit a few snippets from these agreements. And I want you to think about how are these agreements pushing back, rejecting the ongoing pressures, the spirit of the age, the zeitgeist that we face?

Parents are responsible to lead their children to Christ. Others are encouraged to appeal to the lost on a one-on-one basis. So here's a responsibility for parents. Men are called to leadership in the home and are expected to deal with any problems that may arise, whether children or spouse.

I have a responsibility as a father and a husband. The brotherhood discusses practical applications for day-to-day living. Some are general. Others are more specific. Non-accumulation of wealth and goods. Work laboring with our hands. No network marketing as a business, only for purchasing. Now understand, when I'm reading this, I am not condemning any other group that doesn't hold these agreements. These are things that we have decided are a beautiful way to live as a brotherhood.

And it could well be that down the road we'll talk as a brother and say, you know, this doesn't apply anymore. This doesn't represent what we originally wanted it to represent. We're going to change it. Okay, this is not set in stone, but this is what we have agreed to do.

All of us who became members, pretty well all of this was set in stone before I ever joined. So I didn't even have a say in it. You know, that's not fair, right? No, I agreed to it. I saw it ahead of time. I said, yeah, I'm willing to I'm willing to do this. Credit cards should not be used to borrow money and are to be paid off monthly.

No sports fans. Only training types of videos. Nothing for entertainment.

Hands-off courtship, including any other body contact. Weddings are to be worship services where Jesus is worshiped and exalted, and there's details about that. We are opposed to contemporary and the lighter gospel music. Cars are not to be expensive or fancy and are to be purchased according to need.

And it talks about not being involved in politics. It talks about everything beyond our own needs is to be given to supply someone who lacks. These are all attempts to be as Godlike as possible as a brotherhood. It's a beautiful thing.

And again, times change. The zeitgeist could change. And we find that some things no longer apply and other things perhaps need to be addressed. It's quite possible.

So that's just a few snippets from the cliff notes. Now, I want to get splinter in the eye specific about one of these things. And I say splinter in the eye because I had one this past week that incapacitated me for about 24 hours till I get to the eye doctor and he got that little metal wicker out of my eyelid.

We have a very short section here in these brotherhood agreement about the appearance of men and women. And it's a fairly short one indeed. For the men, it says, wear button-down shirts, not pullover or form-fitting.

Well, that's pretty plain.

Now, I'd like to address something that happened just recently. Heather and I were hosting a public event. And since it was public, I feel that I can share it publicly. Several of our young men showed up not wearing button-down shirts. You say, oh, that's just you're just picking at things. You know, it's unnecessary. It's not let me tell you, t-shirts and polo shirts, I don't necessarily have a problem with them.

In fact, let me give you a little of my history. I grew up wearing t-shirts. And even further back than that, my grandfather, who was raised Amish, went to Africa as a missionary. He was a builder there. And I've seen photographs and a short video clip even of my grandfather doing his mission work in a t-shirt in Africa.

And as a young boy into my teens, before my grandfather passed away, my grandfather was an old farmer there in Big Valley. I remember my grandfather wore t-shirts. My grandfather wore them. I have close family that wear them today. I grew up wearing them. I wore some polo shirts.

This isn't about the shirts. I don't necessarily have a problem with it. My concern is we have entered into an agreement. And what agreements like this do is they tend to highlight through specifics areas where we may be adopting a world spirit and falling into world love. I'm not condemning anyone. I'm simply sharing with you reality. This is what happened.

This is where it could go. This is what we agreed to. And if we feel like t-shirts aren't a problem, it's not for me to overlook it and say, don't worry about it. It's not for the father or mother to overlook it and say, it doesn't work. It doesn't matter. It's not for you as a brother in good standing in the church to say, I don't care about it.

That's not your prerogative. Because what that is is lawlessness, which stems from rebellion.

And I know from experience of raising a cute little son that you can have cute rebellion. The face looks as innocent as an angel, but the refusal to do what it was asked is definite.

Cute rebellion.

And so I'm bringing out a specific issue because we can talk generalities all day long, but when it comes to life, we have to live it specifically. We do. And for those that have not committed to these agreements, you're not held to that, okay? You didn't say, you know, there are good godly men that wear t-shirts. I know them personally. I think I was pleasing to God back when I wore a t-shirt. In fact, I still wear t-shirts. I wear a t-shirt all the time, really, under my button-down shirt.

Day in and day out. Winter, spring, fall, summer.

So I don't want you to leave here saying, oh, Brandon said you can't be a good Christian if you wear a t-shirt. That's not at all what I'm saying. I'm saying that if you have made an agreement and you go back on your word, you can't be a good Christian.

God takes us at our word. He says, oh, that's extra biblical. Extra biblical stuff doesn't matter.

Well, let me ask you this. When you married your wife, did God specifically tell you in the Bible to marry her? Not at all. But once you gave your word, God holds you to it.

And so I would agree. I'll be the first one to say, that's a small issue. What I'm addressing with the shirts, it's a small issue, but it ties into a bigger issue of casualness, apathy, don't care, anti-authority, lawlessness. It has awful roots and it goes in a terrible direction.

So if we have certain things that are in the agreement, frankly, there are things in the brotherhood agreements that I don't feel personally as a conviction, but I have agreed to follow them. And I willingly and cheerfully do so.

And I do so because I am very concerned and afraid of lawlessness. Jesus very clearly in Matthew 24:12 links lovelessness and lawlessness. He says, because lawlessness will abound, the love of many will grow cold. These things all work together. Love for God, obedience to God, and love for the brotherhood all work together. You can't separate them.

And so the beauty of what we have here, what I shared with you, part of it, is that it's not a checklist, but it's a guideline to help us understand how to live together in unity. Other churches do things other ways. That's fine. I bless them. I encourage them. I wish them well. But we have decided in this context how we believe it's best to live. And as we continue to meet together, I'm sure we'll be making changes to that. And that's all right. But we do it together, not individually.

God love is the only thing that can effectively, constantly resist world love and worldliness.

Those who dismiss brotherhood agreements as unnecessary almost always end up moving to the level of the age. You can see it in church after church.

When there's not intentionality, not purposefulness, it simply happens because the spirit of the age is constant.

So how can you apply a message like this? I mean, half the house here doesn't even wear t-shirts. How do we apply this?

Whether you're a member of this brotherhood or you're an attender, this is what I would like you to consider doing in this coming week. For the next seven days, whenever you're facing a decision, however big, however small, I would like you to think about it in the light of this. Am I fragmenting the brotherhood or am I fostering the brotherhood? Am I fragmenting by insisting on my way or am I encouraging and fostering by a willingness to go along with and support? What are you saying? When you talk, are you being snarky and derisive and mocking about the brotherhood? I'm talking to members and non-members here.

Or are you speaking in such a way as to build up and to encourage commitment and respect and unity with the things that you say?

Do your decisions represent each one of us well? We are connected together. We are a body. We're not individuals, but we are together. Do your decisions clearly identify you with love for God and love for the brothers? Your decisions about health insurance, business, buying and selling, houses, buying and selling, cars, buying and selling, are those decisions fragmenting the brotherhood or are they fostering unity in the brotherhood?

The things that we do speak very loudly and influence the brotherhood.

This message has not been intended in any way to fragment the brotherhood. That's one of my chief desires, is to see the brotherhood united, together, pulling together. And if it does any sort of fragmenting because of my attitude or my personality or anything like that, then I have failed in my task.

Now, if bad things happen because people don't like the truth, then I call upon God to vindicate me for what has been shared here today. The purpose of this message is the upbuilding of the brotherhood and the strengthening of our love for God and for each other.

We have a clear command, a clear contrast, and a clear consequence.

In closing, I hope that John's command against world love is both clear and a little less confusing than when we started. His warning still applies today. Love, not the world. Neither the things that are in the world. If any man loved the world, the love of the Father is not in him.

I want you to get real about pursuing God love so that you get clear about rejecting world love.

Come, brothers and sisters, let us walk the way of godliness and God love together. Are there any comments?