This is our last sermon in the series inspired by Jerry’s Bridges’ book Respectable Sins, and today we are dealing with one of the most insidious yet seemingly innocent sins: worldliness. Worldliness is what happens when we fail to draw a distinction between being in the world and of the world. Our reading from 1 John this morning reminds us, “If anyone loves the world, love for the Father[a] is not in them. 16 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.” In other words, when we focus too much on culture we lose track of faith. But it happens so subtly that we often don’t notice until we’ve passed the mark.
It is very challenging, this call to be in the world and not of it. How much easier might it be if we lived in our own little society, completely filled with Christians whose beliefs are much like our own! But we are called to be in the world while not giving in to the temptation to be of the world. It’s a line that seems very thin until it is in our rearview mirror.
Bridges defines worldliness as “being attached to, engrossed in, or preoccupied with the things of this temporal life.”[1] In other words, it’s being focused on things that don’t move us down the road of holiness toward heaven. The three categories Bridges breaks the sin of worldliness into are the same as the title of this sermon: money, idolatry and vicarious immorality. Make no mistake, there is a wealth (pun intended) of sin in these three categories.
People get tired of hearing preachers talk about money. I’m sure that was true with Jesus as well since He spoke more about money than just about any other topic. But while the Bible never says that money is the root of all evil, it does, in fact, say in 1 Timothy 6:10, “For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil. Some people, eager for money, have wandered from the faith and pierced themselves with many griefs.” And that’s pretty much where Bridges goes with this part of the chapter. He gives some interesting statistics:
- In 2004 the average household income after taxes was $52,287 while the average credit card debt load was $70,000.
- From the average 2004 income of over $52,000, the average household gave only about $794. That’s all giving, not just to church. For you math majors out there, that’s just about 1.5% of household income.
- Evangelicals gave an average of 4.4% of their income. More than double that of the average American, but less than half of the Biblical minimum 10% tithe.
- Churches gave an average of 10% to mission in 1920, but in 2003 that had dropped to less than 3%.
- The difference is being spent on items for household and self – savings is down to roughly 2% of income.
Even if you add the rather unusual 4.4% given by evangelical Christians to the roughly 2% savings, that means that the overwhelming majority of even evangelical Christians are spending 93.6% of their after tax income on things, stuff, entertainment or personal services. We’re spending on stuff of the world. Our hearts may be generous, but our bank accounts, well, not so much.
It’s not just about giving to the church, though heaven knows the churches could use a bit of help. Really, it is about being willing to give up some worldly luxuries so that others in need might have the necessities. If you think about it, we complain loudly that the government takes too much of our money to feed the poor and house the homeless and care for widow and orphans, but in some ways it’s a good thing they do – a lot of folks would be starving on the streets if it was left to the churches alone to care for them. Perhaps that’s one form of the curse on the nation referred to in Malachi – high taxes to pay to do what churches used to do.
Our reading from Malachi today reminds us that God is generous with us when we are generous with Him. We are called upon to “Bring the whole tithe into the storehouse, that there may be food in my house. Test me in this,” says the LORD Almighty, “and see if I will not throw open the floodgates of heaven and pour out so much blessing that there will not be room enough to store it.” This right after saying that the people are robbing God when we fail to bring the whole tithe. We have laws against theft and our culture has little regard for those who steal from other people, but how many of us are stealing from God? Scary thought, isn’t it?
We can all come up with reasons we need to have and buy and pay for the things we do, why we cannot possibly survive if we tithe, but beyond robbing God, what does that say about our trust in Him? It is a turning away from God, yet He tells us, “Return to me, and I will return to you.” So whether you manage to trust enough to tithe, whether you concentrate your giving to the church or spread it around, the point is that we should be thinking more about God and less about worldly pleasures, and our pocketbooks and bank statements should reflect that. Money and how we spend it is a pretty good gauge of our level of worldliness.
But it’s not only about money. We’ve talked several times about idolatry, a specific kind of worldliness. We don’t bow down to wooden figurines and we’ve talked about how money can be an idol, but there’s more to it. What about our careers? We have come to associate our careers so closely with our identities that we equate them with our value. If we are important in our jobs, if we have good careers, then we are valuable. We take time away from our friends, our families, our lives and most importantly our God to work more to get farther ahead. Often getting ahead improves our finances, but we’d strive to get ahead even if it didn’t because getting ahead gives us status and power. Career has become idol.
Bridges includes in his book a lovely little vignette that shows a better way to think about our careers – as doing what we do to help others and please God. He tells the story of a car salesman who said, “After I became a Christian I stopped trying to sell cars and started helping people buy cars.”[2] Same job, different perspective. He began focusing on helping people rather than selling things. He did the same thing for employment, but now in a way that would help others and be pleasing to God.
But there are still more idols: politics, culture, sports. Not just the pros, though of course we get a bit obsessive about such things. Have you ever gone to a little kids’ soccer game on a Saturday morning and seen a parent screaming at a referee? Have you heard a parent’s frustration over the fact that if they don’t put their kid in league sports on Sunday morning when they’re in junior high the kid will never have a chance at making the high school team? Have you ever heard a coach yelling at and belittling players who are not playing up to par as if it is the end of the world? It gets ridiculous. And we get just as nutty over politics. I knew a guy who lost lifelong friends when he put a sign in his yard supporting his choice of presidential candidate. And if you listened to the news over the weekend you heard each side accuse the other of being stupid and heartless and unyielding. Yet somehow they make sure they get paid, even if they make others suffer. Too often politicians are no longer servants of the people, but calculating power-grabbers whose only real motivation is re-election to receive personal perks and power. Such politicians have made their career an idol and we have made them idols. Malachi described it long ago, “14 “You have said, ‘It is futile to serve God. What do we gain by carrying out his requirements and going about like mourners before the LORD Almighty? 15 But now we call the arrogant blessed. Certainly evildoers prosper, and even when they put God to the test, they get away with it.’” That’s idolatry – putting other things ahead of God because worldly rewards are more readily recognizable, more tangible in this life, received more quickly, more in keeping with the culture. But God isn’t interested in what’s popular with the culture. He’s interested in righteousness.
That leads right into my favorite of the sins Bridges highlights in his chapter on worldliness: Vicarious Immorality. Here we thought we were doing pretty well on the immorality thing. We’re not committing murder or theft, not adulterers or fornicators. Yet we are often immoral vicariously. Vicarious meaning “experienced in the imagination through the feelings or actions of another person.”[3] Immoral meaning behavior that does not conform “to the patterns of conduct usually accepted or established as consistent with principles of personal and social ethics.”[4] In other words, vicarious immorality is enjoying the wickedness of others, and we are good at it. The clothes worn to attract the lustful attention of strangers, the lascivious enjoyment of those same clothes on strangers, the blatant culture of sexual permissiveness that we have come to accept as the norm. It’s all part of vicarious immorality.
So what do we do? We repent and change our ways. Or, as the song says, we “turn back and forswear our foolish ways.” We turn back to God, repenting from the insidious sins of worldliness; we avert our eyes from the trashy tabloids, give up the latest fashion in favor of modesty, focus on doing whatever our job is not for the power or prestige but to please God and help others, give a bit more to charity and spend a bit less on ourselves. Then we will be like the group of folks in Malachi who feared the Lord and remembered His name. Then we, like they, will be spared as God promises: “17 “On the day when I act,” says the LORD Almighty, “they will be my treasured possession. I will spare them, just as a father has compassion and spares his son who serves him. 18 And you will again see the distinction between the righteous and the wicked, between those who serve God and those who do not.”
The antidote to worldliness, like all other sins, is repentance and an increased focus on righteousness. When God does act, we sure don’t want to be on the wrong side of that equation. Instead, we want to be holy – or at least to be striving for holiness - because as 1John reminds us, “The world and its desires pass away, but whoever does the will of God lives forever.” We must all try to be more holy and less worldly. We must try to live our lives in a way that is pleasing to God. And amen.