The Cardiology of Worldliness (1 John 2:16) John MacArthur

Video from Grace to You

The Cardiology of Worldliness (1 John 2:16) John MacArthur

"Continuing in our study of the wonderful epistle called 1 John, the first epistle written by the apostle John, finding ourselves in chapter 2 and looking at a section from verses 15 to 17. This would be the third week that we’ve looked at this small section of Scripture, but it’s very definitive, and I trust that the message tonight will be as helpful as the last two have been. Let me just read these three verses again, 1 John 2:15 to 17.

“Do not love the world, nor 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 and the lust of the eyes and the boastful pride of life, is not from the Father but is from the world. And the world is passing away and also its lusts, but the one who does the will of God abides forever.”

We basically have sort of taken that passage apart and put it back together again in terms of its structure and its main message. But for tonight, I want to just focus on verse 16 really. I want to focus a little bit on diagnosing the cardiology of worldliness, all that is in the world, the sum of it is the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the boastful pride of life. None of that is from the Father; all of it is from the world.

When you’re talking about the world, by that we don’t mean the created physical world and we don’t mean the world of men, we mean the system of sin or the system of evil, all that is in that anti-God, anti-Christ system is made up of a matrix of the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the boastful pride of life. This is really diagnostic, this is getting down into the essence of sin and why we sin and what compels us to sin - instruction that is very helpful for us.

But I want to put it in a larger context because we’re only dealing with just a brief portion of Scripture tonight. I can kind of broaden the big picture a little bit and maybe put together a message tonight that will give us a sense of the reality of sin. Solomon was right when he wrote that there was not one person on earth who was righteous and good. There wasn’t one person who did not sin. It is the universal problem. All have sinned. None are righteous, so says Romans chapter 3. Sin, then, is the universal problem. There is none good, no not one..." from the Transcript

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