The world of sense intrudes upon our attention day and night for the whole of our lifetime. It is clamorous, insistent and self-demonstrating. It does not appeal to our faith; it is here, assaulting our five senses, demanding to be accepted as real and final. But sin has so clouded the lenses of our hearts that we cannot see that other reality, the City of God, shining around us. The world of sense triumphs. The visible becomes the enemy of the invisible; the temporal, of the eternal.1
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It is an ironic thought too that fallen men, though they cannot fulfill their promises, are always able to make good on their threats. For decades they have been promising us a warless world where peace and brotherhood shall sit quiet as a brooding dove. All they have given us is the control of a few diseases and the debilitating comforts of push-button living. These have extended our lives a little longer so we are now able to stay around to see our generation die one by one; and when the riper years come upon us they retire us by compulsion and turn us out to clutter up a world that has no place for us, a world that does not understand us and that we do not understand.2
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The world has nothing that we want—for we are believers in a faith that is as well authenticated as any solid fact of life. The truths we believe and the links in the chain of evidence are clear and rational. I contend that the Church has a right to rejoice and that this is no time in the world’s history for Christian believers to settle for a defensive holding action!3
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For the first time in human history a shockingly wicked ideology has been organized into a world conspiracy, shrewd, cruel, inhuman and fanatically determined. Of course, I mean international communism, the devil’s most cunning and most effective limitation of Christianity to date. It is as if the boiling cauldrons of Gehenna had sprung a leak and the noxious vapors had, entered the brains of men and turned them into moral cave men without any conscience or any sense of common decency. They appear to be possessed and morally demented to a degree known nowhere else on earth. These men, though numerically few, yet constitute a threat to the world so grave, so deadly, that nothing else on earth can be compared to it.4
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Men think of the world, not as a battleground but as a playground. We are not here to fight, we are here to frolic. We are not in a foreign land, we are at home. We are not getting ready to live, we are already living, and the best we can do is to rid ourselves of our inhibitions and our frustrations and live this life to the full. This, we believe, is a fair summary of the religious philosophy of modern man, openly professed by millions and tacitly held by more multiplied millions who live out that philosophy without having given verbal expression to it.5
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The sea is always trying to get into the ship, and the world is always trying to get into the church. The world around us continues to try to find its way in, to splash in, to come in with soft words and beautiful white crests, forever whispering, “Don’t be so aloof; don’t be so hostile. Let me come in—I have something for you—something that will do you good!”
The world is making offers to the church—but we don’t need the world!… The world has nothing that the Christian church needs!6
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That this world is a playground instead of a battleground has now been accepted in practice by the vast majority of evangelical Christians. They might hedge around the question if they were asked bluntly to declare their position, but their conduct gives them away. They are facing both ways, enjoying Christ and the world too, and gleefully telling everyone that accepting Jesus does not require them to give up their fun, and that Christianity is just the jolliest thing imaginable.7
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Nowadays, we perceive that even a large part of evangelical Christianity is trying to convert this world to the church. We are bringing the world in head over heels—unregenerated, uncleansed, unshriven, unbaptized, unsanctified. We are bringing the world right into the church. If we can just get some big shot to say something nice about the church, we rush into print and tell about this fellow and what nice things he said. I don’t care at all about big shots because I serve a living Savior, and Jesus Christ is Lord of lords and King of kings. I believe every man ought to know this ability to see another world.8
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Turn on the broadcasts, and you will hardly find an advertising program where the announcer can talk for 20 seconds without lying. We have gotten used to lies on the radio. They lie on the billboards. They lie in the magazines. This kind of deceit is all around, us, and we pick up that psychology without realizing it. We have the psychology of mistrust, we lose our confidence in people.9
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You can be a hypocrite and love the world.
You can be a deceived ruler in the religious system and love the world.
You can be a cheap, snobbish, modern Christian and love the world.
But you cannot be a genuine Bible Christian and love the world.10
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There is no unity in the world—there is division and hatred and hostility and plenty of open strife which we don’t call war if we can keep it localized.11
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God fully expects the church of Jesus Christ to prove itself a miraculous group in the very midst of a hostile world. Christians of necessity must be in contact with the world but in being and spirit ought to be separated from the world—and as such, we should be the most amazing people in the world.12
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I am perfectly certain that I could rake up fifteen boxcar loads of fundamentalist Christians this hour in the city of Chicago who are more influenced in their whole outlook by Hollywood than they are by the Lord Jesus Christ. I am positive that much that passes for the gospel in our day is very little more than a very mild case of orthodox religion grafted onto a heart that is sold out to the world in its pleasures and tastes and ambitions.13