There was a season of my life when I wanted a unicycle more than I wanted anything else, and I am fully aware of how ridiculous that sounds. My parents asked what I wanted for my birthday; I told them that I wanted a unicycle. They asked again at Christmas, and I said a unicycle. Eventually, my parents gave in and bought me one.

Unicycles are remarkably hard to learn to ride. I got good enough to work the second-floor hallway of my dorm, which was only about four and a half feet wide, so there was always a wall within reach when things went sideways. My buddies all wanted a turn, and we had a great many laughs during hours we should have been studying, until wisdom finally overtook ambition and I let the unicycle go.

Before I owned the unicycle, that thing consumed my mind, and after I owned it, I remember thinking it was nowhere near as good as I had expected. The wanting was enormous, and the having was thin, despite nothing about the unicycle changing.

The unicycle was harmless. The appetite underneath it was not, because that same appetite pointed at bigger objects has emptied bank accounts, ended marriages, and hollowed out people. John the apostle writes about that appetite and the whole system that exists to feed it.

We hear often that God is love, and we should, because it is true. However, Scripture also shows us a love that God hates.

“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 desires of the flesh and the desires of the eyes and pride of life—is not from the Father but is from the world. And the world is passing away along with its desires, but whoever does the will of God abides forever.” (1 John 2:15–17)

Three Different Worlds, and Only One of Them Is Forbidden

We have to settle what John means by the word world, because Scripture uses it in three different ways, and mixing them up will send a sincere Christian off in a strange direction.

The first use is positive and refers to the physical creation around us, the well-ordered earth and universe. It is the root behind our word cosmetic, so that a woman putting on cosmetics is bringing order and arrangement to her appearance. The second use is also positive and refers to the mass of humanity, which is the sense John himself uses when he writes that God so loved the world (John 3:16). The third use is the negative one, and it is the one in front of us here. It refers to the values, the ambitions, the pleasures, and the conclusions about life that stand against God and against the virtues His Word honors. If it is anti-God, it belongs in this category of “the world.”

This passage calls you to steward the creation you were handed, so go ahead and mow your grass, and please do not pour your used oil out in the yard on the theory that you are refusing to love the world. Scripture calls you to love the people around you, because God loves them and so should we. What God prohibits is affection for the ideas, the values, the vices, and the sensual pleasures that dominate a world in rebellion against Him.

Put positively, to claim that we love God is to say that we love the things God loves and hate the things God hates, and that claim must have consequences. God is light, so we cannot secretly thrill at the things of darkness and still be counted among His children. God is love, so we cannot secretly thrill at hatred and violence. God is truth, so we cannot find a private delight in deceiving people. God is pure, so we cannot delight in impure games and impure behavior. Those things mix about as well as fire and water.

The Same Three Hooks, Recycled for Every Generation

One of the more useful things I have noticed over the years is that Satan has never needed to reinvent temptation. He does not convene a committee every decade to develop new material. He has three hooks; he has always had three hooks, and he simply repackages them and hands them to the next generation, which proceeds to buy the same destructive life the previous generation already proved would not work.

John names all three in verse 16: the base bodily desires, the restless desires of the eyes, and the boastful opportunities we take to look bigger than we are.

The desires of the flesh point somewhere other than our ordinary human needs. We need food and water and rest and clothing and shelter, and none of that is under indictment here. The phrase leans hard into the twisted desires that rise up out of a sinful heart, particularly the premature and distorted expressions of our sexuality, whether they are acted out in the body or entertained in the mind. It covers pornography, immodesty, public nudity, vulgar conversation, the entertainment built to feed it, and every sexual expression outside of marriage.

The desires of the eyes describe the restlessness that comes from constantly needing more. Put a child in the seat of a cart and walk him through a store and you will hear it out loud, “I want that, I want that, I want that.” He has no idea how immature he sounds. We smile at how silly children are, and then we leave the toy department and our own hearts start up. Mine is a hardware store problem, and not the lumber aisle either. I walk past the tools, and something inside me starts saying, “You need that, and you need that.” And I stand there telling myself to stop it, knowing I am like the kid in the cart.

The pride of life is the perverted human desire to be thought of more highly than we deserve, and we manage it mostly through conversation, steering the talk toward our possessions, our achievements, our knowledge, and the people we know. I was pumping gas in town once when a man came over to tell me a long series of things he had decided I needed to know, mostly concerning what he had just done and just bought. That is his business, and the question that followed me home was whether that’s what I do when I talk. The same root grows in the opposite direction, because criticism does the same work. They are ignorant, they are inept, they are weak, they are common, and if everyone could be as sharp as I am, the world would run properly. That is the boastful pride of life wearing its other disguise.

To see how old and how consistent these three are, read Matthew 4 and watch the enemy try all three on Christ in the wilderness, then turn back to Genesis 3 and watch Eve encounter the same three in a garden.

Clothing and Sunday Mornings

It is entirely appropriate to save up for a special purchase. Clothing wears out, vehicles break, homes need improvement, and it is good to have reasonable hobbies that refresh us, which is what recreation is meant to be: a re-creating of a tired person. What John indicts is the insatiable appetite, the see it and say it and name it and claim it reflex that always wants more, more, more, until the barns are overflowing and the wanting still isn’t satisfied.

I feel this most sharply about the clothes I wear when I preach, and people are sometimes surprised that I think about it at all. My aim is to look appropriate and unmemorable, which means flashy and radical are out. If I were to decide that caring about clothing is the lust of the eyes and settle the matter at the thrift store, I could walk up here in bell bottoms and bold plaid and a set of epic lapels from 1973, and some of you would remember that decade fondly while spending the whole message thinking about how much I resemble an Elvis impersonator. There would be nothing immoral about my clothing, though if I wore it up here, a fair number of people would conclude that I had lost touch, and their attention would go there instead of to the Word. When you walk out on a Sunday, I want you saying that God worked in your heart, rather than complimenting me on my lapels.

The same tension followed me out to the driveway while I was preparing this message. My truck needed washing, and there I was with a hose in my hand saying the words love not the world to myself, glancing back and forth between the truck and my old Trailblazer. That vehicle has 228,000 miles on it and makes a set of noises no vehicle should make, and I have a real interest in not scattering parts of it down the worst road in the county on my way to a hospital call. I tell you about the clothes and the two vehicles because this is complicated. The line runs straight through the middle of the heart that is doing the wanting, rather than between owning and not owning.

Dancing on the Deck of a Sinking Ship

Verse 17 pulls the covers back, and the tense of the verb is worth noticing. John does not say the world will pass away someday, off in the distance where it need not concern us. He says it is passing away, presently, already, while we watch.

Think about what people paid to board the Titanic. The better tickets cost the equivalent of years of an ordinary wage, and every dollar bought a place on the “unsinkable ship.” Knowing what we know now, you wouldn’t have paid a nickel for the privilege, and nobody says, “Put me on that ship, I intend to be dancing on the deck when we go down.” That is precisely the arrangement John describes, loving the world when the world is a sinking ship.

Jesus described the options of death and life using a single image.

“Enter by the narrow gate. For the gate is wide and the way is easy that leads to destruction, and those who enter by it are many.” (Matthew 7:13)

The world calls out to come along on the wide road, and the road really is easier, and it is well populated, and it ends where Jesus said it ends. Ask whether the world system is making moral progress, and then look squarely at the evidence. Are the influencers and the celebrities becoming better people for having bought the world’s promises whole? Every week brings more broken families and more drunkenness and more of the same wreckage. Ask whether easier access to alcohol has helped us, whether legalized marijuana has helped us, whether the flood of pornography has produced fulfilled people, whether the gambling money pouring in has brought joy to the young men betting on college sports.

The world system is crumbling, and people keep patching it up, rebranding it, and promising that this policy or this pleasure will finally satisfy.

What a Love Like That Reveals

Deception holds the whole world system together. Satan dangles sin in front of us and calls it the fast track to freedom and happiness and fulfillment, and when the seeds go into the ground and the harvest of heartache comes up, he is nowhere to be found. He gets us off the narrow path and leaves us alone with the guilt, regret, and the mess.

You must teach your children to see through the deception. When my girls were home and something deceptive came across the news, I would call them in and rewind it. Do you see the lie? Do you see the inconsistency? A mother I heard recently plays the same game with her daughters and calls it “spy the lie.” Someone will object that this is an exhausting way to live, and I would answer that it is simply the world we live in, because the master deceiver is at work in it.

The lies also come from inside, which is the harder half. Every one of us will be tempted to push Christ off the throne and install ourselves as the rightful sovereign, and even while we watch what that decision has done to our own lives, our hearts still say, “I know, but I am smarter than that, and I can stop whenever I want, and I can look at this and be fine.”

That brings us back to the blunt sentence at the end of verse 15. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. These are mutually exclusive loves, and no arrangement will hold both of them at full strength. Before salvation, this is simply where we lived. Paul described it exactly: you once walked following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience (Ephesians 2:2). That was the old life, and an influence was operating on it that we did not choose.

Understand also that the system has never been neutral toward Christ. He said as much.

“If the world hates you, know that it has hated me before it hated you.” (John 15:18)

That is hard in a workplace and harder in a high school, because everyone wants to fit somewhere and nobody wants to be the sore thumb. The people invested in the world system will laugh, they will roll their eyes, and some of them will say brutal things. Jesus told us in advance so that we would not read the hostility as evidence that something has gone wrong.

The One Thing That Lasts

Verse 17 does not end with the ship going down. The world is passing away along with its desires, but whoever does the will of God abides forever.

That word has been running through this whole letter. We are told to abide in Him, we are told that the Word of God abides in the strong, and now we are told that the person who does the will of God abides forever. Two things stand side by side in this paragraph, the world and Christ, one of them is dissolving as we watch and one of them is permanent. Every one of us is attached to one or the other.

John talks about abiding as evidence of salvation rather than earning salvation. When conversion is real in a heart it changes what the hands do. A converted person develops the ability to say something the world finds unintelligible: I need some material things in order to live, and I have no need to be buried in the stuff, and what I actually need is Jesus, and in Him I am satisfied.

Your commitment to loving God rather than the world will be tested this week. It will be decided in the cart at the store, on the phone at eleven at night when nobody else is looking at the screen, in the sentence you were about to say to make yourself sound a little larger than you are, and in the conversation you have been avoiding because having it would hurt your pride.

Your actions speak considerably louder than anything you would say about yourself, so the question to carry into the week is this one: “What does my behavior say that I really love?” Wherever the answer turns up evidence of sin, confess it and forsake it, and then make it your daily prayer that your heart would love God and that your affections would settle where His have already settled.

The world you are being sold is coming apart in the hands of the people selling it. Give your one life to the God who will still be standing when it has finished falling, because whoever does the will of God abides forever.