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1 John 2:16 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.
The flesh, the eyes, and pride of life
Beloved we live in a world flooded with sin; “This whole world lies under the power of the wicked one” (1 John 5:19). The wicked one uses every possible means for his “fiery darts” (Ephesians 6:16) to entangle the Christian mind. Daily we are bombarded with attractive people telling us that we can’t be happy unless we own the product that they are selling or adopt the lifestyle that they are pursuing. We thumb through magazines that entice us with beautiful homes, new cars, luxury items, or expensive vacations that all can be ours, if we just get enough money or go into enough debt. The credit card company will be glad to get us hopelessly in debt, if we’re not careful. It is lust for the things of the world that provoke Americans to spend billions on casino gambling and lottery tickets. Just one lucky hit and you will have it all!
We are on a spiritual battlefield—the world. Worldliness is, at its core, a matter of the heart. If your heart is captured by this world, you will love the things of this world. If your heart is captured by the love of God, you will be drawn to Him and to the things of God. The only way that our hearts can be transformed so that we love God is by the supernatural new birth. In Ephesians 6 Paul shines the lights on the reality that life is a battle. Paul instructs us in Ephesians that the battles and the temptations we are facing are not physical battles but, rather it’s spiritual. The enemy of our souls uses every opportunity to try to get us to depart from God’s path and to destroy our trust in God and God alone. Please listen to me the devil is a skilled fighter, and he doesn’t fight fair. With Satan there is no such thing as a fair fight.
When you place a spoon in a glass of water that’s only two-thirds full, it appears that the spoon is bent or broken. This is called refraction. We know that the spoon is neither bent nor broken, it just looks that way because of the light. As the light passed through the water, a distortion is created. Listen the world in which we are now living has created a refraction. It has created a distorted view of life, so that people are looking at life and living life in a way that the secular culture has defined it, and truly creating a bent view of reality. In fact, if you look at the world order closely, it will make you think your faith is broken. But it is not that your faith is broken, it is the distorted view of this world order being applied to your faith.
In 1 John (2:16), he divided worldly temptation into three categories:
The desires of the flesh the desires of the eyes and the pride of life. There is nothing new under the sun.
Those are the three areas where Satan will attack. Go back to the Garden of Eden when he came to Eve there in the garden, "Hath God said that you can eat of all of the trees that are in the garden?" "Yes," Eve said, "all except the one in the midst of the garden, and God said that we should not eat of it or touch it. For in the day that we ate of it, we shall surely die." "Aw, you won’t die. God knows that in that tree lies the
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