St Francis of Assisi said that we must “wear the world like a loose garment, which touches us in a few places and there lightly.” It would be a profitable exercise in our spiritual growth to continue to work on understanding what the world is, how it affects us, and to recognize its grasping after our life.
This week we look at the temptation of Jesus in Luke 4 as a particularly good place to think about how the world comes for us. Satan came after Jesus, and in so doing, he used the world. What is the world exactly?
The world is a system of godless secular life with its ideologies, priorities, pleasures, and aims. It is the opposite of the kingdom of God which is centered on complete trust in and dependence on God and in which God is the center of all, he is everything, his glory, his will, and his power are preeminent. The world is defined by the temporal and the secular, and is seen and engaged with through entertainment, business, politics, science, and commerce.
Now, how does that come to play in Jesus’ temptation, and how might we sense the world encroaching on our own soul?