Love Not the World

Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him. Notice that this is a letter. The man writing it has just spent three verses naming who he writes to: little children, fathers, young men. The hard sentence goes to people already told that their sins are forgiven them for his name's sake.

He says what he means by world in the very next line, so nobody has to guess. For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, is not of the Father, but is of the world. Three appetites: what the body wants, what the eye wants once it has seen it, and the standing a person gets from having got it. The same writer put down the sentence about God so loving the world that he gave his only begotten Son, and expected a reader to tell which world was meant.

His reason is expiry, and he gives it in a line. And the world passeth away, and the lust thereof: but he that doeth the will of God abideth for ever. He tells you how long those things last, and leaves you to work out why anyone would spend their loving on something already on its way out.

Carry the plain form of it. Those three appetites are the engine of every advertisement you will see today, catalogued by John two thousand years ago. Whatever you love that runs on it is running out. The love of the Father is the one affection in the sentence with a future. It is offered to little children, to fathers and to young men. That is everybody in the room.

Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 202 is Health Restored (Jeremiah 30:17).

All 365 readings in Daily Manna, Year Two