Daily Manna, Year Two · Day 202 · July 21
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.”
Friend,
I want to show you a hard sentence, and the people it was sent to: "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." It sits in a letter. In the three verses just before it, John names the people he is writing to: little children, fathers and young men. So this hard sentence goes to people who have already been told, "your sins are forgiven you for his name's sake."
John says what he means by "the 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." Those are three appetites. The first is what the body wants. The second is what the eye wants once it has seen something. The third is the pride a person takes in having it, and the standing it brings. John's Gospel holds the famous sentence, "For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son." So John trusts his readers to tell which world he means here. God loves the world of people, and He sent His Son to save it. What we must not love is the world of those three appetites.
His reason comes in one line: "And the world passeth away, and the lust thereof: but he that doeth the will of God abideth for ever." Those appetites have an end date. John tells you how long they will last, and he leaves you to see why it makes no sense to give your love to something that is already on its way out.
So carry the plain form of it with you. Those three appetites drive most of the advertisements you will ever see, and John named them nearly two thousand years ago. Whatever you love because of them is running out. The love of the Father is the one love in this sentence that has a future, and the one who does His will "abideth for ever." That promise is for little children, for fathers and for young men, which means it is for everyone in the room, and for you.
Yours on the same road,
a fellow learner
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 202 is Health Restored (Jeremiah 30:17).