For What it’s Worth…

Worldliness; Resisting the Seduction of a Fallen World,  edited by C J Mahaney,  has been sitting on my desk for a few weeks.  I decided that since it’s a collection from a number of authors,  I’d take it chapter by chapter,  rather than review the whole thing.  Chapter 1, Is This Verse In Your Bible, by C J Mahaney establishes the premise for the entire book.

“Today, the greatest challenge facing American (read “Western”) evangelicals is not persecution from the world, but seduction by the world.”

Quoting a Charles Spurgeon sermon from 1860, Mahaney demonstrates that the greater the distinctiveness between the church and the world, the greater the church’s witness. When the church and the world are indistinguishable, the church tends to fail in its mission.

Mahaney wants to help Christians take seriously the command in 1 John 2:15 Do not love the world or anything in the world.  He helps us wrestle with the issue of loving men and women in the world, but resisting the temptation to join the deception of self-sufficienct and arrogance of the world.

Wordliness, at its most basic level, is “human nature without God”.  It’s the trap of being driven to other things rather than obeying and glorifiying God.  Mahaney helpfully tackles the problem of worldliness, not as a range of behaviours that need to be curtailed, but as a problem of the heart – the heart all-to-easily swayed by sinful desires.

But of course, precisely because this is an issue of sin, the war against worldliness isn’t a battle we can win on our own.  We resist worldliness by exalting Christ.  Jesus’ death on our behalf brings forgivess for sin and the power to overcome sin.

Before reading this book, I’d recommend doing the following:

1) Pray that God would awaken you to blindspots in your life and bring to light sin and areas of temptation you were not previously aware of (or willing to deal with!).
2) Spend some time reflecting on your prayers.  Consider what you’re praying for.  Does your prayer life reflect God’s priorities for your life, or a spiritualised shopping list of the world’s desires?
3) Reflect on the thoughts that fill your mind when nothing else does!  By that I mean, where does your mind go when you’re relaxing, when you’re laying in bed?  What desires and ‘what ifs’ fill your thoughts?

I’m confident that this sort of prayer and reflection will make the reading of this book much more pertinent and personal.

This book is for you if:

You’re reluctant to discuss worldliness because you might have to change.
You hear about a book like this and immediately think of someone else who needs to read it.
Someone were to look at your credit card statements and web browsing history and not be able to tell you’re a Christian.

There’s an extra reason why this is a good book, and that’s that you can read it online for free at Crossway Books!

Crossway Books US$ 12.99
Moore Books AU$ 22.95