By Byron Register

The anxieties and the troubles of this world, the deceitfulness, deception, or pleasure of riches; meaning wealth, abundance of external possessions. The KJV translates "and the lust of other things" but the Greek "καὶ αἱ περὶ τὰ λοιπὰ ἐπιθυμίαι" Lit. and concerning the rest of the desires. It talks about these desires entering in, how do they enter in? They enter in through the mind and when they do they crowd out or choke utterly the divine seed of the word sown in the mind. Then the person becomes unfruitful or metaphorically, not yielding what it ought to yield.

(1 John 2:15 KJV) 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.

John uses a strong prohibition; "Μὴ ἀγαπᾶτε" Love Not the world! The world here doesn't mean God's creation but the sinful pleasures that are in the world due to sin. Christians are loving the things that are in the world and not the Creator of the world. We are in love with material things and conforming ourselves after the things of the world.

(Romans 12:2 KJV) And be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God.

What does Paul mean when he tells us not to be conformed? The Greek word here is suschematizo; not to conform with this age, that is, do not fall in with external and fleeting fashions of this age nor be fashioned to them, but undergo a deep inner change by the qualitative renewing of your mind.

(1 John 2:16 KJV) 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.

The sinful desires of the flesh, eyes, and the pride of life are not out from (ek) God but they are out from (ek) the world. These sinful desires are not from our heavenly Father they come from a different origin, the world. There is a reason that John gives us such a strong prohibition against these lust.

(Mark 4:19 KJV) And the cares of this world, and the deceitfulness of riches, and the lusts of other things entering in, choke the word, and it becometh unfruitful.

The anxieties and the troubles of this world, the deceitfulness, deception, or pleasure of riches; meaning wealth, abundance of external possessions. The KJV translates "and the lust of other things" but the Greek "καὶ αἱ περὶ τὰ λοιπὰ ἐπιθυμίαι" Lit. and concerning the rest of the desires. It talks about these desires entering in, how do they enter in? They enter in through the mind and when they do they crowd out or choke utterly the divine seed of the word sown in the mind. Then the person becomes unfruitful or metaphorically, not yielding what it ought to yield.

James 4:1-10 [Warnings Against Loving The World]

(James 4:1 KJV) From whence come wars and fightings among you? come they not hence, even of your lusts that war in your members?

Our love for the world brings wars and fighting among us; Let's look closer at this Scripture the word "whence" means of place, from what place, of origin of source, or from what author or giver. So what source does these fightings come from? We know by God's Word that He doesn't bring strife or confusion among His children. This love for the world causes fights because of our desires for pleasure, lust, enjoyment, or desires for pleasure it is not from God. These lusts war in our members like a soldier would fight or strategize against his enemy.

(James 4:2 KJV) Ye lust, and have not: ye kill, and desire to have, and cannot obtain: ye fight and war, yet ye have not, because ye ask not.

James tells us the reason we don't have answers to our prayers, "ye lust, and have not:" we are lusting after the wrong things we kill [Lit. to commit murder] and we desire or we are filled with jealousy are to burn with zeal; to be heated or to boil with envy, hatred, or anger. We can't obtain by this kind of behavior because it is against the will of God, James puts it simply, "ye have not, because ye ask not."

(James 4:3 KJV) Ye ask, and receive not, because ye ask amiss, that ye may consume it upon your lusts.

James tells us the reason we don't receive he says, "ye ask amiss" this comes from the Greek word, "kakos"; badly, wrongly, wickedly, sick; to speak ill of, revile, one, or with bad intent. A lot of times because of our love for the world we tend to ask God for things of this world and our intentions are not for God's glory or for the use of the ministry but for the fulfillment of our own desires. We ask for these things so that we may consume or waste "it" upon our own lusts.

(James 4:4 KJV) Ye adulterers and adulteresses, know ye not that the friendship of the world is enmity with God? whosoever therefore will be a friend of the world is the enemy of God.

Because of a love for the world James calls them adulterers he goes on to say don't you know that if anyone becomes a friend to the world then they are an enmity with God. The last part of this verse is what I find to be interesting, "whosoever therefore will be a friend to the world is the enemy of God." This comes from the Greek word, kathistemi, and here it is in the third person and it means that God will appoint, ordain, or make the person who is a friend of the world His enemy, Do you want to be God's enemy? So what's is the way to stay God's friend and not His enemy?

(James 4:7 KJV) Submit yourselves therefore to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you.

Submit, this word is an act of submission to be obedient to God and then we must do one more thing, resist the devil. We must set ourselves against, oppose, withstand, and resist the devil, this shows us that the source of our love for the world's sinful desires is Satan, the god of this world. When we resist the devil he will flee from us, this word flee means he will escape, avoid, disappear, flee from fear or threatening danger. All we have to do is submit to God and resist the devil and he will run from us, or the Holy Spirit that is in us, as in terror because he knows who we belong to because our Father can beat him up!!

I really do love my wife. I always have. But I am not very good at it.

I'm not alone. None of us -- including you -- are capable of loving of our wives the way we should unless we are living life in obedience to God and dying to ourselves daily as Christ showed us through his love for us.

Alone -- on our own -- we are not capable of selflessly loving one another. Think about the last time someone offended you, someone angered you, someone upset you. You're probably wondering what this has to do with your wife and your ability to love your wife. What if I told you, only everything. You see, the way we think about, consider and treat other people, those we are not close to, is actually an indicator to us of how our spiritual heart pumps. The closer we are to people, the more things we take for granted. The less guarded we are. Have you ever noticed that you give strangers more latitude, more freedom, more respect and more grace than you give to those closest to you? No matter how good or bad you think your relationship is with your wife, no one is closer to you than she is. You might disagree with this statement completely, but I am not talking about what you think or what you feel. Thoughts and feelings can be and often are misleading. They are highly overrated. I am talking about reality. God's reality. If you stood before God and man -- witnesses -- and took a marriage vow, whether it was in a church, before a Justice of the Peace, or you eloped to Las Vegas, that woman you married -- you became one with her. God sees you as one person. You cannot get any closer to another person than that. You just can't.

Rationally speaking, none of what I am saying here may make sense to you. I get that. But when you realize that your marital relationship is a spiritual responsibility that God has given you to love another person as He has loved you, then some things might start becoming more clear. If I live my life seeking to manifest myself, to love myself, rather than living my life to manifest Christ then I am going to have a very difficult time laying down my life, dying to myself.

When I started realizing just how inadequate I am at loving my wife, I did what any normal, self-respecting man would do -- I blocked it out. Ignored it. I pretended like the issue was not real. I even went so far as to blame my wife for my failure to love her like I knew I should.

Thankfully, God knew better. And even though I did not deserve it, He lived up to His promise. He set me straight. He did so in a brutally honest, painful way that was very kind, loving and gentle. I know that sounds like a massive contradiction in terms, but now I will attempt to explain.

As only God can do, he began sifting through me, through my heart. God began shining lights into my soul. There were -- and probably still are because I have not seen the "miners" climb out of the pit yet -- some pretty dark and scary places in there that I had no idea existed. Self-delusion is pretty powerful that way, but it doesn't bear up too well under the pillaging and destruction of a determined God out to sanctify and restore a child of His.

Somewhere along the way, I started feeling in my heart like I should pray and ask God to use me to love my wife the way He wants her to be loved. You see, I realized the only thing that consistently stands in the way of me loving my wife the way God wants to love her -- the only way God wants her to be loved -- is me. I was -- and I am -- the only thing standing in the way of God loving my wife the way she was intended to be loved by her Father.

It wasn't that I had a big problem. No, I was the BIG problem.

And the one person that was being harmed the most by me being so full of me was her, my wife -- the woman who I had vowed to love, to honor, and to cherish.

I still remember almost 20 years ago now asking God to give me the honor of Ashley becoming my wife. I remember how sincere and how pure my heart's desire was. How could I screw up something so right? How could the woman I had always dreamed about from the time I was a child -- well before I ever laid my eyes on Ashley -- have grown so distant. How could the woman who I still remember looking into her eyes and knowing without any doubt she was God's answer to my prayers not know how much I loved her. How could the person I loved more than life itself not know. Vividly I recall seeing God himself move in those beautiful eyes of hers. I remember telling her so. Yet, over time, she and I had grown apart. Life happened. She was so . . . so distant from me. So removed. My wife was so alienated . . . by my selfishness . . . that she said she no longer felt like I loved her.

At first I was angry at myself. Then, I would get mad at her. Then, I would blow it off. Push it aside. I would do anything not to deal with it. I did not want to deal with it because I did not know how. Something had to be wrong, not with me, of course, but with her.

I can't think of anything worse. You love someone, but inside all they do is hurt, and pine. They hurt because they can't feel or see your love. They pine because God created us all not only to love, but also to be loved.

As men, I believe, we have a tremendous burden placed on ourselves by ourselves, and by listening to one another in unGodly settings. We buy in to our own crap. Either we lose sight of reality at some point or we simply do not realize at all that we are here on this earth for one reason and one reason only: To glorify God.

We glorify God very simply: by being obedient. No obedience = No glory. There is no in between. You're either all in. Or, you're not in at all. Nobody knows where you stand. Except God. God knows.

God gave us two great commandments. As men, we are to love God with ALL of our heart, ALL of our soul, ALL of our strength and ALL of our mind. We are also to love one another as ourselves, as Christ loves us.

I learned the hard way that whatever God commands or instructs us to do, He also empowers us to do. I must have read or heard that at least a thousand times before it dawned on me that I did not have to depend on myself to accomplish what God wanted from me. Instead, all I had to learn how to do was get out the way. An ego is a wonderful thing to waste. We should try to waste ours every day, multiple times a day if necessary. Once we remove ourselves from the equation, by choice, God fills our empty vessel with His person, His Spirit. Love moves. In fact, the same power that allowed Jesus to endure His accusers, slanderers and murderers following an unjust trial; that same power that empowered Jesus after scourges and beatings that left His body nothing more than a pile of raw hamburger meat nailed to a cross; that same power that filled Jesus so that from that cross, as he suffocated to death, he could still pray to God the Father to "forgive them for they know what they do"; that same power is available to husbands everywhere. It is a selfless love. His will be done on earth, as it is in heaven. It requires more courage, more strength and more righteousness to accomplish than all the men who have ever lived or will live could possibly muster if they could somehow combine forces. Yet, it is available to each one of us individually, one and all, through Him and Him alone. It wasn't that long ago I did not know this. Now, I do know this.

And through Him -- Empty, selfless, and filled only with God's Holy Spirit, is the only way to truly love my wife the way she deserves because of God's grace to be loved. She is not really "my wife." She is the woman, the lady, that God has given me as my wife. Between those two ways of saying things and seeing things is more than a world of difference. I am the steward, the vessel, God has chosen to demonstrate His love, true love -- Godly love -- to my wife -- his daughter. Alone, on my own, I fail every time. In Christ, there is no failure. God, please love my wife through me. And renew in me my heart every second of every day so that I may be a vessel worthy of your love so that I can love her as you have loved me -- selflessly! In Jesus name, I pray. Amen!

Do you love your neighbor?

When Jesus was asked about the most important commandment in the whole Bible, he said, "Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength; and love your neighbor as yourself." The first part, if I may be a bit glib, is easy. All you have to do is think for a while about how badly you messed up your life, and how miraculously God saved you, and you really can't help but love him. You can love him by yourself in the desert, like the ancient saints used to. Loving people while living in a world surrounded by them, on the other hand, is much harder.

That's because people are annoying. People are the ones who drive slow in front of you, take fifty-eight items into the ten-items-or-less lane, play their music too loud after your bedtime, and come to your workstation five minutes before closing with something urgent that's going to take an hour. Who can love their neighbors, honestly? Yet that's what we're commanded to do.

Many of us think that we're loving people because we love the people who we spend a lot of time around, the people who love us. What credit is it, really, if we love our friends? As Jesus said, "Even the pagans do that." I think there's a really good way to measure how loving we really are, and it's by gauging the way we treat two groups of people who are the hardest to love: strangers and the people who hate us.

The Bible does talk a lot about loving strangers. It usually refers to a few specific types of them: widows, the fatherless, and people who are traveling through the land. The common theme between those people, and the thing that makes loving strangers such a sacrificial act, is that most of them are utterly unable to give anything back to you, except perhaps for the joy you get from serving. The quintessential story of stranger-love in the Bible, the parable of the Good Samaritan, was compelling because the Hebrew and the Samaritan were strangers, not even from the same country. If they'd been best friends, the tale might not have had the same impact. Giving to strangers strikes at the heart of selfishness, which even in saved people, is often the strongest instinct there is. The last time I went out of my way to really help a stranger was several months ago. When did you last part with a major chunk of money that you really shouldn't have given away? When did you last pick up something that somebody dropped, or even let someone cut in line in front of you?

I've heard other Christian writers talk about how people often speak of love using economic metaphor. You "invest" in a relationship. You "spend" time with people, and you "pay" them attention. Trust is "earned." Words are power, and without even realizing it, we think of love the same way we think of money, and the end result is that we frequently only spend our love when there is something in it for us. Showing love - which usually means parting with our time and/or our money - to strangers gives us nothing in return. To use economic metaphor, it gives us no return on investment. There's no compelling reason to do it at all, except that God says to. Because there's nothing in it for us, because there's no reason to do it except for personal conviction, it's a great measure of how loving we really are.

The second way to gauge our love is to see how we react to the people who don't love us. This might mean different things for all of us - a difficult co-worker, an abusive parent, or an unloving spouse. For many of my Christian friends, it simply means the people who have different Christian beliefs. The most natural reaction is to lash out against these people with the pain, indignation, and frustration that their actions seem to deserve. Yet again, what credit is it to us if we treat the people well who treat us well and treat the people poorly who treat us poorly? Even the pagans do that.

Actually, many of the same things that made it difficult to love strangers also make it difficult to love these people, and those difficulties are often multiplied. While loving a stranger is hard because you don't gain anything and may never see them again, loving a co-worker is hard because you see them almost every day, and loving a parent or spouse is hard because it's such a deep emotional relationship. Rather than simply gaining nothing from your love, you actually stand to lose a lot, by opening yourself up to the pain of rejection or the chance that they may take advantage of your kindness. If you've ever loved someone who's hard to love, you know what I'm talking about, and you probably understand why it's such a rare occurrence, even among Christians. But the difficulty of it is precisely what makes it another accurate gauge of whether we're loving people or not.

I think that most of us, upon looking honestly at how we treat the strangers and the haters in our lives, have no choice but to admit that we fall pretty short of the standard that Christ laid out. Those people, though, represent the pinnacle of love. There's no reward for giving them time, attention, or money. Yet, as Jesus said, what reward can there be if we merely give people the love or unlove that their actions deserve? We are called on to love unconditionally. That is the example set by Jesus, dying for you and me rather than giving us the condemnation that our actions so justly deserve. Let us all strive to follow his example, spreading love and kindness to friends, strangers, and enemies alike

Jim Barringer is a 26-year-old writer, musician, and teacher serving at The Church of Life (.com) in Orlando, FL. More of his work can be found at facebook.com/jmbarringer and ExtantMagazine.com. This work may be reprinted for any purpose so long as this bio and statement of copyright is included.

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