Scripture: "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."--1 John 2:15
"From what has been said of the first state and fall of man it plainly follows that the sin of all sin, or the heresy of all heresies, is a worldly spirit. We are apt to consider this temper only as an infirmity, but it is indeed the great Apostasy from God and the Divine Life.
"Choose any life but the life of God and heaven, and you choose death; for death is nothing else but the loss of the life of God. The spirit of the soul is in itself nothing else but a spirit breathed forth from the life of God, and for this only end that the life of God, the nature of God, the working of God, the tem¬pers of God, might be manifested in it.
"Hence it is that all the religion of fallen man, all the methods of our redemption, have only this one end, to take from us that strange and earthly life we have gotten by the Fall, and to kindle again the life of God and heaven in our souls. 'All that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, is not of the Father,' is not that life that we had from God by creation, but is of this world, is brought into us by our fall from God into the life of this world, and therefore a worldly spirit is not to be considered as a single sin, but as a state of real death to the kingdom of life and God in our souls.
"Hold this, therefore, as a certain truth, that the heresy of all heresies is a worldly spirit. It is the whole nature and misery of our fall, and keeps up the death of our souls. Of all things, therefore, detest the spirit of this world, or there is no help; you must live and die an utter stranger to all that is Divine and heavenly. For a worldly, earthly spirit can know nothing of God. All real knowledge is Life, or a living sensibility of the thing that is known; as far as our life reaches, so far we understand and know, and no further. All after this is only the play of our imagination amusing itself with the dead pictures of its own ideas."
When our Lord spoke of the world, its prince, and its spirit, He ever laid stress on its hatred of Him and His Church. And so His Apostles, too, warned most earnestly against being conformed to the world. "If a man love the world, the love of the Father is not in Him." We need to yield ourselves to the Holy Spirit from heaven to discover the evil and the danger of the spirit of the world, to give us the victory over it, and to fill us with the life of heaven.
