In the first sense, Christians are to receive and be thankful for the world, for it is God’s gift. Jesus Himself was appreciative of the world in this sense. In the second sense, Christians are to love the world and seek to evangelize it, for God also loves the world. In the third sense, however, the sense we have here, Christians are to reject the world and conduct their lives according to an entirely different set of values.
When John says that Christians are not to “love the world or the things in it,” he is not thinking then so much of materialism (“things”) as he is of the attitudes that lie behind materialism. For he knows, as we should all know, that a person without worldly goods can be just as materialistic as a person who has many of them; and, conversely, a rich person can be quite free from this and any other form of worldliness. John is actually thinking of selfish ambition, pride, the love of success or flattery, and other such characteristics.
John does not say this merely to have Christians to be different, however. He has perfectly good reasons for saying what he does. The first reason why Christians are not to love the world or the things that are in the world is that love for the world and love for the Father are incompatible. God is set over against the world’s sin and values. Consequently, it is impossible to love and serve God and at the same time love that which He hates and which opposes Him. Does the believer love God? Then he must serve Him. As Jesus said, “No man can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one, and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and mammon” (Matthew 6:24).
The truth of this statement becomes even more evident when the nature of the world system is analyzed, as John now proceeds to do in three succinct and memorable phrases: “the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life.” It may be, as John uses the phrase here, that the expression “the lust of the flesh” refers to those sinful desires which arise out of man’s fleshly or carnal nature. We can think here of the grosser sins. But in John’s writings, as throughout Scripture, “flesh” usually has a broader connotation by which is meant the whole of man’s nature as it is apart from God’s grace in Christ Jesus. Therefore it is more likely that “flesh” is to be understood broadly in this context. In this case the phrase would refer simply to all godless desires.
The second phrase refers quite naturally to covetousness. But again, this must be understood in a broader sense than a desire merely to possess things. The “lust of the eyes” most certainly refers to the desire to “keep up with the Joneses” in regard to the appearance of their home, the second car, the vacation cottage, and other material considerations. But it also refers to the desire to keep up with the Joneses in terms of the husband’s status at work, the wife’s position in the Women’s Association, the social acceptability of the children, and all other such non-material but nevertheless worldly values. These are the things that the Christian is not to love. In other words, he is to be content to be overlooked for the promotion, to do without the external symbols of success, to be thought unsophisticated or unglamorous if such actually contributes to the glory of God and the living out of the will of God for the individual Christian.