Navigating a World Not Conducive to Walking with God

In this episode Josh explores the tension between living in a distracted world and maintaining a close relationship with God. We discuss how our engagement with worldly systems affects our struggles with sin, particularly unwanted sexual behaviors, and explore spiritual disciplines that can guide us back to a life of thriving in faith. 
• Exploring the dual meanings of 'world' in scripture 
• Understanding friendship with the world as spiritual conflict 
• The impact of worldly influences on sexual sin struggles 
• Identifying aspects to leave behind for spiritual growth  
• The value of spiritual practices like silence and fasting 
• Encouragement to make firm choices for a deep relationship with God

Join us to uncover ways to break free from the world's systems and walk in friendship with God.

It’s that time of year! We are inviting YOU to our annual dessert banquet.This year we have something special planned to go with our theme "RE-MEMBER."

Join us to see, hear, and learn the beautiful ways God remembers details of our stories with us.

Saturday, April 12th DC/ Northern VA: Click this link for more information and to register.

👉Men's Overcoming Lust & Temptation Devotional
👉Women 21-Day Prayer Journal & Devotional - (Women overcoming unwanted sexual Behavior)
👉Compass 21-Day Prayer Journal & Devotional - (Wives who are or have been impacted by partner betrayal)

Chapters

• 0:00 The World and Walking With God
• 4:20 Worldly Friendship and Spiritual Discipline
• 15:32 Walking Away From Worldly Friendships

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:18

I may be late to the party here, but in the last few years, handful of years, I've been increasingly convicted, increasingly compelled, by a reality that is all over the pages of scripture but that somehow I have missed for a long time. And this reality is simply that the world is not conducive to a life of thriving and flour, that the world is not conducive to walking with God. What I mean by that specifically and I'll share several examples that in our day-to-day lives, the normal, quote-unquote normal of our lives, whether it's waking up in the morning, listening to the radio, watching TV, driving to work, driving home from work, going to the store, buying things, selling things, raising kids, going to school, you name it that as we do those things, the natural rhythm of the world around us, the natural airwaves of the world around us, what we are doing, in those things, as normal, neutral as they may sound, that nonetheless the environment, the air we're breathing is not conducive to walking with God. So let's talk about the world. Now. In scripture, when you read the word world, when world comes up especially I'm just going to stick to the New Testament here there are two different uses of the word world, and I don't know the Greek so I can't speak to that specifically. But one use of the world includes God's creation nature, the sky, the heavens, the earth and people, human beings that's one use of the word world human beings, that's one use of the word world. And we see that in John 3.16, where Jesus says for God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have everlasting life. And you can see, even in the context of that one verse, that there the writer of John is quoting Jesus and Jesus is referring to people. For God so loved the world, people, the people who inhabit the world and all that they're meant to live in and rule over, and reign and grow, and et cetera, et cetera. God so loved the world. This is the world he created.

Speaker 1: 2:59

But there is also another version of world that's talked about in scripture and that is more aligned with the world systems. The way the world will operate in rebellion to God, trying to be its own God, trying to do it on its own, trying to do it separately from its creator world, is in fact an enemy. And here I'm going to quote from the apostle James, so one of Jesus' disciples. He writes in James 4, he says adulterers. This is beginning in verse 4 of chapter 4, adulterers.

Speaker 1: 3:33

Do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God? So in other words, enmity you make yourself an enemy to God. Friendship with the world is enmity with God. Therefore, whoever wishes to be a friend of the world becomes an enemy of God. Or do you suppose that it is for nothing that the scripture says God yearns jealously for the spirit that he has made to dwell in us? Now, obviously, in the context, james is not referring to people. He's not referring to people that God so loved that he came to save. Otherwise this would make any sense. Therefore, whoever wishes to be a friend of the world becomes an enemy of God. Jesus himself is a friend to sinners. He is a friend to people in the world. He came for their sake, out of love for them.

Speaker 1: 4:20

James is talking about something different here and in context. He's talking about the world system, the way that things work here, and how embedded and under our skin and into our gut and into our heart and our desires the world can get. He starts chapter four with those conflicts and disputes among you. They come from your cravings that are at war. So there's that idea of war again that are at war within you. You want something and do not have it, so you commit murder. You covet something and cannot obtain it, so you engage in disputes and conflicts you do not have because you do not ask. You do not ask and do not receive because you ask wrongly, in order to spend what you get on your pleasures. And that's where I picked up before. And the next word he gives is adulterers. In other words, to be an adulterer is to be unfaithful. You have left your committed love, the one you have betrothed to. You are married to God himself and you've instead gone to sleep with other lovers.

Speaker 1: 5:21

And if you've heard this podcast for any length of time, you know that that whole concept of adultery is used repeatedly by prophets in the Old Testament. God uses the idea of adultery to compare what it is when we leave him. He is faithful to us, he has covenanted himself to us, he has wed himself to us and we say yes, lord. And then we turn around and man, you want some pictures of adultery in the old Testament that are just brutal? Go to the book of Ezekiel. Ezekiel holds nothing back and this might get an explicit rating for this podcast, but he, ezekiel, his word to the unfaithful Israelites is is you? You were drawn to the, to the large penises of Babylon, and so you went lusting after them. This is a picture of idolatry. This is a picture of adultery with the world.

Speaker 1: 6:11

And so what are the world's systems that we are under and, specifically for this podcast, what are the ways that our adulteries, our friendship with the world keep us struggling and struggling and struggling with our unwanted sexual behaviors, with our sexual sins? Why do we struggle with sexual sin? Well, one of the reasons is because we have become so embedded into, so committed to, so in bed with the world, that when we try to say no to our sexual sin, we've got like no ground to sand, we've got no tools in our pocket, we've got no strength in our muscles to say no, because we have just lived in friendship with the world. One example of this I know a young man who is trying to abstain from pornography but refuses to give up screens, and he regularly goes to screens. He loves watching YouTube shorts and TikToks and whatever else.

Speaker 1: 7:13

And I'm not saying that you can't do that. I'm not trying to restrict you or draw hard lines or create new laws. But I am saying that if those things are part of your friendship with the world, if you are believing that you can watch YouTube and scroll and scroll and scroll, or you can scroll through TikToks and they will not influence you, that they somehow will help you to be a friend to God, even though they are reeking of the world, then I'd suggest you've got something else coming. You cannot be a friend to the world and a friend to God. You cannot sit in the boat of the world, with the flow of the world, and walk in obedience to God. There is no way to do it. To God, there is no way to do it.

Speaker 1: 8:08

So, in your struggle against sexual sin, your attempts to leave sexual sin behind, what might you need to say no to, outside of just the sexual sin? What are the other things around your sexual sin that keep propping it up, that keep leading you down that path? That is the natural flow of the stream. Now, here, there, I want to caution you because I'm not in any way trying to encourage you to what what people in recovery call act in, which is just try to get really rigid with your life. Create a, a, a hard and fast set of rules that keep you away from temptation and and that you get really, really strict with yourself. Most people, when they try to do that, are just like a yo-yo back and forth between rigidity and sin. Rigidity and sin, because they don't have that kind of living, doesn't have power to save you.

Speaker 1: 8:54

Rather, what I am saying is would you be willing to open your life to the Lord and to others, to go on a journey of self-discovery, to find out what are the ways that I have believed that the world and the world systems and the way that quote unquote everybody does it? What are the ways that I believe that that will work for me, that that actually will cultivate, or help me to cultivate, a life of obedience and devotion to the Lord? Because once those things are exposed, then you can begin to make other decisions that are more healthy, more holy, more wholesome, more in the direction that you want to go. What are the ways that you need to give up going with the flow and instead saying, no, that's not actually working for me, because that does not cultivate a life of friendship with God? The other thing I want to encourage you in this is to consider the ancient spiritual practices, the ancient spiritual disciplines that Christians have followed for thousands of years now, things like simplicity. And simplicity is the discipline of being content with what you have, not getting more than you need, not possessing, or holding on to more than you need, giving away what you don't need with generosity, simplicity. Simplicity could also be a matter of the kind of schedule you keep. Is your schedule without margin? If so, then what about practicing the spiritual discipline of simplicity?

Speaker 1: 10:27

Sabbath is another one, and this is relatively new to me. I'll be honest with you. I, just for the last nine months, have been practicing the Sabbath. Did not practice Sabbath before, and by practicing Sabbath I specifically mean not working, ceasing from work, stopping work and all thoughts of work on the Sabbath, and my family and I, we keep Sabbath on Sunday, but it means we don't work on Sunday. Sunday, but it means we don't work on Sunday. We also don't buy things on Sunday, because to buy things to go out to eat means we're making somebody else work and they may not care about keeping the Sabbath. But just looking at the Old Testament and God's command for his people in the Old Testament about Sabbath, that's just a choice that we've made and listen.

Speaker 1: 11:13

It maybe used to be that that a lot of the shops and and things would shut down on Sundays. Sports weren't on Sundays I mean kids sports weren't on Sundays at least and so there was a lot more openness to people practicing Sabbath. Not the case anymore. It's more evidence that the world is having its way in our world, in our culture. So simplicity, sabbath, this ancient spiritual discipline of silence, silence, is a rare commodity in our culture.

Speaker 1: 11:42

Henry Nouwen wrote a book on silence. It must've been 30 years ago now and what he was finding at that time was that silence was very, very difficult to come by. I would say it is even more difficult to come by. There is so much noise in our culture and when we do find places of silence, we are so addicted to distraction that we pull out our own little devices and say give me some noise, give me some distraction, give me something. Silence is the practice of being still before God with no noise. As you do it, if you're anything like me, you're going to find a million different kinds of voices in your head, ideas, distractions, that just kind of will flow through your head, which is just more evidence of how the world is working against your ability to walk with God. We can't even sit with God in silence for five minutes. We become so conditioned to live a life attentive to a myriad of anything else besides just being with God.

Speaker 1: 12:48

Next spiritual practice, of course, would be scripture reading, scripture study. Man, I gotta tell you like I find hardly any medicine so powerful in healing and curing and correcting the craziness of the cultural's impact in my thinking. I find no greater medicine than diving into the pages of scripture, reading whole books at a time. Just if you want some medicine to help you wake up to the reality of the God exists and that we are designed to walk with him and that walking with him necessarily means walking in contradiction to the world around us, then pick up the gospels. Read the gospels Matthew, mark, luke and John. Then pick up the gospels. Read the gospels Matthew, mark, luke and John. Read the epistles. They will do you a world of good and I'm preferential to reading things as a whole. I can rarely do that with the gospels and the longer epistles, but if I need a boost of vitamin C and medicine for my spirit, you know read. I'll read first or second Thessalonians first, second Timothy first, second or first John is. Those are just some phenomenal books to wake me up. First negative Peter. I mean gosh.

Speaker 1: 14:13

So scripture, study, scripture reading in large quantities, do it and watch the difference it makes, watch how it wakes you up and begins to form your inner world and your thought life around the things of God. And finally and again, there's so many other spiritual practices, but the final one I want to bring into this is fasting, abstaining from food for a length of time, whether that's for a meal or a half a day, or 6 am to 6 pm, sunrise to sunset, a whole 24-hour period or longer. There's something powerful about fasting and I can't explain all of it, but there's something that opens our spirits to the Lord as we fast. And one of the practices I love to do when I'm fasting is when I notice the hunger pangs. I use that as a cue to pray, a cue to turn my attention, at least for a moment, towards God and to say something like and a friend taught me this years ago something like Lord, what I'm really most hungry for is not food. I am most hungry for you. I hunger and thirst for you, god, thirst for you, God. Practice that and it will begin to draw you away from the world. It'll also, by the way, if you're anything like me, it'll point out for you just how enamored with food our culture is.

Speaker 1: 15:32

There are signs and smells and literal advertisements for food everywhere. It's hard to drive down the street without seeing a picture and smelling smells of food. We are addicted to our idols of food. That's the way the world goes. So in your journey away from sexual sin, in your journey away from unwanted sexual behavior, are there ways that you have been believing that you can just live a normal life unimpacted and able to find freedom from sexual sin, even as you have made yourself a friend to the world? I would encourage you open this part of your life to God, see what he might expose, see what he might reveal to you about ways that you made a friend to the world, not for the purpose of becoming rigid, not for the purpose of becoming an angry curmudgeon who shakes his fists at the world, but simply as a way to say okay, lord, I see that I've made myself a friend of the world. I want to love the people of the world as you did, jesus, even as I make a firm break from the systems and the idols and the ways that the world is under. The spell that the world is under. I want to walk in friendship with you. I want to walk in friendship with you, friends.

Speaker 1: 16:47

Let me close with a passage from John's letter, john. In John first, john two, beginning in verse 15, he says do not love the world or the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world the desires of the flesh and the desires of the eyes and the pride of life, is not from the Father but is from the world. And the world is passing away along with its desires. But whoever does the will of God abides forever. Amen.