We are not to remain stagnant. God has called us to learn, to grow, and to become better. He gives us a huge goal, which is to come into the image of His Son, Jesus Christ. He tells us He wants us to become perfect, even as He is perfect. We have to overcome, grow, and produce fruit so that we bring God glory, give praise to Him, and please Him, and so that we are prepared for the Kingdom of God. This is the process of being conformed into His character image. We talk a lot about improving in the religious side of our lives. However, very infrequently, we talk about improving in our physical pursuits. But they do all go together. In John 17, Jesus is speaking about His disciples and about us. He tells God that He was going to leave the world and leave them behind. He wants us to be united with Him, even though He has gone away, while we are still here in this world. When we were called out of the world and accepted Jesus Christ as our personal Savior, we began a new life in the Spirit. We have been changed, in a way, by God coming into our lives. We have a whole new perspective on things. But our physical circumstances remain largely unchanged. We are still the same person underneath it all. We have the same family, we have the same education, and we have the same job, the same physical body, we are in the same basic condition as we were, and we even have the same fundamental character and personality we had before. The only difference in our life now is that God has appeared in it. That has caused other changes, but in the main we are the same. Our circumstances are the same. As we try to live God's way, being very much the same as we were before conversion, Jesus' statement here is so true. We remain in this wretched world, but we are no longer of it. We suddenly find ourselves strangers in a foreign land, even though it is the land that we grew up in, the land of our birth. We find that suddenly the world has turned against us. It hates us. Many of the so-called freedoms and advantages that we once enjoyed, being unconverted and not knowing what was right, are now denied to us. We cannot do the same things that we used to do. As Peter says, we do not run to those things that the Gentiles do, what we once did with them. We cannot. Satan himself, who is the architect of this evil world and system, wants us eternally dead. And so he sets his minions against us. But we are told here in John 17 that Christ our Savior purposefully sends us into the world. But He also sanctifies us by the truth; we are set apart, we are consecrated, and He also puts us under the keeping or protection of God Himself. Keep them through Your word, He says. So, we have advantages along with our disadvantages. While in the world, we are not without resources, and we are not alone. But, we are still in the world that we are not to be a part of, which hates us. In I John 2, this world, in which we have been left, this ordered system of living that is against God, becomes one of our enemies, not just satan and his minions but the world itself. We cannot become too friendly with it, and we certainly cannot love it. Many of its ways of doing things are so contrary to the way of God. We cannot become involved with them. This world is passing away. It is a ship going down in the ocean, and we do not want to be on that ship when it goes under. But if you do the will of God, you will live forever. There is quite the dichotomy, here. There is the world on one hand and God's way on the other hand. In II Corinthians 6, we are not to be friends with the world; not only are we not to love the world; not only are we not to get onto this sinking ship of this world; but now, we are supposed to come out of it and be separate. This puts us into a bit of a quandary. We are to remain in the world, and Jesus sent us into the world, yet we are to come out of the world and are not to be friends with the world. We are not to love the world. We are to remain in the world, while

It is true that we are not of this world, but we live in it. We cannot totally avoid having regular day-to-day interactions with uncalled people, or else we would have to leave the earth. Besides, if we stopped interacting with sinners, where would our light shine? A light is most needed, and most effective, where there is darkness. We are the light of the world but do not participate in the unfruitful works of darkness. We are not to love the world the cosmos, the lifestyle but we are to show love toward the people of the world. God does to the point of having given His only begotten Son to die for the world so that all who believe in Him could be saved and not perish. This love for the people of the world includes praying for them in various ways. It is right to pray for a city and its residents whose lives have been ripped apart by a catastrophe, manmade or natural. It is right to mourn, cry, and sigh, for the brokenhearted mom whose little girl has been kidnapped, for shattered families working through a messy divorce, and for the nation itself that God be merciful to all of us. God says to leave the world's values and priorities. We seek higher values, the world to come and its priorities. We are not trying to save the world now, but we are allowed to have feelings for our fellow human beings. We do not find pleasure in the things the world's people do, but we do care for them. However, we should never forget John 15:18-19. The world hates us because we are not part of their way of life. We are not of the world. We are different from a different world, as it were, but we still hurt when others hurt. We need to be a people who sigh and cry about the suffering and evils we see, begging God, Your Kingdom come. The next time you feel a need to pray for your neighbors, for someone in distress, for the President and other leaders, or for the nation itself, please do so. God says we should.

On the very night that Jesus was taken by the Jewish and Roman authorities for His trial and crucifixion, He warned the twelve to beware of the world. Satan is the world's major enemy in terms of a personality. But the main tool for the destruction of God's work as well as the deception of all of mankind is the world. This has to be a part of our world view how dangerous the world is. It is nothing to fool around with and we had better have our eyes wide open. God is not saying, I want you to avoid it completely and totally, or bury yourself underground somewhere so that you just peek your head up every once in a while, and say, 'What's going on?' But you be a thinking individual who is taking account of what is going on around you, and making the best decisions as you possibly can to glorify God. This is where the thing about the world is first brought up. And of course, the Passover has just taken place, and Jesus is out leading the group through the garden of Gethsemane. If we are following in the steps of Jesus Christ, He is not part of the world, and we have to make efforts to make sure that we are not part of the world. I went right through them because he is painting a pretty clear picture of the enemy that we are going to have to face to some degree every single day of our life. There is just no escaping it. It is there. It is out there, and it has a tremendous amount of influence, if we allow it. This is why we are cautioned to be careful. The world cannot defeat us if we keep our faith in God and continue to go on growing in our knowledge of God, and in our closeness to God in the relationship that we have with Him. The sum of this comes down to something like this: At this point we are like the apostles who are the characters in what we have just read. We are like the apostles, at an end an end is occurring; they were at the end of Jesus human ministry; He was warning them regarding the dangers that were emanating from the world. Here it is, about two thousand years later, and we are approaching another end the end of the church's work and the return of Jesus Christ. We too are being warned to beware of the influence of the world. As I was giving that third sermon, I mentioned to you the Tavistock Institute following the mention of Abraham keeping the commandments of God. I mentioned the Tavistock Institute because the experimentation that they involved themselves in for decades through the latter part of the twentieth century and right on up here into the twenty-first century the things that are available to those who want to use the things that they have discovered. Tavistock was not alone in their researching of the destructive psychological means of altering human personality and character. The Russians were doing it; the Chinese were doing it; the Americans were doing it; all the same sort of things. They may have had somewhat different procedures, but the research provided a nugget of historical proof for movies like the Manchurian Candidate, and the Bourne movies from which the authors then created a fictional novel. Note the warnings right at the end of Christ's ministry. This is Luke's version of Jesus outlining of the last days, and the Olivet prophecy. So Christ is warning us as He was giving this Olivet Prophecy. It is helpful to know. Recall Pat Higgins' article on watching. To me it showed convincingly that watching is not to be understood primarily as watching world news but being alert to one's spiritual condition. This is why I mentioned Tavistock, and those other things, because the methods that they uncovered in their research are very dangerous exceedingly dangerous. Being on guard above all things to the encroachments of Satan's mindset into our thinking is what we have to watch for. Watching world news is of course something that we will be able to do to some degree, and we should do it because it gives us some kind of a clue, but it is far more important to be on guard for one's spiritual cond