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.

Being in the world but not of it forms a central warning drawn from Christ's final teachings before His crucifixion. On the night of the Passover, as He led the disciples toward Gethsemane, Jesus told them plainly that the world would hate them just as it had hated Him, because although they lived in the world, He had chosen them out of it. This same theme continues through John 16 and 17, where Jesus assures His followers of tribulation in the world yet declares that He has overcome it, and prays that the Father would keep them, since they are not of the world just as He is not of it. John further develops this in his epistles, warning against loving the world or the things in it—the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life—since such love displaces the Father's love. Believers are called children of God whom the world does not know, and though the whole world lies under the sway of the wicked one, whatever is born of God overcomes the world through faith in Jesus Christ. This warning is not incidental but connects to the broader responsibility of the church as Christ's spiritual body, called to continue His work of proclaiming and magnifying the gospel. Just as the apostles stood at the end of Christ's earthly ministry and were cautioned about the world's danger, the church today stands near the end of its own work and Christ's return, facing the same warning. Satan, the world's chief enemy in personality, uses the world itself as his primary tool for deception and destruction, making vigilance essential. Ephesians 2:1-2 clarifies this danger through the Greek term aion, translated "course," which refers not merely to time but to the spiritual and moral character pervading a period—the "spirit of the times." Various scholars describe aion as the invisible, pervasive atmosphere of thoughts, opinions, and attitudes that people inhale and exhale continually, an atmosphere emanating from Satan designed to draw people toward disloyalty to God. Unlike cosmos, which depicts mankind broadly alienated from God, aion represents the customized spirit of a particular age, tailored by Satan to deceive individuals according to their circumstances. Modern illustrations of this influence include research bodies such as the Tavistock Institute, whose psychological methods of confusion, fear, and manipulation—paralleled by similar research in other nations—demonstrate how lies and orchestrated deception can render people compliant, a pattern reflected in the manipulation of mass media today. Because of this, watchfulness must center primarily on one's spiritual condition rather than merely observing world events. The concluding exhortation, drawn from Luke 22:31-32, where Jesus urgently calls Peter to alertness against Satan's sifting, reminds believers that although the world is filled with powerful spiritual forces working through words, media, and culture, they need not live in terror, since Christ prays for them and promises never to forsake them. Instead, they are called to be thinking, discerning children of God who guard their minds against the world's subtle influence while remaining engaged in it.