Worldliness – Sunday, October 18, 1981
In a very real sense, the world is too much with us. Most of us lay waste our powers here in an endless round of tasks and misdirected goals. With earthly eyes, we learn to regard certain things that do not merit our regard. We begin to yearn for things that do not correspond with our deepest yearnings.
Jesus Christ warned us that the world, like a hall of mirrors in a carnival, would have the power to fool us with its pretense. He said that many are “choked with cares and riches and pleasures of this life and bring no fruit to perfection…1 “Choked” is a vivid word to tell of the gradual cutting off from the body of that which gives real life.
And so it is. Our eyes are caught by magazines which elevate those not worthy of elevation. Our hearts are caught with material possessions which give the owner temporary status but decay in eternity. Worldly goals will never have the capacity to satisfy eternal beings, and if in our hurry we overtake those goals, we will be left feeling as empty and unfulfilled as before. Still, we are bombarded with pressures to covet the baubles of the world, the appearances which make us feel successful.
We care more if our children are popular than if they have the integrity to stand alone for what is right.
We care more how they look than what they are.
We want the right house, not the right heart.
We hope the world, not the Lord will think highly of us.
Instead of moral perfection, we settle for “common decency” which in itself is becoming all the more uncommon and all the more indecent.
We desire the trappings of power, not the real power that comes from personal integrity.
Poet Stephen Spender once said that as a child he wanted the life of power and action that the world offered. But as he matured, he changed his mind. He came to the realization that many
so-called powerful or prominent people who did seemingly spectacular things, failed to do the ordinary things— “the ordinary things which fill the lives of most normal people, and which would be far more heroic and spectacular perhaps, if they did not happen to be done by so many people.”2
It will not matter ultimately if we are listed in Who’s Who or are surrounded by material comforts. When we see the Lord again, he will judge us not by who we are, but what we are, not by what we had, but what we gave.
1 Luke 8:14
2 Spender, Stephen, “The Making Of a Poem,” from The Creative Process ed. by Ghilsen, Brewster, The New American Library pg. 122
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October 18, 1981
Broadcast Number 2,722