Life On The Highest Plane
Carnal or Spiritual
The language of James 4:4 is drastic and austere, there is an irrevocable finality about it. Men may hold two opinions about "the world" but not so with God. In James 4:4 he at least leaves no Christian any room whatever for argument regarding his attitude toward and relationship to "the world" but declares in words of transparent clearness that any Christian who maintains friendship with the world is guilty of adulterous infidelity in his relationship to Christ.
To realize the truth of God's pungent statement the reader need only remind himself of what the world is and of its attitude to Christ. "The world" is satan's eyes, ears, hands and feet combined to fashion his most cunning weapon for defeating God by capturing the souls of men. "The world" is satan's lair for the unsaved and his lure to the saved to keep them from God. "The world" is human life and human society with God left out.
What, then, should be the Christian's relationship to the world? The answer is found in the Christian's relationship to Christ. Christ and the Christian are one. They are joined together, as we have seen, in such an intimate union and identification of life that God, the Holy Spirit, does not hesitate to say that the love relationship they bear to each other is one analogous to that of marriage.
Is it any wonder, then, that God says that friendship with the world on the part of a Christian is tantamount to spiritual adultery and the He brands "the friend of the world" "an enemy of God"? Hobnobbing with the world in its pleasures, entering into partnership with it in its pursuits, fashioning one's life by its principles, working to carry out its program, all make one an accomplice of the evil one against one's own Beloved, against the Saviour, Lord and King of one's life. Such adulterous unfaithfulness in love marks one as a carnal Christian.
But perhaps some reader is still in the dark as to what is worldly. He is not clear as to what he may have, do or enjoy. The acid test of worldliness is given in 1 John 2:16. Under the Holy Spirit's illumination test your life by it and you will quickly discern the mark of the worldly.
Worldliness is "all that is not of the Father. Whatever would not be as appropriate and fitting to Christ's life in the heavenlies as to the Christian life on earth is worldly. Whatever does not come out from God and cannot go back to Him with His blessing is worldliness. Such is the negative aspect of worldliness.
It has a positive aspect as well. Worldliness is "the lust of the flesh," "the lust of the eyes," and "the pride of life." Worldliness may be manifested in one's conversation, in one's style of hair dress, in the clothes one wears, in the company one keeps, in the pleasures one enjoys, in the books one reads, in the appetites one indulges, in the things one buys, in the ambitions by which one is ruled, and in the activities in which one engages.
Anything which feeds or pampers the flesh, the animal part of man, whether it results in gross sensuality, or in taking the bloom from heart purity, or merely in soft self-indulgence and self-ease, is worldliness. Anything that strains the heart, soils the hands, stings the conscience and separates one from the joy and sweetness of communion with Christ, is worldliness. It is "the lust of the flesh."
Anything that caters merely to the fashions of this world, that stimulates desire for possession and property, that aims merely to please men and gain their approval, that keeps the eyes fixed on the lowlands instead of on the heights, on the seen rather than on the unseen, anything that puts a cloud between Christ and the Christian and shuts Him out from one's vision is "the lust of the eyes."
Anything that exalts self, that fosters pomp and pride, that clips the wings of the soul so that it grovels in the dust of earth instead of soaring heavenward, that sets the affections upon the wealth, the fame, the honors of earth rather than upon the treasures of Heaven, that robs the Christian of his possessions and privileges in Christ, is "the pride of life."
There can be no confluence between these streams. Their admixture in a human life produces the carnal Christian. It is a life of dishonoring hypocrisy.
Ephesians 5:8, "For ye were sometimes darkness, but now are ye light in the Lord; walk as children of light."
1 John 1:5-6, "God is light, and in him is no darkness at all ... If we say that we have fellowship with him, and walk in darkness, we lie, and do not the truth."
1 Corinthians 3:3, "Are ye not carnal and walk as men?"
The carnal man says one thing and does another; his walk does not correspond with his witness; he professes what he does not possess. The carnal man walks as those who make no profession of being Christians and presents them with such a caricature of Christ hat he has no power to win them to his Saviour.
Does anything more need to be said to prove that the carnal Christian falls far short of God's best and is not well pleasing unto Him? But there is abundant hope for the believer who, wearied with the conflict, humiliated by the defeat, chagrined by the immaturity, distressed by the fruitlessness, convicted of the infidelity, and pained by the hypocrisy, turns to God and cries out for deliverance from the wretched captivity of carnality into the glorious liberty of spirituality.
Ruth Paxson~
(continued with # 4 - "The Marks of a Spiritual Christian)
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