As the believers in Christ, we know we must not love the world. Jesus Himself, on the night He was betrayed, prayed to the Father regarding the apostles, and by extension all of His believers,

I have given them Your word, and the world has hated them, for they are not of the world even as I am not of the world.
— John 17:14

And so later the apostle John, who was there that night, implored us,

Do not love the world, nor the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him.
— 1 John 2:15

And James in his letter says, very directly,

Adulteresses! Do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God? Therefore, whoever desires to be a friend of the world sets himself as an enemy of God.
— James 4:4

Satan is still, until the Lord returns, the “ruler of this world” (John 12:31, 14:30), and his world system is directly opposed to God and to His purposes in Christ. We as those who would follow Christ must therefore not be caught up in that evil world system.

Thus, for centuries, so many believers have tried to escape the world by setting up various man-made regulations, but all who have tried this way have failed in the end.

So how then can we truly be those who, practically speaking, do not love the world?

The apostle Paul shows us the way in the book of Galatians, in some of the verses we have been considering in the previous Notes in this series.

At the beginning of this book he declares, as we have seen, that

Christ….gave Himself for our sins that He might draw us out of this present evil age.
— Galatians 1:3-4

So here again we see the matter of not loving the world.

Then in the following chapters Paul shows us the basic stages of our growth in Christ. And no doubt, he himself had passed through these stages. As a result, he was now living in the reality of the new creation, which he speaks of at the end of this book (6:15; see “Saved from the Old Creation to the New by the Indwelling Christ.”)

And as such a one he could boldly declare,

May I never boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, through which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world.
— Galatians 6:14

So here was one who truly did not love the world! He had been delivered from it by being “crucified” to it, as he says, that is, by dying to it, through the cross of Christ, and then entering into the reality of the salvation God offers us in Christ. As a result, he had a transfer from the old creation to the new creation. This is the genuine pathway of deliverance from the world.

And in our experience, this will also be the way in which we will become those do not love the world. To put it very briefly, we will be delivered from loving the world as we grow in our experience of Christ and of His cross, so that we, too, are crucified to the world in Christ and are now living, not in the old creation, but in the new.

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—  22 May 2025 —