I knew an attorney in my hometown of Ephrata, Pennsylvania, who in more than forty years of practice, had quite a following among the local plain people. (Some of the plain people, of course, are known for their austere garb.) On more than one occasion this attorney said, “Paul, underneath it’s all the same!” And I knew exactly what he meant. Underneath the exterior garb, the plain people struggle with greed, lust, hatred, malice, and bitterness just like everyone else does.
As I taught a Bible study at church on the book of James, we came to the passage in James 4:4 which declares, “You adulterous people, don’t you know that friendship with the world is hatred toward God? Anyone who chooses to be a friend of the world becomes an enemy of God.” Our group talked at length about what it means to be worldly, or “a friend of the world,” and concluded that as believers, many times we’ve attempted to reduce worldliness to simple lists of do’s and don’ts. But dotting every “i” and crossing every “t” in a code which a certain group may mandate externally, is not a sure guarantee that a person isn’t worldly at heart. The principles of the world include the internal influences of force, greed, selfishness, ambition, and pleasure.
In the early 1730s Conrad Beissel left the Church of the Brethren and founded the now famed Ephrata Cloister. His was an attempt to have his followers lead a life of rigorous asceticism by physically withdrawing from the world and adhering to a severe set of rules. And yet that attempt at nonconformity to the world didn’t preclude Beissel and his adherents from struggling with the worldly battles within of greed, lust, hatred, malice, and bitterness.
Essentially, worldliness is an attitude of the heart. The Apostle Paul wrote about a man named Demas who allowed the internal monster of worldliness to seduce him: “Demas, because he loved this world has deserted me” (2 Timothy 4:10). Because of the insidious nature of worldliness, the challenge for each of us is to be pure, both within and without.
July/August 2000