Worldliness

By Darrell Brooker

This week’s installment from the pen of that great Scotsman, Horatius Bonar, speaks to the worldliness of the church and the worldliness that still needs to be purged from the hearts of those who love the Lord Jesus. We have been called by Him to live lives separated from the pleasures of this world; separated from those things that come between us and God. We have been called to leave our sin, leave those things that defile us, and called unto obedience and holiness of life. In our hearts, do we really believe that Christ is all we need? Do we truly live by faith in Him alone knowing that the world cannot even begin to satisfy us? As Bonar says, if our faith in Christ means anything, it means we are no longer a part of this world, nor should we seek after those things the world has to offer. Christ should be all we need! We are to be holy. ‘Will we be less than our name implies?’

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The god of this world is doing his utmost, in these last days, to ensnare the Church, to seduce her into worldliness, to draw down her eye from the heavenly glory, to silence her cry, to induce her to drop her widow’s raiment, and if not altogether to identify herself with the world, at least to be less peculiar, less singular in her walk, less solemn in her testimony against the “fashion of this world,” the “things that perish with the using,” “the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eye, and the pride of life.”


Shall he succeed? Shall his sophistry prevail? Shall his appeals to all that is best in the natural man be met with acquiescence on the part of the saints of God? Shall his arguments and wily flatteries, addressed so skilfully to our love of natural beauty, wisdom, goodness, truth, be yielded to, so that we shall give up our distinctiveness as the called of God, and the heirs of his kingdom? Shall he persuade us to be less strict, less holy, less heavenly, with less of the sorrowing widow in our deportment, and more of the crowned queen?

Shall we resist, or shall we yield? Shall we hold fast our profession, or shall we fling it aside? Shall we try to seize a portion here, or shall we be content to wait in faith, until the Lord return?

Surely this is a question for the age,—a question for the Church of God,—a question for every child of the kingdom. It is a question, too, for those who are still wholly of the earth: “Will ye cling to the earth; and what will that earth to which you cling do for you?” It is a question for those who think it possible to be both lovers of God and lovers of pleasure: “Will ye try to reconcile what is irreconcileable? Is not God enough without the world,—is not Christ enough without its pleasures?” It is a question for the anxious and the earnest: “Will ye not decide,—will ye waver, will ye halt, will ye try something less than an entire surrender of the whole man to God?” It is a question for the Christian: “Will you be less than your name implies,—less than a child of heaven, less than an heir of God, and a joint heir with Christ?” It is by faith you stand. It was the belief of God’s free love, as manifested in the cross of his Son, that made you what you are; and if that faith has any meaning, it means that you are no longer of the world, that your treasure is above, that your inheritance is not here, and that you are waiting, in patient love and hope, amid weariness and buffeting and trouble, for the grace that is to be brought unto you at the revelation of Jesus Christ.

-Taken from Family Sermons, Sermon XLV The Church’s Widowhood, 1863, as found on The Life and Works of Horatius Bonar CD-Rom