Faith that Overcomes the World

REFLECTION QUOTES

“What has changed is the modern world. The rise of the Modern World through the Industrial Revolution is so powerful, so pervasive, and so pressurizing that you can barely get away from it. The world is so powerful today that what’s surprising is there’s almost no world-denying branches of the Christian faith left. Evangelicalism used to be very attentive about worldliness, but no longer cares about it much today.”

~Os Guinness, contemporary Christian thinker


“Worldliness is that system of values, in any given age, which has at its center our fallen human perspective, which displaces God and his truth from the world, and which makes sin look normal and righteousness seem strange. It thus gives great plausibility to what is morally wrong and, for that reason, makes what is wrong seem normal.”

~David Wells, Losing Our Virtue

“Even in peacetime I think those are very wrong who say that schoolboys should be encouraged to read the newspapers. Nearly all that a boy reads there in his teens will be known before he is twenty to have been false in emphasis and interpretation, if not in fact as well, and most of it will have lost all importance. Most of what he remembers he will therefore have to unlearn; and he will probably have acquired an incurable taste for vulgarity and sensationalism and the fatal habit of fluttering from paragraph to paragraph to learn how an actress has been divorced in California, a train derailed in France, and quadruplets born in New Zealand.”

~C.S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy

“All of the testimonies that I had heard up to this point were egocentric and filled with pride. Aren’t I the smarty-pants for choosing Christ! I made a decision for Christ, aren’t I great? I committed my life to Christ, aren’t I better than those heathens who haven’t? This whole line of thinking is both pervasive among evangelical Christians and absurd. My whole body recoiled against this line of thinking. I’m proof of the pudding. I didn’t choose Christ. Nobody chooses Christ. Christ chooses you or you’re dead. After Christ chooses you, you respond because you must. Period. It’s not a pretty story.”

~Rosaria Butterfield, The Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert

“Negotiations and love songs are often mistaken for one and the same…
The thought that life could be better is woven indelibly
Into our hearts and our brains.”

~Paul Simon, “Train in the Distance”

SERMON PASSAGE

1 John 5:1-5 (ESV)

1Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ has been born of God, and everyone who loves the Father loves whoever has been born of him. 2 By this we know that we love the children of God, when we love God and obey his commandments. 3 For this is the love of God, that we keep his commandments. And his commandments are not burdensome. 4 For everyone who has been born of God overcomes the world. And this is the victory that has overcome the world—our faith. 5 Who is it that overcomes the world except the one who believes that Jesus is the Son of God?