We are people of the world and we live in the world and we look like people in the world. We derive benefits from worldly societies. There is nothing wrong with that. God has designed that to be the case. We have obligations to earthly society, and we need to faithfully fulfill them as Christians. We are in the world, but we are no longer of it, for we have been made holy; we have been sanctified out of it; we have been separated by grace for God.
And so you are no longer bound up with the fate of this passing, dying world that is under God’s wrath. You are in Christ, by God’s grace and through faith, so that what is his now is yours. You no longer belong to the world and you are no longer to partake of its ethos.
The Christian in short, is to be like the man at the beginning of John Bunyan’s classic allegory, Pilgrim’s Progress. The man named Christian is Bunyan’s hero in the story. He was born and living comfortably in the City of Destruction. But he read the Bible, and in the Bible he learned that his city was doomed to be judged with fire. Then he met a man named Evangelist, who told him of the pilgrimage to the cross and from the cross to the Celestial City to be saved. And though his family and friends thought he had lost his mind—many of you may have experienced that—he was resolved that he must depart the City of Destruction. And they called out to him, but he put his fingers in his ears crying,
Dr Richard D. PhillipsLife, life, eternal life,and he left without looking back. But his friends chased him and they caught up and they reminded him of all the pleasures and the comforts that he would be giving up. But Christian answered that all of them are not worthy of being compared with what he is seeking to enjoy, an inheritance incorruptible, undefiled, that does not fade away, reserved and kept safe in heaven.1
1 Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God,To the saints who are in Ephesus, and are faithful in Christ Jesus: