Ages where men, taking these things literally and looking at it from this same standpoint, decided that the way to avoid the temptations of the world was completely to seclude themselves from it. They built high-walled monasteries and lived their lives inside them, thus thinking to avoid the world. The worst tragedy of all is that we're passing all this on to our young people. We’re teaching them these same things because they pick up our way of life and our way of thinking, and instead of teaching our young people to overcome evil, we’re teaching them to avoid it. They are not learning how to fight the good fight of faith. We don’t know how ourselves, many of us, so how can we tell them? How can we show them? What are the results of this type of separation? Let me say, I do not speak from hearsay or from mere observation on this matter. I speak from very sad experience, born of at least ten years of my Chris tian life that I consider now almost utterly wasted because I was thinking and acting along these very lines. These were the results in my own life. I’m confident, from observation, they’re the results in other Christians’ lives who think in this way. The first result is, there comes a terrible sense of boredom and frustration in life. Life becomes pale and uninteresting, especially Christian things. You just go through a routine. You go to church and you go through the set formula of things you’re supposed to do, but there’s nothing very gripping, very fas cinating, very illuminating about it. Life becomes very boring. The challenge is gone. Why? Because there’s no sense of danger? There’s nothing to call forth heroics out of a young Christian faced with that kind of thinking. He's protected. He’s sheltered. His life is arranged in such a way that the temptations are reduced to a minimum and con sequently he becomes bored and frustrated and there’s no challenge. Life becomes very lackluster. We sense this in our Christian lives and often we try to correct it by creating false challenges. You know, "Le t’s win the attendance contest," and we get all excited about the attendance contest. Or, “ Let’s gain a reputation in our church for having a tremendous missionary outlook, and let’s parade the figures in front of us all through the years as to how much we’re giving for missions.” So we cre ate false challenges and false goals. It is not that these things are wrong in themselves but the trou ble is, the personal challenge in the individual life
is gone. You remember what Peter Marshall said so graph: ically, “ Today’s Christians are like deep-sea divers encased in suits designed for many fathoms deep, marching bravely forth to pull plugs out of bathtubs.” We're taught all the resources of the Christian life, for what? Well, to just win attendance contests with! Build buildings with! No real challenge, you see. Life becomes lackadaisical. I think that’s one of the major reasons why our Christian young people today are so lethargic, or lackadaisical, so utterly pepless about their Christian lives. It’s difficult to get them to avoid the things on our lists any longer. They’d rather feel some of the stimulation and the challenge and the tempta tion of the world than to live lives that are so color less and lackluster. Now the second result of this isolationist separa tion is a tremendously increased amount of worldli ness in Christian living. Now I mean that! This is a paradox. It seems strange. But the reason why Christians isolate themselves is because they’ re try ing to avoid worldliness, and it always results in more worldliness than ever. You see, if you think that the things on your mental list are the only worldly things and you avoid those, then what happens? Why, you let down your guard and the world then begins to seep in, in a thousand places all through your life. Instead of be ing worldly in the ways that are on your list, you’re worldly in a thousand different ways and all of them equally as bad. The truth is that worldliness is not a matter of things, of doing this and not doing that. That’s not what marks the difference between worldliness and spirituality. If we could just learn that! That’s the mistake we so often make. Worldliness is a matter of the attitude of the heart, the attitude of life in thinking and dealing with things. Let me see if I can illustrate that. If you ladies wear a new dress to church in order to attract atten tion, that’s worldliness. You’re trying to attract at tention to yourself. The opinions of others mean much to you. That’s worldliness, no matter whether you never drink, dance, smoke, or go to a nightclub. On the other hand, if you wear a dowdy old dress to church in order to be thought spiritual, that’s worldliness too. Now the dress, you see, has noth ing to do with it, new or old. It’s the attitude of the mind that constitutes the worldliness.
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THE KING’S BUSINESS
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