Will you turn please to 1 John and
chapter 2.
You already have marked the first verse, the
sixth verse of the first chapter with a
one if you'd follow the suggestion we've made.
You've put a two after the third verse
of the second chapter.
You have put three after two nine, second
chapter verse nine, third chapter verse fourteen and
the fourth verse twenty.
Now I'd like to suggest you put four
after the fifteenth verse of the second chapter
and that you just put a check mark
by sixteen and seventeen to remind yourself in
the days to come that these two verses
are included in this fourth evidence of eternal
life.
I read for you that which shall engage
us this morning.
Love not the world, neither the things that
are in the world.
If any man love the world, the love
of the Father is not in him.
For all that is in the world, the
lust of the flesh and the lust of
the eyes and the pride of life, is
not of the Father, but is of the
world.
And the world passeth away, and the lust
thereof, but he that doeth the will of
God abideth forever.
Here again is that word love.
We found in the use of it yesterday
and in reference to Matthew the twenty-second
chapter and the great commandment, Thou shalt love
the Lord thy God, that used in this
way with the imperative, we are to understand
it not as an emotion or a feeling,
a sensibility, but rather as in the form
of benevolence, the committal of the will, the
supreme choice of the life, in the case
of God, to seek his highest good and
blessing and joy and satisfaction with us, and
in the case of our neighbors, to seek
also their highest good and blessing and joy
and fulfillment and happiness in every way possible.
And also thou shalt love thy neighbor as
thyself, because of our worth and value, God
has established that we are to seek the
highest good, highest good and blessing and happiness
and joy of ourselves consistent with our love
for God and our love for our neighbors.
Now, let's see if that definition applies here.
Thou shalt not love the world, thou shalt
not seek the highest good and joy and
blessing and satisfaction of the world.
Your happiness will not depend upon the world,
you're not living to please the world.
To the contrary, you're living to please God,
and therefore his commandment, Thou shalt love not
the world, is consistent in terms of the
definition.
You will not commit your will and your
purpose to please the world, to seek the
approval of the world, or to bring joy
and satisfaction to your heart through the world.
The world works, I think we can accept
that.
Now the text.
Love not the world, neither the things that
are in the world.
Do you accept as much authority for this
commandment as you did for the first and
great commandment?
You ought to.
They are given by the same Holy Spirit.
It was the Lord Jesus who said, Thou
shalt love the Lord thy God.
And it's God the Holy Ghost speaking through
the Apostle John says, in effect, Thou shalt
not love the world.
Now what does this word world mean?
It has reference to all that engaged you
and held you and attracted you prior to
your coming to Christ.
That is what he wants us to understand
by world.
Now there's a contract here that God has
drawn up with us, and I suggest it's
this.
You cannot walk in the light and in
darkness at the same time.
You accept that?
Is that sensible?
Is that logical?
Is that common sense?
You can't walk in light and darkness at
the same time.
Now you cannot love the commandments of God
and hate the commandments of God at the
same time.
It's impossible.
And you can't commit your entire being to
pleasing God and pleasing the world at the
same time.
Absolutely impossible.
You recognize that.
You realize that.
You recognize that you either love God or
you love the world.
You either seek to please God or you
seek to please the world.
But no one can love both at the
same time.
Now there's a rationale for this commandment.
The world passeth away.
You'll agree, I'm sure, that it's folly to
sell something that you cannot lose in exchange
for something that you cannot keep.
It doesn't make sense, does it?
It's foolishness to trade gold and silver and
precious stones for wood and hay and stubble.
Especially when the world tells us, when the
word tells us that not only is the
trade absurd and foolish, but more than that,
the lust thereof passeth away so that after
a while the very thing that you so
intensely desired and for which you made such
a foolish bargain has passed away and you
don't even want it anymore.
We found with our children when they were
growing up that they had a great, oh
what a great number of wants they had.
And there were so many books that showed
various things that young teenagers would like.
And they had allowance, and they had some
money, and we had some rules.
One of our rules was this, anything they
wanted, they could buy.
Two weeks after they said they wanted it,
it was a family rule.
They'd come in and say, I want to
get this, Dad, I want this.
And I'd say, fine, you got the money?
Yeah, here it is.
And so we'd just put it in the
weight lid, in the weight bottle, up behind
the cupboard.
You know, never once can I remember when
at the end of two weeks they wanted
what the money was sitting there for because
between then they had three more things they
wanted.
The lust thereof passed away.
The desire thereof was gone.
And that's what God says here, foolishness, to
sell, to trade something you can't lose for
something you can't keep, to trade gold, silver,
and precious stones for wood, hay, and stubble.
It's absurd.
It's not only absurd, it's also perilous, and
we ought to understand that peril.
In Matthew chapter 16, verse 26, for what
has a man profited if he shall gain
the whole world and lose his own soul?
Or what shall a man give in exchange
for his soul?
In Luke chapter 21, verse 34, and take
heed to yourselves, lest at any time your
hearts be overcharged with surfeiting and drunkenness and
the cares of this life, and so that
day come upon you unawares.
In James chapter 4, verse 4, you adulterers
and adulteresses, know you not that the friendship
of the world is enmity with God?
Whosoever, therefore, will be a friend of the
world is the enemy of God.
Matthew 24, 38 and 39, for as in
the days that were before the flood they
were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in
marriage, until the day that Noah entered into
the ark, and knew not until the flood
came and took them all away.
Great peril in loving the world.
There are scriptures full of it, I've just
picked two or three verses.
In contrast to that, the foolishness of such
a transaction, is the permanence of loving God.
He that doeth the will of God abideth
forever.
Now doing is the evidence of loving.
If you love me, you will do my
commandments, you will keep my commandments.
And so it seems to me that we
should be quite prepared to face this person
that is sitting across the table in the
cafe and asked us at the beginning of
a conversation, you know I'm not sure I'm
a Christian, I'm really not sure that I'm
born of God.
And we've taken them through one and two
and had them read them, three, and now
we're down to four, and we say to
them, now what's your attitude toward the world?
You may know it by the way they
live, but don't tell them.
Let them discover it for themselves.
After all, you're not the x-ray machine,
you're just sort of bringing them to where
the x-ray machine is.
The word of God is that which divides
between soul and spirit.
And so you say to the person, now
what is your attitude toward the world?
Whom do you seek to please?
Where does your happiness come from?
Does it come from what the world thinks
about you?
Do you have to have its approval and
its applause to make you happy?
Or is your happiness from a relationship with
God?
Now the commandment, love not the world, is
enforced by verses 16 and 17 in this
way.
All that is in the world.
And then the Spirit of God through John
begins to tell us, all that's in the
world is the lust or the desires of
the eye.
Well, what does the eye see?
It sees things.
So all that's in the world includes things.
And then it says, the lust of the
flesh or the desire and the appetites of
the flesh.
And that's experience.
Sexual experience, or if it's just a case
of being in the world, social experience with
those that are haters of God.
And the third thing is the pride of
life.
And that's position.
Now have you ever seen a drawing, a
caricature of Satan, with a pitchfork?
And that fork has more than three tines.
You'll know it's not correct.
Because fork he may have, pitchfork he may
have, but there are only three tines on
that fork.
The lust of the eye, the lust of
the flesh, and the pride of life.
Mind you, he's devised an enormous number of
variations, because he's certainly enticed multitude, millions of
men and women with no other tool than
just that.
And phenomenally successful many times in our lives
when we look back upon it.
But that's all he has.
He doesn't have any more.
For all that is in the world is
the lust of the eye, the lust of
the flesh, and the pride of life.
Now these correspond, and some of you have
heard me in the past, have heard me
refer to this, to three types of idolatry.
Whereas they're not only in the areas that
I'm giving the emphasis, they are in the
areas I'm giving the emphasis.
The lust of the eye, the word Baal,
is owner.
And Baal worship was apparently for the purpose
of acquiring things.
You know when the children of Israel crossed
the Jordan and came in and took the
land and occupied it, they took over the
farmsteads and the fields of the people that
had been there, the Canaanites.
God had judged and sent Israel there for
the purpose of judging them for their iniquities.
And they conquered it, and they took it,
and they lived on it.
But the children of Israel did not do
as God had told them to do, which
was to complete the judgment that God had
pronounced upon the Canaanite nations.
So the people that had occupied the area
still hung around in the neighborhood.
Can you see an Israelitish farmer out there
trying to till the ground?
It was a little bit rocky, a little
bit poor.
And God had told them how it was
going to flow with milk and honey, and
about all they had was some weeds, poison
ivy.
So far they hadn't had much blessing from
God because they hadn't obeyed.
And so one day the Israelitish farmer is
out there trying to get this ground stirred
up to get a crop in.
And now leaning against the stone fence is
the fellow that used to own the farm,
the old Canaanitish farmer that's still in the
neighborhood.
Don't have much of a crop, do you?
Well, no, it's not so good.
Well, if you only knew how to get
a crop, you'd do better than you're doing.
Well, what am I doing wrong?
Well, it's not what you're doing wrong, it's
not what you're doing right.
That's where the problem is.
What do you mean?
Well, he said, do you ever notice that
thick part of the wall down there in
the corner?
Yeah, I saw that.
What was that for?
Why did you make that so thick?
Did you ever notice it's got those dark
streaks running down on it?
Yeah.
Well, that's where we sacrifice to Baal.
See, he owns this field.
And if you don't give him what he
asks for, you're not going to have a
crop.
Oh, that's what that is.
So that night, when he gets home, he
tells his wife, You know, I had an
old farmer who used to have this place,
tell me that down there in the corner
where they got that thick part next to
it, those stones with those streaks on it,
that's blood, dry blood.
And they sacrifice to the evil spirit that
owns this piece of ground.
Well, I certainly wish you'd do something, because
I've got to have a new rug and
some new cooking ware and a new dress.
I haven't had a new dress for three
years.
I wish you'd do something.
Well, I don't know.
He can't stand the heat from the kitchen,
so just the funniest thing happens the next
day.
When he's down there, a little lamb jumps
up on that wall, and he's just there
wiggling on a stick.
And don't you know it?
Accidentally, that lamb runs into that knife and
cuts its throat.
Runs into it three times, to tell you
the truth.
It wasn't done deliberately.
It wasn't done as a sacrifice.
But you know, stuff began to grow, and
the crops began to flourish.
Boy, that's getting around.
That's how you get a good crop.
You sacrifice to the owner, the bale.
Well, why?
Because, you see, if you've got more grain
you're going to eat that year, you can
trade it for some of the things somebody
else has.
You can buy things with it.
And so what do we read?
And the children of Israel did evil in
the sight of the Lord, and served Balaam.
In Judges 3, 7, and 8.
And the children of Israel did evil in
the sight of the Lord, and forgot the
Lord their God, and served Balaam and the
groves.
Therefore the anger of the Lord was hot
against Israel, and he sold them.
That's the lust of the eye.
Things.
Compromise with the God of this world to
get things.
Then there was a second, the lust of
the flesh.
Now that carries us back into Genesis, where
there's an interesting thing.
It says Nimrod was a mighty hunter before
the Lord.
But that word, hunter, is literally rebel.
And just a few generations from Noah, when
God had judged the world because of all
of its sin, and now Nimrod has become
a mighty rebel against the Lord.
And he leads the people in revolt.
And he says, you know, if we build
us a tower, it could reach clear up
to heaven.
We could take this Jehovah God down out
of it, and we could have our own
religion, and we wouldn't have to be restricted
in our pleasure doing the things He wants
us to do.
We'd decide how to be happy.
And so the tower of Babel was built.
And we're told by Hislop in his volume
2, Babylon's, that he got his father's wife,
not his mother, but Semiramis, and he sort
of enthroned her as the goddess of heaven
and commanded the people to worship Semiramis.
And the worship was associated with all kinds
of lustful sexual indulgence.
Later on was Ashtoreth, the successor to Semiramis.
And the worship of Ashtoreth, Ashtarte, And then
in history, it's Juno.
In Ephesus, it was Diana.
But it was just a continuous succession, different
names, but for the same purpose of giving
license to immorality.
And in Judges 2.13 we read, And
they, that is Israel, forsook the Lord and
served Baal and Ashtoreth.
And the anger of the Lord was hot
against Israel, and He delivered them into the
hands of the spoilers.
In 1 Samuel 12.10, And they served
Balaam and Ashtoreth.
In Judges 10.6-7, And the children
of Israel did evil in the sight of
the Lord, and served Balaam and Ashtoreth.
And they forsook the Lord and served not
Him.
And the anger of the Lord was hot
against Israel, and He sold them into the
hands of the Philistines.
Well, we've covered two.
The lust of the eye, the lust of
the flesh.
The worship of Baal, the worship of Ashtoreth.
Now let's come to the third.
The pride of life.
All that's in the world are things and
experience in one other.
Position, power, influence, authority.
That's the worship of Moloch.
Let me read a few Scripture verses regarding
this, and then we will comment on it.
Leviticus 18.21 And thou shalt not let
any of thy seed pass through the fire
to Moloch, neither shalt thou profane the name
of thy God, I am the Lord.
Of King Josiah, who renewed the covenant and
destroyed idolatry in Judah, it is written in
2 Kings 23.10 And he defiled Topheth,
which is in the valley of the children
of Hinnom, that no man might make his
son or daughter pass through the fire to
Moloch.
And Jeremiah proclaims God's judgment upon Judah, because
they had done evil in my sight, saith
the Lord.
They have set their abominations in the house
which is called by my name to pollute
it, and they have built the high places
of Topheth, which is on the valley of
the son of Hinnom, to burn their sons
and their daughters in the fire.
And again in Jeremiah 32.35 And they
built the high places of Baal, which are
in the valley of the son of Hinnom,
to cause their sons and daughters to pass
through the fire unto Moloch, which I commanded
them not.
Neither came into my mind that they should
do this abomination to cause Judah to sin.
Worship of Moloch Well, what is it?
Get the picture.
Moloch is given to us in archaeological records
as being a very large statue of a
king on a throne, often carved out of
one solid piece of stone, as was the
statue of Davabu Simbel down there in southern
Egypt.
Picture showed, or what we have depicts Moloch
as being this king on a throne with
his thighs together and his hands folded across
his knees so that the forearms and hands
created a basin over his lap.
Apparently there were tunnels carved into the stone
leading behind the statue and bellows.
The bellow would consist of a skin of
a goat and a means of getting air
in and then the aperture would close and
they could force the air up the channels,
putting charcoal in the lap of the statue,
setting it aflame, getting the bellows behind there
to force the air through it.
They could turn that into a very, very
hot, fiery furnace, if you please.
The worshipper would come, in this case the
Israelites, who had been called of God to
be a people to show forth His praise.
Mother and father coming.
They've served Baal, gotten the things they wanted.
They've served Ashtoreth and gotten liberty for sexual
indulgence, but they're still not satisfied.
They've got to have position.
And that requires a sacrifice.
And so they bring the child down, a
firstborn boy or a girl, because Moloch was
made out of stone.
He really couldn't tell the difference between boys
and girls, but it had to be an
infant.
And the parents, the father would stand there,
would address the priest telling them what position
he wanted, what he was asking for, why
he was making the sacrifice.
And then calculating trajectory as a basketball player
would, trying to get the ball through the
hoop, the father would throw the little baby
into the air so that it would land
squarely on that bed of coals.
A living sacrifice to the God of this
world.
And that was the sin of Israel.
That was the pride of life.
You say, oh, what a terrible thing.
Indeed, sin is always a terrible thing.
And when we find today, with this revival
of Satanism that's rapidly accelerating across America, that
little babies stolen from shopping malls and elsewhere
are ending up as human sacrifices.
It's nothing new.
It just goes back to what Israel did
back there and why God judged them so
severely.
But, you know, with that as crude, as
gross, as horrible, as offensive as it is,
there's another type.
Strange, when I was pastor in New York
City, I often had the children of outstanding
Christian workers come sometimes from other states and
from some distance to talk with me because
they did not want to reflect upon their
fathers.
But I've had oh so many of them
say, you know, my father is so busy
going around the country preaching, going around the
country talking, working with these groups, doing all
these things.
I never see him.
And I've got problems and I've got this.
Or my father is working in his business
day and night and he's neglected us.
He claims to be a Christian follower of
Christ.
Well, what are they doing?
Well, would it be unkind to suggest that
maybe the fathers, maybe perhaps the mothers, with
their own personal ambitions were willing to sacrifice
their children on the altar of their ambitions?
Not with a knife and not with glowing
coals, but just with neglect and indifference and
unconcern.
So what have we here?
What we have here is a commandment by
the Holy Ghost that everyone that has been
born of God and made a partaker of
the divine nature will not love the world.
Because if any man loved the world, the
love of the Father is not in him.
Oh, I didn't say that.
I didn't write that.
I'm only reading it.
God said it.
I'm not trying to be harsh.
I'm only trying to be honest.
I'm only trying to say what God's Word
says, that if anyone loves the world, the
love of the Father is not in him.
So when people say, I'm not sure I'm
a child of God, the fourth evidence is,
what's your attitude toward the world?
In 1 Peter 2, verses 9 and 10,
we are told we're a royal holy priesthood,
a royal priesthood, a holy nation, that we
should show forth the praises of Him who
has called you out of darkness into His
marvelous light.
What's the conclusion?
What's the evidence of eternal life?
You cannot love the Father and the world
at the same time because love for the
Father is a commitment to please Him.
Now that doesn't mean that a child of
God cannot be overtaken in a fault, by
temptation, fall into sin.
But if he is, if a child of
God does, he's going to deal with it
because he's done something he really doesn't want
to do.
The purpose of his heart is to please
God and he did something he hates.
He did it.
But the evidence that he's a child of
God is that he's going to judge it
and forsake it and confess it and know
the cleansing of the precious blood.
It's so important for us to understand this
in the light of Titus 2, verses 11
-14.
For the grace of God that bringeth salvation
hath appeared unto all men, teaching us that
denying ungodliness and worldly lusts, we should live
soberly, righteously, and godly in this present world,
looking for that blessed hope and the glorious
appearing of the great God and our Savior
Jesus Christ, who gave himself for us, that
he might redeem us from all iniquity and
purify unto himself a purchased people zealous of
good works.
Understand this when you're talking with this person
and dealing with evidence number four.
The grace of God that brings salvation teaches
everyone to whom salvation is brought identically the
same things, regardless of what their culture may
have been, their background may have been, their
language may have been.
The grace of God that brings salvation teaches
everyone to whom such salvation is brought identically
the same thing.
It was my first day at our station
at Malut in the upper Nile province in
the Sudan, right on the Nile River, about
four, five, six hundred miles south of Khartoum,
depending on whether you went by the river
or you had to go by steamboat and
by railroad.
We got there in the middle of the
night, went out to our station.
The next day the man with whom we
traveled from the States to the Sudan, John
Phillips, our senior missionary and head of the
station, came over to our home where we
were having breakfast.
He said, I want to show you around.
Come with me.
And so I went with him.
He showed me the various houses and the
outbuildings and then the school.
And we ended up in the building that
was the school assembly room, classroom, and where
the little local church met on Sundays, the
Lord's Day.
The headmaster of the school was there.
His name was Paul.
He was a dinker man.
He'd grown up down in the New Era
district of the dinkers, so he had the
stripes across the forehead.
When he was seventeen, to prove his manhood,
he had gone to the witch doctor and
had said he was ready for the transition
ceremony.
He lay down with a little cup for
the back of his head in the soil,
nothing else.
The witch doctor came and put this spear
blade.
It had been worn down, only about six
inches of blade, very sharp on stone.
And he put it in Paul's forehead over
here above the eye and cut clear through
to the scalp.
And then he put sort of a cooking
pot in that and then about a half
inch above it all the way up his
forehead clear up to the hairline.
Paul had that.
When Paul had been a baby about three
or four months old, his mother had taken
him to the witch doctor who had taken
another knife and had cut the lower jawbone
and scraped the tooth buds of the four
front lower teeth off of the jawbone.
So he had no lower teeth in the
front.
It was Paul a dinker.
But now, local pastor and headmaster of the
school who loved Jesus Christ and faithfully proclaimed
the gospel.
John Phillips was from Baltimore He was a
graduate of Wheaton College and of Harvard's business
school.
And here was a guy from Minnesota.
And the three of us were standing there
very briefly telling about how we'd come to
know the Lord.
And when Paul finished, we were standing in
the center of this little grass thatched roof
house.
All three of us were strangely enveloped by
a sense of the presence of the Lord.
And tears were in our eyes without our
sobbing.
It was just the presence of God.
What was it?
The grace of God that brings salvation had
taught us identically the same thing regardless of
our background or our culture.
The grace of God that brings salvation teaches
us to deny ungodliness and worldly lusts.
That's repentance.
And to live soberly and righteously and godly
in this present world.
Looking for that blessed hope and the glorious
appearing of the great God and our Savior
Jesus Christ who gave Himself for us that
He might save us from hell and take
us to heaven when we die.
Is that what the Word says?
Not in my book.
What it says in this book and in
yours is this.
Who gave Himself for us that He might
redeem us from all iniquity and purify unto
Himself a purchased people zealous of good works.
In contrast to loving the world, it's to
hate evil.
The grace of God has taught us to
deny ungodliness and worldly lusts and to live
soberly, righteously, and godly in this present evil
world.
Not to seek its favor.
Not to get our pleasure and joy and
happiness from it.
How do we illustrate it?
How do we illustrate what it means?
Years ago, I read an account of a
young man from Great Britain who was a
younger son of a famous family.
He had enough money so he could come
to America.
He'd gone across America on the river boats
and on the Santa Fe Trail.
He worked as a cowboy.
And he'd gone into the mountains.
And he ended up around Sumter where they
had the gold strike in 1949.
And he'd put in a claim.
And he'd worked the claim.
And he'd gotten quite a lot of gold.
A lot of money.
Which he had converted into letters of credit
there in California.
And he had decided to take the southern
route and go across.
He'd come across through the north.
And he wanted to go across now through
Texas and Louisiana and then by boat from
Louisiana to New York and back to England.
He was in New Orleans and he did
like all of us tourists do when we
go to New Orleans.
He went down to the slave market.
I'm sure if you've been in New Orleans,
you've done it.
Or when you go, you will.
The difference was, when he was there, they
were still selling human beings as chattel.
He'd never seen it before.
It had been outlawed before his time.
He couldn't remember it in England.
And here was the first time he'd ever
seen human beings sold on a block.
As he stood there, he heard the ribald
remarks.
He saw the cruelty, the viciousness, the iniquity
and the lies, eyes and voices of the
people who were there.
There was one very beautiful young woman standing
there with the slaves to be sold.
And he heard some of them talk about
how they were going to buy her and
what they were going to do with her.
One man particularly, who had a reputation that
he'd overheard being one of the most vicious
slave owners in all of that area, was
determined to buy this young woman.
She came to the block.
The bidding started.
And this man seemed to be having it
his own way, for no one wanted to
incur his wrath.
And finally, this Britisher put in a bid.
And the man bid again.
And the Britisher put in another bid.
And the man raised it.
And to stop this nonsense, this man raised
his bid by a hundred percent.
And there was a gasp that went through
the group.
The most money that anyone had ever paid
for a slave in New Orleans.
He paid out the gold to the cashier.
He was given the strap that went around
the neck of the young woman.
As she came down the steps on the
block where she'd been standing while the transaction
had been completed, she got on the first
step from next to the ground, just face
to face with the one who had bought
her.
She had been saving up a mouthful of
saliva.
And when she stood right in front of
him, she spat that saliva full in his
face and hissed through her clenched teeth, I
hate you.
He said nothing.
Back of his hand, he wiped it away.
The crowd opened.
He walked through it.
He went to someone.
He asked some directions.
Went a little further.
Asked further directions.
Was shown a door.
Went up some stairs to an office.
The woman had no idea where she was
going.
She stood there.
She wouldn't flee because of the price and
danger.
Notoriety for this sale.
He went over.
Someone came.
Brought someone else out.
He paid some money.
He insisted.
They were saying no.
He insisted.
And finally, they signed the paper and handed
it to him.
And he walked back.
He stood in front of her.
And he said, Here are your manumission papers.
You are free.
And she looked at him and said, You
paid more for me than anyone else has
ever been purchased in New Orleans.
Yes, I'm told so.
And you bought me to set me free.
Yes, that's why I bought you.
To set you free.
Tears came to her eyes.
She fell to her knees.
She put her face down in his rude
miner's boots and started to sob.
He bought me to set me free.
She looked up and said, No, sir.
All I ask is to serve you as
long as I live.
Oh, it doesn't illustrate it.
Maybe it helps.
The great God and Savior who gave Himself
for us that He might redeem us from
all iniquity and purify unto Himself the peculiar
purchased people zealous of good works.
Be it hard then to hear the Holy
Ghost say, Love not the world, neither the
things that are in the world.
If any man loves the world, the love
of the Father is not in him.
Can we not, as with her, kiss His
nail-pierced feet and say, He bought me
to set me free.
My love is toward Him and not toward
the world.
Father in Heaven, seal to our hearts, we
ask Thee this fourth evidence of the new
birth.
Should there be those among us who know
Him in name only, might they discover it
and deal with it.
Shall each of us, Lord, redeemed by the
poured-out life of Thy dear Son, realize
that He bought us to set us free.
We might glorify Him and walk back in
this world with all of its idolatry, free
from being entangled with it, to bring honor
and glory and praise to the One who
loved us and washed us in His precious
blood.
In His name and for His sake.
Amen.