Of course we are to interpret the 'world' here in accordance with the
ethical usage of that term in this Gospel, according to which it means
the aggregate of mankind considered as apart from and alien to God. It
is roughly equivalent to the modern phrase, 'society.'
With that order of things Christ's real followers are not in accord.
That want of accord depends upon their accord with Jesus.
Every Christian has the 'mind of Christ' in him, in the measure of his
Christianity. 'It is enough for the disciple that he be as his Master'
But Christian discipleship has a better guarantee for the assimilation
of the disciple to his Lord than the ordinary forms of the relation of
teacher and taught ever present. There is a participation in the
Master's life, an implantation in the scholar's spirit of the Teacher's
Spirit. 'Christ in us' is not only 'the hope of glory,' but the power
which makes possible and actual the present possession of a life
kindred with, because derived from, and essentially one with, His life.
They whose spirits are touched by the indwelling Christ to the 'fine
issues' of sympathy with the law of His earthly life cannot but live in
the world as aliens, and wander amid its pitfalls with 'blank
misgivings' and a chill sense that this is not their rest. They are
knit to One whose 'meat and drink' was to do the will of the Father in
heaven, who 'pleased not Himself,' whose life was all one long service
and sacrifice for men, whose joys were not fed by earthly possessions
or delights. How should they have a sense of community of aims with
grovelling hearts that cling to wealth or ambition, that are not at
peace with God, and have no holdfasts beyond this 'bank and shoal of
time'? A man who has drunk into the spirit of Christ's life is thereby
necessarily thrown out of gear with the world.
Happy is he if his union with Jesus is so deep and close that it is but
deepened by his experience of the lack of sympathy between the world
and himself! Happy if his consciousness of not being 'of the world' but
quickens his desire to help the world and glorify his Lord, by bringing
His all-sufficiency into its emptiness, and leading it, too, to discern
His sweetness and beauty!
But how little the life of the average Christian corresponds to this
reiterated utterance of our Lord! Who of us dare venture to take it on
our lips and to say that we are 'not of the world even as He is not of
the world'? Is not our relation to that world of which Jesus here
speaks a contrast rather than a parallel to His? The 'prince of this
world' had nothing in Christ, as He himself declared, but He has much
in each of us. There are stored up heaps of combustibles in every one
of us which catch fire only too swiftly, and burn but too fiercely,
when the 'fiery darts of the wicked' fall among them. Instead of an
instinctive recoil from the view of life characteristic of 'the world,'
we must confess, if we are honest, that it draws us strongly, and many
of us are quite at home with it. Why is this but because we do not
habitually live near enough to our Lord to drink in His Spirit? The
measure of our discord with the world is the measure of our accord with
our Saviour. It is in the degree in which we possess His life that we
come to be aliens here, and it is in the degree in which we keep in
touch with Jesus, and keep our hearts wide open for the entrance of His
Spirit, that we possess His life. A worldly Christian--no uncommon
character--is a Christian who has all but shut himself off from the
life which Christ breathes into the expectant soul.