John 15:18,19

John 15:18

The World we have Renounced

Perhaps there is no word more commonly in our mouths than "the world," and yet hardly any to which we attach less clear and certain meaning indeed, the sense intended by it varies according to the character of the person that uses it. Let us therefore endeavour to come at something better than mere floating notions about it. The world out of which the disciples were taken was not the Gentile world, but the disobedience of the visible Church.

I. First, it is true to distinguish between the Church and the world, as between things antagonistic and irreconcilable; for the Son of God, by His incarnation and atonement, and by the calling and mission of His Apostles, has founded and built up in the earth a visible kingdom, which has no other head but Him alone. That visible kingdom is so taken out of the world that a man must either be in it or out of it, and must, therefore, either be in the Church or in the world. In the visible kingdom of Christ are all the graces and promises of life; in the world are the powers and traditions of death. We know of no revealed salvation out of that visible kingdom; we can point to no other way to life. There is but one Saviour, one Mediator, one Sacrifice for the sin of the world, one baptism for the remission of sins, one rule of faith, one law of holiness. There can be no real fellowship or intercourse between those that are of the body of Christ, and those that are not. The only intercourse the Church has ever held with the heathen has been either such as St. Paul permitted to the Christians in Corinth, who might still maintain the relations of outward kindliness with unbelievers, or direct missions for the conversion of unbelievers. There could be no closer fellowship; for there was a moral and formal contrariety between the rules of conduct and aim on both sides, which held the Church and the world apart.

II. But farther, it is no less true to say, that the world, which in the beginning was visibly without the Church, is now invisibly within it. So long as the world was heathen, it warred against the Church, in bitter and relentless persecutions. It was when the conversion of individuals drew after it, at last, the whole civil state when the secular powers, with all their courts, pomps, institutions, laws, judicatures, and the entire political order of the world, came into the precinct of the Church then it was that the great tradition of human thought, passion, belief, prejudice, and custom, mingled itself with the unwritten usages of the Church. The world is now inside the fold, baptized, catechised, subdued, specious, and worshipping. This is a far more dangerous antagonist. There is but one safeguard for Christ's servants; to be like Him, in whom the prince of this world in the hour of temptation had nothing he could make his own. Our safety is not so much whereas whatwe are.

H. E. Manning, Sermons,vol. ii., p. 239.

References: John 15:18. A. B. Bruce, The Training of the Twelve,p. 429; W. Roberts, Christian World Pulpit,vol. x., p. 318. John 15:18 -xvi. 15 W. Milligan, Expositor,2nd series, vol. iv., p. 370.