My children would say that I am good at giving strings of commands: “Be sure you are home by 9 p.m., and make sure you don’t speed, and be careful.” The word and comes in handy in such situations! Paul makes good use of the word and to begin Romans 12:2. He has just urged the Roman believers to place their bodies at God’s disposal. But his concern does not end there; he issues a very important addendum—and “do not be conformed to this world.”1 Why is this addendum important?
Perhaps nothing clouds spiritual judgment more than worldliness. The book of Judges provides an example of this in the story of a man named Micah who steals money from his mother. She gives it back to him, setting it apart as holy to the Lord for Micah to make a graven image and a molten image. Micah does so, establishing an idolatrous shrine of worship and ordaining one of his sons to be a priest. When circumstances bring a Levite to his house and the Levite agrees to be a priest for him, Micah exults, “Now I know that the Lord will be good to me, since I have a Levite as priest” (Judges 17:13). He has so thoroughly imbibed the moral atmosphere of his age that he regards as right what is clearly wrong. This clouding of discernment is why Romans 12:2 exhorts us to refuse conformity to sinful culture.
The Definition of Worldliness
The word translated world (literally, “age”) in Romans 12:2 refers to a specific period of time and its characteristics. Paul identifies a key characteristic of the now age (1 Timothy 6:17) as “evil” (Galatians 1:4). Satan is the god of this age, blinding the minds of unbelievers (2 Corinthians 4:4) and creating a moral atmosphere characterized by disobedience to God (Ephesians 2:2). This age has its own wisdom (1 Corinthians 2:6)—a wisdom God makes foolish through the preaching of the cross, and its own cares—concerns that make daily provision, riches, and pleasures a top priority (Mark 4:19; Luke 8:14). These cares, like thorns, choke out any lasting fruitfulness the Word of God might have produced.
The world is also a place of desire. In fact, the word desire efficiently captures the essence of worldliness: desires of the flesh, desires of the eyes, and the pride of life (1 John 2:16). Ambitions, relationships, possessions, actions, and priorities are worldly when they are motivated by desires that fall into the three categories above. The Bible gives us examples of these:
- Cain killed Abel in order to indulge the fleshly desire for revenge.
- Achan’s eyes led him to desire and acquire something that was expressly forbidden.
- Nebuchadnezzar swelled up with pride and the desire for others’ praise at the Babylon he had built.
When we indulge wrong desires, acquire things for the wrong reasons, or live for success, we are worldly. Such desires and motivations are antithetical to God’s will for “the world is passing away, and the lust of it; but he who does the will of God abides forever” (v. 17).
The Danger of Worldliness
The world is not content to let us go our Christian way while it goes its own. Instead, it pressures us to conform to its wisdom, cares, and desires. Unfortunately, “the Christian often yields quite unconsciously.”2 We must be alert to the ways we are adopting the world’s thinking. Too often, we adopt thoughts that are not captive to the obedience of Christ and ways of thinking that are against the knowledge of God (2 Corinthians 10:4-5). Worldliness is fatal to godliness; the two are opposites. “If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him” (1 John 2:15). “Friendship with the world is enmity with God” (James 4:4). Demas is infamous for this: once a faithful coworker of the Apostle Paul, he fell in love with the present age and abandoned his post of duty (2 Timothy 4:10).
The Duration of Worldliness
Worldliness is a dead-end street. The “present form of this world is passing away” (1 Corinthians 7:31, ESV; emphasis mine). Even the world’s desire is passing away (1 John 2:17). To live for the world’s desires is to cut off the branch on which you are sitting; it is to pull the carpet out from under your own feet. A loving God sees the disastrous end of worldliness (such as a passion for wealth) and issues a warning: “those who desire to be rich fall into temptation and a snare, and into many foolish and harmful lusts which drown men in destruction and perdition” (1 Timothy 6:9). Lot is an example of a man who prioritized material gain over spiritual profit and lost everything he had vexed himself to acquire.
The Deliverance from Worldliness
Only Christ’s death on the cross enables us to escape the grasp of a world clamoring to conform us to its agenda. Jesus Christ sacrificed Himself to “deliver us from this present evil age” (Galatians 1:4). In so doing, He “broke the back” of sin’s power through His death on the cross. “Those who are Christ’s have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires” (5:24). The cross was history’s most dramatic reversal, an epic turning of the tide of war. In addition, the grace of God that brought us salvation is also a teacher—instructing us how to “live soberly, righteously, and godly in the present age” (Titus 2:12). As our minds are renewed by truth, we are transformed away from conformity to the world and brought into increasing conformity to Christ. That transformation will be the focus of the final blog article in this series.
1 Unless otherwise noted, all Scripture quotations are taken from the New King James Version®. Copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
2 C. E. B. Cranfield, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans, International Critical Commentary (London; New York: T&T Clark International, 2004), 608.
Click here to view part 1 of this series: Appreciating Mercies Received.
Click here to view part 2 of this series: Placing Our Bodies at God's Disposal.