The Christian and the World
A Sermon on John 3:8
Scripture
8The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it is coming from and where it is going; so is everyone who has been born of the Spirit.”
8The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so is every one that is born of the Spirit.
Sermon Description
The religious man recognizes certain things as wrong, is troubled by them, tries to avoid them, but never gets beyond that. His is not at all aware of what the New Testament calls “the world”. Worldliness is to think of the whole of life in the world without God. The worldly man is dominated by his morality, or religiosity, but is never awakened to the reality of God. The Christian can see through the world and no longer judges it by outward appearance. The world can still tempt, but fundamentally the taste for it is gone. Once he was part of it, but now it is outside trying to get in. We are children of God not by what we do but by the Spirit and the life that are in us. When the saint sins, he knows he is not merely sinning against Law but against Love. When moral men sin, they feel they've broken the code. It’s a legal transgression not a relational one. But the child who sins against his father knows he has violated the relationship. The moral man feels remorse, but he knows nothing of repentance. The great question is: have we been born again?
The Book of John
Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones
Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones (1899-1981) was a Welsh evangelical minister who preached and taught in the Reformed tradition. His principal ministry was at Westminster Chapel, in central London, from 1939-1968, where he delivered multi-year expositions on books of the bible such as Romans, Ephesians and the Gospel of John. In addition to the MLJ Trust’s collection of 1,600 of these sermons in audio format, most of these great sermon series are available in book form (including a 14 volume collection of the Romans sermons), as are other series such as "Spiritual Depression", "Studies in the Sermon on the Mount" and "Great Biblical Doctrines". He is considered by many evangelical leaders today to be an authority on biblical truth and the sufficiency of Scripture.