The world, the flesh and the devil (Satan) constitute the forces which oppose the religious life. These are distinct from each other, yet they act in perpetual concert.
the WORLD + the FLESH + the DEVIL = CONFLICT
What is worldliness? To take the object, sun or star, animal or tree and worship it, and serve it. This is what man did when “they worshipped the creature rather that the Creator.” (Romans 1:25) They stayed in the realm of the things seen and did not pass through them to the actuality of the unseen things. That is worldliness.
Worldliness consists in dealing with the material, without recognizing the spiritual of which the material is an expression, dealing with the things that are temporal without recognizing of the things that are eternal; living in the midst of the transient without having commerce with the abiding. Worldly pleasure is abuse of the senses by forgetfulness of the spiritual.
What is a worldly person? A worldly person is one who lives as though this were the only world. They may tell you in conversation that they believe in another. They may think about another, but Monday through Friday in business, at home and in pleasure they live as though there were no God in the universe. Worldliness is life lived in the dust to the forgetfulness of deity, life that has no sense of the infinite and eternal, that does not bring the measurements of eternity and lay them on every half-hour.
How comes it that the world which ought everywhere to reveal the heights, the world which out to suggest God, make me forget Him? Man’s attitude in the presence of the world is determined by his conception of himself. To live in flesh is to be imprisoned by the material and temporal, never to see through the garments of God in the green meadow to the God who wears them, but to see only the grass. A self-centered and self-contained life seeks its satisfaction in, rather than through, the material world.
We defeat Satan when the life becomes God governed. Self is found at last, realized within itself. Flesh is made subservient to spirit. I have not lost the world, I have found it. Only the temporal is now seen in its relation to the eternal, and change and decay are no longer destruction, but the perpetual process of that which abides.
Use the world but do not abuse it, for the fashion of this world passes away. All things of the world are mine, but I am not to live in them as though they were the whole. I am to understand that they are things of dust and I must treat them as such.
When you lose your vision of God, you lose your sense of the Eternal.
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