Jesus was not starting a new community of ascenes. Do you remember? The ascenes whose work was found in the Dead Sea Scrolls.

These were people who drew apart from civilization, to live in total isolation so that they could keep themselves pure for the coming of the Messiah.

And while they're hiding down there in the caves, the Messiah came and they missed them.

Of course, genuine Christians don't want to be worldly. But what does it mean to be in the world but not of it?

To quote Paul, what does it mean to not be conformed to this world?

These are important questions and ones that we can easily get wrong. I know I did as a young Christian.

Well, as we begin a new study this week on renewing your mind, RC Sproul will help us understand what it means to please God in this full and world.

Some, in an attempt to please God, have retreated from the world. But that's not what Jesus told.

So to help us understand how we're to relate to the world and glorify God in it, here's RC Sproul.

Martin Luther said that the Christian in his struggle for obedience has many obstacles to overcome.

But basically, we're involved in warfare that takes place not on one front or two fronts, but on three fronts, and that the triad of enemies that confront the Christian are as Luther maintained the world, the flesh and the devil.

That's a very famous quotation from Luther. And of course, Luther understood that when he made that list of the world and the flesh and the devil, that though he distinguished among those three particular enemies, he understood that all three of them were intimately related one to the other.

That the spirit of the flesh of which the Bible speaks is that part of our nature that is enraptured by and seduced by the spirit of this world.

And this world is the arena over which Satan has a particular level of influence and even at times a kind of dominion.

And so though we distinguish among these three, we don't want to separate them one from the other.

But we will look at each one of these serietim.

And in this session, we're going to consider the Christians struggle with what the New Testament calls the world.

Now, obviously the term world in the New Testament is used in more than one way.

In some cases, the term world simply refers to this planet.

There's nothing pejorative, nothing negative about the term when it's used in that way.

It's simply a geographical location.

This place is distinguished from Mars or Jupiter or the heavens above.

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