The World
I have known some young people who have more or less said to me, “We must get into the world and experience it in order to know what it is like and to grow stronger in the Lord.”
This kind of thinking is wrong and very detrimental to our spiritual growth and personal testimony. It is true that we are in the world, but the Lord Jesus prayed, “I pray not that Thou shouldest take them out of the world, but that Thou shouldest keep them from the evil” (John 17:15). We are also told, “Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this…to keep himself unspotted from the world” (James 17:15). There is certainly no instruction in the Bible to go out and indulge in worldliness just so we have the experience. You will never be able to justify such a course.
However, there is a divine pattern set out for us at the beginning of the Book of Psalms. “Blessed is the man that walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly, nor standeth in the way of sinners, nor sitteth in the seat of the scornful. But his delight is in the law of the Lord; and in His law doth he meditate day and night” (Psalm 1:1-2).
