1 John 2

Don’t love the world or what belongs to it. If anyone loves the world, the Father’s love is not in him. Wesley, to all ages: pursue your victory by overcoming the world. Seek happiness in visible things and you do not love God.

Two loves cannot reign in one heart. This is not hatred of people or of creation as gift (4:1–5 of 1 Timothy already fenced that). It is the world as rival happiness. Grace that can be received can also be spent on visible things instead of the Father.

Calvin: the only rule for living religiously is to love God; but occupied with vain love of the world we turn thoughts another way. This vanity must first be torn away. The world: everything connected with present life apart from the kingdom and the hope of eternal life—corruptions of every kind, allurements by which man withdraws from God.

We necessarily forget God when we regard nothing so much as the earth. A corrupt lust that thinks no more of immortal life than mute animals cannot be of God. The Father’s love and the world’s love do not cohabit.

All that is in the world: desires of the flesh, of the eyes, pride of life—not from the Father. Wesley: outward senses; pleasures of imagination, grand, new, or beautiful; pomp in clothes, houses, living, which procures honor and gratifies pride—including desire of praise and, remotely, covetousness. All from the prince of this world.

Three mouths of the same hunger. The issue is source: not from the Father. Creation remains good; this appetite is the world’s, and it can be refused.

Calvin: three kinds parenthetically, examples of the pursuits of men who live for the world. Lust of the flesh: worldly men intent on living softly, only on their own advantages. Lust of the eyes: libidinous looks and vanity that delights in pomps. Pride of life: haughtiness, ambition, contempt of others, blind love of self.

As soon as the world presents itself, corrupt-heart lusts are captivated like unbridled beasts. Various lusts, all adverse to God, bear rule. Shared anatomy of the world; the quarrel is not whether these are deadly.

The world is passing away with its lusts; the one who does God’s will remains forever. Wesley: all that can gratify those desires passes with it. He that loves God, not the world, abides in the enjoyment of what he loves, forever.

The will of God is doable by grace, and the abiding is promised to the doer. Passing world is pastoral urgency, not a slogan. Train the loves toward what lasts.

Calvin: nothing in the world but what is fading. True happiness God offers is eternal; it is shameful to be entangled with what will vanish. Doing the will of God: not perfect keeping of the law, but the obedience of faith, imperfect yet approved. Christ comes to the despairing, regenerates, and makes the endeavor obtain the praise of perfect righteousness.

The law makes the will known, but no one satisfies it; happiness is not hoped from it as a completed score. The world passes; the doer of God’s will abides. The how of that doing is where camps usually part—here both refuse despair and refuse a world-love.