Lovers of Fences: Do Not Love the World

We wear the word out before breakfast. I love this coffee. I love that song. I love the way October smells right before it turns. And then there are the quieter uses — the ones we don't say at the table. I love someone I have no right to. I love the thing I promised God I was done with. Same word. We hand it to a brisket and to a betrayal without changing our tone.

It would be easy to blame the language, and there's something to that. English gives us one threadbare word where scripture makes distinctions. Most of what we call love for forbidden things, the Bible calls desire. Appetite. But blaming the dictionary lets us off too easily. Because when I say I love what I cannot have, I'm not misusing a word. I'm dignifying an appetite. I'm dressing a craving in devotion's clothes so it can sit in church with me.

Scripture will not allow the costume. John writes:

Do not love the world or the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world—the desires of the flesh and the desires of the eyes and pride of life—is not from the Father but is from the world. (1 John 2:15–16, ESV)

Notice what is spoken to us. He does not say the problem is that we love too much. He uses the same verb for the misdirection, loves the world, because the capacity to love was never the defect. We were built to love. The question was only ever the aim.

And the aim, left to itself, bends toward the fence.

Why do we want most what is marked off? Paul's answer is the most unnerving sentence he ever wrote about himself: "I would not have known what it is to covet if the law had not said, 'You shall not covet.' But sin, seizing an opportunity through the commandment, produced in me all kinds of covetousness" (Rom. 7:7–8, ESV). The command didn't create the sin. Something in fallen flesh reads a fence as a signpost. There must be something worth having over there. One tree in a garden full of permitted trees, and the woman "saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise" (Gen. 3:6, ESV). Food. Eyes. The promise of being more.

Read John's list again and hear the echo. The pull we feel is not a modern problem. It's a fracture that changed reality after the fall.

So there is a war on, and it's not a figure of speech. "For the desires of the flesh are against the Spirit, and the desires of the Spirit are against the flesh, for these are opposed to each other, to keep you from doing the things you want to do" (Gal. 5:17, ESV). To keep you from doing the things you want to do. Anyone who has stood in a doorway wanting two opposite things at once knows Paul isn't theorizing. The tug is the war. Feeling it isn't the failure of faith; it's the friction of contested ground. The ground is the heart.

Here is where I want the remedy to be simpler than it is. I want scripture to say: desire less. Feel less. Starve the wanting until it goes quiet. It never asks that of the capacity itself. It asks for something harder and more exact. "Those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires" (Gal. 5:24, ESV). The disordered wanting is put to death, and even that death is not the end of the road. It clears room for the thing the wanting was always reaching past. Paul's portrait of ruined humanity in the last days is crowded with love: "lovers of self, lovers of money… lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God" (2 Tim. 3:2, 4, ESV). Rather than. The love never went away. It changed thrones.

Which means the cure runs through the aim, not the appetite. "Delight yourself in the LORD, and he will give you the desires of your heart" (Ps. 37:4, ESV) — not a promise that God funds our cravings, but the claim that delight, relocated, slowly rewrites what the heart asks for. Loving God is not the death of wanting. It is wanting, finally, pointed at something that will not rot in our hands.

Because everything on the other side of the fence has a shelf life. John finishes the thought we started:

And the world is passing away along with its desires, but whoever does the will of God abides forever. (1 John 2:17, ESV)

The fence was never hiding treasure. What it marked was a grave. And the love we keep spending there was made for Someone who abides.

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1 John 2:15–17 · Romans 7:7–8 · Genesis 3:6 · Galatians 5:17 · Galatians 5:24 · 2 Timothy 3:2, 4 · Psalm 37:4