Overcoming The World
Russell Walden
http://www.geocities.com/rwalden492/index.html
rwalden492@hotmail.com
Introduction

1Joh 5:4 For whatsoever is born of God overcometh the world: and this is the victory that overcometh the world, [even] our faith.

Day by day we conduct our affairs, interacting with the people and the world around us. Our associations, interactions and involvments lend continuity and texture to life. This dynamic of community taken as a whole, makes up civilization as we know it. We live out our lives bounded by and defined by the societal structures and norms we are born to. The world, our relational environment, defines us, expresses the conduct of our lives. It is the backdrop and context for all aspects of life, social, economic, educational, etc.

This is the human experience, the common denominator of the human condition.

In the tidal pool of the community of men there are concentric influences continually interacting and coalescing around us. Art, Business, Education, Government, all are component parts of a harmonious whole the Greeks called "the Cosmos". Driven by human passion and pursuit, these eddies and currents govern and segment our time on earth. These structures, or worlds find expression in definable subsystems, or aggregate components that make up human society. These parts are quite identifiable as to their role, function and place in the fabric of human history. Economy, Government, Education, Art, etc., all make up the sum of human society, culture and civilization. This is the WORLD of men, the world in which most live and move and have their being. This is the world of which we must become masters, rising above subservience and slavery to find God's higher creative purpose, i.e. our reason for being and mission in life. If we let the immediacy of life, and its urgent demands devour our time, resources and attention, then we will drown in ignominy, mere cogs in the MACHINE that man has been seeking to build since his ill fated project on the plains of Babel.

What are the underpinnings of this world we live in? What are its foundations? When were they laid? Is it even important for us to know? Society didn't just happen as an outgrowth of evolutionary development. Society was founded through a seminal effort at a given point in time, with a specific purpose, and a determinate end in mind. The Christian scriptures speaking from antiquity record for us the foundation of the world, of society, history, and civilization as we know it. This is the foundation we must excavate and clear away from our lives if we are to build on the true Rock Christ Jesus, else we lay stone upon stone thinking we are participating in the Kingdom of God, only to find we are merely expressing the spirit of the world.

Society and the world around us are not static but dynamic. The world around us will respond to specific stimuli. It can be governed, even mastered by a person willing to step back from the blinding mendacity of every day life, to look past the past the broad, surface strokes of daily activity and discern underneath the canvas our world view is painted on. From that perspective you may then cease to be a piece of flotsam on the sea of humanity and become a mariner on the waves of life, cutting across the currents of chance and happenstance, striking the sails of your purpose toward the shores of true substance and significance in a transcendent human condition, in union with God through his Son Jesus Christ.

God and Christ, you might ask? Yes, the manifest creator who inaugurated our corporeal existence and initiated the human family. The creator who of necessity intervened in the course of history, the course of the world, and remediated its purpose by the Man Christ Jesus who came to redirect the hearts of men to their true destiny, not in the course of the world, but in the way of the Kingdom of God. The Kingdom of God? The Kingdom of God is not a religious nomenclature for a higher ascetic. The god of religion, the Great Opiate surely exists, impersonates, and often even seeks to pre-empt the God of the Kingdom. But the God of the Kingdom is the Self Existent Sentience who having made himself known through religion, nonetheless did not hesitate there or pause there. Religion was his entry point, but quickly passing that threshold he seeks through his Son Jesus Christ and his mortal followers to infuse his purpose, his character and his rule on every facet of society and the human condition.

For every component aspect of the world of men, there is an answering dynamic of the kingdom that lays siege to the world, society and systems of mortal construction. Do men Govern? God will further govern, and one day the kingdoms of the earth will become the kingdoms of our God and his Christ. Do men pursue commerce and traffic in materialism and this realm's resources? God also traffics in the human marketplace, not in natural currency, but in the currency of the Kingdom, the souls of men, through servants, brokers of his presence and truth who have bound themselves to be about their Father's business. Do men war? God also wars, in the heavens, in the unseen realm the scriptures speak of as "principalities and powers". This is the realm of which God is calling his people to be conversant and familiar.

Too long religious men have pursued spiritual ends through natural means. The world cannot reform the world. And religion is of the world. We must lay down religion and embrace the kingdom. In fact we must put our foot in the neck of religion and subjugate it to the purposes of the Kingdom. Likewise the realm of business, finance, education, government, etc. We do not peacefully co-exist with these aggregate components of the world system. Nor do we seek to parallel them with a religious twist or enhancement. No, we must acknowledge that we are not of this world, not in our character, our efforts or our pursuits. We are in the world, and our victory is that we are not of the world.

What must you do? To ask that question is to validate that you are yet of the world and not of the kingdom. So don't hesitate. Let us seek to become students of the kingdom, vassals of the king. Let us delve deeply in to the sonship the Father has afforded us, and seek his path for our lives. Not a path of accommodation with the world. Nor a path to circumvent the world. Conflict is not to be avoided. He came to bring a sword. The sword of the mouths that speak present, anointed truth. May that sword be in your heart and in your mouth, bared, without scabbard, until the day the Government rests fully upon his shoulders.