261st Meditation
“If anyone does love the world, the love of the Father finds no place in him” (1 Jn 2:15).
As the Gospel tells us, “no one can serve two masters” (Mt 6:24). Our heart must belong undividedly to the Heavenly Father, and then we will learn to love the world with the love of the Father: “This is how God loved the world: he gave his only Son” (Jn 3:16).
If we love the world in the Father’s way, we look at it from the perspective that it is in need of redemption. We long for the salvation of souls and we want to assist people on the way to find it. But we do not do so by adopting the mentality of the world, nor by seeking its approval, nor by resembling it. Rather, we are to keep away from modern idols and withdraw from the attraction of the world, so that it does not compete with our surrender to the Father.
St. John’s statement is unequivocal: “If anyone does love the world, the love of the Father finds no place in him”. It leads us to the discernment of spirits, for it helps us to recognise whether a person is close to God or inclined towards the world.
Whenever the spirit of the world becomes dominant in our life, when we are ruled according to its criteria, we lose focus on the Father. Then it is no longer His Word that measures and permeates everything in our life, but the world away from God exercises its dominance over our way of thinking and feeling. Thus, people become “worldly”, whereas love for the Father makes them more and more a part of His being and, in that sense, makes them “divine”.
Our Father lets us live in this world, but He wants us not to belong to the world (cf. Jn 17:16). If we get involved with the world in order to be loved by it, we set out on a wrong path. Our goal, on the other hand, is to accept the Father’s love totally and to live in it forever. In order to do this, we need to keep our distance from the world, because it can become a temptation to us. This is why we must be vigilant and prudent in our dealings with it.