The New Testament teaches that to be a follower of Christ it is necessary that a man turn his back upon the world and have no fellowship with it. Our Lord drew a sharp line between the kingdom of God and the world and said that no one could be at the same time a lover of both. This was also the teaching of Paul, James and John (2 Corinthians 6:14-18; James 4:4; 1 John 2:15-17). It is therefore of critical importance that we who claim to be disciples of Christ should check our relation to the world. The question of the Christian and the world is not, however, as simple as it might seem. There is much difference of opinion among Christians as to what constitutes the world. Before we can be sure of our relation to something we must first know what it is. The fact is that two worlds coexist around us. One God made out of nothing; the other man made by taking the materials that originally came from God and fashioning them into a moral caricature of the original.
