With Christ, we can overcome the world

By Fr. Roy Cimagala

THAT’S what St. John in his First Letter said. “Who is he that overcomes the world, but he that believes that Jesus is the Son of God,” he said. Christ himself said it in a most explicit way, assuring that everything will be ok as long as are with him. “In this world you will have trouble,” he said. “But take heart! I have overcome the world.” (Jn 16,33)

This divine assurance, of course, does not exempt us from waging a continual spiritual struggle all throughout our life. And for this, we should just learn the art of spiritual warfare, equipping ourselves with nothing less than the “whole armor of God,” as St. Paul in his Letter to Ephesians recommends. (cfr. 6,11)

With Christ, we can manage to drown evil with an abundance of good. We can manage to love even our enemies. We can always find ways to sanctify ourselves and the world itself, especially in the areas of politics and business, and the rapidly developing technologies that are giving us new challenges and trials.

Yes, we should not be afraid of the world. In fact, we can and ought to love the world without being worldly. That’s because God himself created the world which is given to us for our own good. It only became bad and dangerous when it already got affected by our sins.

And so, with respect to what the proper attitude we should have toward the world, we should always remember that it is also God’s creation and should be treated according to the will and purpose God has for it.

We should therefore know how to be in the world, without being worldly, trapped and imprisoned in worldly things, and failing to look, find and love God and everybody else. And the secret is to follow Christ who shows us how to be in the world without being worldly.

Christ, who is the very essence of wealth and human dignity, lived a very simple life: he had nowhere to be born or die, nowhere to lay his head, came to our world with nothing and left it also with nothing. In his public life, he sent his apostles to preach without extra luggage.

We need to understand that poverty and a certain detachment from earthly things are required for our hearts to be properly filled with the spirit of God and to enable us to fulfill our mission in the world and to pursue the real purpose of our life.

We have to be most wary of the danger of worldliness which is becoming practically irresistible these days. Yes, it’s true that we have to love the world since that is where God has placed us to test us if what he wants us to be is also what we ourselves would like to be. We should love the world the way God loves it, but we should not be held captive by it.

The secret, of course, is to see to it that our mind and heart are always with God. We should not allow ourselves to be fully taken by the charms and deceiving allurements of the world. We have to be completely detached from it, which does not mean that we should hate it. On the contrary, we have to be immersed in it as much as possible and yet love it but in the way God loves it.

Email: roycimagala@gmail.com