Week 4 – Escaping the world’s corruption

Corruption. If you live in the world, you know. 

These days, we are drowning in corruption – politicians throwing around threats and money, bribery, cover-ups, covert racism – the list goes on and on. 

But corruption isn’t new.

The idea of corruption goes all the way back to Genesis. Genesis details how God created the heavens and the earth, light, water, land and sky –  everything functioning in beautiful symbiotic harmony. 

Genesis 1:31 God saw all that he had made, and it was very good.

In other words – everything was superb, there was no corruption.

We know what happens next though, don’t we?  Adam and Eve fall prey to Satan and his seductive temptation, which leads them to disobey God and introduce sin into God’s masterpiece.  And just like that, creation is corrupted. 

Adam and Eve’s sin was the start of the same corruption that Peter referred to in our passage. And that first corruption of the world, was, like all corruption, caused by evil desires. In Adam and Eve’s case, the desire to know and rely on their own knowledge of good and evil rather than relying on God’s wisdom and instruction. In other words, the same fundamental desire we all struggle with – stepping outside the kingdom of God and stepping into the kingdom of self.

So, how can we escape the corruption of our hearts?

It’s a matter of simple physics – an object in motion tends to stay in motion.  We can only do one thing at a time and we can only be in one place at a time. So we are participating in God’s kingdom, we are abiding with him. When we are participating in living like Jesus, we are, by default, not living in sin. It’s a pretty simple idea, really.  

Think about it, spending our days with our head down, muttering to ourselves “Don’t sin…don’t sin… don’t sin”, never works. Because will power is feeble.

The only means of escaping corruption is participation. We must be actively engaged in the participation of the divine nature of God, just like our verse says. You see, when we draw close to God, actively participating in his divine nature, (that is, becoming like him), we find less time, inclination and opportunity to fall into our fleshly desires. The gospel’s instruction is not simply to cut out all sin and call it a day, but to be pro-active in our faith – that is, following him, serving others and emulating his love in the world. And as we participate in God’s nature, so we begin our own transformation, naturally growing towards Christ-likeness. 

So what are the nuts and bolts of participation in God’s divine nature? This means spending time with God in prayer, reading and meditating on his Word. Not just those practices though, it’s about surrounding ourselves with other believers, committing to serve, listen, encourage others, keeping kind words on our tongue and pure thoughts in our head… a life full of love for our Heavenly Father will naturally result in minds and hearts that  bend and reach towards God’s light, becoming a little more like Him every day.