Love Not the World

Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him. 1 JOHN 2:15

One chapter of Julia Foote’s memoir bears the title Love not the World, and it opens with the verse above. It is the least fashionable part of her teaching. She wrote against drink, dancing, the theatre, fine clothes and the worldly ways of professing Christians, and some of what she wrote will sound stern. But behind the rules was a conviction that deserves a hearing: that a heart made clean will show it, and that the world is quick to notice when it does not.

The accursed cup

Her warnings against drink were not theory. She grew up in a world where liquor was passed round at weddings and funerals alike, where, she says, the pall-bearers could sometimes scarcely carry out the coffin, and where the officiating clergyman drank as freely as anyone. Her parents kept liquor in the house, made a sweetened drink of it every morning, and gave the children the bottom of the cup. At five she drained a bottle she found in an unlocked chest, and very nearly died.

Woe unto him that giveth his neighbour drink, that puttest thy bottle to him, and makest him drunken also. HABAKKUK 2:15

So when she turned to her readers, she turned first to parents. Do not give your children, she pleaded, the cup that will send them down to misery and death. Listen to the woes of the drunkard and the wailing of poor women and children, “and touch not the accursed cup.” She looked beyond the home, too, and called on Christian men to vote as they prayed, that the legal traffic in spirits might be abolished. (In the same breath she asked God to banish capital punishment, having watched her own schoolteacher hanged; she believed the gospel of Him who prayed for His murderers had outrun the law of a life for a life. Christians have differed on both questions, and a reader need not follow her into every conclusion to feel the force of what she saw.)

Wine is a mocker, strong drink is raging: and whosoever is deceived thereby is not wise. PROVERBS 20:1

Like many in the holiness and temperance movements of her century, she treated total abstinence as the plain duty of every Christian. Scripture condemns drunkenness in the strongest terms, but it does not forbid wine as such, and many faithful believers have judged moderation to be lawful. Where she is surely right is in her refusal to treat drink as harmless in a culture that was being destroyed by it, and in her insistence that the strong should think first of the weak.

It is good neither to eat flesh, nor to drink wine, nor any thing whereby thy brother stumbleth, or is offended, or is made weak. ROMANS 14:21

The dance and the whole heart

Dancing she had reason to fear, as she tells it, because of what happened to her at one. Mocked as a little Methodist fool for stopping, she tried again and felt, she says, a heavy hand on her arm and heard a voice saying repent; the dance broke up in silence. She goes so far as to say that if she had persisted, she believes God would have struck her dead. A reader should take that as the conviction of a frightened girl rather than as a rule for others. But the argument she built on it is worth hearing. People told her that David danced. So he did, she answered, and Miriam too, but as worship. What she objected to was the pleasure that dulls the appetite for God. And she put the matter in a single line: “Put away your idols, and give God the whole heart.”

That is the key to all her strictness. She was not interested in a list of forbidden pleasures for its own sake. She was interested in the heart, and she believed that the pursuits a person loves reveal where the heart is.

If the mind be renewed

On dress, her argument was short and sharp. Paul tells believers not to be conformed to the world but transformed by the renewing of their minds. Some say this refers to the mind and not to the clothing. Her reply: “if the mind be renewed, it must affect the clothing.” She quoted Paul and Peter on modest apparel, and then added a principle that reaches far beyond clothes: “It is by the Word of God we are to be judged, not by our opinion of the Word.”

And be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God. ROMANS 12:2

In like manner also, that women adorn themselves in modest apparel, with shamefacedness and sobriety; not with broided hair, or gold, or pearls, or costly array; But (which becometh women professing godliness) with good works. 1 TIMOTHY 2:9–10

It would be easy to mock this, or to turn it into a new legalism. Her point was that the inward and outward life cannot be kept in separate rooms. She saw professing Christians, even some who claimed to be sanctified, conformed to all the maxims and fashions of the world, and asked whether the low state of religion in the churches was not the result.

The witness of a plain life

The deepest reason for all this is found back in the chapter on her call, when she reached for her letter of authority and found that it was in her heart and was to be shown in her life. That is what she meant by separation from the world. Not a code of dress, finally, but a life so plainly given to God that anyone could read it.

Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven. MATTHEW 5:16

Readers will draw their lines in different places from hers. But few Christians today are in danger of being too unworldly. Most are in danger of being unable to say, if asked, what difference their faith makes to how they spend their money, their evenings and their pleasures. Julia Foote could have answered that question in a sentence. The challenge of this chapter is to be able to answer it too.

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. List the three pleasures you would find it hardest to give up. Ask of each, honestly, whether it has become an idol, and give God the whole heart.

2. If drink has any hold on you or on anyone in your home, take one concrete step this week — tell someone, seek help, or put it away.

3. Think of one weaker brother or sister in your circle. Is there any liberty you enjoy that makes their path harder? Consider laying it down for their sake.

4. Ask whether your renewed mind has affected your clothing, your spending and your entertainment. Change one thing that it has not.

5. Test your views on worldliness by the Word of God, not by your opinion of the Word, and not by hers.

A PRAYER

Father, You have told me not to love the world, and I confess that I often do.

Search my pleasures and my habits, my cupboard and my wardrobe. Show me any idol I have not seen, and give me grace to put it away.

Make me mindful of the weak, the tempted and the children, and keep me from being a stumbling block to any of them.

Renew my mind, and let the renewal show, until my life is a letter anyone can read. Amen.