"Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world..."
By Scott Tibbs, April 22, 2019
I have addressed this before, but I will expand on it here. I get a lot of hate mail on this topic, so let me clarify where I stand. Christians are not forbidden from all worldly entertainment. This includes watching sports, movies or TV, playing video games, playing board games, solving puzzles and so forth. There may be a few sects of Christianity who believe this, and if that is how they want to live, more power to them. I do not judge how you live your life. However, this is not the position of the vast majority of sincere Christians.
But the Bible says that we are not to love the things that are in the world, right? The Bible says we are to be separate from the world right? Well, we have to have some common sense here. We cannot cherry pick a couple verses out of context and then dogmatically apply them to all of life in the most extreme way possible. If we were to do that, then Christians cannot hold a job outside of the church. After all, if someone has a job he enjoys, he "loves the world" and is disobeying Scripture. But the Bible also commands Christians to work, so the two commandments are in conflict! Um, no they are not.
But it does not stop there. A dogmatic, extreme interpretation of those two commands from Scripture means that Christians cannot go on vacations to historical landmarks, Christians cannot allow their children to have toys, and Christians cannot learn about science, math, literature or history. Furthermore, Christians cannot watch or play sports, Christians cannot go to a friend's music recital and cannot play any kind of game: video games, board games, card games, jigsaw puzzles, and so on and so forth. Christians cannot even go on a walk and enjoy the beauty of nature.
Obviously this is absurd. God does not want us to stop living out lives the moment we become saved. Obviously, there are Biblical principles to apply here – such as not spending so much time with entertainment that you neglect your responsibilities or neglect worship of God – but there is no explicit command in the Bible that we must avoid all worldly entertainment. What we may not do is put anything above God: Not our entertainment, not our employment and not our family. Our ultimate and final loyalty is to the Lord Jesus Christ and nothing is to be placed above that.
The Bible never expected us to go out of the world. In fact, the Apostle Paul says we should not go totally out of the world in 1 Corinthians 5, and Paul worked with his hands making tents. Christians will always be interacting with the secular world because this is how God made the world.
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