Today is part three of a series. This is our High Intensity Summer (HIS) series. My topic today is: The World
It started with a car ride, and the day the Holy Spirit redirected our plans.
We call this our High Intensity Summer.
I won’t rehash everything, but in the last eight weeks:
We have seen 380 men and women, believers in Christ, pray a prayer of consecration and rededication to the Lord. They have stated an intention: I intend to live a life of grace-powered holiness.
Our goal is 500, and it’s not too late for you.
Over 283 people have stepped up to do prayer walking in our city, and together they have prayed for over 25,000 home and families, on location. God is already working in those souls, and drawing them that golden moment called salvation.
Our goal was 200 prayer walkers, and we surpassed that.
And our goal is to pray for 50,000 homes, and we’re more than halfway there, with 5 weeks to go.
We now have about 100 volunteers who have stepped up to be the hands of Jesus in service and compassion and love — practical, get your hands dirty, get your shirt sweaty, and get your boots muddy acts to be the hands and feet of Jesus in the world. This is on top of all the stuff we’re already doing.
Our goal is 5,000 acts of service with 300 volunteers, and we only launched this phase last weekend. We need you.

So that’s stuff that’s already happening. But there’s more.
In a few minutes, I am going to unveil a new HIS initiative. But wait, there’s even more.
Because on top of all this, we are about to launch an evangelistic effort…
We will bring in a special speaker, digitally… and I am super excited. His name is Justin Brierley, and he has been interviewing atheists for 10 years and has a lot to say about why Christianity is true.
He is an apologist by trade — meaning he defends the faith logically, philosophically, scientifically, and psychologically.
All of that to say that when the people of God put the mission first, a whole lot can happen in eight weeks. Thank you. I am proud to be on this mission with you at Pathway Church.

There’s one thing that I feel compelled to keep talking about. In this series, I’ve been reminding you to look beneath the surface. In all of these activities, in all of these goals, programs, and events, it is super-important to look beneath the surface.
Because if you peek behind the veil, you will see another realm at play. Scripture reveals an invisible realm.
I am talking about the spiritual realm of the heavenlies. And whether we are talking about consecration, or prayer walking, or Christian service, or especially about evangelism, there are invisible, eternal, forces locked in an ages long conflict for the souls of humans and the destiny of the world.
This is bigger than any of us realizes.
We are fighting for souls. We are fighting for the glory of God and the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.

For the weapons of our warfare are not carnal but mighty in God for pulling down strongholds, casting down arguments and every high thing that exalts itself against the knowledge of God, bringing every thought into captivity to the obedience of Christ, (2 Corinthians 10:4, 5)

Please think with me, for the next few minutes, on the topic of a word that is so common in the Bible, most of us stop thinking about what it means.
I am talking the word, world, and my goal is to show you there is a depth of meaning in this word that most Christians haven’t begun to realize. We are going to think of the World, the World Spirit, World Religion, and World Government.

World

Let me give you a couple of quick facts about language and linguistics.
A word is a placeholder for an idea. When you communicate a word, you hope to conjure the same idea in the other person’s head that you have in your head about that word.
Every word has a range of meanings. For example, a bill can either be the front end of a duck, or the thing that the electric company sends you every month.
It is the context that helps the other person figure out exactly what meaning you have in mind when you communicate your word.
Now, let’s take the word, world.
In the Bible, world has a range of meaning. It can mean the earth. It can mean the people of the earth (God so loved the world). It can have a variety of meanings. It’s the context that tells you which meaning is in play.
What is the meaning in these contexts?

Do not love the world or the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. (1 John 2:15)

Adulterers and adulteresses! Do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God? Whoever therefore wants to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God. (James 4:4)

In Scripture, the world has a dark side, and this is actually the main way that the Bible uses this word.
The Greek word is kosmos. Kosmos mainly refers to the arrangement of things. The system, the harmonious arrangement, the order of things. We get the word cosmetics from this. It is an intentional assembling of things into a system.
In the Bible, whenever the word world is used in this sense, it is negative. It is morally messed up. So, we are going to call this the world-system.

How is this kosmos arranged?

The world-system includes every human institution, structure, government, and organization.

Media, social media, arts, government, education, academia, entertainment, politics, even sports, and sad to say, even so much that goes on in the church. The devil has his fingerprints on all of it.
It is worldly. It is part of the world-system that is set for good without God.
And remember from the first two weeks, all of this is very subtle, and underground, and incognito because the devil is subtle.
To love the world-system is to make yourself an enemy of God. When a person loves the world-system, it shows the love of the Father is not in them.
So that is a basic idea of the cosmos, the world-system. Why is this such a negative thing?

World Spirit

The world-system is a negative thing because it is drunk, and driving under the influence of Satan. This is what I mean when I say the World Spirit.
How do we know the world-system is under the influence of Satan? Simple. The Bible says so.
Three times, Jesus refers to Satan as the prince of this world-system. The archon, ruler or governmental chief, of this kosmos (John 12:31; 14:30; 16:11).
The devil is called the “prince of the power of the air” (Eph 2:2) and “the god of this age” (1 Cor 4:4).
John writes:

We know that we are of God, and the whole world-system (kosmos) lies under the sway of the Wicked One. (1 John 5:19)

When God set Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, he gave them dominion. That is the ownership and right to rule the world. When they sinned, they surrender the scepter of the world to Satan. And now, the whole world lies under the devil’s sway.
There’s a really remarkable event in the life of Jesus. The devil came to tempt him.
One of those temptations went down like this:

Then the devil, taking Him up on a high mountain, showed Him all the kingdoms of the world in a moment of time. And the devil said to Him, “All this authority I will give You, and their glory; for this has been delivered to me, and I give it to whomever I wish. “Therefore, if You will worship before me, all will be Yours.” And Jesus answered and said to him, “Get behind Me, Satan! For it is written, ‘You shall worship the LORD your God, and Him only you shall serve.’” (Luke 4:5-8)

Do you see what happened? The devil claimed ownership of all the kingdoms of the world-system, and Jesus did not argue with that claim. It was the devil’s to give.
When we talk about the world-spirit, we are talking about a philosophy of life that has been warped by the lies of the devil and the doctrines of demons.
The world-spirit is a system of thought. It is the default setting of every single person you know who has not had their minds rehabbed the Bible.
I’m saying that the devil is a philosopher. He is an appealing philosopher. He is a seductive philosopher. He is a confusing philosopher, because his position is irrational. He is a popular philosopher, because he has basically hypnotized the whole, wide, world.

See to it that no one takes you captive through philosophy and empty deception, according to the tradition of men, according to the elementary principles of the world-system [kosmos], rather than according to Christ. (Colossians 2:8, NASB)

The devil’s philosophy is high-sounding nonsense. It is arrogant intellectualism.
This is what I mean by the world-spirit.

The world-spirit is the high sounding nonsense of satanic philosophy that sounds so good and saturates the whole wide world.

Like a bicycle wheel, this philosophy has one hub with many spokes that radiate from it.
The hub has always been the same since the misty dawn of civilization in the Garden of Eden. The hub is “good without God.” The hub is Lucifer’s ambition when he said, I will be like the Most High (Isaiah 14:14).
The devil doesn’t want to be unlike God. He wants to be like God.
So his philosophy packs in all the good it can, but without God. That’s why it’s so deceptive. It looks so good.

The hub of satanic philosophy is a declaration of independence from God.

Then, radiating out of that hub, you have all its different spokes:
hedonism, religion, stoicism, secularism, and on and on.
The devil is pumping out his philosophy, all the time. You are being bombarded. And your shield is faith, and your sword is the Word of God. Without that, a person is sucked in.
I am talking about your friends, your family, your neighbors, your kids, the people you know at work… apart from the restraining work of the Holy Spirit, they will be taken captive to the building blocks of the world-system’s philosophy.
Cosmic philosophy always ends in absurdity, which leads to despair which leads to death in this world, and condemnation in the world to come.
When you look beneath the surface of our High Intensity Summer, we are using the weapons of our warfare to pull down the stronghold of the world spirit of this age. 

World Religion

Not only is the devil a philosopher, but he is pastor too.
If the devil could wave his magic wand and create a world religion, it wouldn’t be satanism. It would be secularism. It would be humanism. It would be legalism. It would be any way to incarnate the “good without God” motto.

Every time you hear someone declare that all religions are the same, you can count on the whisper of Satan animating that claim.

Satan is working ceaselessly to mind control the world. The best way for him to do that is through religion. He is great with religion. The devil loves religion. He loves everything that keeps a person in darkness from the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ, crucified and risen again.
If there is a Christ-less gospel, the devil is cheering it on.
If there is a Cross-less gospel, the devil is cheering it on.

Now the Spirit expressly says that in latter times some will depart from the faith, giving heed to deceiving spirits and doctrines of demons, speaking lies in hypocrisy, having their own conscience seared with a hot iron, (1 Timothy 4:1, 2)

According to the prophets of Scripture, before the return of the Lord, we are to expect a coming world religion.

This world religion has FALSE PRIESTS.

These are the elites of academia, social media, politics, theology, and academia. These are the thought police, pulling the levers over at the ministry of truth, and punishing dissent with banishment and exile and loss of personhood.
They’ve even given themselves a name. They call themselves “the Brights.” As in bright lights. So you have articles about them:
A Bright New World, in Psychology Today
A Brights Idea, in the St Petersburg Times
Let There Be Brights, by atheist Richard Dawkins in Wired Magazine
The Bright Stuff, by atheist Daniel Dennett, in the New York Times
The World is in Need of Influential Brights, by atheist Florian Aigner
These Brights are the priests of a new world order, a kosmos saturated with great ideas that have never actually worked anywhere.
This satanic world religion has a False HIGH PRIEST. This will be a person called the False Prophet, but there are many mini-examples in the run up to that day. (Rev 19:20)

The world religion has a FALSE GOD.

There is a Satanic Trinity of the Dragon, the AntiChrist, and the False Prophet.
You should know that anti doesn’t mean opposite, in Greek.
Anti means instead of.
The Antichrist takes the place of Christ, and says, “I am an angel of light, and I’m here to help.”

The world religion has a FALSE SALVATION.

It is being woke, or social justice, economic justice, or liberation, or swallowing the post-modern pill of ultra tolerance, a term of Orwellian double-speak if ever there were one.

The World religion has a FALSE SAVIOR.

This would be all those antichrists leading up to the Antichrist.

This world religion has a FALSE HEAVEN.

It is a Christ-less Utopia. Its anthem is John Lennon’s Imagine. Its hell is anything that stands in the way of achieving it.

Every time people sacrifice TRUTH on the altar of UNITY they serve the globalizing power of the satanic world-system’s religion.

World religion isn’t the ultimate goal however. World government is.

World Government

If the devil could, he would create a good and beautiful world, united in independence from God.

The world depicts Satan as a fiend, making his home in hell, and making himself busy tormenting souls.
That deception is part of his strategy, and could not be further from the truth.
The devil is the embodiment of the highest ideals the world-system has ever conceived. He himself inspires those ideals. If he could get rid of violence and sin, he would do it.
The devil’s ambition leads him to make this world as nearly perfect as his wisdom and power can make it.
All the gross violence and depravity of the world is evidence of the  human heart’s corruption and ironically, of the devil’s impotence.
He has always wanted to be “LIKE the most high.”
Satan’s ideal is an improved social order, with with a decent and moral people, ruled by the Brights, locked in some kind of utopian kingdom on earth.
Be careful what you do for the kingdom. Make sure you’re serving the right kingdom.

A good and united world is the devil’s greatest goal. It is also his greatest frustration.

God has taken out every power that has ever tried to unite the world under one political rule.
It started with the Tower of Babel. Then the ancient empires. Then the Egyptians, The Assyrians, the Babylonians with Nebuchadnezzar, the Persians with Cyrus, the Greeks with Alexander the Great, and the Romans with the Caesars.
Into the modern era, the National Socialists (Nazis) under Hitler, the Communists under Lenin, Stalin, and Mao…
World Government will always be tyrannical. Why? Because the human heart is corrupted, and only the only people available to govern the devil’s world-system are depraved, morally corrupt people.
Utopia is impossible. Utopia is actually dangerous. It plays right into the devil’s hands.
World government is pathological.
Satan cannot do it. He cannot pull it off. He is not wise enough. He is not powerful enough.
It is impossible.
That is, the Lord Jesus Christ at his return.

When Christ returns, he will set up the one and only global government that can actually work and dignify its citizens.

Only Jesus can do this. Only Jesus has the wisdom. Only Jesus has the power. Only Jesus has the ability. Only Jesus has the purest motives.

Then the seventh angel sounded: And there were loud voices in heaven, saying, “The kingdoms of this world have become the kingdoms of our Lord and of His Christ, and He shall reign forever and ever!” (Revelation 11:15)

Ruling with Christ will be people who have been given new hearts, with the corruption of sin removed, and a heart of love for God and neighbor perfected.
This is the millennium. This is the kingdom of God.
This is the end of the world system. It proves the lie of the cosmos diabolicus.

The World-System (kosmos) is poison; the gospel of Christ is the antidote.

It is the desire to populate Christ’s coming kingdom, and to rescue a lost world for heaven after that, that motivates everything we do as a church, especially in our High Intensity Summer.

New Initiative

Pathway church is going to help launch an operation in Thailand to help rescue young women and men from the sex trafficking industry and to bring them to Christ.
This is part of our High Intensity Summer.
Global Compassion Project
International Workers:
Tou Lee Thao and Tang Thao
Bangkok, Thailand, Red Light District (4,000 sex workers every night)
Connections with Sex Workers who are deaf
Connections with David & Aleah Nishizaki
Goal
that Pathway Church will support the gospel by raising $50,000 to jumpstart this incredible mission to sex workers and students in Thailand.

Pathwaychurch.life/give