The spirit of anti-Christ works in believers to produce lawlessness; that is, a lawless handling of the Word of God and a lawless understanding of the Word of God. The wisdom of God is found in the word of God by the spirit of God; there is another wisdom, the wisdom of the world that is found in the doctrines of men and the traditions of the elders, the teachings of men; that is the wisdom of this world and it is brought by the spirit of anti-Christ
The spirit of the world, on the other hand, works in believers to produce unrighteousness; that is, unholiness of life; his method is to turn our hearts, our minds and our souls away from total concentration on the things of God, instead into concentration on the things of this world. The lustful spirits of the spirit of the world turn Christians towards earthly things and away from God and this transforms them into “enemies of the cross of Christ who set their minds on earthly things” (Philippians 3:18-19); they walk by sight, not faith.
To live a godly life we must have a consciousness of God at all times. In all that we do, in all that we think, in all that we say, God must be central; that is what the Bible describes as “godliness” and the opposite is said to be “ungodliness”, which is a condition of believers, not unbelievers, who are described as “godless”.
To combat the spirit of the world that leads us away from the consciousness of Christ and into a consciousness of the material things of this world and the flesh, we must be constantly renouncing it; when worldly thoughts come into our minds we must be vigilant to renounce them and cast them from us in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and come back to the consideration of the world of the divine, that world to which we have aspirations to belong eternally; but unless we belong to it in this world, how can we belong to it in the next?
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