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. For all that is in the world—the desires of the flesh and the desires of the eyes and pride in possessions—is not from the Father but is from the world. And the world is passing away along with its desires, but whoever does the will of God abides forever. 1 John 2:15-17

You’ve probably heard this verse in church at some point in your life. You may have even had your small group leader or pastor touch base on it at some point. Well, what does it really mean? What is The Lord really trying to say?

My stomach churns when I think about the way people who don’t know Jesus feel when the weight of the world crashes down on them. What do they have to look forward to? Who do they have to pray to? What does their hope lie in? One answer: the world. They look for hope in the world, they look forward to the world, and they pray to the world. Looking back on my time in college so far, I have found myself “that person” at times. Okay let’s face it, I was looking to the world for the majority of my time here. I have looked to friends, family, grades, social activities, parties, boys - for what? Happiness. Joy. Satisfaction. Fulfillment. And guess what? Those things last only a little while. Those things are always brief. Those things are always ending.

Don’t get me wrong, though. I love going out with my friends; I love being social; I love meeting new people; I love my family; I even love obsessing over my grades. And honestly, there’s nothing wrong with that. But where I go wrong is when I look for happiness and joy in those things. And yes, I realize all those things can bring us fulfillment. But where we really go wrong is when we rely on those temporary things to forever satisfy us.

For example, think of the way you feel on Sunday mornings. Sunday mornings in college are hard. The excitement of the weekend is behind us. We put off our obligations, our homework, and basically all of our realities until this day. We have a whole week of school ahead of us, and we get overwhelmed all at once just thinking of the upcoming challenges we must face. Growing up, I loved Sundays. Sundays meant my family and I would load into the car and go to church, followed by my dad cooking out on the grill for lunch and my mom preparing a Sunday night’s dinner. Sure, we had a little homework here and there. But I just remember always loving that day. So what happened to that? How did we get to this point? College students (for the most part) hate Sundays. Why? Because we spent our week looking forward to the things that don’t truly satisfy us. That date party is over, your bottle of alcohol is empty, and the football team won again - so now what?

I realize that we are always going to feel the burden of Sundays at least a little bit. The fact that the weekend is over and there’s a week of work ahead of you is always going to, well, suck. But along the way, we need to remember that the only thing that will satisfy us is The Lord. I need to live my life in a way that reflects how much I hate sin and how badly I don’t need these worldly possessions. Once I do that, I can find the desire to be changing the world instead of chasing it.

So I have to make that decision - which life am I living for? My life on earth, or my life after earth? I find myself depending on happiness in things that I can so easily lose. Well, the one thing we can’t lose is Jesus. Luke 9:25 says: It is worth nothing for you to have the whole world if you yourself are destroyed or lost. When Jesus returns, (news flash @Kardashians) your wealth will mean nothing. We can’t take any of this with us, so why do we let it destroy us, just like Luke said?

It’s okay to have nice things. It’s okay to love people, places, and yes, even things, on this earth. What's not okay is when we rely on these things wholeheartedly, yet shove God under the rug. Luke 16:9-10 then says: Here’s the lesson: Use your worldly resources to benefit others and make friends. Then, when your earthly possessions are gone, they will welcome you to an eternal home.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned throughout my life, it’s that the desires of our flesh get us nowhere. While I knew this and was preached this multiple times before college, I didn’t experience my own personal reality with this until I was filthy in sin.

Matthew 10:39 says: If you cling to your life, you will lose it; but if you give up your life for me, you will find it. We cling to our lives too much during the week, resulting in a tangled sea of obligations and worries. So maybe, just maybe, if we look for that hope in Jesus, we can feel satisfied with the Sundays we have left here.