The World and the Father.
I. While St. John looks encouragingly and hopefully on the young men, while he sees in them the strength of the time that is as well as of the time that is to come, he is also fully alive himself, and he wishes them to be alive, to the danger of their new position. They may forget their heavenly Father's house, just as any child may forget his earthly father's house. And the cause will be the same. The attractions of the outward world, the attractions of the things that are in this world these are likely to put a great chasm between one period of their life and another; these may cause that the love of the Father shall not be in them. They are to beware of love of the world, because, if it possesses them and overmasters them, they will assuredly lose all sense that they ever did belong to a Father, and that they are still His children. The Father's love must prevail over this, or it will drive the Father's love out of us. The Father's love to the world which He has created is never absent from the Apostle's mind; he does not wish it to be ever absent from the minds of the young men to whom he is writing. If they keep up the recollection of it, they will in new circumstances and amidst new trials retain the freshness of their childish feelings; the home and the family will be dearer to them than ever.
II. Here, then, are good reasons why the young men shall not love the world, neither the things that are in the world. For if they do, (1) their strength will forsake them; they will give up the power that is in them to the things on which the power is to be exerted; they will be ruled by that which they are meant to rule. (2) Next, they will not have any real insight into these things or sympathy with them. Those who love the world, those who surrender themselves to it, never understand it, never, in the best sense, enjoy it; they are too much on the level of it yes, too much below the level of it, for they look up to it, they depend upon it to be capable of contemplating it and of appreciating what is most exquisite in it "He that doeth the will of God abideth for ever." He has attached himself to the unchangeable, the eternal; he belongs to an order which cannot disappear. It is the order of Him whose children we are; of Him who created the world and all that is in it; of Him who loved the world, and sent His Son into it to claim it as His.
F. D. Maurice, The Epistles of St. John,p. 117.
References: 1 John 2:16; 1 John 2:17. W. J. Dawson, Christian World Pulpit,vol. xxxii., p. 406; J. Keble, Sermons from Septuagesima to Ash Wednesday,p. 230.