I do not ask that you take them out of the world
Our role is in fact to remain in the world as witnesses, to be the presence of Jesus to others. Yet in Jesus we have a new relationship to the world, one of freedom, in which we are no longer slaves to the subhuman forces of sin that reign in the world.
Formerly, when you did not know God, you were enslaved to those that by nature are not gods. But now that you have come to know God, or rather to be known by God, how can you turn back again to the weak and worthless elementary principles of the world, whose slaves you want to be once more? (see Galatians 4:8-1).
We have been transferred from the kingdom of darkness into the kingdom of light (see Colossians 1:13). As Christians, grace makes us one with Christ and with one another. This unity is the fundamental truth about us that is meant to define us and shape our lives. The Father is always ready on his end to consecrate us in this truth. But we must do our part, which is to receive his word, meditate upon it, and to let it shape our words and actions. Otherwise, our consecration would be like a priest empowered to say mass who refused, preferring instead to stay home and watch television. We must act in line with what God has made true about us, remembering that we are meant to be in the world but not of it, living like "those who deal with the world [but] as though they had no dealings with it" (see First Corinthians 7:31).
We have been made members of a better kingdom and given a better purpose. We tend to forget about this truth and revert to living from old habit patterns and ways of thinking. The Evil One desires this forgetfulness in us. Jesus prays for us against the Evil One, and gives us his word precisely as the antidote to this sort of forgetfulness.
Life apart from Christ may once have afforded us some pleasures. But now that we have been consecrated to Christ true joy is possible for us. This is not as a consequence of circumstances, but as a gift of the Spirit. The Evil One would prefer we backslide into our former ways of attempting to satisfy ourselves without reference to God. But being grounded in the word rather than the world reminds us that joy is ours to receive, not because we deserve it, nor because of the circumstances, but rather because Jesus himself loves us and desires to share his joy with us.
We see in Paul exactly this same concern that his followers remain in the truth so that the truth can bear fruit in them. There is the same link between the truth and the fruit we receive, which Paul calls our inheritance.
And now I commend you to God
and to that gracious word of his that can build you up
and give you the inheritance among all who are consecrated.
The word can build us up. The more meditate on it, speak it, pray it, and live it, the more we will be built, becoming temples fit to be dwelling places of God in the Spirit. We might worry that this other worldly life might make us no earthly good. But Paul's life proved this false. Our new life, in the world but not of it, does not make us less human, but more. Our relationships with others are strengthened beyond what is even possible at a natural level.
They were all weeping loudly
as they threw their arms around Paul and kissed him,
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