Today’s passage say this: “But mark this: There will be terrible times in the last days. People will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boastful, proud, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, without love, unforgiving, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not lovers of the good, treacherous, rash, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God— having a form of godliness but denying its power. Have nothing to do with such people.”
My brother, my sister, have you asked yourself why the Lord asks us not to have anything to do with such people? It seems obvious: it is because there is in fact no love in them. And it is simple: where there is no love, there is danger. You see, it is so easy to love what pleases us more than what pleases the Lord. But, pleasure is something that does not last, that we can control. Yet God cannot be controlled.
The fact is, we are given the freedom to do what we want by the Lord. But we are also warned that not everything we decide to do is profitable to us (1 Corinthians 10:23). Most pleasures can be obtained easily. The love for God requires effort and sometimes sacrifices. Pleasure has a narcotic effect: it takes our minds off ourselves and our daily lives or circumstances. The only problem is that, once that narcotic effect is over, we have to face the reality again. In fact, pleasure does not remove any problem or answer any question we may have, it just worsens our pride: the more we dig into what pleases us, the more we stay into it because it makes us feel good, especially when we look good in the eyes of others. Truly… only the people who participate in our pleasure will agree with us in such moments. Now, the love for God reminds us of our needs and our responsibilities as we must lay aside our pride and our accomplishments in order to depend on Him.
So, my friend, have you chosen to love pleasure or to love God? How do you know? The Bible shows us that true followers of Christ do not live by their feelings (what pleases them) or appearances… they live by faith, hoping that the grace received from the sacrifice of the Cross will fulfill all the promises of God in their lives and that something amazing that only God could do happened when the veil was broken (Matthew 27:50-55)… My friend, there is no ‘pleasure’ search in our walk with the Lord… there is only a ‘love’ search… We all know that God loves us so much that He gave His Son (John 3:16). Our walk with Him is therefore to love others: “This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us. And we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers and sisters” (1 John 3:16)… Look how those 2 verses seem identical except that the 1 on the second one is each of us individually! Indeed, pleasure is temporal, but love is eternal. Satan lost love eternally that is the reason why he is so angry against us to the point that he wants to destroy us because God loves us. Stay blessed in Jesus’ name.