As I mentioned yesterday, I’m speaking this weekend at the National Preachers & Leaders Conference in Daytona Beach, Florida. It’s a gathering of leaders of Hispanic churches and others involved with outreach in Spanish. I’m really honored to get to speak. Besides the three classes I mentioned yesterday, I was also asked to give a keynote address.

The overall theme of the conference is love. My assigned topic for that talk is “Love Not The World.” I was encouraged to make the talk especially applicable to church leaders.

I was sorely tempted to do some of my presentations on citizenship and what it means to be strangers and aliens. But that doesn’t seem to fit the context of 1 John 2, which is the passage that was given to me along with the title. 1 John 2 is talking about the desires of the world: flesh, eyes, pride of life. I decided to be true to the text and discuss that topic.

I first want to use John 17 to demonstrate that “love not the world” isn’t talking about trashing the planet or even hating the people around us. “The world,” in much of John’s writings, refers to those who don’t follow God. It’s the idea of being “in the world but not of the world.”

From there, I’ll look at the three types of temptations John mentions. I’ll relate them to the temptation of Eve (saw fruit was good for food, was beautiful to look at, was to be desired to make one wise) and the temptation of Jesus (tempted with bread, “shown” the nations of the world, tempted to throw himself from the top of the temple).

From there I’ll steal something that Trey Morgan tweeted once, about the three G’s that plague preachers: girls, gold, glory. I’ll offer some practical advice that others have shared with me.

One thing that I want to impress on these guys is that reasonable safeguards are not enough. We’ve got to be willing to be unreasonably careful in these areas. I’ll use the example of civic planning. When considering the necessary zoning rules for floods, engineers can’t just think about a typical year’s rainfall. They have to be ready for the 100-year flood, that once-a-century storm that can wash everything away. In the same way, we can’t rely on measures that work 95% of the time. We need to be extreme in our care. (And no, I don’t expect everyone to agree, especially the younger guys who haven’t seen as many people fall)

Those are my thoughts for sharing on Saturday. But there’s still time to sway me! What modifications or additions would you suggest regarding this topic?