Excerpt from This World: Playground or Battleground? by A.W. Tozer:

The world is for all of us not what it is – it is what we believe it to be.

In the early days, when Christianity exercised a dominant influence over American thinking, men and women conceived the world to be a battleground. Our fathers believed in sin and the devil and hell as constituting one force, and they believe in God and righteousness and heaven as the other. By their very nature, these forces were opposed to each other forever in deep, grave, irreconcilable hostility.

Humans had to chose sides – they could not be neutral. For them it must be life or death, heaven or hell, and if they chose to come out on God’s side, they could expect open war with God’s enemies…. They never forgot what kind of world they lived in – it was a battleground, and many were wounded and slain.

That view is unquestionably scriptural… that tremendous spiritual forces are present in the world. Humanity, because of its spiritual nature, is caught in the middle. The evil powers are bent on destroying us, while Christ is present to save us through the power of the gospel. To obtain deliverance we must come out on God’s side in faith and obedience. That in brief is what our fathers thought.

How different today. The fact remains the same, but the interpretation has changed completely. People think of the world not as a battleground, but as a playground. We are not here to fight; we are here to frolic. We are not in a foreign land; we are at home. We are not getting ready to live, but we are already living, and the best we can do is… live this life to the full.

[Many Christians] are facing both ways… gleefully telling everyone that accepting Jesus does not require them to give up their fun…. The “worship” growing out of such a view of life is as far off center as the view itself – a sort of sanctified nightclub without the champagne and the dressed-up drunks.

Having discovered the scriptural way, Christians must follow it, even if to do so, they must separate themselves from much that they had accepted as real, but which now in the light of truth is seen to be false.

( I hope this excerpt will encourage you to read – The World: Playground or Battleground? A Call to the Real World of the Spiritual by A.W. Tozer, compiled and edited by Harry Verploegh, Christian Publications, 1989. )