The more we love God, the more everything else just naturally begins to feel like a waste of time in comparison. We stop caring about the things of the world because we grow out of them. It’s like a kid playing with tinker toys. When you grow older, you stop caring about tinker toys because you have so much better things to do. In the same way, as you love God more, you increasingly just stop caring about the things of the world. They start feeling like a waste of time because you have encountered something so infinitely superior. This feeling of distaste for things of the world grows more and more acute as we come to love God more and more.
We can pray for the gift of despising the things of the world for the sake of God, though. If this is prayed properly, it is truly the same as praying to love God and love your neighbor more completely. For this is what leads to despising the world. It comes down to entering very deeply into the love of God.
Imagine a young man who likes sports and hanging out and playing computer games, but doesn’t have much going on in his life. He meets a girl and falls passionately in love. Suddenly all the former fun activities cease to matter as much. Because his love for the girl is so much more important to him, the old things cease to feel so fun while he is without her.
1 Corinthians 13:11, “When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put childish ways behind me.”
