The choice here is between the spirit of the world and the spirit which is of God. Looking at this passage, it is interesting to note that the spirit which is of God has been received.
What do you see today? Even among the intellectuals, the world has rejected revelation. So there are no given fixed moral standards, for example. There are no fixed God-given values any more. There are no set principles as a foundation for all thinking: that has gone. So how does the world decide what is right and what is wrong? If it has rejected the set principles of the Bible, of the Christian faith, of God, how does it decide what is morally acceptable and what is not? Well ultimately, it is going to be largely decided by emotion: what people want. ‘No, no,’ the world insists, ‘it is decided by reason.’ But reason, is influenced by emotion. What I want, the lusts of the flesh. So moral values are turned round and even the greatest intellectuals with – and we credit them with this – great minds; they cannot think any more, because of they have got no foundation for thought., no fixed principles, no revealed moral system, nothing which God has declared to be right and fixed, reflecting his holy character. It has gone. So we are living in an emotionally guided world, and you see it all around you. People are taught to react entirely by their instincts in other words, their emotions. So ‘this is wrong’, or ‘this is right’, not because of the standards of God, but because of the lusts of the heart. ‘We have received not the spirit of the world, but the spirit which is of God.’ That is why Christians should not watch the soaps, which are training you into the emotional thinking of the spirit of the world, rejecting God’s standards, so that gradually the spirit of the world takes over your thinking processes. God intends that we should understand what he has given us and value it above anything that we might have in this world. That treasure will hold us from going back into the world again.