What is awaiting the believer and how does the world view believers who shun worldly pleasures?
The glory of an eternal future awaits the believer, an eternity so vast that seventy years of earthly time cannot be compared to unlimited billions of years. The world views believers who shun worldly pleasures as a bunch of kooks, unable to comprehend the eternal glory being prepared for them.
Les explains that the glory awaiting the believer is set against an eternity of unlimited billions of years. Compared to that, the seventy years or so of this life—and any shunning of worldly pleasures—cannot even be put into a mathematical ratio. Because the world has no concept of the eternal, it thinks believers who turn from the pleasures of this world for a few years are a bunch of kooks. Les ties this to Paul's Gospel: Paul speaks of what prepares us for that kind of eternity, saying that by the Gospel he preached, you are saved, but you must know what you believe—unless you believed in vain. That Gospel is that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, not by accident, but according to God's pre-eternal plan foreknown and counseled by God, as Peter says in Acts 2. John 3:16 is not to be discarded, but it must be used with this Pauline Gospel to make sense today.