Recommended Citation:
Lawal, J. O. (2025, March 23). Friendship with the world. From Pastor’s Desk, 12(47).
Beloved: grace, mercy and peace be multiplied to you from God our Father and Jesus Christ our Lord. It is with great pleasure that I welcome you to another week of the month of March 2025. My prayer is that God will daily keep His love in your heart burning, so that you may remain true to Him to the end. Amen.
As we face this new week, I want to admonish you with the words of James that say, “You adulterous people, don’t you know that friendship with the world is hatred toward God? Anyone who chooses to be a friend of the world becomes an enemy of God.” (James 4:4NIV) What point is James making here? It is that there is no way we can choose God as our friend and still be in love with the world. Once we choose the world as our friend, then, we have already chosen God as our enemy. And how that will hurt us is not something anybody can tell. But it will surely hurt us.
Now it is unfortunate that we have many so-called children of God who claim to love Him but who are still in love with the things of this world. They still want to talk and dress like those of the world. They still want to party like them. And they are still in love with their music and movies. How, then, can they truly say that they love God? Or how can they say that these things of the world that they are in love with are not hurting their relationship with God? It is only a liar that will say that.
Don’t get me wrong. I am not saying that everything being done by those of this world is wrong. To say the fact, there are a lot of things being done by those of the world that are right and good for God’s people too and that God’s people can learn from. But there are also things that those of this world do to basically pollute themselves and others. And the child of God must identify such things and separate himself from them. Otherwise, regardless of how much he claims to love God, he will be polluted and turned into an enemy of God.
Remember Lot’s daughters. Even though they left Sodom as virgins in their bodies, they were actually not virgins in their minds. Why? The reason was that the things they saw and heard in Sodom corrupted their minds. In fact, it is possible that they had practised in their minds all the things they were seeing and hearing in Sodom before they left the place. Therefore, at some point, when they could no longer control themselves, they got their own father drunk and then slept with him. What a shame! (Cf. Gen 19)
In like manner, we may think that the things we are seeing and hearing through our friendship with the world are not hurting us. But we are only lying to ourselves. There is no way we will be in friendship with the world and its pollution will not enter our lives. And once it enters our lives, we too may one day do as Lot’s daughters did. We may do the unthinkable.
All of this is why the word of God warns us against friendship with the world. It can only make us enemies of God. And if we should become His enemies, what will become of our hope of His eternal kingdom? It may just slip out from our hands. I pray that the hope of God’s kingdom will never slip out of our hands. But we too should watch ourselves.
Have a great week.
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