Friend or Foe

  Today, I want to ask you a serious question. Are you a friend of God, or are you a friend of the world and all of its darkness? James chapter 4 verse 4 gives us a pretty cut and dry explanation of this. James asks the question, "Don't you know that friendship with the world makes us enemies of God."  I know you may say that sounds rather harsh, but in Exodus 20, verse 5, God says that He is a jealous God, and to not put anything before Him. Take for example a husband and a wife. The husband comes home from a long day at work and finds his wife doing her makeup and getting all dolled up. He asks her where she is going, and she tells him that she is going out with Joe from the office. How do you think that makes the husband feel? The same is with our Father. The jealousy and betrayal He feels when He sees you doing things that are worldly and not of Him breaks His heart. 

  2 Corinthians 6:14-17 says  "Do not be unequally yoked with unbelievers. For what fellowship has righteousness win lawlessness, and what communion has light with darkness. And what agreement has the temple of God with idols? For you are a temple of God." Verse 17 says to "Come out from among them and be separate. Do not touch what is unclean, and I will receive you." I know we've all heard the saying "Do not be unequally yoked", and there have been many interpretations of this in which I will not go into at this time, but what the writer of second Corinthians is really saying is that the "unbelievers" were the false teachers of the time that were distorting the message. These teachers were not of God. "Unequally yoked" depicts two different kinds of animals plowing a field with the same yoke. They both will pull two separate directions. That creates chaos, and the God is not a God of chaos, rather Satan. 

  First Corinthians 10:21 tells us that we cannot drink from the cup of the Lord and of demons. The cup of the Lord represented the Lord's supper, which was for the believers. You simply cannot put the contents of the two in the same body. Your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit (see 1 Corinthians 3:16-17).

  Ephesians 5:8-11 says that we were once in darkness, but now we are in the light of the Lord. Walk as children of light, and to have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of the darkness, but to rather expose them. Our job as Christians is to be a light to this dark world. If the light of God is in us, how can there be any darkness?

  Keep this in mind my friend that if you are a friend of God, you are an enemy of the world, but take heart, Jesus said in John 15:4 that if the world hates you, it hated Him first. We do not need to be afraid of this because it says in first John 4:4 that we are of God and we have overcome them (the world), because He who is in us is greater than he who is in the world. 

  In conclusion, I would like to remind you of what Joshua 24:15 says. Choose this day whom you will serve.