If you are married, imagine your spouse taking a few hours of each day to go over to another person’s home, a person of the opposite sex, and spending a few hours alone in intimacy with that person. He or she comes back to you each day and says, “Oh, we’re just friends.” You protest, “Yes, but you are with that person and you expect me to just be okay with it?!” Nearly every one of us understands just how wrong that would be. This sort of “friendship” with others is nothing less than infidelity and unfaithfulness.
God regards our friendship with the world as infidelity to Him. When we are worldly, we are adulterers and adulteresses. You might say we are “prostituting” ourselves. We are sleeping around. We are unfaithful to the One True God.
James teaches that worldliness is, in essence, spiritual adultery. Like a trial attorney concluding his case, James thunders:
Adulterers and adulteresses! Do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God? Whoever therefore wants to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God.
James 4:4
Equating worldliness with adultery is a concept rooted in the Old Testament. God is regarded as the Husband of Israel and Israel as God’s bride. To be unfaithful to God is to commit spiritual adultery.
This is the same truth Jesus taught in Matthew’s Gospel: “No one can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one and love the other, or else he will be loyal to the one and despise the other…(Matthew 6:24).” You can’t be faithful to both God and the world. Put another way: you can’t have two spouses.
This truth is developed in the next verse: “Or do you think that the Scripture says in vain, “The spirit 1 who dwells in us yearns jealously”? (James 4:5)
The idea here is that God places within us an inner spirit that is properly satisfied only when we are reconciled to God and only when we find complete satisfaction in God Himself. The NLT has: “God is passionate that the spirit he has placed within us should be faithful to Him.”
James appears to be summarizing the teachings of the Bible on this matter when he refers to “the Scripture.” It’s as though he were asking, “Do you believe the teaching of the Bible to be wrong here—the idea that God has created us for relationship with Him and that we should be faithful?”
When we compromise our convictions and we allow ourselves to be pulled away from God by the tug of the world, then we are committing spiritual adultery. We are allowing the spirit within us to find satisfaction in other “spouses,” things other than God Himself.
Verse 6 points us to the cure for worldliness, a cure, or correction to be developed more fully in the verses to follow. James says, “But He gives more grace. Therefore He says: ‘God resists the proud, but gives grace to the humble.’” (James 4:6)
God is always ready to give grace to those who come to Him in humility. When we come before God with a desire to be faithful to Him and to grow and to find satisfaction in Him, He gives us the ability to live in a way that both pleases Him and blesses us.
When we ask God to disentangle us from the ways of the world, He gives us the grace to be disentangled. We have to ask ourselves, however, whether we really want to be disentangled from the ways of the world.
Do you really desire Him more than anyone or anything? Or do you want it both ways: a little of God and a little of the world? Do you really want a vibrant and committed relationship with God or do you want to “sleep around a bit?” You’re glad to drink from the living water, but you’d also like to drink occasionally from the broken cisterns of muddy water. Know the ease of becoming God’s enemy and beware.
Don’t settle for cheap substitutes of the One True and living God.
**Excerpt from You’re Either Walking The Walk Or Just Running Your Mouth (Preaching Truth: 2020), pages 131-133, available in all formats here.
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