James 4:4a You adulterous people, don’t you know that friendship with the world means enmity against God?

Friend of God or friend of the world. What’s your heart attaching itself to? The previous verse says, “You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, to spend it on your passions.” The word passions means pleasures. What are you really desiring? If it’s not God Himself, you are after the wrong thing. It doesn’t matter how godly it looks.

I told you the story of my idolatry. I was after an image of a godly wife from a book on marriage I read. (Did you throw away all those how-to books yet? Garbage. All of them.) It’s not that being a godly wife or things like growing a church are evil goals, but they aren’t exactly the biblical ones. I was just never going to reach the biblical one (becoming like Jesus) the way I was going because I was following the wrong book to get there and devoting myself to the wrong vision.

Here’s EVERY how-to. Just know God. Live in relationship.