Bible Text: James 4:4 | Speaker: Dr. Harold J. Sala | Series: Guidelines For Living | 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 4:4

In their rather controversial book The Seduction of Christianity, authors Dave Hunt and T. A. McMahon contended that Christianity is facing its greatest challenge: the challenge of acceptability, of striving to please the masses at the cost of integrity of the faith. They believe that never in all history have more people come to name the name of Jesus Christ, yet never have so few really understood what it really means. “Of course I’m a Christian; I’m not a Jew or a Muslim,” exclaimed one gentleman in response to my question about his faith.

For nearly half a century most people considered Communism, as an atheistic, godless philosophy, to be the great enemy of the faith; but then after only 73 years of Communism in the former USSR, this is no longer the great threat. True, Islam aggressively penetrates countries once considered Christian, building mosques and schools and taking converts by the scores. Yet Islam is not Christianity’s greatest threat.

New Age philosophies have enticed the discontented with their emphasis on self-improvement and success. While this appeals to some people, New Age teaching is little but old heresy dressed in new garments.

Simply put, Christianity’s greatest challenge is itself, with the threat coming from within, not without. In simple terms, we Christians are our greatest enemies. When an enemy is without, the lines of battles are clearly drawn. In the vernacular, it’s “us” or “them”; but when the enemy is within, it is difficult to tell who has infiltrated the camp and who really has counted the cost and is willing to pay the price of denial and commitment which Jesus Christ demands of His followers.

Chuck Colson, whose journey in faith has covered some very painful terrain for him personally, has written, “The enemy is in our midst. He has so infiltrated our camp that many simply no longer can tell an enemy from a friend, truth from heresy.” (Chuck Colson, The Struggle For Men’s Hearts and Minds, p.16).

It would be quite easy at this point for me to talk about some of the divisive issues which are widely discussed today: the ordination of women in the church, the acceptance of homosexuals in the community of God, the number of broken homes along with the acceptance of less demanding standards for leadership; but, even so, these are not the real issue.

These are but symptoms of a deeper problem. Writing to believers who were yet contemporaries of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, James, the leader of the early church, wrote, “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 4:4).

For lack of a better word, our greatest enemy is worldliness, but even in using that term, there is a danger of being misunderstood. For too many of us, the term worldliness conveys a mentality of doing certain things or not doing other things. In recent years, that term has conveyed a mind-set which obscures the lines of demarcation between the people of God and the people of the world, the faith of the Gospel and the philosophies of our age, the old and quite clearly defined principles of right and wrong versus an “anything goes as long as you are sincere” mind-set of our generation.

It was Dwight L. Moody who pointed out that the place of the ship is in the sea, not in the dry rock where the storms can do no damage to her hull; but, reminded Moody, when the sea gets into the ship, it’s in real trouble.

Resource reading: John 1:1-12