James 4:4 Don’t you realize that making friends with God’s enemies—the evil pleasures of this world—makes you an enemy of God? How many of us are enemies of God though we sat in Church this past Sunday?

Do we think often about what pleases God or conversely, what displeases God?

If there really is a God shouldn’t our lives orient around His pleasures? By definition of God, it would seem all of our allegiance should be focused on knowing and doing the will of God. Yet this appears to be more the exception of the religious radical than the normal Christian life.

The half-brother of Jesus, the Apostle James, writes worldly minded people or people not focused upon His Kingdom coming to earth as it is in heaven are enemies of God. Do the enemies of God make it to heaven? We might argue we believe, we do good, we are good but none of these things address the issue of obedience to God’s will and purposes.

As Jesus prayed in the garden so we must echo, not my will but Your will be done.

If I am to do what is pleasing to God and thus demonstrate my loyalty to Him I must become a student of the manual He left me for knowing such things: the Bible.

God has not made knowing Him obscure but rather has revealed Himself and His will plainly both through His appearance in Jesus and His recorded history as written in the Bible.

To not be worldly oriented we must become heavenly oriented and this means knowing and doing the will of God recorded in the Bible.