What Would Be Your Choice?
What has caused all of the fighting among you? Is it not from the
lusts which war in all of your members? You covet, yet you do not possess
anything; you kill, and envy, and yet you still do not obtain anything;
you fight against and attack others; and you do not have anything because
you do not ask for it. You ask, and yet you do not receive because you ask
in such an evil way in order that you attend to your desires.
You adulterers, do you not know that the love of this world is hostility
towards God? Therefore, it stands to reason that you who choose to love
this world are an enemy of God. The spirit dwelling in us lusts with envy.
But the Lord has given us more grace. God humbles the proud, and gives
grace to the meek. Epistle of Saint James the Righteous
What is more important to you - the things you own or your relationship
with God? Where is most of your time spent - watching TV, surfing the
Internet, working on the inside and outside of your home, polishing up
your new car or studying God's Word? What is more important to you and
that you depend on the most your material assets or your spiritual
assets?
If one day you were told you had to choose between all that you own in
this world or the freedom to worship and devote your life to God - what
would be your choice?
"Those of you with riches stored up, you should be wailing and weeping
due to the troubles that are coming upon you. For your riches have become
spoiled and have begun to smell; and your garments are full of holes,
being consumed by moths. Your gold and your silver have become covered
with corrosion; and its corrosion will be a witness against you, and it
will consume your flesh. Such a great fire will you have blazing against
you in the last days. Behold, the wages of the laborers who worked in your
fields, which you have wrongfully kept for yourself, cries out; and the
crying of the reapers has entered the ears of Yahweh of hosts. For you
have lived in pleasure on the earth, and reveled, and filled your bodies
as in a day of slaughter." Epistle of Saint James the Righteous, chapter
5
