Friends, welcome back to the Ransomed Heart podcast.

John Eldridge here, actually recording this introduction from the UK where we are currently over on a kind of mission.

We are so excited to introduce to you a series that we're beginning this week on the topic of the world

in the unholy trinity of enemies that the scriptures warn us about you have the world,

the flash and the devil as the old saints would call it.

I think we're fairly clear at this point what our own flesh is capable of and we are only too familiar with the devil and what he's about, but this thing called the world. What is this world that

scripture actually has some fairly strong things to say about, including friendship with the world, is

enmity of God or becoming an enemy of God.

That is strong stuff and it began a series of conversations,

readings, just sort of interaction among our team to unpack this thing.

Surely it's not stuff like some of our forefather's thought.

It's playing cards, it's going to the movies, right, it's dancing.

It has to be something far more substantive, something far more at the level of

the heart. And so what began is one recording led to two and two led to three and we are

launching this week a six-part series on the world that we think you are going to find

immensely helpful. I hope, insightful, and truly hope

that it is liberating. So here we go on part one.

Do not love the world or anything in the world.

If anyone loves the world, love for the father, is not in them, 1st John 2. 15.

Religion that God our father accepts as pure and faultless is this, to look after orphans and widows

and their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world, James 127.

And then the doozy, then the one that I find personally really disruptive from James 4, don't you know that friendship

...