Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: RSS
You do not have because you do not ask. You ask and do not receive because you ask wrongly, to spend it on your passions. You adulterous people! Do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God? Therefore, whoever wishes to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God. Or do you suppose it is to no purpose that the scripture says, “He yearns jealously over the spirit that he has made to dwell in us”? But he gives more grace. Therefore, it says, “God opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble.”
Submit yourselves, therefore, to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you. Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you. Cleanse your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded. Be wretched and mourn and weep. Let your laughter be turned to mourning and your joy to gloom. Humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will exalt you.
Do not speak evil against one another, brothers. The one who speaks against a brother or judges his brother speaks evil against the law and judges the law. But if you judge the law, you are not a doer of the law but a judge. There is only one lawgiver and judge, he who is able to save and to destroy. But who are you to judge your neighbor?
Please pray with me.
Dear Heavenly Father, we thank you for the opportunity to gather today to worship you and to hear from your word. Please help me to communicate your word clearly and in truth. I pray that you would open our hearts and our minds to hear what you have to say to us, and that this time would be honoring and glorifying to you. I pray this in Jesus’ name. Amen.
So this past school year, our family read through Tolkien’s *The Hobbit*, or I should say, I read it out loud, and the kids occasionally listened. If you’re not familiar with it, this story serves as the prequel to the *Lord of the Rings* trilogy, and it follows a company of dwarfs, a wizard, and a hobbit on a noble quest to the Lonely Mountain to reclaim a stolen treasure and an old dwarf kingdom that was under the control of an evil dragon.
The story is excellent, and one of the things I appreciate most about it is Tolkien’s ability to develop characters and demonstrate their growth in virtue and vice through the various trials, testing, and temptations they encounter along their journey. One of the main characters in this story is Thorin Oakenshield, who is the leader of this quest and the son of the dwarf king who previously ruled the kingdom they sought to reclaim. Thorin is a strong and just leader who demonstrates loyalty and care towards the members of his company. He is a consistent example of courage throughout the many trials they face on the way to the Lonely Mountain.
As the story progresses, the dwarfs and Thorin finally find themselves in possession of the great treasure and kingdom within the mountain, which had been their objective from the start. It is at this point, when Thorin has control of the treasure, that his behavior begins to change. A once convicted but reasonable leader, he starts demonstrating a lack of compassion and patience. His relationships that were once marked by honor, peace, and mutual sacrifice soon become tense, strained, and broken, revealing his selfishness and greed. His lust for wealth and power was consuming him, and what started as a noble journey turned into a quest to satisfy his selfish ambitions and desires.
This transformation of Thorin’s character provides a good illustration of the trajectory and result of the temptation that James warns us of in our passage for today: the temptation of worldliness.
This letter, written by James, who was most likely the half-brother of Jesus, is a general epistle written to Jews in the early church. Within this letter, James touches on various ethical issues, behaviors, and temptations that reveal the deeper motivations of our hearts and are capable of harming our fellowship with those in the church and, more importantly, our fellowship with God. From warnings against showing partiality to taming our tongue to boasting about tomorrow, among several others, James dissects these different issues, leaving us exposed in the process.
Through the truths and wisdom revealed in this letter, we are given greater clarity not just on how our outward actions should look, but on the right inward motivation behind them. As Ben clearly articulated in last week’s sermon, James reveals the earthly wisdom inherent in the various issues and temptations he warns us of throughout his letter and uses these issues to help us cut through our own hearts, exposing our motivations and exhorting us to pursue the wisdom that comes from above.
James finishes chapter three by describing the wisdom from above, helping to further protect and equip the saints to engage these various challenges in a righteous way. As we come to chapter four, James discusses yet another example of earthly wisdom at work and calls his listeners to account for their worldly behaviors that he has outlined in his letter. Most importantly, he follows his rebuke with a demand for his listeners to repent and shows them the wisdom that is from above in action as he walks through the solution to their worldliness.
Our passage for today is verses one through twelve of chapter four, and the structure I’ll use to work through this text will be separated into four parts. In verses one through three, James begins by dissecting the issue of fighting and quarreling, providing yet another example of the fruit of worldly wisdom. In verses four through six, James shows us God’s relationship to the worldly. In verses seven through ten, he calls his listeners to repent of their worldliness. And finally, in verses eleven and twelve, James returns to the issue of our speech, showing how it reveals a motivation in rebellion to God and his wisdom.
Chapter four begins with, “What causes quarrels and what causes fights among you?” I’m not sure about you, but it seems to me that understanding the answer to this question is necessary to navigating life as a human. We all live within the context of relationships, and conflict within these relationships is unavoidable in this fallen world. If God shows us the cause behind our relational conflict here, it seems like important knowledge to have.
James continues in verse one with an answer to his question: “Is it not this, that your passions are at war within you? You desire and do not have, so you murder. You covet and cannot obtain, so you fight and quarrel?” That sure escalated quickly. James opens this chapter pointing to the desires and passions of those in the early church as the cause behind their fighting and quarreling. These passions and desires that James is talking about in verses one and two are the desires of the flesh for the things of this world.
The word “passion” that James uses is translated from the Greek word *hedone*, which is where we get our word “hedonism” from. This is the belief that pleasure and self-indulgence is the greatest good in life and, therefore, the greatest pursuit. This word has a negative connotation when used throughout scripture. An example of this is in Luke chapter eight, verse fourteen, where Jesus is explaining the parable of the sower. He describes the seed, which is the word of God, that fell among the thorns, as those that are choked by the cares, riches, and pleasures (*hedone*) of life.
This does not mean that pleasures in themselves or the cares of this world are wrong or evil, for these are gifts from God. But when we place our pursuit of these above God, we are beholden to our lust, our envy, jealousy, and selfish ambition. This leads to our conflict with others. James says he is telling us in verses one and two that it really is as simple as “We don’t get what we want, so we fight.” As a parent, this is absurdly obvious with children. The four-year-old takes the toy that the two-year-old wants, and there are two responses: either the two-year-old bursts out in hysterical screams and crying, or he hits, claws, or scratches at the foot. Either way, the result is not peaceful.
We may think that the cause of fights and quarrels among adults is more complex than this, but it’s not. Our fighting tactics are just more subtle and deceptive. Usually, James even goes so far as to declare murder a result of these selfish desires not being met. Although he probably was not using murder as a literal occurrence among the early church, he is communicating that the trajectory of our envy, our jealousy, and selfish ambition is towards violence, and with that, the potential for murder.
In doing this, he also shows the evil and corruption we are capable of when we are under control of the flesh. Not only are we susceptible to conflict with others when we desire more than we have been given, but our envy and coveting clouds our ability to understand God’s purpose in all of it and robs us of the opportunity to endure it with joy and grow us in steadfastness and patience. If our pursuit of pleasure is fueled by envy or jealousy, we will fail to understand God’s purpose for the testing of our faith.
If we fail to be doers of God’s word and endure the testing of our faith with joy and perseverance, we are failing to live by his wisdom and will instead live by the wisdom that comes from the flesh, the world, and the devil. This wisdom will lead to disorder and every vile practice, James tells us in chapter three, and this includes our fights and quarrels. It will also disorder our prayers, as James continues in verse three. While some are not even asking or praying, which we see at the end of verse two, others are asking with the wrong motivation.
“You ask and do not receive because you ask wrongly, to spend it on your passions,” James says. A man that is run by his belly is not a man prioritizing God’s will in his life. James acknowledges that there are those that ask God, but their motive for asking is problematic. Prayers with a chief end of gratifying the desires and passions of the flesh are not prayers likely to be answered by God. These prayers do not reveal a desire for God’s wisdom or the advancement of his kingdom, but instead an ultimate desire for the materials and pleasures of this world.
Again, this does not mean that pleasure is bad or the materials of this world are evil, but that our pursuit or love of them over God is this unrighteous pursuit of pleasure. Seeking it in ways or from a source that the Bible condemns reveals a will that is not in submission to God and his word. In his Sermon on the Mount, Jesus instructs us to pray that his kingdom come and his will be done, not ours. When our motive for prayer is not for God’s will to be done, it exposes where our true loyalty lies, which James reveals to us in the following verses.
In verses four through six, James shows us the severity of our position before God as we selfishly pursue our desires and passions. Fueled by wisdom that is earthly, unspiritual, and demonic, James pulls no punches in verses four and five: “You adulterous people! Do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God? Therefore, whoever wishes to be a friend with the world makes himself an enemy of God? Or do you suppose it is to no purpose that the scripture says, ‘He yearns jealously over the spirit that he has made to dwell in us’?”
James uses the imagery found throughout the Old Testament of God’s marriage to the people of Israel and their unfaithfulness to him. As one commentator puts it, James is characterizing his readers as the unfaithful people of God. By seeking friendship with the world, they are, in effect, committing spiritual adultery and making themselves enemies of God. James communicates clearly that our allegiance cannot be to both the world and to God. God sets the terms of the relationship, and we will either be a friend or an enemy. These are the options, and there is no opting out.
The marriage imagery is also helpful for us to recognize our arrogance and foolishness in thinking through if we are being loyal to God. If our affections, time, and resources prioritize the pursuit of someone who is not our spouse, are we demonstrating loyalty to our spouse? This strong rebuke by James should grab our attention and cause us to reflect on the ways in which we demonstrate this behavior and thinking with God in our own lives.
Although there is some debate about what James means in verse five, it is clear that he is expressing God’s jealousy and his intolerance of our allegiance to another, and I hope the married couples here can relate to this jealousy. The image of marriage should evoke the strongest feelings of love, loyalty, and commitment, but also of jealousy and anger when we consider the betrayal of that love and loyalty.
James continues in verse six with, “But he gives more grace. Therefore, it says, ‘God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble.'” Here, James repeats the alarming state of those that seek worldliness as he communicates God’s opposition to them. He also provides the defining characteristic of those who choose friendship with the world as he contrasts the proud with the humble.
In his book *Mere Christianity*, C.S. Lewis communicates the impact pride has on man’s relationship to God. In his chapter “The Great Sin,” Lewis writes, “In God, you come up against something which is in every respect immeasurably superior to yourself. Unless you know God as that, and therefore know yourself as nothing in comparison, you do not know God at all. As long as you are proud, you cannot know God. A proud man is always looking down on things and people. And of course, as long as you are looking down, you cannot see something that is above you.”
Lewis goes on in the chapter to describe pride as purely spiritual and therefore far more subtle and deadly than other sins, and he does a great job of communicating the deceptive nature of pride in his book *The Screwtape Letters*. In this book, we are shown the spiritual battle for the human heart from the perspective of a novice demon named Wormwood, who is seeking advice from his more seasoned uncle Screwtape. Screwtape provides this advice to his nephew apprentice: “I see only one thing to do at the moment. Your patient has become humble. Have you drawn his attention to the fact that all virtues are less formidable to us once the man is aware that he has them? But this is especially true of humility. Catch him at the moment when he is really poor in spirit and smuggle into his mind the gratifying reflection, ‘By Jove, I’m being humble.’ And almost immediately pride—pride at his own humility—will appear. If he awakes to the danger and tries to smother this new form of pride, make him proud of his attempt, and so on through as many stages as you please. But don’t try this too long, for fear you awake his sense of humor and proportion, in which case he will merely laugh at you and go to bed.”
The blinding power of pride keeps us estranged from God and the truth. It is pride that not only keeps us from recognizing our sin and therefore our guilt before God, but it also leads us to justify our sin and even celebrate it. Sadly, we just finished another June when our culture, captivated by worldly wisdom, so clearly demonstrates this truth for us.
But God opposes this pride in all human pride, and as Christians, we must know our pride is at the root of all our sin and rebellion towards God. Pride leads to our rejection of his word or apathy towards it, and pride keeps us from his grace. Humility is necessary to experience God’s grace, and it is God’s grace that James communicates through the following verses as he shows the humble response to our prideful friendship with the world that leaves us enemies of him.
As James states earlier in chapter one of his letter, we must be doers of the word and not hearers only. In verses seven through ten, James transitions to showing how humility is demonstrated as he provides the answer to our worldliness. This solution can be summed up in one word: repentance. James is writing to believers who have placed their faith in Jesus Christ and his death and resurrection for the forgiveness of their sins, and he trusts that God, in his grace, will grant them repentance. If there’s anyone here this morning who has not done this yet, I would urge you to do so today.
These four verses are the appropriate response to our desires that originate from the flesh, are befriended by the world, and exploited by the devil, leading to our enmity with God. James begins this series of exhortations with, “Submit yourselves, therefore, to God.” The placement of this initial command to submit to God is significant because the subsequent commands are done in vain if there is not first a submission to God. This submission is not possible without a fear of the Lord. This fear, which is righteous and good, casts out our fears originating from the wisdom of the world. The fear of the Lord is a requirement for the wisdom that comes from above and the submission necessary for the repentance of our sin.
It includes both our intellectual understanding and full heart surrender to Christ and his lordship over every area of our lives: our marriage, our parenting, our work, our education, our politics, our sexuality, the entertainment we consume, everything. Therefore, our external lives should reflect our obedience in all these areas as it is expressed in his authoritative word. We do not approach God’s word as a judge determining the parts we listen to and those to ignore. This requires an attitude of humility, for we cannot recognize any authority over ourselves without humility.
And true humility recognizes Christ’s sovereign authority over our lives and the hopeless condition we are in apart from his grace. The wisdom of the world, the flesh, and the devil exploits the corrupt desires and passions of our flesh to promote the belief that our own pursuit of meaning and fulfillment is the highest purpose or end to our lives. It switches the object of worship in our lives from God to ourselves and advances the belief that we are ultimately in control of our own destiny. Therefore, submission to anything but our feelings and desires is not just unnecessary, but in opposition to this submission to God and his word offends this sensibility, for that would require submission to his will, which is almost always opposed to ours.
James follows his command for submission to God with, “Resist the devil, and he will flee from you.” Here I think we can see the importance of our submission to God first if we are to have any ability to obey this command. In Matthew 28:18 of the Great Commission, Jesus states, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore, go.” It is Christ’s authority that Satan fears. This is why Satan seeks to separate us from God, for it is here that we are more vulnerable. This separation from God is what we must resist. We must recognize that it is nothing—not us—that Satan fears, but Christ in us.
In order to fight the spiritual war we are in, we are dependent on Christ’s authority over the spiritual realm. We cannot resist Satan with the authority of Christ if we are not in submission to Christ. Practically speaking, we must flee from immorality, temptation, and sin. We cannot be in submission to Christ and also enslaved to our sin.
And this leads right into verse eight, which says, “Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you.” We flee sin and temptation with a destination in mind: we draw near to God. Prayer is essential to us. Drawing near to God—prayer fueled by the genuine desire to be reconciled to God—provides the opportunity for confession of our sin and the hope of forgiveness. When we draw near to God, James promises us that God will draw near to us. When we experience this nearness of God, we realize that God’s grace was behind not just his pursuit of us, but our drawing near to him first. John 4:19 tells us that we love because he first loved us. And as we draw near to God, we recognize that he was drawing us and seeking us all along.
Verse eight continues with, “Cleanse your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded.” James continues to show us what true repentance includes as he uses Old Testament terms of “cleanse” and “purify” involved in the ritual purity practices of the priests and sacrifice offerings. The complete cleansing and purification of those James is writing to—and ourselves—is only available through faith in the atoning work of Jesus Christ in his death and resurrection, which is a work that cleans and purifies our hearts completely.
In repentance, there is a turning away from our sin as we turn to Christ in faith, and we do not hold on to part of our sin or try to justify it, but we forsake it completely. For the second time in his letter, James rebukes his listeners as double-minded. This is translated from the word *dichychos*, which means “two-souled.” He uses this descriptor in the first chapter of his letter to describe the man who is torn between God and the world. His doubting of God makes him unstable in all his ways, and he is like a wave of the sea that is tossed by the wind.
The double-minded man is not one who desires to purify his heart completely of friendship with the world, but due to his doubt in the wisdom of God, he clings to worldly wisdom and does not stand firmly on the truth. James continues in verse nine with, “Be wretched and mourn and weep. Let your laughter be turned to mourning and your joy to gloom.” In the chapter on repentance to life and salvation of the 1689 Baptist Confession of Faith, it states, “Saving repentance is a gospel grace in which those who are made aware by the Holy Spirit of the many evils of their sin, by faith in Christ, humble themselves for it with godly sorrow, hatred of it, and self-loathing. They pray for pardon and strength of grace and determine and endeavor by provisions from the Spirit to live before God in a well-pleasing way in everything.”
The confession communicates not just the need for our prayer to confess our sin and seek forgiveness from it, but conveys the appropriate posture and state of our hearts as we do this in repentance. Our sin keeps us from fellowship with God and is the reason why the atoning sacrifice of Jesus was necessary. This is not a light or trivial truth. If we regard our sin without the seriousness it deserves, we are failing to understand the full impact of it, and we are in jeopardy of being led by worldly wisdom.
As the 1689 confession states, godly sorrow and hatred of our sin is part of repentance. There is sorrow and hatred towards our sin in true repentance because we understand that our sin reveals our rebellion towards God and the transgression of his perfect law, which leaves us condemned and under his wrath. The just penalty of our sin is only satisfied through the life and death of Jesus Christ. When meditating on this reality, our appropriate response is sorrow and hatred towards our sin.
James’ use of laughter in verse nine exposes the flippant attitude or lack of sorrow his listeners may have had towards their sin and friendship with the world. We should not make the same mistake. Our grief and sorrow must primarily result from the offense of our sin towards God and not from the consequences or circumstances our sin has caused. Sin does have awful, natural consequences in this life, including death, and our grief and sorrow over these results of sin is appropriate. But if these are the source of our mourning, we are not accurately understanding or recognizing our sin’s offense to God’s holiness and perfect justice. All sin is sin towards God first and foremost, and we must grieve it as that. We must seek his forgiveness first.
Before we are able to seek the forgiveness of those our sin has affected, we must first be reconciled to God before we can be reconciled to others, and we must first love God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength before we can love our brother rightly. But once we have confessed and sought forgiveness from God, we must do the same with those we have sinned against.
James finishes this section of verses that provides the answer to our enmity with God in verse ten: “Humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will exalt you.” James again grounds the solution to our worldliness in humility while also providing the hope that comes with true repentance. Christ is the supreme model of humility, and Paul’s description of the humility of Christ in Philippians chapter two, verses three through eight, provides the example we are to imitate.
Paul says this: “Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves. Let each of you look not only to his own interests but also to the interests of others. Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.”
This humility described by Paul is only available through Jesus Christ, and James declares in verse ten of our passage that through this humility, Christ will exalt us. The world is keen on promoting humility, but if we do not recognize Jesus as the source of our humility, then we are not acting with genuine humility, and therefore we cannot be exalted.
There is a worldly wisdom that promotes a false humility with us as its source. If we accurately recognize our lowly position before God and then stay there wallowing in self-pity, this is not humility. The object of focus for the person full of vanity, arrogance, and boastfulness, and that of the person with low self-esteem who is constantly navel-gazing is still themselves. Both are forms of self-exaltation, and, as C.S. Lewis put it, “Humility is not thinking less of yourself; it’s thinking of yourself less.”
James states that Christ will exalt us, not ourselves. Self-exaltation, whether it is the loud, vain, arrogant man or the quiet, self-absorbed man, is not exaltation at all, but slavery to the sin of pride and vanity. Christ is the only way to this exaltation that James speaks of. It is only through faith in Jesus Christ, his death and resurrection, that reconciliation with God and freedom from our sin is possible. When we humbly recognize, receive, and depend on God’s mercy through Christ, we will be exalted.
James says, therefore, in faith we can walk confidently by the Holy Spirit in obedience to God’s truth, his word, and his promises. As we conclude our passage for today in verses eleven and twelve, James follows his call to repentance of worldliness by returning to another practical example: our speech. And perhaps this is one of the ways that we are most tempted to act with worldly wisdom and give in to selfish ambition, jealousy, and envy.
James spends the majority of chapter three critiquing our speech and the dangers of an uncontrolled tongue, and here he gives a concrete example of this. The worldly system we operate within promotes the positioning and exaltation of ourselves through the criticism, disrespect, and slander of others. This is contrary to God’s character and his word and therefore should not be true of our speech towards others. When we gossip about or speak ill of others, we are not demonstrating a fear of the Lord and submission to him. We are demonstrating our disregard for his law and therefore the lawgiver, and we tempt our brothers and sisters to do the same.
We harm our personal witness and that of the church, and we do not contrast the beauty of Christ and his wisdom with the ugliness of the world’s wisdom. We blend into the world, failing to show others the freedom that comes from knowing Jesus Christ and his gospel. And when we participate in this type of speech, we have determined ourselves to be the judge of God’s word. This is a position we are not authorized to hold, and it exposes our rebellious heart towards God. This authority belongs only to Christ, and our response should be to recognize our rebellion to his authority and repent of this behavior while seeking to live in submission to his word as doers of the law.
Finally, in verse twelve, James warns us that it is only Christ who has the authority and power to save and to destroy before he finishes with the question, “But who are you to judge your neighbor?” James is not rebuking those who, in love for their brother, make them aware of sinful behavior as they appeal to the standard of God’s word and do so with an attitude of humility, love, patience, kindness, and respect for their brother, but he is condemning those using judgmental speech against their brother that is characterized by an arrogant and self-righteous attitude.
Our speech reveals our hearts, as Matthew 12:35 says, “For the mouth speaks what the heart is full of.” A heart that treasures Christ will produce speech that is in submission to Christ. Does our speech show the world what we treasure?
Once Thorin Oakenshield had reclaimed the treasure within the mountain, it began to consume his heart. As his heart became captivated by this treasure, his care for his companions and his noble objective began to diminish. His actions revealed a love for his treasure above all else, and he began to lose sight of his purpose. He started to view those friends who had helped him in his quest as enemies.
I won’t spoil the ending, but there is redemption in Thorin’s story as he becomes aware of the hold that the treasure has on his heart. Jesus warns us that where our treasure is, there our heart will be also. So what do our hearts treasure, and what do our actions reveal? A devotion to? Are we captivated by the world and its wisdom? If so, with humility, let us heed this warning from James.
Let us humbly submit to Christ, repent of our worldliness that makes us enemies of God and leads to our conflict with others. And instead, let us seek the wisdom that is from above, that is pure, peaceable, gentle, open to reason, full of mercy and good fruits, impartial and sincere. As we fellowship with one another here at Red Village Church or wherever God has placed us.
Please pray with me.
Dear Heavenly Father, I thank you for your clear warning of the temptation to be worldly that you present to us in your word. I pray that you would give us the humility to recognize how we may be in danger of becoming friends with the world. Where this is the case, I pray that you would help us to confess this and repent. Help us to seek your forgiveness and the forgiveness from those who we’ve sinned against. Help us to live confidently in the peace and hope that comes from being reconciled through your son, Jesus. I pray this all in Jesus’ name. Amen.