You can turn in your Bibles with me to James chapter four. You're looking at verses one through 12 this morning. It's about, went back and checked, it was about 11 years ago that a very short and very funny video got put out on YouTube. I won't often recommend a YouTube video. This one is very relatable to this content today. It's a YouTube video, very short, less than two minutes, of a husband and wife sitting on a couch, talking. And the wife was telling her husband all about the pressures that she was feeling, and the frustration, and even some of the achiness and the headaches that she'd been getting lately. And the husband is just sitting there, listening patiently. And she turns, and what you see when she turns her head is a big nail sticking out of her forehead. And her husband sits there, and he's nodding along, and then finally wants to say something. And he says, honey, I think if you remove that nail, you might start to feel a little better. And the wife insists, it's not about the nail. This is not about the nail. I just want you to listen. I want you to hear me. and he gently tries to persuade her and she refuses to listen. The whole thing is a very funny play on the stereotype of husbands wanting to fix their wives' problems and wives just wanting their husbands to listen and to empathize. It's all well and good to listen about how hard it is to deal with the symptoms of the nail in your head, but sometimes we actually do have to realize there's a nail, and you have to take it out. and the pain goes away. If only we really have the humility to admit it, we can be free of that pain and that frustration. Now James is, in some way, telling his flock the same kind of thing. Yes, I can see that you're having all these problems, but I'm telling you, I have the solution for you. It's a difficult one, and it might not be the one you want to hear, but here it is. And I promise, if you deal with it like this, All of those pains will be gone. So before we read James chapter four, verses one through 12, let me pray for us and we'll read. Oh Lord, if you should mark iniquities, oh Lord, who could stand? We know that with you there is forgiveness, that you may be feared. And so we wait for you now, God, We find hope in your word. We pray that we would find in your word this morning your steadfast love and your plentiful redemption. We pray that no vice or sin would remain in us that resists your holy war. Father, give us more grace this morning. It's in Jesus' name that we pray, amen. James chapter four, verses one through 12. What causes quarrels and what causes fights among you? 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. 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? Amen. So thus far in James, to give a little bit of a recap here, chapters three and four have been one very long explanation of one major sort of persistent sin in these Christians' lives. And we finally get here in chapter four to see that the church is fracturing. It's starting to split apart, and the damage is being done primarily through the tongue. People have been hard to deal with, as he said in chapter three with all of his different analogies. The tongue is setting on fire this church, so to speak. They even go about potentially cursing one another. They're following the wisdom of the world rather than the wisdom from above, like at the end of chapter three. And now James really does get to the heart of the matter with all of this conflict, all of these speech problems going on. He takes a very clinical sort of approach to diagnosing it and then to prescribing the cure for his flock. So we're gonna look at this passage under four main headings. Number one is the presenting problem. Number two is the underlying issue. Number three is the cure. And number four is the resulting healing. So start in verses one through three. His presenting problem. Here is what's presenting on the surface. quarrels and fights among believers. And he asks, what causes those things? Well, very directly in verse one, right off the bat, he says, it's your own passions, your own desires are what's causing these fights. And we kind of get the hints in these few verses, as well as the previous section at the end of chapter three, some of this repetitive language here about envy and coveting and jealousy and ambition, You can tell, it's very clear, that all these conflicts boil down to what I want. I want something. So all these messy conflicts, whether they're passive-aggressive or just plain aggressive, come back to the same thing, desires. So it's not all that uncommon of a problem in the church, right? The Joneses across the street have a bigger and better car and a bigger and better house, and so I start to think less of them. Or, not that I'm aware of this issue, but when you're putting carpet into a church, one person wants one carpet, another person wants another. And it turns into an explosion when all we're talking about is carpets. or something a little more seriously as somebody takes credit for my idea. I had a great idea, and somebody else is the one standing up front, getting all the recognition. Sometimes those desires aren't all that bad. If they're sinful desires, we're not supposed to be wanting those, but even the good ones, if they lead to hate and resentment, if they lead to name-calling and insulting, if they lead to a frostiness and a coolness in the relationship, even those good desires are not good. They're causing something very, very bad. There's always something underneath the surface, so to speak. You see a little bit of the iceberg, but deep down under the water, there's so much more there. Even to kind of choose the silliest example, if you were to do some marriage counseling for a couple who were arguing about the carpet in their house. It's not really about the carpet. It's never about the carpet. It's about one spouse not feeling respected or heard, one spouse feeling like they're not being taken seriously. There's always something much, much deeper. Really, these first three verses here are like Biblical Counseling 101, or Conflict Resolution 101. There's always something deeper. It always comes back to lusting for something we want more of, envying or coveting what somebody else has. And all of those things are choosing the world over the will of God. Now, he starts to press a little more deeply into this idea, this idea of sort of envy, self-centeredness, by relating it to prayer. So he says at the very end of verse two, rather than choosing to go to God, you decide to fight and to get it yourself. You don't have because you don't ask. You're not asking, you're choosing to get it yourself. But then, verse three, He continues to say that, well, even when you do ask, it's to no avail because you're asking wrongly. You're asking to spend it on yourself. It's like a child sort of stomping into their parent's bedroom and demanding that you give me the next newest toy. I want it, get it for me. That's not how we ask God for things, right? That is not what prayer is supposed to be. Prayer is asking things of God, never with a bent for what I can get, what I can do, my glory. It's always with a focus on somehow God's name, furthering God's kingdom, doing things according to his will. So even when we do ask him for things, which we absolutely can. He's a God who gives generously without reproach. James reminds us in chapter one, But even if not, we pray, like we just did, willingly, your will be done. I will ask, but whatever you decide, God, is what I'm going with. So this is a very ordinary kind of problem, but a very extraordinary cost in the church. Maybe notice as well that he's using war imagery. the horrors of war to describe and to really sort of underline the severity of this problem. You are drawing battle lines against each other in the church. When you fight, when you quarrel, it destroys the love and the unity of the body that is supposed to be one of our primary witnesses to a watching world. We can't draw these battle lines. We can't be at war with each other. It's a very serious call that he's talking about. It might not be the main point of this text, but given the season, given the week, it is worth noting that sort of a small A application of this text would be to fight for contentment, to fight for thanksgiving, fight to be thankful, because those are the cures against envy and jealousy, desiring more. Fight for contentment, which is to say that you really do believe whatever God has given me is enough. I don't need more. I don't need less. One of the Proverbs says, and I didn't write it down, but one of the Proverbs says, give me neither riches nor poverty. Because I know that if I have riches, I will become puffed up and say, who is the Lord? And give me neither poverty, because I may be tempted to steal and resort to theft. And thus profane your name, God. Give me just enough. So if contentment were prevalent in the church, the conflicts would plummet. Conflicts would plummet. Maybe not end, but they would certainly drastically decrease. Now, all of this is the presenting problem. Secondly, though, there's something deeper going on here. The underlying issue, verses four and five, just as David confesses in Psalm 51 that against you and you alone have I sinned, after, I'll remind you, the sin of committing adultery with Bathsheba and murdering Uriah, Her husband, David, confesses it's against you and you alone have I sinned. So James tells his church, this is not just an issue between people. So right there in verse four, keep in mind, all throughout James, what has he been calling the believers? Brothers and sisters. Brothers and sisters in the Lord, verse four, he gives them a different name. He says, you adulteresses, you adulterous people. The battle lines have been drawn, not just against each other, but against God. Even if you're fighting against each other, all of you are on the same side against God. To fight and be at war with one another because of your own sinful desires is to be an enemy of God and an unfaithful bride to Him. So when we value the things that the world values, prestige and praise, we try to get it the way the world does, slander, stirring up trouble, speaking negatively of people, envy, it's not a very overt denial of God But we are putting ourselves in line with the world. We're taking up arms along with them to say, I'm for myself. I'm not for God. But listen, here's where it turns. Verses four and five, especially verse five. Our God, as a spurned lover, is too jealous to let us pursue those other lovers. We got that in Isaiah 54. Did you catch that? So in Isaiah 54, God is called many different things. He's called our maker. He's called our king. But he is not a far off and distant creator and king. He's also the loving husband for his people. He's near to his people. He dwells with them. He loves them. He's a loving husband who takes his wife, other places from scripture like Hosea and Ezekiel, he takes his wife from wallowing in the slums to be his, brought back to life. His everlasting love and his compassion are placed on us. And even when he has to discipline us for a moment, which is actually the context of Isaiah 54, the discipline of exile for his nation, even when he has to discipline us for a moment, his love is so great that he will not let us abandon him. Even in exile. Even with some of the analogies in that chapter. Even though you may feel storm-tossed in your life, Although you may feel like a building torn down to its foundation, the mountains themselves would crumble into dust sooner than he would remove that steadfast love from you. And that includes not letting us pursue those other loves. He draws his people back to himself with the cords of kindness, and the chords of steadfast love. He puts an end to our wandering. He puts an end to our unfaithfulness. And he brings us back. So verse five. Verse five is a notoriously difficult verse to translate. I suspect if you're reading from the King James or maybe another translation, it might say something completely different. But the ESV has it, 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? God has created our spirits to be in fellowship and relationship with him, and he yearns jealously for that. It's a love, and it's a holy love. It's a love that does not allow any other competitors, any other sin, to come between you and Him. And so, we turn to the cure. In verses six through 10, the cure is grace-fueled repentance. Now, the whole idea of enemy, and to be an enemy is a strong word, is it not? For James to call his flock enemies of God, But with all of that depth there, we have to be reminded that through the blood of the cross, God has already reconciled us to himself, right? Romans chapter five, while we were still enemies, God reconciled us to himself. Christ has made peace for us once and for all. Once that peace has been declared, it cannot be undeclared. And yet, there's a lot of spurned grace here, is there not? Kind of woven throughout, sitting here behind the scenes in verse four, with the image of a bride and a husband, it reminds us that the Father has chosen us to be His. He's elected us by His grace to be His bride. There's the idea of Christ, again, making peace in the grace of reconciliation from the Son. and also that the grace of the Holy Spirit sort of indwelling us. And so we might contradict those things. We may waver. Our hearts might not be totally faithful to Him. But even when we spurn those things, verse 6, He gives more grace. He gives more help. He gives more gifts. His grace is sufficient, even when we're spurning Him, to make us faithful again. His grace is sufficient if, like he quotes in verse six, if we're willing to humble ourselves, to humble ourselves to come to him for help. He forgives and he welcomes. If we choose to rival him, if we choose to go it alone, if we choose to say, well, I don't really need to change, I don't need God, he resists you, he opposes you, You remain at war with him, and he is still the enemy. But what flows out of that grace? It starts with grace. It starts with God's movement. And then, in verses 7, 8, 9, and 10, 11 straight commands. 11 commands in four verses on how to repent. So this is really like Repentance 101, if we're in class here. Verse seven says to submit. Submit yourself, therefore, to God. Now we tend to think of submission as being kind of passive, right? You sort of step back, you're not taking the spotlight anymore, but that's not really what submission is. Submission, if you keep up with the analogy of war, is active enlistment. You are choosing to follow God, to listen to his commands and obey them. Now, how do we submit to God? The end of verse seven into verse eight. Resist the devil, draw near to God. Do you remember the characterization of Satan in the gospels, what Jesus says about him? He is the father of lies. And he was a murderer from the beginning. And keep in mind, that's sort of what these Christians are doing themselves. They're lying, they're slandering, and it's causing them to metaphorically murder one another. So he says, stop listening to that commander. Stop listening to that voice. That's Satan's way of doing things. That's the world's way of doing things. Draw near to God. Come to him. Listen to that voice. He's not speaking here to those who are unbelievers, drawing near to God for the first time. He's speaking to those who have been distant from God for a very long time. They once had really deep fellowship with Him, and now it feels like He's gone. And granted, for these believers, it's their own doing, but He's distant. He's drawn Himself away. but we all need to restore that fellowship with him, draw near to him, and he will come back to you. One author notes that we often want that the other way around. We really want him to draw near to us first, we wanna have that feeling, that experience of him being with us, and then we'll start praying, or then we'll start reading the Bible, then we'll start pursuing him, but it's the other way around here. There's a promise, there's an assurance, but we need to make that movement. to go back to God. Now, how do we draw near to God? At the end of verse eight, into verse nine, he says cleanse, or the end of verse eight, cleanse your hands and purify your hearts. Cleanse and purify. That's very priestly language. The idea of becoming clean again, which means no longer go on sinning. No longer do those things that you once did. Both your hands, your actions, and your heart. Cleanse it all. Put it to death. End it. Live a holy life. Don't be disloyal to God anymore, but follow Him. And then verse 9, be wretched, mourn, weep, Turn laughter into mourning? Turn joy into gloom? He's kind of starting to sound like the gloomy Old Testament prophets. That's kind of intentional. He's sounding very prophetic here. Heartfelt weeping is an appropriate response to our sin before God. Changing our action, you might say, is actually not enough. It's not enough to just change what you're doing. There has to be sorrow for the sin. You have to be sort of eaten up inside by it. You should grieve over the sin that has grieved God. Now we're commanded over and over again in scripture to rejoice always, and again, I will say it, rejoice, but we can't rejoice when we're far from God. We can't rejoice when we're living in active sin against Him. There's, in a sense, there's supposed to be a sort of restlessness about our lives. There should be a feeling of, I can't get peace. I can't seem to find happiness. True joy only comes if we've experienced the cleansing power of the blood of Jesus Christ to take away the guilt and to take away the power of sin. That's where it starts. So even though we are believers, even though we're already Christians and sons and daughters, we're never meant to presume upon God's forgiveness and mercy. We can always count on it, That's what Isaiah says, that's what James says, that's what all the rest of the scripture says. You can always count on it, but we never presume on it. Meaning we never take our sin casually, even after we've been saved. So he talks about turning your laughter into mourning. Laughter is the mark of a fool in the Old Testament. To laugh at your sin, to laugh at the things you've done wrong, to not really care, It's the mark of a fool. Now, these are really extreme words from James. They really are. But it's because God is so holy, and it's because his love is so pure, and his grace is so good, and he's done such amazing things for us, we have to have a right picture of God if we want to be with him. And then verse 10, he closes it again with sort of this general, this general command to humble yourself before the Lord. And now, hopefully, after all those other commands, those 10 other ones, we can get a better picture of what humility is. Because humility is not just sort of a, well, a general lowliness. I don't feel great about myself. Well, I'm no better than the next guy. Humility is so much more profound than that. Humility is recognizing spiritual poverty without God. It's like the parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector. The tax collector just stands in the corner of the temple, beating his chest and saying, have mercy on me, God, because we're bankrupt without Christ. I am bankrupt without Christ. There's nothing good that I have apart from him. You are bankrupt without Christ. That's humility, when you know that. Victory in life and goodness, heaven, exaltation, James says, it only comes from the work and the effort of Jesus Christ dying on the cross, paying for your sins, and bringing you back to God. That's what this cure is. All the wars, all the fights, they're a spiritual and God-centered problem. They have a spiritual and God-centered cure. Grace is the foundation, grace is the spring, and repentance is what flows out of it. So we pray, as Augustine did, grant what you command. God, what you require of us, what you require of me, help me, give it to me. Give me what I need to actually keep this, because I know that I can't. It has to be your spirit moving in me. Grant that to me, God. So, fourthly and finally then, what happens? What happens when you experience this grace-fueled repentance, when you put it into practice? Number four is the resulting healing. Verses 11 and 12, he sort of comes back full circle to where he was in chapter three, when he talked about the danger of the tongue, and he says that the healing, the fruit that grows from humility and repentance, and you might say that the cleansing of the hands, is that you will no longer speak evil against one another. Speaking evil against one another, it's a very broad term, It's a very broad word. Most narrowly, it gets at something like defamation or slander, to defame one another. Sort of has this idea of when you're talking to somebody, sort of being superior over them and talking down to them. So it can include something like lying. speaking lies about somebody else. It can even include something like speaking harmful truths, criticizing, even unnecessarily publicizing sins. And it includes, as one author writes, even our thoughts. The quote from one writer says that defamation begins and lives on in the mind. I thought that was very profound, very good. That's true. Things tend to sit in our minds longer than they will come out of our mouths. That's the fruit. And notice, James is not concerned here actually with this being a truth thing. He's not concerned that the believers are actually lying. It's a humility issue. So now he's already made the point in his letter, right, to love your neighbor as yourself. Back in chapter two, he's made the point as well, and both these things come across in these last couple of verses, that we're not to be hearers of the law only, but a doer of the law. And so the law to love your neighbor as yourself, nobody is above that. When we choose to hate, we choose to resent, choose to hold grudges, we're putting ourselves above that law to love your neighbor as yourself. None of us are above that law. None of us can judge the law in that way as being wrong. And, he says, nobody is above the law giver. Because when we judge the law, we're judging the one who's given us the law. One final quote, again, from the same commentator. He says, to take up the position of judge is to elbow God off his throne. Whenever we judge His word, whenever we judge our ways to be right and His ways to be wrong and follow the world's example, we're elbowing Him off His throne. And from the grace-fueled repentance, we will no longer do that by God's grace. That's the healing that James wants to see in his church. So really, at the end of the day, the mark of a true and godly and Christian community is not that we never experience conflict. We always will, because we're all sinners, right? We're a lot of sinners, all in one small place, and all these sharp edges are gonna scratch each other. But the mark of a Christian community is the grace-fueled, humble response to that conflict. So let me just give you four very quick exhortations based on this passage as we close. Number one, humble yourself enough to confess your sin to God. That's the first and foremost one from this passage. We cannot get grace from him unless we confess our sins to God. Proverbs 28, 13 says, the one who conceals his sin will come to ruin, but the one who confesses finds mercy. Humble yourself to confess to him. Number two, humble yourself enough to confess your sin to one another. This is another point that he's gonna come back to at the end of his letter, but the only way to make peace between people is for one of you to walk across the battle line and wave the white flag to say, I'm sorry. I'm sorry for these things that I've done. I'm sorry for the way that I've mistreated you. I don't want to be at war anymore. And what happens when you do that is the grace of God is working in their hearts. They'll turn around and do the same thing. It's been called by somebody else a chain reaction of repentance. When somebody humbles themselves, it sets off the chain. So humble yourself enough to confess to one another. Third, humble yourself enough to forgive. Right, we just prayed in the Lord's Prayer again. Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors. Vengeance belongs to the Lord. Forgiveness belongs to us. It's our duty to forgive when somebody comes to us. If God has made peace with us, covered all of our sins by his blood, surely we can forgive one another for our grudges, for our wicked words, for the resentment, for the cursing, and humble ourselves enough to forgive. And then, fourthly and finally, even humble yourself enough to rest. Because repentance is the means by which God gives us grace and victory and maturity, reconciliation. You don't need to be spiritually restless anymore. You don't need to be spiritually restless and fall into despair. You don't need to selfishly pursue your own desires anymore. Again, God's grace is sufficient to forgive. God's grace is sufficient to provide. God's grace is sufficient to give us everything that we need, so we can rest. We can rest from the guilt, rest from the wars, and rest in God. By his grace, may he shape us into that very community. Let's pray together. Heavenly Father, we do pray for all of those things We recognize that this is not just a word problem, it's not just a people problem, but our very hearts are our enemies. And so we pray for your forgiveness. We pray for cleansing. We pray for your Holy Spirit to be upon us, to dwell in us. We pray that we would no longer spurn those good things, no longer spurn the fellowship of the saints, your word, prayer, All the good things you give us to grow closer to you. We pray that you, your spirit, would rest on each one of us individually. Rest on our whole church as well. We pray that you would give us good words to speak. Help us to be truthful speakers. Help us to be loving speakers. We pray again, deeply, most of all, that you would work those things in our hearts and in our thoughts. Lord, we thank you for the blood of Jesus Christ. Thank You that He covers these things. And we pray that You would give us just a fresh experience of that mercy. It's in His name that we pray. Amen.