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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.
The Heart of the Matter
| Sermon ID | 112424152517628 |
| Duration | 38:12 |
| Date | |
| Category | Sunday Service |
| Bible Text | James 4:1-12 |
| Language | English |
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