Okay, turn in your Bibles to James chapter four. James chapter four. We will be concentrating on verses seven through 10 this morning. The title of this sermon is Grace Like a River. Grace Like a River. Excuse me while I get all my accouterments stashed and stored here. As we read this morning's passage, when we get to that point, it's important, of course, as it is all the time in Scripture, to understand what has gone before in the verses previous and how it connects to what we are reading presently. And for this to make sense, I want us to start with verse six of chapter four, as it flows into this passage that we are going to be looking at this morning. In James 4.6, we read, but he, that is God, gives more grace. Therefore it says, God opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble. So grace is a word that we hear frequently. We come across it in scripture. We use it as Christians in our conversation frequently, but not everybody understands what it means because it can mean different things. There's various usages of it in scripture. I'm not gonna talk about what an individual may mean by it because I don't know, but we find basically three distinctive meanings in scripture when the term grace is used. First off, it's the active love of God towards his creation and his creatures. Secondly, it's used to refer to the appealing attractiveness of God by which he draws us to himself. And thirdly, it's the strength of God to overcome that which keeps us from him. Oftentimes that's us ourselves that keep us from God. So grace flows from God. And I got this image of this like a river flowing from the mountain of God to us. But in this river of grace that flows from God's throne, we find that there are those that aren't affected by it, at least to our eyes. I'm talking about the proud, unbowed soul who can stand like a rock in the middle of a rushing river and appear to be unmoved by it. The river seems to not affect it, at least moment by moment as we watch it. The river rushing past does not penetrate this hard, unyielding stone. But like this stone, which is wetted constantly by the river, and eventually worn by it to the rock's detriment, God's grace affects those even who refuse to acknowledge God because he created them. They, along with God's people, live in the world of his creation. Lord Jesus, he spoke of this in the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5.45. He said, for he, that is the father, makes his son rise on the evil and on the good and sends his rain on the just and the unjust. But then the humbled soul is different from this unyielding rock. Picture the humbled soul like a thirsty tree alongside the river, nourished unceasingly by these life-giving waters. This tree whose roots instinctively reach for the river's course, for this water that it wants, that it needs to live. And this river of grace descending from the highlands of heaven, it flows downhill to us and continues to flow down to the lowliest lowlands of the earth and eventually into a great gulf of God's grace that's teeming with life. For this is how God has designed the world, to receive his grace, that we benefit from it, whether we appreciate it or not, whether we recognize it or not. So this is the idea we have as we enter into this passage. We've heard Pastor James talk about the grace of God and how important it is. Now we read this next excerpt, verses seven through 10, which read, 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 yourself before the Lord and he will exalt you. Well, these verses obviously require a bit of explanation and exegesis. Otherwise, if we were just to pluck one of them out, like verse nine, it wouldn't be a very happy passage we were reading. And it's like, wow, am I supposed to just be this person that's acting sad and mournful all the time? No, not at all. We're gonna put this into context. And in this passage here, James gives a series of terse, or short, kind of sharp commands, beginning with the domino one that's easy to see in verse seven, you know, submit to God. This is hard to do, actually. when you think about it, submitting, probably one of the hardest things for the natural man, the natural person to do. The natural man, that is the unconverted person, rages against any authority over them. We've all experienced this, or we've struggled with it and engaged in it ourselves. And it starts pretty early in life, right? I mean, my experience with kids, my own, and grandchildren and those of friends, it's like, it's about two or three years of age, right? Where this rage against authority starts to occur with the toddlers. And they're raging against everything. What do you got? I'll rage against it. You're not gonna make them happy. That is the natural man. That's us before we learn how to filter stuff and how to control things. This unbridled rage against things and people that want to tell us what to do, that want to control us. So children, We're starting off, don't want to submit to their parents. Continues through life. Think of the workplace. Workers do not want to submit to the bosses. Wives do not want to submit to their husbands. And husbands do not want to submit to Christ. These are things that God's word tells us specifically we are to submit in this way. But we rage against that, that is very difficult for us. In fact, not just difficult, I would say it's difficult for those that are converted. It's impossible for those that are reprobate, that are unconverted. But the Lord calls us to do things that we do not want to do. And these things, really, we cannot do them apart from him. Our sinful nature is compared to, it's juxtaposed against God's grace. Thomas Brooks, many of you have heard of him, 17th century English Puritan pastor and a prolific writer, good writer, He offers this illustration and I think it works very well. He said, sin and grace are like two buckets at a well. When one is up, the other is down. Think about that on the pulley, right? And we can see easily in our lives and in our culture which one of these buckets is up. Is it the bucket of sin or is it the bucket of grace? Well, we pretty much know in our culture, with us, it may vary day to day, right? It may vary hour to hour, minute by minute. But in our culture, let's talk about this broadly, we can measure this in many different ways. And one of the interesting ways that I see in measuring it is by our cultural heroes. All people require heroes. We seem to be made that way. There's a reason for it. But why? So we live in the dimension of time. That's how God's created this world and us to exist. Our lives and events run through time, moment after moment, like a narrative of a story when you think about it. And in this story, it all centers around three main things, which is creation, the fall, and redemption. We find this reflected in the storytelling of our culture. even though many storytellers would not admit it, it's something we can't get away from, because this is what the human race has been enmeshed in from the beginning. These events are a lived out narrative for us. So speaking of cultural heroes, there was a time that classicists, scholars that study, you know, things of the classic period in the world, which is, you know, in the Greek world before Christ, centuries before Christ, they had this time that they referred to, especially in the literature and the writing, as the age of heroes, the heroic age. Well, once upon a time, they thought this was all imaginary stuff. It was that the Greeks wrote about the stuff that happened before them in earlier cultures, and it was just made up. And then archaeological discoveries show that a lot of this stuff, a lot of these places seem to actually be real or are real. So they try and separate this age of heroes to this pre-classical Greek time. But really, I think we're still in the age of heroes because we need heroes. We make heroes. If there aren't any apparent, we assign that role to people. And often, we do this very badly. These heroic traits. that we see exemplified in either the classical Greek writing or as we go through different periods in human history, the heroic traits have changed to what we see today. The noble and self-sacrificing hero has been replaced by a self-centered and oftentimes a psychotic hero. And you can see this. You pick any category you want, whether it's fiction, whether it's movies or TV, or comic books, anything. And look at what the heroes in that genre, in that event, whatever, are like. And compare, let's say, mid-20th century to late 20th century, early 21st century that we're in. There is a marked difference in what is considered the thing to strive for, the heroic ideal of the time. In the second half of the 20th century on in today, you have the rise of what's called the anti-hero. I think back when I was a little boy, one of the big heroes that I had on the black and white TV was the Lone Ranger. What a great show. I mean, this was a character that exemplified virtue and good triumphing over evil, and he did it in a law-abiding way. And then compare it to later in the 20th century when the antihero appeared, and we have Dirty Harry, who's breaking every rule and regulation of the police department and violating the laws and the Constitution and criminal law himself as a police officer. That's a big change that has occurred. But I see, interestingly enough, another change occurring. See, we think that our life is always static. Whatever moment we're in, we don't think it's going to change. The things around us are going to remain the same, and it's just going to, well, if it changes, it's going to get worse, right? It's not going to get better. Do you see a change going on? I see a drastic change going on in our culture. I pray that it's good, continues to be good. But this age of the antihero, I think, is fading out. And as many scholars seem to think that the postmodern age that we're in has become the post-Christian age, I don't think that's so. I think they're gonna be proven wrong. I think the age of the anti-hero is passing. And we're going to return to a better ideal in our culture. Now why am I talking about this? It seems like a rabbit trail, but I don't think it is. Because I see a culture's heroes as being connected to the culture's view of God. When God is out, so to speak, out of fashion, nobody wants to talk about God, we don't need God, we've moved beyond that, that's when the heroes become the anti-heroes. They become demonic. And in times when God is in, I mean that being a church goer is appreciated and admired. Not saying that everybody is a true Christian, but that God is seen as a necessary part of society, then we see heroic qualities of nobility and virtue return. This is part of the effects of God's grace. upon a culture, upon a society. And this shouldn't be surprising to us because the one great hero in all of writing, in all of human history is our Lord Jesus Christ. He is, with a capital T and a capital H, the hero. Everybody else falls short of this. And it's interesting, before the postmodern era, if you read literature, you see in many, many of the great novels, Christ symbols in it. Writers used to put those in there, and I don't know if it was, I don't think it was always intentional, but the story that they told, if you were telling a great story, and it wasn't just some of this, garbage that has been written in our time. If you're telling a great story, it's going to reflect scripture, it's going to reflect the story of God, it's going to reflect Jesus Christ. Fall redemption is going to be in it. Because the Bible tells the perfect story, which every human heart has yearned for, a world where life has been ruined, but then rescued and returned to glory by the grace of God. And the loss of this idea has coincided with the degradation of our culture, which I pray is being restored. If that's God's will, it will come about. And being an optimist, because Willie, if you're a Christian, how could you not be an optimist? We have nothing but good things ahead of us, even though we may be going through times of trouble and tribulation, our Lord has prevailed and we are victors because of him and we will conquer. So the first point I wanna make this morning, point number one is faith requires submission. Faith requires submission. Now it's kind of a long way around to get to this point, but the first part of verse seven here, submission, is what we're gonna talk about next, and submission requires humility, which is a rare commodity in humankind, especially today it seems. Authentic humility is not in fashion. And we've really struggled with this even within the church. It's been said you have a lot of hero worship in Christ's church today. We magnify the messenger and as a result minimize the message. And really, in actuality, the message should be of such a nature that it overshadows the messenger. We should hear what's being preached from God's word and really not pay that much attention to the man who's giving it, because he's really irrelevant to God's message other than being blessed and privileged to communicate the message. So this call that James gives us to submit to God is followed by some matching commands, and they are in couplets. There's three couplets. Now you may not know what a couplet is, but of course I'm gonna tell you. And if you've read Dr. Seuss, you know what a couplet is. If you've read Shakespeare, you know what a couplet is. It's two lines of verse that in English, in the English language and the way we write, these two lines of verse are connected by rhyme and rhythm. So we have couplets in Hebrew also. But in Hebrew writing, The couplets are connected by the rhythm of thought, not by sound so much, which is good because, right, we gotta translate the Hebrew and we don't get the sound, so it would be maybe nonsensical to us, but the point of the Hebrew writers is that they rhyme in thought, so the idea behind it. is what we're looking at. And these three couplets instruct us on how we could submit ourselves to God. So this first couplet, the end of verse seven, the beginning of verse eight, starts off with a negative expression. Resist the devil and he will flee from you. But then it's followed by something positive, a positive expression. Draw near to God and he will draw near to you. So in the first couplet, first half of the couplet, the command to resist is a military term. It means to stand against, as in combat. So that brings to mind a parallel passage of Paul's in Ephesians 6.12, which we're very familiar with, where Paul says, for we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places. So my translation, the ESV, says wrestle, right? Literally, the underlying word there refers to a struggle. Well, wrestling is a struggle, if you've ever had to wrestle. So it's a struggle, and it gives the idea of something that is very personal. If you're wrestling with someone or something, you're grappling with it. It's like hands-to-hand combat, so to speak. And it requires strength and stamina to do this. And of course, you know, when we join it with what Paul's writing in Ephesians 6, we can see that the physical material weapons are worthless in this, right? They're futile, they're not gonna work because who are we fighting against? But serried ranks of evil angels led by fallen angelic princes. These are not beings that we could fight apart from the grace of God in equipping us to do so. And we fight in such a way that it does not require us to draw completely on our own reserves, our reservoirs of strength and stamina. Because God in his grace supplies us with what we need to do this and supplies us with the ways and how we are to do it. Which are counterintuitive to everything that we would come up with on our own. And in our spiritual warfare, in our struggles, we should not think, like you've heard some fundamentalist preachers talking about, you know, punching old Satan right in the nose, just give him a good one, you know, give him a knock there. We are cautioned against taking such a, casual approach to these mighty spiritual beings. Even the highest angels, the righteous angelic princes, did not do that. They would say, the Lord rebuke you. They would rely on the power of the Lord. We cannot fight against these spiritual powers on our own. We're at their mercy, apart from the grace of God. But with the grace of God, They shudder to think of dealing with a faithful Christian drawing upon the righteousness of Christ. That is something that they cannot contend with. So how are we to do this? How are we to resist the devil? It's one thing to say, yeah, we can resist him, okay, okay. Tell me how to do it. I need to know how to do it. I have this, you say, that I can, but I need to know how. What could possibly cause such a powerful spiritual being to flee from us? And the answer, you know, is not that difficult, and James, gives us the answer right in this matching couplet that we see here in the next half of the verse. Draw near to God and he will draw near to you. How do we draw near to God? Well, it's through the means of grace that he gives us. We don't have to find our own way to God. We don't have to, you know, everyone, it's not the idea everyone has their own pathway, you know, to God. You may go, you know, across the sands of the beach. You're going to go up this stony brook to the mountaintop. No, it's we draw near to God in repentance, in faith, in obedience, in prayer, being in God's word, reading it, hearing God's word preached, just soaking it in as the saying goes. And here's the thing, although James tells us draw near to God, well, it's God who draws us. So us drawing near to God is in response to him drawing us to him. Do not resist that, brethren, when God is drawing you near to Him. And here's the amazing thing. And really think about it. How much work is God doing in this? He's doing almost all of it, right? We need to respond, but He draws us near to Him. We respond and we want, we desire this nearness to Him. And then, James says, and He will draw nearer to us. It's a synergistic effect, so to speak. It's like, it's not just two plus two equals four, it's exponentially powerful. So the light of Christ kept near to you in your everyday life will cause the devil to flee. He is a defeated foe who cannot stand against our victorious Lord. Sometimes we get this lofty idea of spiritual warfare, that in some more fundamentalist, more Pentecostal forms of Christianity, they have deliverance ministries. Certain people that think that that's their calling, just to deliver others from Satan. But don't be misled by thinking that that's a special calling. The everyday life of the Christian, whether it's keeping a home, Doing a job that you may think is routine, your eight to five job, like it's nothing special, going to school, grocery shopping, these things done in obedience to the Lord is spiritual warfare. Took me a long time to figure that out in reading and reading and reading and reading. It's like, wow. all I gotta do is be obedient to God and the things he calls me to do, even if it just means running an errand. I'm gonna be obedient to God in what I do, not that there's anything special about it, but where I go as a son of God, God is with me, the Holy Spirit is with me, and that territory, God has claimed all that territory, and we as his representatives, when we go in to wherever we're going in our daily life, It's like the old days when Teddy Roosevelt was the president and he sent the great white fleet out to show the flag to all the nations. The Navy painted all the battleships white so you wouldn't miss them and he flew the stars and stripes from them. It's like, yes, we're the United States of America. Well, that's an example of you guys as Christians. You're like God's fleet going out showing the flag. People around you may not know it, may not pay any attention to it, but I guarantee you, spiritual powers, both righteous and wicked, are aware of that. And if we are conscious of that, or maybe just, it's hard to be conscious of that all the time, because we live our lives, right? It's got a lot of, you got a lot of things on your mind. I know, I know you do, because I do. But if that's in your subconscious and you're aware of it, it's kind of in your conscience too. Because it's in the awareness of those powers that are around you. So point number two, kind of obvious, what I've been going on and on about here, point number two, the Christian life is spiritual warfare. The Christian life is spiritual warfare. The takeaway, the big point that I'm trying to get across here is that spiritual warfare isn't really anything super duper special and different from how we live our lives. We just live our lives as faithful, obedient people to God with a biblical worldview where we understand, and here's where so many Christians miss it, and the world certainly misses it, that everything we do is vital. Everything is important. There's consequences to all of this. And this first couplet that we've read is entirely about this inescapable and unavoidable fact. Resisting the devil and drawing near to God are our daily standing orders. It is what we are to do all of the time. Every moment, of every hour, of every day, of every year, for the remainder of our lives, until the Lord returns or we go to be with Him in glory. And then, believe it or not, it's gonna continue, right? It's just that we're not gonna be dealing with the opponents that we deal with now. And we have to realize that Some of us are going to be bloodied in this fight. We're going to suffer at times. We're gonna suffer physically, we're going to suffer emotionally. And others of us, according to God's will, will seem unscathed in this fight. We have no idea why one happens to some and the other happens to others. So, and I only add that because I don't want us ever to get the idea that we are more holy than a brother or sister because we have been more wounded in the spiritual battle than the other brother or sister has. Of course, obviously, we don't know what wounds a person carries in their life, but even if there aren't any that are apparent, we each, are given tasks by the Lord, and we fulfill them in a certain way. There may be a dear one who's on in years, who cannot much leave the house, but is in prayer frequently and constantly for others, who may seem to just not bearing the consequences of faith. We shouldn't think that we are better because maybe we get harassed at work or someplace because of our faith. Let's move on to the second couplet. In the second couplet, we are told how to submit to God. And there's an external principle we're given first. Cleanse your hands, you sinners. And then an internal principle. And purify your hearts, you double-minded. So remember, James is writing this to Jewish Christians in the first century. They would have understood exactly what he was talking about this, because washing and cleansing for purification were essential elements for God's people under the Mosaic administration, under the Old Covenant. And the, Washings and cleansings that the Jews were commanded by Lord God to do were physical acts, but they had spiritual overtones to them. So it wasn't a matter of personal importance. public health and hygiene. These washings and cleansing rituals we're told in the New Testament were types and shadows of what was to come, of the work that our Lord Jesus Christ would perform for his people on the cross with the shedding of his blood. And then what was physical with spiritual overtones is now through the Lord Jesus is spiritual with physical undertones to it. So these things are connected in a way that I think it's important that we understand. And these ritual purity rites that we read about in the Old Testament were instructive to God's people. Now as you go about your daily Bible readings, If you've not, when you come to Leviticus, keep this in mind, it will help you to get through the book of Leviticus. When you realize that there's a point to this, it's not just, man, I have no idea why they're doing this, and it just goes on and on and on. Think about Jesus Christ, about what he has done. And think, Okay, why is the Lord God instructing his people to do these intricate, detailed rites? Does this make sense? How do I make it make sense? You think about it. These rituals for purity that the Jews were to do, the Israelites were to do, you had to be very, very conscious of what you were doing and how you were living your life. Because these rites, these rituals governed so much of daily activity. And this is one of the purposes of God, to make his people pay attention, to make God conscious in their thoughts. And to do this, he made them a promise. I will dwell with you. You make yourself pure and I will dwell with my people. Okay, so we know no matter how many times we wash our hands and our feet, da-da-da-da-da, and make sure we use the right type of pottery and crockery and so on and so forth, and we don't have any blemishes in our house or on our bodies, that we're never gonna be as pure as God. We cannot be, right? So it really wasn't a matter of you've got to attain this absolute purity that's even purer than ivory soap. Remember that 99.9% pure? So you gotta be better than ivory soap. Well, that's not possible. There's a principle, but the principle is possible. It's like I am serving, I am a person chosen amongst God's people And he is so holy and righteous, and we are not, that we have to consciously do these things to be his people. Well, thankfully, we don't have to go through those rituals, but the idea has not changed under the new covenant. It's been handled. by the one great hero of history, Jesus Christ, Son of God, who performed a sacrifice, spilled his blood, let his body be broken for us, and we are covered by that. But what hasn't changed is that we need to be, we should be conscious of this in our relationship to the Lord daily in what we do. And I think there's a dreadful lack of understanding of this in the broadly evangelical church today of the 20th century and on. You all have heard of, I know, Billy Graham. Billy Graham had at the time one of the most famous converts and that's a convert in quotation marks, the scare quotes, converts to Christianity that was known. Back in the 40s and the 50s, the city of Los Angeles, the organized crime there was run by a man by the name of Mickey Cohen. And Mickey Cohen was a gangster, he was a mobster, he was no good guy. Well, the LAPD, back in those days, you know, the laws weren't strict when it came to wiretapping and eavesdropping. Well, they hired this sound engineer to wiretap Mickey Cohen so they could listen in on what the mob was doing. Well, somehow, Mickey finds out about it. He hires a sound engineer. He says, hey, you going to wiretap me? I'll tell you what, I'll pay you some good money, you wiretap them. And so he wiretapped the LAPD for Mickey Cohen. So they would know when they're going to get raided and whatnot, right? But Mr. Sound Engineer, his wife notices that their income has increased greatly, and she can't figure out why. So she corners him like, okay, bub, you need to tell me what's going on. All of a sudden, we got all this money, you're showering me with gifts, what's up? And like a good husband, he's honest with his wife. He tells her, yeah, you know, I'm on Mickey Cohen's payroll. She goes, are you out of your mind? You're gonna end up dead and I might end up dead with you. You need to come to Jesus. And she makes him go to a Billy Graham tent crusade in downtown Los Angeles. So he goes there and he hears Billy preaching. And he's struck by the word of God. And he responds to the altar call. And he converts to Christianity. But he works for Mickey Cohan, this very dangerous mobster. What's he to do? He goes to Mickey Cohen. He's a brave, brand new Christian. He goes to Mickey and he says, Mr. Cohen, I can't work for you anymore. Ah, what do you mean you can't work for me, huh? He goes, well, I've become a Christian and my faith does not allow me to do these things. And surprisingly, Cohen lets him go. Say, once the mob has you, you're never out. Well, by the grace of God, this man was allowed to depart his association with the LA mob, but that's not, he wasn't happy with that. He starts sharing Christ with Mickey Cohen. Mickey's Jewish, right? And I would say not a religious Jew either from his lifestyle. Well, this sound engineer, he goes back to the ministers in Graham's crusade and says, hey, I've been sharing what you guys told me with Mickey Cohen. And Billy Graham gets words of this. And he tells the sound engineer, I will come and speak and preach to Mickey Cohen any place, any time. You just let me know. So he goes to Mickey Cohen and says, hey, Billy Graham wants to meet you. And Cohen's like, yeah, fine, come on over, we'll break bread, whatever. So Billy goes to Cohen's house and they talk for the longest time about Jesus and the Bible, et cetera, et cetera. And then there's follow-up ministers from the Grand Crusade that talk to this man, Mickey Cohen. And somewhere along the line, Mickey Cohen prays the sinner's prayer. Hallelujah, Mickey Cohen is saved. Can you believe it? So they get Mickey like, hey, you gotta come to New York City with us. We're having a big crusade. We're gonna be at Madison Square Garden and we want you there. So they fly Mickey Cohen to New York City and he appears at the crusade. Everybody goes nuts, especially the evangelical world, right? Wonderful news. Mickey flies back to L.A. They don't hear from Mickey for like five weeks. His discipler's trying to get a hold of him, you know, follow up type of thing. Can't get a hold of him. Read in the newspaper though, there's all sorts of mob stuff going on in L.A. Guys are getting whacked, you know, businesses are getting robbed, yada, yada, yada. Finally they get a hold of Mickey. And his discipler tells him, hey listen, you can't do this stuff anymore. You gotta turn over a new leaf. Mickey's like, what do you mean? He didn't tell me I had to change my life, that I had to stop doing this stuff, get rid of my friends. Hey, there's Christian cowboys, there's Christian ballplayers, there's even Christian actors and stuff. How come there can't be Christian gangsters? And that was the end of Mickey Cohen's Christian experience. It's an interesting story, but it's sad because Mickey represents many people that call themselves Christians, that maybe have prayed a sinner's prayer, and then went back to their life as gangsters, figuratively speaking. But all of us were mobsters and gangsters of some sort before Christ converted us. This is why James, in his letter here, this excerpt we're reading, it's why he addresses sinners and double-minded in this couplet. What we're talking about in the mid 20th century and then even today, things weren't really a whole lot different in the first century. And James, just like the apostles who were also writing to the churches, is not concerned with pagans outside the church. Because pagans are gonna do pagan stuff, right? They're gonna sin. We don't rage against them, at least we shouldn't. And I know many Christians do, and that's mainly because of a love for our nation and our culture. We don't want to see a drug into the mud. James is concerned with those inside the church who are wobbly and stumbling in their faith, who are besmirched with grime from the world, thinking they're partakers in salvation when maybe they really aren't. Maybe they're fooling themselves and they need to be awakened. And James, not a man to mince words, bluntly uses strong language here, calling them sinners and double-minded. Though we've heard that term double-minded before in this letter. And he's using it again. So he's not referring to two separate classes. There's not the sinners and the double-minded. He's referring to one group here, the same people. That is that the double-minded are sinners and the sinners are double-minded. These are Christians who fail to fulfill, to live out the law of Christ, which is to love the Lord your God with all your might, with all your strength, with all your mind, all your soul, and to love your neighbor as yourself. They fail to do that because they love the world and worldly people in a worldly manner. This is what makes them double-minded. Or the Greek literally says, two-souled. They have two souls, or act as though they do, because they have conflicting allegiance with two powers, which are at war, basically, with one another. And earlier in the last chapter, we read in chapter four, verse four, James calls these people, you adulterous people, because they're committing adultery against the Lord. They're unfaithful in their faith. Our last point, point number three. Our faith must be united externally and internally. And this is in the last couplet, the third couplet, verse 9a and 9b. Be wretched and mourn and weep. Let your laughter be turned to mourning. So double-souled sinners are called back to the reality of their conditions here. The preacher, Kohalith, in ecclesiastics, Ecclesiastes uses the illustration of the house of mourning versus the house of mirth. And we find that in chapter seven of that book. In verses four and five of chapter seven of Ecclesiastes, the preacher says, The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning, but the heart of fools is in the house of mirth. It is better for a man to hear the rebuke of the wise than to hear the song of fools. Worldly thinking, we would not want to be in the house of mourning. We'd rather be in the house of mirth, the house of partying, right? Why does this wise sage in the Old Testament call us to the house of mourning? Our culture hates the idea of mourning. We can see it in our practices today. Used to be people went to funerals and there was mourning. Now we go to celebrations. because nobody wants to mourn. We don't wanna think about death, do we? Death is depressing. So, we're just gonna live. We're gonna live until we don't live and then you don't worry about that person. That really doesn't work. That's not how human beings are made. That's not what the Lord intends. What the preacher is saying is that the house of mourning, when you're in it, you should be thinking about, that's gonna be me. That dead body up there is gonna be me. What does my life mean? How am I living my life? How should I change my life? The house of mourning is where we ponder whether we are obedient to God or not. The house of mirth, there's no such pondering. There's just partying and foolishness and fools. So this couplet that we're talking about here, the third one, is kinda odd because really the faithful Christian life is one of joy, but this is not a joyful couplet, right? So James is not talking about the faithful Christian life. He's talking about the one who thinks that they are Christian, but is not leading the faithful life. Those who are unfaithful in the house of God should weep and mourn over their fate. That's why the house of mourning would be better for them than the house of mirth. In Luke's gospel, there's a passage where he records the Lord Jesus pronouncing woes on the worldly. Those who seem to have it so good, that are living their life in the house of mirth. They've got a lot to be mirthful about, because maybe they're rich, maybe they're prosperous, maybe they live a life of ease. But Christ says in Luke 6.25, woe to you who laugh now, for you shall mourn and weep. He's not necessarily talking about you're enjoying life but your grandmother or your mother's gonna die and you're gonna be very sad. He's not talking about that. They need to mourn and weep over their own soul because they're not paying attention to what God requires of them. And weeping and mourning, think about back when you came to Christ, weeping and mourning are the path to repentance. I'm sure many of you recall that time, weeping when you realize what you have done, how you've pained the Lord, the one who did so much for us. The passage that we're looking at this morning ends with this summary command in verse 10. Humble yourself before the Lord and he will exalt you. Now on three separate occasions in the gospels, the Lord Jesus tells us this very thing. He says, for everyone who exalts himself will be humbled and he who humbles himself will be exalted. Of course, again, the Lord is not talking about in this world, is he? He's not talking about the prideful one who's just gonna realize, you know what, I shouldn't be so full of myself. I'm gonna humble myself. It's not a matter of self-realization. It's not a matter of browsing the self-help books at Barnes and Noble and figuring out how can I be more humble? No, it's not that at all. So our Lord talks about this three times. James is talking about it. Then Peter also writes about this. He writes James' summary command almost word for word in 1 Peter 5, 6. He writes, humble yourselves therefore under the mighty hand of God so that at that proper time he may exalt you. At that proper time. It's the Father's time when we are exalted, not our time. So when we read a command in the Bible, that's really important. If it's repeated, we gotta pay attention to that. Three times, wow, okay, God's trying to get a point across here, right? Four times, oh yeah, I'm awake now. Five times, five times we're told this. I think we oughta pay attention to that, you know? There's a message there that we're supposed to be getting. And what does it mean to be exalted? Well, the underlying meaning of this word means to be lifted up to a high place. Our Lord was exalted when he was lifted to a high place. He said he was going to be, but he was referring to being put up on the cross, right? But that was part of his exaltation. What happened after his death and after his resurrection and then his ascension, What did the first martyr of the church, Stephen, see when he looked up to the heaven right before he was murdered? He saw the Lord Jesus at the right hand of the throne, right? That's exaltation. Lifted up to, there's no place higher than that. And in the world, the world's way of thinking, submission and humility is not the way to exaltation, It's the opposite, right? To the worldly, it's self-centeredness and self-love, which the world exalts. Christ, obedient and humble, was exalted by the Father and raised to glory. So how is God going to exalt his humble, faithful people? Well, in the very same way. You, faithful Christian, will be raised from the dead. your body will come out of the grave. Even if you burned it up. Even if someone, well I know you wouldn't burn it up, because you're not there to do it, right? Even if someone else burned it up. You're going to be resurrected. No matter what happens. You know, you go skydiving maybe and you jump out in the mountains and you're scattered all over the place. You'll be resurrected. Don't worry about that stuff. That's not ours to worry about. God will take care of that. Once, and then, just like the Lord Jesus, at this place of authority, this is gonna happen to us also. You've been adopted into God's family. That makes you, according to the old inheritance laws, a son, a son of God. Doesn't matter if you're male or female, and we will be male and female in the kingdom of heaven. It's not like we're all gonna become these androgynous beings and all look alike. We're gonna be us, right? But you're gonna be in a place of honor. You're gonna be exalted as a son of God. You will receive an inheritance in the kingdom. And what it is exactly, I don't know, but it's going to be magnificent. And I think we'll look back on our lives here and we'll see, wow, this is amazing how that back then prepared me for this. But this is so much better. Because back then, man, I was nobody. And now I'm a son of God. And he loves me. And he's given all of this to me. And he expects things from me. I have responsibilities and I'm doing this and that and that for him and it's such a joy. The river of God's grace as we end here. This is what the prophet Jeremiah says about the righteous one. One who's made righteous by God, Jeremiah 17 verse eight. He is like a tree planted by water that sends out its roots by the stream and does not fear when heat comes for leaves remain green and is not anxious in the year of drought for it does not cease to bear fruit. So we are watered by God's grace. Let us not boast in ourselves. Let us not exalt ourselves, but let him who boasts, boasts in this, that he understands and knows the Lord, who practices steadfast love, justice, and righteousness in the earth. For in these things, I delight, declares the Lord. Jeremiah 9, 24. Let's pray. Heavenly Father, we give thanks for the magnificent blessings that you have given us. Father, we give thanks for your word that opens us to these truths that we would never discover, that would remain as Paul talks about, as mysteries. They are mysteries to the natural man, but are revealed in your word to your people. Father, I pray for blessings upon my brothers and sisters here, your beloved. I pray for blessings for our friends that are here that perhaps don't know Christ yet, Father. We pray that they hear your words and that they respond to them if that is your will, Father. And we pray to be in your will this week in everything we do. and say that we may be conscious of the fact that we are yours, we are your children, adopted by you and we are representative of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Father, bless the rest of this day. We ask for blessings upon the quarterly gathering this evening in Santa Clarita. Father, protect your saints as they drive there to the gathering and as they drive home tonight, Lord, especially with the weather being as it is. and we give thanks and we glorify you in all things, in Jesus' name, amen.