Desires Part 2

This is his fourth time here, so I almost feel like he's family now. I've been very encouraged by his ministry, you can tell, who studies hard and works at preparing their message so that they're faithfully and accurately giving us God's word. I think Jordan does that from what I've seen so far.

And I'm excited to hear him speak again this morning. So please come and share the word of God with us. Thank you, brother.

Well, it is a joy to worship with you this morning and I think it is one of the greatest gifts God's given us, just to be able to sing together and to remind ourselves of the truths that we need to hear every single day. And if you were here a few weeks ago, you heard me preach from James, chapter four, verses one through five. And today we'll be preaching from James, chapter four, verses six through ten.

Sort of finishing that section. And the Book of James itself, as many of you would know, is a very practical book. It's written by James to a group of scattered believers, scattered Jewish believers.

And these people are going through various things that Christians go through. Some of the issues that James addresses are the issue of wisdom and faith and taming the tongue, and the issue of hearing and doing and actually living out your faith. He talks about the sin of partiality, he talks about the testing of our faith.

And James addresses a very critical issue we're going to talk about today. And look with me really quickly, just as in introduction, in James chapter four, verses one, this is the problem that we're going to be spring-boarding from. He says, what causes quarrels and what causes fights among you? Is it not this that your passions are at war within you? And last sermon I addressed that in the word of God.

As he develops this thought, he brings us the idea that the issues, the issues of our heart, the conflicts that we have come from inside of us, they come from the sin desires, the flesh. We desire things that we don't have, so we lash out and we sin. And he has a very bold claim and he says that we are adulterous people.

And he brings us to a place where we have to look in the mirror and we have to face the bad news. Have you ever been asked the question, do you want to hear the bad news or the good news first? Depending on if you're optimistic or pessimistic, you may say those things in different order. But as we look at the first five verses of chapter four, that is the bad news.

So allow me to read the bad news here. James, chapter four, verses one through five. What causes quarrel 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 Scripture says he yearns jealously over the Spirit that he has made to dwell in us? Before we jump into our passage today, I want us to look in the mirror and think through where are we this morning? Not where were we last week? Or where were we Wednesday, but where are we right now? It is easy to become sidetracked, to become distracted, to let our zest or our zeal for God fade.

This morning, as we come together as a body in Christ, we are to be refreshed. We are to be encouraged. We are to be equipped for this week by the power of the Holy Spirit, by the power of the word of God in our lives, by God working through us.

And my prayer this morning is that as we are reading through Scripture and understanding what it is saying, that we would be challenged to know the bad news that we are sinners, that our hearts desire terrible, terrible things. And yet, just as the song service this morning has pointed to the grace of God and to who God is, we know that verse six, the hope says, but he gives more grace. He gives grace even though we are these terrible sinners.

Verse six but he gives more grace. Therefore it says god opposes the proud, but he 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.

Let's ask the Lord for help this morning. God, we pray that you would just encourage our hearts, that you would prick our hearts to change God. We all need to look in the mirror this morning, spiritually, and see where our desires are taking us.

And we need to know that you give more grace. And that indeed, if we do draw near to you, that you'll draw near to us, and that you're there with more and more grace, abundant grace and love for us, I pray that you would help us to be challenged and changed in your Son's name, we pray. Amen.

If you've ever been reading a novel or reading a book, you might come to a critical point in the story where all the odds are stacked against the main character, where everything has been set against them and they have nothing but their wits to defeat the enemy. That's where we're at. We're at this pivot point in the passage where James is telling us this is who we are and now this is what we must do.

But it's because of something. What is that catalyst? It is the grace of God. The grace of God is what changes this story.

The grace of God is the hero of this story, verse six, but he gives more grace. And in the previous message we saw that there was a problem and that was our sin, our hearts. We saw the source of our problem explained and we saw a blatant call for faithfulness.

And today, as we look at verses six through ten, we'll see the grace of God in verse six, the path to humility in verse seven, eight and nine, and a command to be humble in verse ten. But as we focus on verse six, we see that this grace of God is transformative. This grace of God is powerful.

It's a generous overflow of the favor of God. And it's not something that I've done to deserve or that I've earned it. It's something that God gives me.

We're in desperate need of this grace, and God gives it. But he gives it to the humble. God opposes the proud.

The ones who lift themselves up, the one who say, I can handle this, the ones who think they are more important, the ones who think that the word of God is less important. If we live our lives in humility, we will recognize who God is. We'll recognize the power and the majesty that God holds.

And once we recognize who God is, that will be a natural springboard from which we can be humble, from which we can serve God. Because once we know who God is, we live our lives differently. We live our lives in subjugation to Him.

Verse six is very simple. He gives us more grace. More grace.

That's not just one sin, that's not just one time. That is more continuous, ongoing grace. And we thank the Lord for that because it seems like every single morning or every single week we get up and we think, well, I was on track this week.

I was doing my devotions every day. I was thinking about the things of the Lord, I was being purposeful in my relationships. And then a couple of days go by where something maybe throws us off and we think, what happened? And we see in this passage, we see all throughout Scripture that God gives us grace, this generous overflow, this loving overflow of his favor.

And the greatest display of this is the Cross of Calvary. It is the love that he displayed for us when he died for our sins. We have a choice here.

Are we going to be part of the humble or part of the proud? Are we going to humbly? Say god, we need you. God, I'm in great need of you because I can't do this on my own. I'm a sinner.

Do we see our sin the way God sees it? The way verses one through five sees it? This is the God of grace and this is why we are on this path to humility in verses seven through nine. This is why we are pushed towards this idea of humility because of who God is, because it pushes us towards humility. Verses seven through nine says, submit yourselves, therefore, because of this God, because of the grace of God.

Submit yourself 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.

Let's break down some of these phrases because James is sort of piling on what he means by this. And he's explaining this in such a way that we can understand it in several different ways. The first phrase here is submission to God.

Submit yourself to God. What is that? Well, it means I have to let go of something, right? If I'm submitting to something, I'm putting myself underneath something. I'm letting go of something else.

So I'm letting go of my own idea of life, my own plans, my own financial plans, my hopes, my dreams, my desires, my own relationships. Everything is worked in the framework of who God is. It is not about what I want.

It is about what God can do through my life. It's submission. When a servant is in service, he is doing everything for his master.

He is doing everything not for himself, but at the will and the whims of his master. Paul multiple times in Scripture says he is a bond servant or a slave. It is not his will.

It is not our will. We are to submit ourselves to God. And that can be scary, that can be a challenge, because we have plans, we have ideas, and we don't know what God has for us.

We are to submit ourselves to God. This is a very difficult thing to do, easy thing to say. How are we doing in this area? Secondly, he says, resist the devil.

Now, this is seemingly a tall task, right? Because the devil is this powerful angel who has fallen from grace and now he has these demons among with him, working with him, and we are to stand against him. How do we stand against him? We stand against him with the power of God. The answer is we don't do it on our own.

We can't do it by ourselves. In fact, if we learn anything from James four one through five, we learn that our hearts produce a bent towards the devil himself. We have to resist this.

And we resist this. Why? How? Because we have the Holy Spirit inside of us. Because when we were saved, when we became a Christian, we were regenerated and the Holy Spirit moved in and saved us and changed us.

And now it is in conflict. You know, the passage in Ephesians chapter six, verses ten through 13 is the armor of God. Ephesians chapter six, verses ten through 13 says, finally, be strong in the Lord and in the strength of his might.

Put on the whole armor of God. Why? That you may be able to stand against the schemes of the devil. For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against rulers, against authorities, against cosmic powers, over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in heavenly places.

Therefore, take up the whole armor of God that you may be able to stand or withstand in the evil day. And having done all to stand firm, there is a battle, there is a conflict. We are to resist.

You can even think of in the Gospel of Matthew, when Jesus resisted the devil with Scripture, he resisted the devil with the word of God. We are able to withstand because Jesus has already won the battle and sort of in a reciprocal relationship, we resist the devil and he has to run and he has to hide. He has to flee.

He will flee from you. Isn't that a powerful response the devil has here? That if we just resist, just offer some kind of resistance with the whole power of the Holy Spirit, not in our own strength, but in God, he will run away. There's hope because he has nothing against us, because the sin that he had against us has now been nailed to the cross.

The ammunition that he had against us is now empty. Resist the devil and he will flee from you. Do not live your life down in the dumps.

Live your life in the hope of the Gospel, knowing that you have been saved and changed and transformed. Resist the devil. Next is the idea of drawing near to God.

We are to draw near, and these phrases sort of work together. If I'm resisting the devil, it's a part of the process of drawing near to God. If I am being drawn away from God, I'm being drawn towards something else.

And that something else is the world, the things of the devil, the things of the world. I'm supposed to be drawn near to God. I draw near to God.

This phrase is an interesting phrase. It's actually used of Old Testament priests who would purify themselves so they could come to temple worship. That's something that they would use, a phrase that is used to make themselves prepared to see God, to be with God and to worship God on behalf of the people.

This is reciprocated by God. If I draw near to him, he will draw near to me. And as it often happens, when we feel like we're far away from God, it's not because God has fallen back or has retreated from us.

It's because we've fallen back and retreated from Him. We forget and we become distracted. Then James moves from the idea of a spiritual drawing near to God of your heart, of your mind, of your intentions.

And then he moves towards more of a physical daily action. There's two phrases here that sort of work together. He says, cleanse your hands and purify your hearts.

Cleanse your hands. This idea here is the act of daily sin that needs to be purged, removed from your daily life. What are those habits that are not healthy? Those habits that are bringing you away from your walk with God, those habits that distract you from who God is not necessarily sinful things, although it could be blatantly sinful.

Cleanse your hands, remove the sin. The dirt of your daily life. In Bible times, you'd think of people removing their sandals and washing their feet as the dirt of daily life had gotten on their feet and in their toes, and they would be dirty and filthy.

Now, as they would come to a house, they would wash their feet because the dirt and filth of the world had gotten on them. We ought to be in daily, constant prayer and asking God to forgive us of those things that we allow into our hearts. We allow to infect our heart and mind.

Cleanse your hands. And this is juxtaposed with the idea of purifying your hearts. So before we were looking very outwardly at what people can see, these sins that people can see.

And now we're looking at our hearts. And we understand from theology, from Scripture, that only God truly sees our hearts. We understand that God sees the inward man and he knows how wicked we are, and yet he still loves us.

We also understand that we can look inward with the help of the Holy Spirit because now that we have the lens of the Holy Spirit in our lives, we can see the sin that infects us is disgusting before our God. It is gross and purifying our hearts is soul care. It is looking inward to regulate what is going into our minds and hearts.

What are our heart's intentions? What are our heart's desires? What do we think about? What do we want? The idea of purifying here is sort of congruent with the idea of lining our heart intentions with God. And as we are sanctified, as we walk with God, as God sanctifies our intentions in our heart, god gives us the desires of our hearts as they are cleaned and purified into the image of what God wants us to pursue. You've heard of the children's song oh, be careful, little eyes what you see oh, be careful, little ears what you hear it's true for them, it is true for us.

It is true that we have to be an active participant in this purifying of our hearts. God wants to work in us. God wants to sanctify us and change us.

But if we are feeding our hearts wickedness, there's very little God can do because God wants to use us. God wants to use people who are humble and submitted and walking, who are submitted to the Holy Spirit and what he's doing in our lives. He continues here with sort of a series of phrases.

He says, Be, wretched, mourn and weep. Be, wretched, mourn and weep. Simply put, here he is saying we should be in great grief over our sin.

We should be in anguish over our sin. We should be confessing our sin because it is detestable and abhorrent to a holy God. God is holy.

It is his character. It is his nature. There is nothing that is God that is not holy.

And as we look at our lives and we look at who God is, we should see this great chasm between our filthiness and who God is. And it should cause us just to be so wrecked over our sin. I hope we know that God is sad when we sin.

God is in great anguish when we sin because he's watching his children, whom he loves and cares for, walk away and step in the mud and make these mistakes and do terrible things. As a parent who watches their child make mistakes, you may be able to relate to seeing your child do something that you know they shouldn't be doing and you can't stop them from doing it, but you know it's going to have terrible consequences. It could be as simple as a little child touching a stove-top and it's too late to get there.

You know that child is going to be in great pain over it, and yet you can't stop it and you're in anguish in your heart because you know that's not good for them. As God looks at us, I believe that he looks at us many times and he sees us and he sees us walking in sin and he thinks, Why are they doing this? Are you broken over your sin? Are you mourning and weeping over your sin? We ought to be. And then he moves from this mourning and weeping to sort of an interesting take here.

Laughter should be turned into mourning and joy should be turned into gloom. He's talking about the response that we have towards the world. The laughter that we have towards the things of this world and the joy that we have in the things of this world ought to be transformed into mourning and gloom.

This speaks to the transformation that happens when we become a believer. When someone is transformed into the kingdom of God, the things that they once enjoyed, that they once lived in, become disgusting. And they look back on that former life and they think, god, how could I have done that to you? How could I have done that? How could I have sinned against a holy God whom I love so much? We ought to have this transformation as well.

We should look back on things that we have put aside and think, god, I grieved you, I've caused you to mourn. And because of that I am in great mourning and distress and gloom over that sin. This is the path to humility, the path that brings us to the place where we are ready to say, god, take us.

Take me. I'm here for you, to serve you. James takes us to that command.

In verse ten, he says, humble yourselves before the Lord and he will exalt you. It's a great verse. A verse that's a very clear comparison between two concepts being humbled and being exalted.

We are to humble ourselves, to put ourselves underneath, or more accurately, we see that we are underneath God, not that we are arranging ourselves under like that we were above God and putting ourselves under God. More accurately, we see how far inferior we are to God and we're recognizing God. You are so great, so powerful, and we need you.

Nothing I have ever done has ever compared to who you are and what you have done. Submit yourself before the Lord and he will exalt you. I love this idea of being exalted by God.

I don't think it necessarily means being blessed financially or being blessed with all the things that this world has to offer. I think it means that we have great value to God. When we exalt something in our life, we hold it up because it has great value to us.

In fact, when we're in conversation with someone, this might be the first thing that comes to our mind when it comes to small talk or when it comes to just our hobbies. What do you exalt with your life? What do I exalt with my life? God exalts us. God shows us that god shows us that we have great value to Him.

He brings us to a place where we understand our value and our meaning to Him. If we humble ourselves so because our hearts produce hostility and idolatry towards God, and because we are by nature an adulterous people, we are to seek the grace of God. We are to humble ourselves before God.

Sort of a sister passage of this is one Peter, chapter five, verses six to eleven. It says, humble yourselves, therefore, under the mighty hand of God, so that at the proper time he may exalt you, casting all your anxieties on Him because he cares for you. Be sober minded.

Be watchful your adversary, the devil, prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour. Resist him, firm in your faith, knowing that the same kinds of sufferings are being experienced by their brotherhood throughout the world. And after you have suffered a little while.

And the God of all Grace, who has called you to his eternal glory in Christ will Himself restore, confirm, strengthen and establish you to Him be the dominion forever and ever. Amen. As Peter echoes the same message here we are to humble ourselves under what? The mighty hand of God this is in verse seven is one of my favorite verses, casting all your anxieties on him.

Why? Because he cares for you. As believers, we find ourselves in a precarious situation where we are in conflict with the world. We're in conflict with our inner man that's trying to wage a war against us.

And we are trying to live these lives of holiness. As we walk with God, as we see the world getting worse, we understand that we are strangers, we are aliens, we are outcasts. As we understand this position that we have, we can't help but humble ourselves and say, god, we need you because we are your ambassadors.

And so we cast everything at your feet. We cast all our anxieties, our fears, because he does care for us. And this passage also emphasizes the presence of the devil that is out there, that is trying to take us down, that is trying to distract us and remove us from our walk with God.

We know that cannot happen, though, because no one can take us out of the hand of our Father. He is our shepherd who holds us and then that last part, allow me to read it again. And after you have suffered a little while, the God of all Grace who has called you to his eternal glory in Christ will Himself restore, confirm, strengthen and establish you.

You not just someone who Peter was writing to a couple thousand years ago, but you and me. We are in great need of this God. And as you think back to the charges that were brought against us, that we are an adulterous people, we are people of the world, that friendship with the world's, entity with God.

And as we look into our hearts and look into the mirror of God's word, we can see how much we need God. The bad news makes the good news so much greater. We are the source of much of the sins and conflicts in our lives.

And God's grace alone is what saves us from ourselves. God's grace equips us and exalts us by God. God is the one who's doing this work.

And as we live our lives today, we need to recognize the condition of our heart. We need to recognize that we need God. And that if we have indeed been changed by the Gospel, that by the fact that Jesus Christ died on the cross for our sins and if we trust in Him that our lives have been genuinely transformed, that no one can take us out of our Father's hand, no one can take our salvation from us.

We ought to be living differently and living differently. Part of living differently looks like being wretched, mourning over our sin, looking at our sin as detestable, seeing sin for what it really is and humbling ourselves before God, saying, I want you to work through my life today. We ought to be saturating our lives with the word of God and with the people of God and actively forgiving brothers and sisters, knowing that we ourselves have been forgiven, knowing that we ourselves are in the spirit of humility.

James here has given us a powerful wake up call, and I believe that we need this often. And it's interesting. Throughout Scripture, you can turn to every single page in this book and you can find themes that occur over and over and over again.

And it's because we need to hear them over and over and over again. So I pray that God has encouraged you and that God is working in your life, and that today we can walk out of this church building knowing that we are in the grace of God, knowing that we can run to Him, knowing that we ought to be living our lives dedicated. That means leaving things behind and pursuing the things of the Lord.

Let's thank the Lord for his word this morning. God, we are in awe of your grace. We're in awe of your goodness to us, despite our hearts, despite the battles that we face, even in our own hearts.

I pray that we would humble ourselves today that if we have sins that we need to confess, that we would confess them, that we would say, God, we are your children. We want to walk with you. And, God, if there's a person here who is not saved, who doesn't know Jesus Christ as their personal Lord and Savior, that they would run to that grace knowing that their heart is in great need, in your Son's name we pray.

Amen.