The study of James ch 4 wk 7
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James ch 4 wk 7
James ch 4 wk 7
Tonight we are going to be looking at chapter 4 of James, in this chapter James deals with fighting, lust and hate.
Chapter four opens with fights and quarrels, and James confronts this despicable behavior with valor.
Furthermore he gave clear advice on how to end the storms that are so detrimental to spiritual growth and maturity.
A believer must turn hatred into humility, judgment into justice, and boasting into belief.
The appearance of conflict among the followers of Jesus stirred James to intense indignation.
The severity of his tone in this section is accented by the absence of the words my brothers, which James used so frequently in other parts of the letter.
He revealed the cause of conflict, outlined the consequences of conflict, and proposed a cure for conflict.
1 What is the source of quarrels and conflicts among you? Is not the source your pleasures that wage war in your members?
2 You lust and do not have; so you commit murder. You are envious and cannot obtain; so you fight and quarrel. You do not have because you do not ask.
3 You ask and do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives, so that you may spend it on your pleasures.
Characteristically, James introduced this new section with a rhetorical question, what causes quarrels and conflicts among you?
James looked at the church and seen a divided church.
Is there anything sadder than such a church?
The church is to be united in love for God and love for one another.
The church is to be united around the truth of God.
These wars and fighting, the quarrels were among the people of the church.
So what was feeding this quarrel that James saw in the church?
It was selfishness!
The people were going for the wrong reason - not to help the church and advance it, but to advance themselves.
Each person was seeking his or her own good instead of the good of brothers and sisters in Christ.
The lust of selfishness led them to murder one another.
Now this was not actual murder where someone had died but that the lust had led them to hat one another, and hatred is inward murder.
How can a church full of hatred advance the cause of Christ?
It can’t.
A church filled with anger and strife disproves its own message.
It says to unbelievers, come to Christ, and He will change your life.
And the unbelievers all around laugh and say, why is it that He has not changed you?
34 “A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another, even as I have loved you, that you also love one another.
35 “By this all men will know that you are My disciples, if you have love for one another.”
We know that lost people are always watching us, waiting for us to make mistakes.
If they do not see love from us they make the conclusion that we are not Disciples of Christ!
They will say well I thought that you were a Christian.
It is easy for us to come to church and to promote ourselves instead of Christ.
See it is our human nature to promote or to only think of ourselves, but we need to put God first and think about what His will is and what it is that He would have us to promote.
These people needed their wants fixed.
They were wanting the wrong things as they came to church.
They were wanting their own desires gratified.
There is nothing wrong with wanting things if the things we want are good and right.
And if they are good and right, there is a way for us to get what we want - that is through prayer.
If we come to the church wanting prestige, we will pound on one another.
If we come to the church wanting the Lord to be glorified and our fellow-Christians edified, we will pray for one another.
Because these people wanted the wrong things, they could not ask God for the right things.
And because they were not asking God for the right things, they were not receiving anything from God; you do not have because you do not ask.
We are supposed to be in agreement!
Prayer is very important, one of the most important things in our lives, one of the most important parts of our spiritual lives.
But how many of us are truly giving it priority?
James could not let his readers get away from the matter of prayer without also linking it to selfishness.
Selfishness is also in prayer.
We come to God allegedly to seek His glory, and we end up seeking our own, offering as our petitions those things that will make life more comfortable and convenient for us.
How many have ever prayed for God to put us through the wringer, in doing so, He can gain greater glory for Himself?
How many of us truly pray, John 3:30
30 “He must increase, but I must decrease.
That we will decrease in our wants and desires so that God’s will and work may increase in us.
4 You adulteresses, do you not know that friendship with the world is hostility toward God? Therefore whoever wishes to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God.
5 Or do you think that the Scripture speaks to no purpose: “He jealously desires the Spirit which He has made to dwell in us”?
6 But He gives a greater grace. Therefore it says, “God is opposed to the proud, but gives grace to the humble.”
James was not concerned with offending anyone here.
He calls the people in verse 4 adulteresses.
He affirms that they were giving someone else the love and devotion that belonged to God and God alone.
Who was this rival lover?
It was the world.
These people were more in love with their world than they were with God.
The world is James’ term for life that is lived as if this present world were all that there is.
It is life that is lived without regard to God.
It is life that is lived according to the values, desires, and aspirations of this temporal realm.
What is worldliness?
It is thinking like the world, talking like the world, acting like the world, and dressing like the world.
This is the day of worldly Christians.
But the problem is that true Christians cannot be continually worldly.
Yes, Christians can and do slip into the worldly behaviors from time to time.
But that is a far cry from habitual worldliness.
If the pattern of our lives is worldliness, we have plain evidence that we are deceived about our relationship with God.
The reason why the Christian cannot be habitually worldly is plaint to see.
James maintains that God has put in His people the Spirit who yearns jealously.
The Holy Spirit of God who earnestly desires that we give our devotion entirely to God will not let us go on in sin without running riot in our consciences!
And the same Lord who yearns for us gives us grace.
The world would prove to be too strong for us if the Lord of Grace did not grant us grace for living in it.
If we humbly seek His grace, He will not fail to give it.
If we proudly reject it, God will set Himself in battle array against us.
The next four verse we look at will give us a cure for worldliness.
7 Submit therefore to God. Resist the devil and he will flee from you.
8 Draw near to God and He will draw near to you. Cleanse your hands, you sinners; and purify your hearts, you double-minded.
We all probably can agree that it is aggravating when a child refuses to submit to his or her parents?
When told to do something, the child stubbornly refuses.
When told not to do something, he or she immediately does it!
We all dislike rebellion in children, especially when we see it coming from children who have exceptionally good parents.
Do we detest that same rebellion in ourselves?
Even the best parents are flawed in ways, but the Lord is perfect in every way.
And from His goodness, He has poured out upon us blessing after blessing.
How are we responding to these things?
Are we doing what the Lord tells us to do?
Are we refraining from those things He tells us not to do?
Are we submitting to the Lord, or are we acting as ungrateful, rebellious children?
Rebellion against God is a serious matter.
The devil is the greatest rebel of all time, and he is in the business of persuading God’s people to join him in rebellion.
If, then, we are rebelling against God, we are submitting to the devil.
What are we to do?
The answer is as clear as the noonday sun: stop submitting to the devil and start submitting to God!
If we will resist the devil, he will flee.
If we draw near to God, He will draw near to us!
There is nothing more urgent and important than for each of us to draw near to God.
If we would be brutally honest with ourselves, we could all draw closer to God.
James is calling us to draw near to God by cleaning up both our behavior (hands) and our inner lives (hearts).
Dirty hands and defiled hearts!
That’s the position that many, Christians are occupying these days.
Their hands are dirty in that they are doing worldly things, things that are out of keeping with God’s ownership of their lives.
They go to places to which they ought not to go.
They say things they ought not to say.
They do things they ought not to do.
But James was not content to call for a change only in the behavior of his readers.
The hands reflect what is in the heart.
A. W. Pink observed that the hands and tongue are the shops, and the heart is the warehouse.
To call people to cleanse their hands without also calling for them to purify their hearts is pointless.
Why did James think it necessary for his readers to purify their hearts?
He said they were double-minded, which means they were not loving God with their whole hearts.
Their hearts were torn between God and the world.
What does the Bible signify when it uses the word heart?
It refers to the totality of the person, that is, to the mind, the will and the affections.
To purify the heart, then, means cleansing the mind, and to cleanse the mind is to rid it of unbiblical thinking.
It is to keep out of the mind all those things that are out of keeping with the truth of God as it is revealed in Holy Scripture.
To cleanse the will is to stop making choices that are based on worldly values and to start making our choices and decisions on the basis of the Word of God.
To cleanse the affections is to stop setting our affections - our love - on the temporary, fleeting, frivolous things of this world and to begin setting them on things above.
Minds that are informed by the truth of God, choices that are made according to the will of Gd and affections that are set on the things of God - all will issue into behavior that is pleasing to God.
9 Be miserable and mourn and weep; let your laughter be turned into mourning and your joy to gloom.
10 Humble yourselves in the presence of the Lord, and He will exalt you.
Few verses of Scripture are looked upon with less favor than these.
This is the day of lightness and lack of seriousness, a day in which we prize laughter so much that we have turned it into a idol.
Now James is not calling his readers to be joyless and miserable.
But he is clearly telling them that our sins are not things that we should be laughing about.
So why should we mourn over our sins?
First, is because they defy the authority of the God who made us, the God who has blessed us with innumerable blessings, the God who had given us the supreme blessings of eternal life and the God before whom we must finally stand to give account.
We must mourn over sins because they so grievously impede the work of the Lord.
The sins of Christians cause unbelievers to think that Christians are no different from themselves and that the gospel is nothing in which they should be interested.
We must mourn over our sins because they rob us of our true joy.
The long history of mankind shows us again and again that sinful living destroys and wrecks.
It can destroy our health.
It can destroy our homes.
It can destroy our churches.
It can even destroy life.
We look then at James’ prescription for getting back to where we as Christians should be.
It is not an easy road, but it is a tried and true road.
13 “Enter through the narrow gate; for the gate is wide and the way is broad that leads to destruction, and there are many who enter through it.
14 “For the gate is small and the way is narrow that leads to life, and there are few who find it.
It is the road of submission, cleansing and brokenness.
Christians often wonder why we do not see true spiritual awakening.
Could it be that the awakening we need waits at the door?
It waits for us to follow the formula that James had laid our for us.
11 Do not speak against one another, brethren. He who speaks against a brother or judges his brother, speaks against the law and judges the law; but if you judge the law, you are not a doer of the law but a judge of it.
12 There is only one Lawgiver and Judge, the One who is able to save and to destroy; but who are you who judge your neighbor?
Here we see the people of the church.
Who were brothers and sisters in Jesus Christ and they were members of the same body.
They were turning on one another, it was like the body attacking itself!
Suppose my hands started attacking my face, bringing blood and inflicting severe pain.
What a strange sight that would be!
But it is no stranger than that which was going on in many churches.
Christians attacking one another!
We have a tendency to dismiss it as trivial thing.
James refuses to do so.
He wants his readers to stare this ugly thing in the face.
He begins by telling them that such evil-speaking means setting themselves above the law.
There is a law against evil-speaking.
It is God’s law.
The Bible speaks against it in a number of different places like in Ephesians 4, and 1 Peter 2.
When we speak badly against a brother or sister in Christ, we are breaking that law.
But we are doing more.
We are suggesting that we know better than God who gave the law.
When we break one of God’s laws, we are setting ourselves above God.
When we set ourselves up against God, we forget that He is the one who has the power to save and to destroy.
James is saying that evil-speaking always has a price tag attached, and it is a heavy price!
Before we buy the product, we should look at the tag.
Before we engage in evil-speaking, we should remember that the God who can destroy has promised to judge such speaking.
How many of God’s blessings have we forfeited because we spoke evil?
How many friendships have been ruined?
How many people have been driven from the church?
Is this a price we are willing to pay in order to speak evil about someone?
If God’s judgment doesn’t find us here, it will find us in eternity.
Perhaps the thing that we most carry away from James’ message is this question: who are you to judge another?
We might put it in these words: who do you think you are?
This is what God asks each of us when we engage in verbally abusing a brother or sister in Christ - who do you think you are?
13 Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go to such and such a city, and spend a year there and engage in business and make a profit.”
14 Yet you do not know what your life will be like tomorrow. You are just a vapor that appears for a little while and then vanishes away.
15 Instead, you ought to say, “If the Lord wills, we will live and also do this or that.”
16 But as it is, you boast in your arrogance; all such boasting is evil.
17 Therefore, to one who knows the right thing to do and does not do it, to him it is sin.
Here we see planning without regard to God.
James could see his readers doing exactly that.
They would talk about going to such and such a city, about spending a year or so there and about the various transactions they would conduct while they were there.
They were talking as if they were in charge of their lives, and they weren’t
James tells them that they had not factored into the equation the brevity and unpredictability of life.
They could talk about one place, that city over there, and before they could get there, end up in another place - eternity.
They could talk about a period of time, this year or next, and before that period began, find themselves in the ream of the timeless.
How easily we forget what life is like.
It is a vapor.
Is is like the morning mist that lingers only in the early morning hours and vanishes when the sun rises.
And when the sun rises, it doesn’t take long for the vapor to vanish.
So James tells his readers to quit acting as if they are in control.
That is proud living.
He says, instead you ought to say, if the Lord wills, we shall live and do this or that.
No, he is not suggesting that we actually have to say those exact words every single time we are planning to go somewhere or to transact some business - although it would not be a bad idea to say them frequently.
Rather he is talking about always keeping in mind that God is in control, and none of our plans ever supersedes or overrides His plans.
11 ‘For I know the plans that I have for you,’ declares the Lord, ‘plans for welfare and not for calamity to give you a future and a hope.
We need to live with God and eternity weighing on our minds.
We constantly have the tendency to make this life the main event and eternity a footnote.
Eternity is the main event, and only a fool lives as if this life is all that there is.
Don’t count on your time.
It is passing.
Don’t count on your possessions.
They will soon belong to someone else.
Don’t count on your career, it will soon be over.
But count on this: eternity is rapidly approaching, and only those who have taken refuge in Jess Christ can face it.
27 And inasmuch as it is appointed for men to die once and after this comes judgment,
Everyone of us will die one day, and stand before Jesus to answer for our lives, we must be prepared.