The Battle for your Will

James 4:7–8 KJV 1900

7 Submit yourselves therefore to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you. 8 Draw nigh to God, and he will draw nigh to you. Cleanse your hands, ye sinners; and purify your hearts, ye double minded.

James begins chapter four of his epistle by talking about how we are to submit every desire to the Lord. As we begin to submit every aspect of our life to the Lord we begin to see the devil flee from our lives. What used to hold us bound has now been submitted to the Lord and through the power of the Holy Ghost we have been giving victory. This whole process is dependent on our submission to him.

We cannot just submit some desires to the Lord and keep others to ourselves. To say “Lord I will give you my plans for ministry but when it comes to my finances I will probably just hold on to that” that is not submission. To serve the Lord means giving up your will so you can begin to allow the Lord to direct our paths.

James writes in chapter 1 about this man who puts some faith in God while having doubt in other aspects of his life.

James 1:8 KJV 1900

8 A double minded man is unstable in all his ways.

We have all been in those moments where we have related to this verse. There is a process of submission and it comes through repentance and crucifying the fleshly desires that you once had. If we don’t reach the end of ourselves we are reminded in this verse that we will live an unstable life.

Matthew 6:24 KJV 1900

24 No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon.

This is a very common passage of scripture where Jesus is talking about how we should focus on laying treasures in heaven instead of laying them up here on Earth. Here Jesus is talking about focusing on eternal things instead of things that are temporary. Ecclesiastes would describe the things of this life as vanity. Materialistic things will pass away but investing into a lost soul will reap eternal benefits.

Verse 24 Jesus challenges His disciples here by asking for total submission to the will of God. After calling his disciples just a few chapters before, Jesus is teaching his disciples that they are going to have to make the decision to serve God or mammon.

I can see Peter sitting there as Jesus is teaching this and thinking about the fishing business that he forsake to follow Christ. It could’ve been easy to look at the fishing business and see how profitable it could’ve been for his life. He may have saw others become very profitable so he saw the evidence of it working. In Matthew 4, we see Peter give up on his desires, the earthly treasures, to invest in the kingdom of God.

There is this battle for our will or our submission to God but we need to forsake every desire that we may have and submit to God. We are always submitted to something but it’s up to us to decide in what or who that submission is given to. Our submission is either yielded to the world or to God.

Conclusion

As I come to a close I would like to tell a quick story that was once told to me:

There was this man who grew up in the faith but as he grew up he reached that point of decision where he had to decide if he believed in the truth for himself. He wanted to make sure that he didn’t just believe because his parents told him to, he wanted to know the truth was really true.

He got to the decision and was too afraid to pick a path because if it was true he didn’t want to face the consequences of unbelief. He reached this place of compromise where he would live on the fence. He would live with one foot in the door and one out. As he lived out his life, he was faithful to church when it came to going but when it came to holy living he compromised. He just couldn’t make up his mind. He just reached that point where he just believed that the knowledge of the truth was enough for him to be saved. He lived his whole life on the fence just going through the motions.

As his time on earth came to an end, his life contained a little bit of Jesus and a little bit of this world. He believed this would be enough to make it to heaven. Living on the fence was enough. He would soon find himself in hell with the devil. He was so confused, he tried making his case telling the devil that “I lived on the fence, I didn’t choose you? Why am I here? I didn’t want this? I went to church, I knew that it was true, I checked all of the spiritual boxes off the list. I lived on the fence. The devil that grabs him and tells him that, well I own the fence!

I’ve come to tell you today that this will come of our life if we decide to live on the fence in our relationship with God. If all we can say is I checked off all of the boxes but not be fully submitted we did not do enough. So I ask you today, are you living on the fence?