A Humble Submission
Notes
Transcript
James 4:7-12
James 4:7-12
Good morning. We continue in the letter of James today and we will be in chapter 4, verses 7-12 today. The main theme of todays message is reflected in the title, “A Humble Submission.”
James has been talking about how to live out the life of faith we are called to. James is instructing how to be a follower of Christ in a world and society that grows increasingly evil and against the things of God. James directs us in this section, what we must do to be triumphant through the power of Jesus Christ at work in our lives.
Living a life of submission to God is the most important thing we must do in our lives. Throughout the letter we have been continually reminded of the consequences when we allow pride to take root and grow in our lives. We have been reminded how pride, at work in our lives, will cause destruction and death, while if we are humble ,we are promised that God will give us grace.
It is in the humble cry of our hearts, as we seek after a saviour from our sin and death, that our salvation is found and our calling is brought forth. It is in humbling ourselves and our selfish desires, and caring for the needs of those around us that our sanctification is grown, as we become more like Christ. It is in the heart of humility, that God’s grace and mercy is shone to those around us, and we find ourselves in a place of submission to the will of God.
We talked in previous messages how living to please our old nature, living to be friends with the world, makes us an enemy of God, but if we have a mind that is renewed through the power of the Holy Spirit, then we are sons and daughters of God. We must lay aside our minds that seek after the wants and desires the world applauds, and we must seek after the things of God in our lives.
Romans 8:6 “6 For to set the mind on the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the Spirit is life and peace.”
Matthew 6:19–21 “19 “Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal, 20 but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys and where thieves do not break in and steal. 21 For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.”
Jesus told us to lay up our treasures in Heaven. It is not about not being allowed to have nice things, but it is about where your heart is. What does your heart seek after. Are you finding yourself a slave to the passion of the world? Someone who must have the next nice thing, or is your heart based on submitting to God’s will, and laying up treasure that is of the heavenly nature?
Pride and refusal to submit to God is what brought about a sinful and lost world from the very beginning when the snake tempted Eve in the garden. While it was pride and refusal to submit to God that brought sin into the world, Jesus modeled the posture of submission when through His humility He prayed, “not my will but yours be done.” In His submission to the Father, life and peace was brought back to man. Pride separated man from God, but humble submission restored relationship with God.
The works of the devil are listed plainly in 1 John:
1 John 2:16 “16 For all that is in the world—the desires of the flesh and the desires of the eyes and pride of life—is not from the Father but is from the world.”
This is why we die to our desires and look and seek after the will of God. John Bunyan wrote:
He that is down needs fear no fall,
He that is low, no pride;
He that is humble ever shall
Have God to be his guide.—John Bunyan
In the previous verses James was dealing with pride within the church. There were fighting and quarreling within the church because as they experienced the trials and the tests and temptations, they acted the same way the world acts when we fall into trouble. We want to lash out at those around us, we want to demand that others act the way we think they should, we look to God and pray God make everything happen the way I want it to. We take a posture of I, I, I, and me, me, me, and we ignore how God may be working in our time of trouble.
James in this section gives clear instructions of how we should act to avoid these issues. We rejoice in trials because we know the end result is they bring us closer to God. We rejoice in troubles because we know that God will use them for our good and His glory.
The question we must look at here is how do we humble ourselves? James has spent the previous verses proclaiming how the saints in the church have failed, and now it is time we take these words, and as God speaks to our hearts through conviction, our cry must be “What shall we do?”
When God convicts us there is no other posture or cry that we can proclaim, than that of humble repentance, crying out what must we do, and then we must take action and do it. It is never enough for us to sit and ask for direction but yet have no action behind our request. James has spent the previous section telling the church where they have failed, and now it is time to instruct them how to succeed.
It is only through a humble posture and a repentant heart that we will be able to find true peace and contentment in God. It is only through this that we find our hope, our satisfaction, our fulfillment in our Father, who wishes good things for HIs children.
Our text today is James 4:7-12 and this is the Word of the Lord to His People.
James 4:7–12 (ESV)
7Submit yourselves therefore to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you.
8Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you. Cleanse your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded.
9Be wretched and mourn and weep. Let your laughter be turned to mourning and your joy to gloom.
10Humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will exalt you.
11Do 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.
12There is only one lawgiver and judge, he who is able to save and to destroy. But who are you to judge your neighbor?
This is the Word of the Lord, Amen!
There are 6 steps that James shares here that lead to harmony and holiness for the believer.
Submit to God
Resist the Devil
Draw Near to God
Cleanse our hands and Purify our hearts
We mourn over our sin that separates us from God
Humble ourselves before God
Submit to God
The first command James points out is that we must submit to God. This means that we are looking to His commands, we are listening for His voice, we are obeying His Word that He has given us. This is what we do when we repent.
There is a difference between repenting of our sin and being sorry for our sin. If we say we are sorry for our sins and yet do nothing to change what we are doing, and we willfully, keyword WILLFULLY, continue to commit the same sin over and over then we have not truly repented and submitted ourselves to the authority of God in our lives.
I want to make the distinction here where I said the keyword is willfully. There are sins that God delivers us from at the moment of salvation, and there are sins that we may struggle with throughout the rest of our earthly life. Just because we struggle with sin does not mean we are not saved or not repentant. It is when we willfully and joyfully continue to commit the same sin again and again that shows a lack of true repentance.
Submit is a military term which means to be subordinate to or to render obedience. Repent is another military term which is the British equivalent of the American about face. To submit to God we must render ourselves to be obedient to His commands, and to have true repentance in our lives we must repent, or turn the complete opposite direction from the sin we are committing, and go the other direction. We run from sin. We run away from the temptation the devil places in front of us and we run to Jesus.
If we are to find our happiness and our substance in the world, we run to and embrace our sin, but if we are to find eternal life in Christ, and find true joy and peace in Him, then we will run from our sin. We will not find our substance in the things of this world, or in our selves, but we will find our identity, our substance, the answer to who we are, in Christ alone.
The reason we see such an issue of sin in this world. The reason we see so many looking for their purpose, looking for their identify, trying to find a reason for their life, is that they have failed to look for it in Christ. This society and this world has an identity crisis, because the only way to find true peace and hope, is in full and total submission to Christ, and when we submit to Christ we find our identity in Him alone! We no longer find our identity in alcoholism, or drugs, or work, or politics. We find our identity, that we are the blood bought sons and daughters of God. We find our identity in Christ alone!
Submit to God, ver. (7). Submit your understanding to the truth of God; submit your wills to the will of his precept, the will of his providence. Submit yourselves to God, for he is ready to do you good.
We submit fully and wholly to God because we can place our full faith and trust in Him and His promises. We talked about this earlier in James. God always keeps His promises, and if we are in Christ we are promised that no matter what trial we go through, no matter what temptation is placed before us, no matter how painful it gets, that God is sanctifying us and purifying us, and every thing is going to be used for His glory and for our good.
Invitation to James: Persevering through Trials to Win the Crown 10. Not Thy Will but Mine Be Done (James 4:7–12)
As C. S. Lewis has Screwtape, a senior demon, explain to his underling Wormwood:
Our cause is never more in danger than when a human being, no longer desiring, but still intending, to do our Enemy’s will, looks round upon a universe from which every trace of Him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys.*
This means even when the night is at its darkest, we hold to God. Even when we feel we have been abandoned by everyone and everything, we hold to the promises of God. Even when we suffer and we walk through the most difficult times of our lives, we hold to the promises of God.
20 For all the promises of God find their Yes in him. That is why it is through him that we utter our Amen to God for his glory.
2 Corinthians tells us that Gods promises are always a yes. If God said He would do something then He will do it and because of this we will glorify God. We submit ourselves to God because we find our very essence of life itself in Him alone.
2. Resist the Devil
The second command here is to resist the devil. When satan tries to tempt us and turn our eyes away from God, we resist him. This command follows the command to submit to God, because how do we resist the devil? We submit ourselves to God.
Invitation to James: Persevering through Trials to Win the Crown 10. Not Thy Will but Mine Be Done (James 4:7–12)
To submit humbly to what God is doing through our trials means first that we will resist the devil. Instead of giving an ear to his insinuation that “God is not being good to you,” we will affirm in faith, “The Lord is good. He is the giver of every good and perfect gift (1:17). He only does good in my life.”
We submit to God, knowing that His ways are perfect, then when satan tries to tempt us with questioning God, or tries to cause us to allow pride to take hold in our lives, because we are submitted to Gods will, and not our own will, then we can resist his tricks. We are told in 1 Peter
8 Be sober-minded; be watchful. Your adversary the devil prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour.
The devil roams seeking ways to tempt us and cause us to fall. We must submit ourselves to God daily. It is not a one time occurrence but it is a daily discipline to die to our self and to submit to the authority of God in our lives. Paul wrote in HIs letter to the Corinthians;
31 I protest, brothers, by my pride in you, which I have in Christ Jesus our Lord, I die every day!
This was not a literal death, but a daily death to our own selfish desires, in full submission to God, and when we do this and we resist satan we are told he will flee from us. Jesus gave the example when He was being tempted in the wilderness. We can read in Matthew 4 that Jesus, after His baptism, had gone into the wilderness to fast and pray for 40 days. While He was in this state of hunger and denial of self, to seek after the Father, satan comes to Jesus and attempts to tempt Jesus to sin. Three different times he attempts to get Jesus to sin and all three times Jesus resists temptation in the same way, with the word of God.
It is important that we study and know the Word of God, our Bible, if we are to resist the devil. We submit to God and because we are submitting to God we want to know His commandments and His Word so that we can follow Him. When we know His Word we then have the ammunition we need to guard against the attacks of satan.
11 I have stored up your word in my heart,
that I might not sin against you.
We study and we memorize scripture because it is our weapon against the temptation and the arrows that satan attempts to destroy us with. We store Gods Word in our hearts, not just in our heads. I think this is a meaning we lose when we are just quoting this widely known scripture. We can memorize God’s Word and store it in our heads. We can have the knowledge, but without the wisdom of how to apply that knowledge, it is useless. It was not simply quoting scripture that made the devil flee when he came to tempt Jesus. It was the application of the Scripture that Jesus quoted. There was not just a head knowledge of, “this is what Scripture says,” but there was a heart of wisdom that carried it into action.
We hide God’s Word in our heart because our heart is where we combine the spiritual with the physical. It is where we store God’s Word because we are in relationship with our Father, and we want to fully submit to Him. If it is only in our heads then it is good knowledge, but it is only in our hearts that it gives us the sword to fight temptation.
We call the Bible, the Word of the sovereign God of all creation, to His people, the sword because it is how we fight against temptation. Just as Christ quoted scripture when He was tempted in the wilderness, we fight our battle with the Word of God stored in our heart so that we do not fall to sin. We are promised that when we resist the devil, he will flee.
There is a power beyond what we can understand in the written Word of the Holy God to His people.
3. Draw Near to God
Just as we are told to resist the devil and he will flee, James instructs us to also Draw near to God, and we are promised that He will draw near to us. We draw near to God by spending time studying His word and in prayer to Him.
Opening Up James Submitting to the Authority of God (vv. 7–8a)
There is no more urgent and important business for each of us than to draw near to God. If we would be brutally honest with ourselves, we would have to say that we have had our faces towards the devil and our backs towards God. It is time to reverse all of that. It is time to turn our faces towards God and our backs towards the devil.
We submit to God and in our submission we resist the devil, and then we draw near to God when we deal with the things in our life that push Him away from us. When we deal with the sins that blind us to His mercy and grace, and attempt to drag us away from His presence. We draw near to God when we give complete control to Him, and we find peace in Him in the quiet and the stillness He brings to our hectic and worried souls.
The only way for us to truly submit to God and resist the devil is to draw near to God.
13 No temptation has overtaken you that is not common to man. God is faithful, and he will not let you be tempted beyond your ability, but with the temptation he will also provide the way of escape, that you may be able to endure it.
God provides our way of escape. When we endure trials, when we are tempted, when we face hardships, we draw nearer to God and in our relationship and our knowledge of the goodness of our Father He will always provide a way of escape.
We would think that because of our sin, because of our failures, God would distance Himself from us, that He would want nothing to do with us, but we repent and come to Him in prayer, we come to Him believing, we draw near to Him and we hold to His everlasting promises and He forgives us. He restores us. He give us new hearts. He gives us renewed minds. He creates in us a clean spirit. He draws us ever closer to Him and continues to sanctify and mold us into the image of His Son, our saviour, Jesus Christ.
The Spurgeon Study Bible: Notes Chapter 4
4:8 “Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you.” First, we see that the text is not merely an invitation; it is a command. We must obey it. We need not entertain any fear that we will be an intruder when, in the exercise of his gracious sovereignty, God says to us, “Come!” Next, notice that he would not call us to himself if there were no road by which we could come. Once there was a great gulf fixed between us and God, but Jesus bridged the awful chasm. So draw near. The road to God is open to all who believe in Jesus. Finally, notice the encouraging promise. There is nothing about his casting out, spurning, or rejecting. We will be received graciously and loved freely. The promise is emphatic: “He will draw near to you.”
4. Cleanse our hands and Purify our hearts
James tells us that as we submit to God, we resist the devil, we draw near to God, we then cleanse our hands and purify our hearts. In the Jewish faith hand washing was a very important ceremonial event. In Exodus we can read that before the priests would go to offer sacrifices they must wash and purify themselves. There were multiple basins of water around the temple to allow the priests to wash their hands before offering sacrifices to God. This ritual was an important visual of what James is speaking of here.
Opening Up James Cleansing Our Hands and Our Hearts (v. 8b)
But James was not content to call for a change only in the behaviour of his readers. The hands reflect what is in the heart. A. W. Pink observed that the hands and tongues are the shops, and the heart is the warehouse.2 To call people to cleanse their hands without also calling for them to purify their hearts is pointless.
James is not talking literally about washing our hands but here our hands means our actions and the things we do. The purifying of our hearts represents our motives and desires behind why we do what we do. We spoke about this earlier in the letter, people were doing good works but they were doing it with the wrong motives. They had a desire to teach but it was not to glorify God, but to glorify themselves. Their hearts were not purified.
We must make changes both physical and spiritual in our lives. As followers of Christ there are certain things, physical, that we no longer do, places that we no longer go. Spiritually, in our hearts, our desires must change and be purified that we are no longer seeking after glorification of ourselves. We are no longer seeking men’s approval, but that our focus is fixed on God’s approval and that our motivation, our desire behind every thought, word, and deed, is that God is glorified and we are able to shine His light to the World around us.
16 In the same way, let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven.
8 By this my Father is glorified, that you bear much fruit and so prove to be my disciples.
We cleanse our hands and purify our hearts so that God may be glorified in our lives.
5. We mourn over our sin that separates us from God
When we cleanse our hands and we purify our hearts there is a period of mourning that we have, a deep sorrow we should feel over the sin that has separated us from God. When we are convicted of sin in our lives it is a serious time.
We see in the Old Testament, when people would repent it was a time of mourning in which they would wear sackcloth, a very rough fabric made from goats hair, and they would pour ashes on their heads. This would be a sign to those around them, they were in mourning.
The prophets of the Old Testament would wear sackcloth and ashes as they would warn the people of the need to repent and the pending destruction if they did not repent, and in Revelation we see the two witnesses sent to the earth are clothed in sackcloth and ashes in mourning and repentance of the coming divine judgment.
There is a process when we mourn over our sin. There is a process in repentance of our sin. There will be a time that all will mourn and weep over there sin. Matthew Henry said:
All sin must be wept over; here, in godly sorrow, or, hereafter, in eternal misery
We will weep over our sin here in true repentance and sorrow for the separation it has created between us and the Father, or there will be a day that all those that did not find the grace and mercy of God, will weep over the sin that now separates them eternally from the love of God.
There are many that would say that those in hell are tormented forever, absent from Gods presence, but this is not an entirely true statement. We are told in Matthew 8:12 an image, where those cast into hell will weep and gnash their teeth, and it is not because of the absence of God, but it will be because there is an absence in hell of Gods grace and mercy. In hell the judgement of God will be experienced for all eternity, while those that repented and were saved by Christ, will experience the love of God for all eternity in the new heaven and the new earth.
Opening Up James Being Broken over Our Sins to the Point that We Have a Truly Penitential Spirit (vv. 9–10)
Gordon Keddie writes, ‘When James appeals to world-infected Christians to change their laughter to mourning and their joy to gloom, he is not rejecting Christian joy, but showing them the way to its true enjoyment.’3 He also writes, ‘James wants us to be happy Christians … but he also wants us to understand that any joy which co-exists with a worldly spirit and practice, and includes the assurance of being right with God, is a dangerous mirage.’4 Kent Hughes offers this observation: ‘… while gloom is not a Christian characteristic, mourning over our sin is.’5
Evangelical Commentary on the Bible C. A Call for Repentance (4:4–10)
True Christian joy comes not with the ignoring of sin, but with the experience of the forgiveness of sin; and we have to see the serious effects of our sin before we can truly turn from it and find forgiveness
If we truly look, and understand the effect that sin has then we will mourn over the effect it has, but in the experience we have knowing that we are forgiven by God for our sins, we find the truest joy that can be had by man. We must understand and mourn our sin in order to turn from it and find the forgiveness the Father has promised.
6. Humble ourselves before God
Finally, James instructs us to humble ourselves before God. This is the key to all of this, to turn from the sin of pride, to stop trying to make ourselves a god of our own likeness, and to fall humbly before the feet of our master in joy and thankfulness for His grace and mercy.
The Bible Exposition Commentary Chapter Nine: How to End Wars (James 4:1–12)
It is possible to submit outwardly and yet not be humbled inwardly
It is the sin of pride that resulted in Lucifer being removed from heaven, it is the sin of pride that resulted in the removal of Adam and Eve from the garden, and it is the sin of pride that over and over again has caused men to turn their backs on God and deny His rule and reign. We may put on the garment of submission and be able to talk the talk and trick others into thinking we are submitting all of ourselves to God, but if we do not humble ourselves inwardly before God it is nothing more than a puppet show that will result in our destruction.
Instead we humble our hearts before God. We lay aside our foolish pride and we seek after Him. To be humble before God means that we are lowered and God is exalted. That we are not proud or arrogant, that we do not seek to make a name for ourselves, but that we lift the name of Jesus above all else.
CLOSING
James after calling for repentance, concludes this section on the tongue and community with another appeal. Christians that slander each other, that judge each other, are in total opposition to the humble spirit that God desires us to have. James restates the basic problems behind all the issues that have been discussed. James reminds us that there is only one above the law. That there is only one that has the right to declare the law and that is God the Father. He is both the Lawgiver and the Judge of all.
We have no right to judge the law but only to obey it. When we begin to judge the law and we begin to try to modify it or change it to fit our thoughts and our desires then we are rebelling against God. When we criticize and judge our fellow Christian, then we are pushing God aside and taking the role of Judge for ourselves. This is a role that only belongs to God.
To clarify, this does not mean that we are not to call our brothers and sisters to repentance when we see them falling into sin and temptation, but we call them to repent in love, and we do not slander or gossip about them. We do not bring division within the body of Christ through our words and actions.
God is the King that declares the law. He is the Judge that upholds the law. He is the only saviour from the penalty of the law.
James gives this list of imperatives or commands for the life of the Christian that are all related and tied together. We must first submit to God, then we will resist the devil, as we resist the devil we draw near to God. As we draw near to God, we cleanse our hands and purify our hearts to enter into the presence of His holiness. As we realize the magnitude of our sin that has separated us from God we mourn and cry out as Isaiah when He cried:
5 And I said: “Woe is me! For I am lost; for I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips; for my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts!”
As we mourn our sin we humble ourselves before God, ridding ourselves of our foolish pride and seeking to lift high the name of Jesus, and glorify God in all we say and do. All of these imperatives or commands come with promises that we hold to.
In submitting to God and resisting the devil we are promised that the devil will flee.
We are promised that if we draw near to God, He will draw near to us.
37 All that the Father gives me will come to me, and whoever comes to me I will never cast out.
When we cleanse our hands and purify our hearts and repent in mourning and weeping over our sin we are promised that God will take our mourning and our weeping and He will give us joy, the joy of our salvation!
11 You have turned for me my mourning into dancing;
you have loosed my sackcloth
and clothed me with gladness,
Finally, that if we humble ourselves before God, He will exalt us and lift us high. That on that final day we will be exalted to heavenly places to dwell and reign with our Saviour and King.
This is a promise of joy. This is a promise of hope. While we mourn over our sin, we rejoice in the grace and mercy God has poured over us, as He has forgiven us of all our sins. He has paid the penalty for our sins. He has completed the work and there is nothing we do to earn our salvation. He has removed our sins far from us. The Psalmist writes:
12 as far as the east is from the west,
so far does he remove our transgressions from us.
This is the promise of our God. This is the love of God at work in the lives of His Children. That we submit and humble ourselves before God. That we can stand and sing the words of the hymn writer, John Newton:
Lord, Thou hast won, at length I yield,
My heart, by mighty grace compelled,
Surrenders all to Thee;
Against Thy terrors long I strove,
But who can stand against Thy love?
Love conquers even me.
We surrender all, our lives in whole, because the Love of God has conquered all, even me.
Prayer
Father, I thank You for Your promises that we can hold to and know they are always true. I pray that as we go through our week, our month, our year God that we would fully submit and humble ourselves to You. That we would see Your power at work in our lives and that You would lead and guide us that our hope, our desire, our purpose would always be to exalt You and lift Your name high. I pray that You would shine Your light through us to those around us. That we would be used by You to bring others to know the joy and the peace that is only found in You. I pray this in the might name of Jesus. Amen.
Benedition
6 Humble yourselves, therefore, under the mighty hand of God so that at the proper time he may exalt you, 7 casting all your anxieties on him, because he cares for you.
