Study of James chapter 4 week 7
Notes
Transcript
Passion or Pride
Passion or Pride
We are continuing our study through the book of James, as we will look at chapter 4 this morning.
James begins talking about conflicts and what causes the conflicts, is it a passion we have or is pride that we are holding on too.
James is dealing with two different kinds of wisdom and is typified by two ways of life, that is two kinds of friendship: the one with the world and the other with God.
In chapter four, James expounds on these two types of spiritual friendship, penetrating deeper into the basic problems of double-mindedness and self-deception and the corrective need of active faith.
James is trying to prove his point by specifying what his readers were failing to do.
The first thing that we see in chapter four is the source in evil desires.
1 What is the source of wars and fights among you? Don’t they come from your passions that wage war within you?
James turns the attention of the readers directly upon the conflicts and disputes among them.
Instead of peace and the fruit of righteousness, his readers were manifesting just the opposite: they were full of mutual opposition and attacks.
Instead of attacking the faulty thinking and misuses of certain doctrines and truths about God’s relationship to his people or about the nature and content of faith, James presupposed the readers mutual knowledge of particular problems in their congregation.
The fact there were disputes and conflicts among the people over particular issues and selfish interest is well known.
Human anger cannot accomplish the righteousness of God. James 1:20
20 for human anger does not accomplish God’s righteousness.
If believers’ faith were active and bringing discipline to their speech, they would not allow the sin of envy to have its way.
The readers were full of the fighting that envy - only superficially masked by the language of faith - irresistibly produces.
James is wanting to deal with the root problem of the conflicts.
What had been a fairly concentrated discussion of the implications of the doctrine of faith in the first three chapters has now become a major confrontation with the realities that cannot be hidden about the real fellowship - or lack thereof - among the believers.
The language that James uses for conflict can be used for warfare or can also be used as powerful imagery for the destructiveness of relationships where violent attitudes have broken out unchecked.
Just as a lack of mercy was evidence of his readers’ sin of favoritism, now their active hostility toward each other is used as evidence of their conflict with God.
James then identifies the source of their conflicts, which was their passions.
The sense is not that their passions were evil but rather the conflict of passion that cannot all be satisfied simultaneously or without one canceling out the other.
The conflicts here can be both interna and external.
The best that a truly religious, devout Christian can do is to keep the body in check along with the tongue.
The struggle that must be won daily, in spite of much stumbling into sin, is the one every believer fights against deformed passions.
When these desires are not kept in check, the worst of them blaze out of control and usher in the worsts conflicts of coveting and envy.
The second thing we see is the outcome in envy.
2 You desire and do not have. You murder and covet and cannot obtain. You fight and wage war. You do not have because you do not ask.
Now James returns to another theme he has already introduced, that of the deadly effects of evil desires in the life of sin.
15 Then after desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin, and when sin is fully grown, it gives birth to death.
James identifies the nature of his readers’ cravings in two ways.
First, wanting what they do not have.
Second, coveting what they cannot obtain.
These desires can and do become as dangerous as they are assuredly the cause of sin.
What James emphasized with regard to the internal personal conflict of deformed desire is experienced corporately.
There is nothing harmless or mild about what these individuals were willing to resort to.
When passion is unbridled, murder is committed.
A vicious logic links the frustration of evil desire with evil acts and finally with the act of killing.
The statistic that most murders take place between family members or intimate associates testifies to the kind of destructive force that envy and jealousy are.
Coveting is another dimension of the conflicts.
Whereas envy is willing to destroy in order to gain what belongs to another, coveting is willing to steal what is not ones’ own.
Coveting is willingness to turn an earthly object of human desire into something of ultimate concern.
Although covetousness does not attain the destructiveness of envy, it nevertheless is a dangerous step along the road to sin.
The terrifying linkage of evil desires and their deeds could have been avoided by some with an approach that is quite simple - prayer.
Prayer that is consistent with true faith will not make selfish requests.
Desire-filled, envious believers do not make of God, but instead are driven by their self-sufficiency and shame, self-sufficiency in that they do not really trust in God for His provision, and shame in that they do not correct themselves once they become aware of how bad their attitudes really are.
In the refusal to humble themselves in prayer, they only show how lacking they are in the most basic traits of Christian wisdom and how driven they are by worldly wisdom.
Instead of asking God, they become so insistent with one another that they quarrel and fight, trying to extract what they envy from the other.
The third thing we see is the enmity of friendship with the world.
3 You ask and don’t receive because you ask with wrong motives, so that you may spend it on your pleasures.
4 You adulterous people! Don’t you know that friendship with the world is hostility toward God? So whoever wants to be the friend of the world becomes the enemy of God. 5 Or do you think it’s without reason that the Scripture says: The spirit he made to dwell in us envies intensely?
The negative progression continues in these verses.
You ask and you do not receive because you ask wrongly.
Such prayers cannot lesson frustrated evil desires.
The imperative of prayer, that is of asking God for His provision, requires the prior knowledge of our true need.
5 Now if any of you lacks wisdom, he should ask God—who gives to all generously and ungrudgingly—and it will be given to him.
The kind of asking that was practiced by the original readers was futile because it asks only on selfish and envious terms.
Prayers become evil because of what is prayed for and why.
The evil motives from which some have dared to shape their request have their source, again, in evil desires, that is, their pleasures.
In such prayers God is regarded as a mere dispensary of instruments of vice.
God does not answer these prayers not only because they are evil but also because they would just spend His generosity on themselves.
This heathen approach to God is at the heart of “friendship with the world” mentioned in verse four.
In the beginning of verse four, James addresses the people as adulteresses.
Spiritual adultery is synonymous with being an enemy of God.
James readers had, by their evil ways, turned their back on God and were having an affair with the world.
The terrible misdirection of their friendship, which should have been with God, proves again how self-deceived they were.
The status of unbelievers is enmity toward God and friendship with the world, and this worldly friendship is something Christians can flirt with.
24 “No one can serve two masters, since either he will hate one and love the other, or he will be devoted to one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money.
15 Do not love the world or the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him.
James was not saying conclusively that his readers were completely the friends of the world rather than friends with God.
Rather, they were adulteresses, unfaithful lovers.
James was speaking generally, but his readers were dangerously close to this negative condition, not one of familiarity with the world or active participation in it but rather a personal investment in it and chief concern placed in its way of life that do not follow the standards established by God for His people.
In verse five James presents his readers with another rhetorical question to penetrate into what they were thinking.
Their thinking was misguided because they had allowed their desires for God and their desires for the idols of the world to wrap them up in a total conflict of desire and interpersonal relations.
Instead of appreciating the power of the tongue and God’s requirements to bridle it, they had allowed their tongues to spew forth both blessing and curses.
Instead of pursuing the wisdom from above that counsels humility and peace, they had allowed the wisdom from below to dominate their aspirations.
The flip flopping back and forth between different worlds of desire and deeds was what James had in mind.
God is the giver of the spirit of life; it belongs to Him.
Moreover, the human spirit is not merely the vitality of the body, but also that which communes with God on the one hand or adulterates itself with idols.
The natural inclination of the spirit, especially when unguarded from the temptations of the world, is to envy.
Without active faith, making prayerful request for wisdom from God, you will be at the mercy of your most base desires.
