James Chapter 4

Big Idea: James attacks our propensity for self-gratification above all else. Because of our desires to fulfill our pleasures at all costs, we set ourselves up in opposition to God as we choose align ourselves with the world. James is calling for humility and repentance for the sake of revival. We will look back at James’ words in chapter two as just one example of this idea played out. We treat people differently based off of what we stand to gain from the relationship. Our evaluation of that is consistent with how the world thinks and yet God values all people not based on what He stands to gain but purely off of who they are…His creation that He dearly loves. Deep down, this section is about the way we mend our fractured selves. Even after choosing to follow Jesus, we still live fractured lives where we choose friendship with the world over friendship with God. Repentance rooted in humility is the key.

Welcome to week five of our James study.

Briefly outline where we’ve been.

James wants us to be perfect and complete.

We need a few things if we are going to attain that:

Trials, Wisdom, and genuine faith.

He then goes on to explain some ways in which we live fractured lives. Last week, we talked about our tongues…or the ways in which we communicate and how our language is the litmus test for what is happening deep inside our souls.

This week, we are going to continue looking at another thing that James calls into the light about how we live fractured lives, but perhaps most importantly, this week, James is going to give us the tools we need to fix the fractures between our faith and works. James is going to point out another area of fracture that we all share and he is going to use that as his illustration and example of why we need the right tools to fix the fracture.

I used to work with Aircraft maintenance in the military. It would terrify you if you knew how much of an aircraft was held together with tape and glue…Do sheet metal having to go get the right tools bit…

They understood a very simple truth:

The right tool for the right job makes all the difference.

I heard a good quote this week about this: If you don’t think that the right tool for the right job matters, try eating a steak with a spoon and a straw.

Explain that James used the tongue last week to take us on a deep dive into the root of our problem and yet he didn’t really give us the solution to fixing the problem…I gave a brief synopsis of how to fix the saltwater spring but if you remember, I had to go outside of the book of James to do that. James sort of left it hanging but I couldn’t do that. This week, however, James is going to give us the solution to fixing the fractured areas in our life.

Do the clay jar with a fracture in the side and the right tool bit...

First, let’s look at the area of fracture that James is going to use as his context for the conversation around the right tool.

James 4:1–3 NASB95

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.

The Greek word for pleasures here is the same word we get our word ‘hedonism’ from.

I want to use the phrase “Self-gratification” because it gets us closer to James’ intent.

Self-gratification is a closer translation in our modern language.

It isn’t that James is wrong in using the word pleasures here, its just that our minds only typically go to like one of three or four places when we hear that word pleasure. Its usually about either sex, money, status, or feeling for us when we hear that word. James doesn’t specify because, for him, that word incorporated a lot more. Let’s look at the rest of that verse and you’ll see what I mean.

James says that our pleasures wage war in our members…weird. James is setting up a metaphor for us here.

Do the horse being deficient in minerals and eating the barn wood bit...

The idea is that God has wired us, much like that horse, with specific needs and desires. In its proper environment, an open pasture with a diversity of plant life to eat from, that need for the minerals would have been fulfilled. But we apparently weren’t giving it everything it needed through its feed and so it went on a path of destruction to meet that need.

Let me give you an example of one need that God has created in us and we’ll look at an example James has already given us of how we self-gratify that need in a wrong way.

God has created in us all the need for prosperity.

Now, I don’t mean the need for health, wealth, and prosperity. I also don’t mean the need for us to be super wealthy or live with excess. But if you look back at God’s plan for creation from the beginning, it was a garden overflowing with abundance where everyone would have been taken care of without need or want. Look at God’s directions to Israel about caring for the poor, widows, orphans, and foreigners. The design of God’s kingdom is such that all are taken care of and all prosper.

Question…are we ever tempted to gratify that need in ways that harm others just for the sake of our own prosperity?

Look at this passage from James chapter 2 that we skipped over.

James 2:1–8 NASB95

1 My brethren, do not hold your faith in our glorious Lord Jesus Christ with an attitude of personal favoritism. 2 For if a man comes into your assembly with a gold ring and dressed in fine clothes, and there also comes in a poor man in dirty clothes, 3 and you pay special attention to the one who is wearing the fine clothes, and say, “You sit here in a good place,” and you say to the poor man, “You stand over there, or sit down by my footstool,” 4 have you not made distinctions among yourselves, and become judges with evil motives? 5 Listen, my beloved brethren: did not God choose the poor of this world to be rich in faith and heirs of the kingdom which He promised to those who love Him? 6 But you have dishonored the poor man. Is it not the rich who oppress you and personally drag you into court? 7 Do they not blaspheme the fair name by which you have been called? 8 If, however, you are fulfilling the royal law according to the Scripture, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself,” you are doing well.

Explain how we will posture ourselves around people of power and wealth that we stand to gain something from.

Look at how James concluded that passage:

James 2:8 NASB95

8 If, however, you are fulfilling the royal law according to the Scripture, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself,” you are doing well.

We will do well…that is to say: we will prosper in the way that matters most and in turn fulfill the God given desire for prosperity as we love our neighbor.

Second question… is it ever damaging when we gratify our own desires at the expense of others? Absolutely! Look at what James says comes from that!

James 4:2–3 NASB95

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.

The result is murder, envy, some translations say strive, fights, quarrels and war. It even taints our prayers because we will even look to God to satisfy our desires selfishly.

We don’t ever do this though do we? Sure we do. Sometimes its easy to see…like Pornography:

Porn = need for intimacy - proper avenue is through a committed relationship with your spouse - short circuit that by self-gratifying sexual fantasies that objectify others for our own consumption. The damage may not be murder…although it wouldn’t surprise me if that has happened. No, the damage is broken trust, a dulled conscience, it rewires your brain in some messed up ways, damages true intimacy and even ends in divorce.

Substance abuse = need for feeling good. God didn’t create us to live in perpetual pain and lack of sensation. God gave us pain and pleasure receptors for very specific purposes, and yet we can easily short-circuit his design for them. Maybe that’s hardcore narcotics but perhaps its alcohol. Has the self-gratification through substance abuse ever left a trail of destruction behind it?

Its easy to see how adultery and theft and slandering others fits this category of destructive self-gratification as well…but how about the things that aren’t quite as obvious?

Attitude of self-righteousness - nobody wants to be seen as morally deficient and yet to gratify that by putting others down or elevating yourself through pride is destructive.

Little lies and the carefully curated image of ourselves we portray through social media - We were created to be loved and receive affection...

Tight fist around our money and a scarcity mindset...

The propensity to shelter ourselves and our children from the world. This is a tough one because it has biblical backing…we should not be stained by the world…James says that by the way.

And yet…do the show car in the garage and not getting it dirty…

We are meant to take the gospel into the world (drive the car) just don’t get it dirty. We can’t leave it in the garage. And yet, in a move to honor one part of God’s command, we will fail to balance it with an equally important command to take the gospel into our neighborhoods and cities. Has that ever caused a trail of destruction? I would argue that this is perhaps the most destructive thing on this list. Christians who have sidelined themselves in the fight God intends them to be engaged in not only leaves a trail of destruction here and now by allowing the darkness to spread unchecked, but it leaves a trail of eternal destruction.

And here is where James begins to drive at the root of the problem.

James 4:4–5 NASB95

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”?

Behavior modification and moralistic therapeutic deism falls short…

Here is what I mean… these are the tenets of Moralistic Therapeutic Deism:

A god exists who created and ordered the world and watches over human life on earth to some undefined extent.

God wants people to be good, nice, and fair to each other as taught in the bible and by most world religions.

The central goal of life is to be happy and to feel good about ones self.

God does not need to be particularly involved in one’s life except when God is needed to resolve a problem.

Good people go to heaven when they die…so be good.

Out of this comes behavior modification. Let’s just take last weeks sermon about the tongue. Good people don’t curse. Cursing is bad. The goal is to not curse so let’s put a dollar in the swear jar to discourage cursing and therefore modify our behavior over time. James says no that the problem is much more serious than that.

When we seek pleasure and the gratification of real God-given needs apart from God’s design, we have aligned ourselves with the rest of the world who has rejected God.

Listen to Grant Osborne’s commentary on this verse:

In Hellenism the idea of “friendship” connoted a very serious relationship with political and social allegiance and a harmony of outlook, sharing the same standards and seeking the same pleasures. James’s readers have chosen the world rather than Christ for that unity of perspective and so stand in “enmity against God.”

Have you ever found yourself in a destructive friendship? One where you counted up the cost just to realize that it wasn’t good for you.

Verse James chapter four verse five is hands down one of the most difficult verses in the New Testament to translate. I imagine if there are five different translations here today, they all say something entirely different. The reason being, is that the Greek language doesn’t use punctuation marks and the word order doesn’t matter in the slightest as to the meaning of the sentence. Its made even more difficult by the fact that James says he is quoting scripture and then goes on to quote something that isn’t found directly anywhere else in scripture.

James is actually quoting more of a theme than any particular verse. Think the story of Hosea and Gomer. God told the prophet Hosea to go marry a prostitute and have children with her. Who in here would like that assignment? Yeah....didn’t think so. This was to symbolize God’s own marriage to His people who were themselves adulterers chasing after other little g gods for their pleasure and self-gratification.

The Westminster catechism asks the question: What is the chief end of man? That is to say, what is man’s ultimate purpose?

To glorify God and enjoy Him forever.

I like how John Piper breaks that incredibly complex sentence which takes several hundred pages in a book to explain…listen to what he says:

We honor God the greatest when we derive our deepest satisfaction, pleasures, purpose, and self-worth from Him.

READ:

A person who has aligned themselves with Gods purposes and vision for life and seeks to fulfill their God-given needs and desires from God and in the way God intended will not only find the deepest satisfaction possible. When we don’t allow that satisfaction to terminate on ourselves but turn it Godward, it results in the deepest expression of worship possible as well. The fullest human experience and the life without fracture or imperfection is the life who has aligned itself as a friend of God looking to Him as the source of all pleasure, self-actualization, and definer of success.

This was our failure from the very beginning. In the garden of Eden, we had the choice to allow God to provide that for us, or we could reach out our hand and fulfill that apart from Him and under our own wisdom. When we did that, we aligned ourselves with the enemy whose nature from the very beginning has been at war with God.

But…there is good news…there is grace. Let’s read on.

James 4:6 NASB95

6 But He gives a greater grace. Therefore it says, “God is opposed to the proud, but gives grace to the humble.”

The grace of God is greater because it is greater than the extent of our failing. That is incredibly good news. That means there is no fracture so deep or severe that God’s grace cannot cover over it. But we need the right tool for the job.

The tool that allows us to access God’s grace to heal our fractured nature is humility.

The right tool for the job is humility. vs. 6 Pride is concerned with what is best for me and humility is concerned with what honors God. To one end we find opposition and to the other we find grace and acceptance.

READ:

I want you to think of humility like a fuse. This stands in stark contrast to the way that the health, wealth, prosperity and moralistic therapeutic deist gospels preaches that humility is like a steering wheel. You see, a steering wheel sees humility as an object of control that can somehow move the hand of God in whatever way we want…that if we just come to God with enough humility that somehow we can control the outcome…that’s not humility, that’s the opposite of humility.

Besides that, James has already spoken to that back in verse three when he said we ask with the wrong motives, so that we may spend it on our pleasures. No…humility is more like a fuse. God’s power is like the battery…its always there and He is going to move and act as HE WILLS. Our life is like the rest of the vehicle. All of your systems may be perfectly functioning and capable and yet without that fuse, you are cut off from the power that enables your life to work. No other source will deliver the pleasure and true self-gratification that God can. All other sources will ultimately be destructive to the system.

When we notice a fracture in our lives, its time to check the fuse box. There are paths of destruction in our lives of which we are intimately aware of. At the center of that destruction inevitably stands some way in which we have sought pleasure and self-gratification apart from God’s definition of Good and Evil. We have usurped God’s authority in a move of pride and selfish-ambition and have chosen to pursue our pleasure at the cost of those around us and our relationship with God.

I’ll give you some examples here in a second, but first, lets off the passage.

Let’s read James’ solution and then we will put it all together really practically.

James 4:7–10 NASB95

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. 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.

Did you see it? James just gave us the way to fix the fractured areas of our lives through humility. Its riddled all throughout those four verses.

James is calling for a move of repentance rooted in our humility.

James is calling for a revival of repentance. Here is what I mean. The word we get repentance from is ‘teshove’ and its where we get the expression to shove something…literally its the image of planting your foot and shoving off in a new direction. Its a change of course. Did you see it?

Verse seven - shove off of your friendship with the enemy and he will flee as you submit to God. Realize the depths of this problem. This isn’t just an issue with lust, or substances, or money, or vanity, or legalism, or whatever…at it’s roots this is a rejection of God in favor of friendship with the one opposed to Him. That makes the consequences eternally significant.

Verse eight - close the distance between you and God. Change your dirty hands into clean hands. That is to say, our actions…or our works need to change. Change your impure heart into a pure heart. This is a move of repentance. James has already made it abundantly clear that our works (hands in this verse) are directly tied to our faith (heart in this verse). And here is the deal:

Repentance is based in trust.

Do you trust God for his definition of good and evil and as the only one who can supply true pleasure and gratification and acceptance or are you going to look elsewhere? That’s a move of the heart that affects what we do with our hands.

Verse nine - Change your laughter into mourning and your joy to gloom. That is, the things that you once derived pleasure from that were against God, become disgusted by them.

Its like Old Yeller…we may love the thing…it gives us pleasure for that matter, and yet we have got to intentionally and ferociously put that thing down because it will kill you and destroy everything you love. You either put sin to death or it will do it to you. This is an act of outright aggression towards our sin.

I have watched as people escape the clutches of porn or substance abuse and then they go on to become staunch advocates against the porn industry or the drug and alcohol suppliers. I don’t think that is so much for others sake as it is for their own. They are constantly putting reminders in front of themselves of the dangers of their former addiction so as not to be allured by its sweet aroma every again.

Verse 10 - Exchange the pride of thinking that you can solve this issue or supply this pleasure on your own for the humility that recognizes God as the only one capable of doing so, and you will be exalted. That is to say that not only will you have that need realized, but you will attain a greater satisfaction than was ever possible had you attempted to meet the need in your own wisdom and strength.

O.K…I know that was a lot…you guys with me? Clear as mud? Let’s close out by making this all really practical.

I want to go back to the examples we listed earlier and apply these truths.

God did not create you to reach for pleasure or fulfillment through pornography, substance abuse, the affirmation of people through some curated and fake version of yourself, a moral high-ground, or as you insulate yourself from the world God intended you to participate in…or any of the million other ways we seek self-gratification.

It is because we have failed to trust God in one of those areas that we then go outside of His plan for life to seek them out in our own wisdom. It’s evil and we leave a trail of destruction in our path when we do that.

Because we have failed to trust that God has our best interest at heart in our intimacy, we seek out pornography and other people who are not our spouse. Because we have failed to understand the true value and acceptance we have in God through Christ, we seek affirmation from others in ways that cause us to curate a version of ourselves that we think they will like and accept or we will do things that are completely against God’s moral law. Because we fail to trust that God can protect us and our families from the world, we leave it to go to hell in our absence as we remove ourselves from the fight.

Because we fail to trust God for our provision we adopt a scarcity mindset and fail to be truly generous and can be led to see people as a means to our own financial agenda. Because we fail to trust that God is ultimately the sovereign king over the universe, we give ourselves over to political leaders we think can ensure the greatest preservation of our self-interests. Because we fail to trust God in all sorts of issues, we reach for pleasure at the expense of other people and that is where our fights and quarrels and murders and envy stems from according to James.

And here is the deal…some of those things require us to trust God in the long game.

Let’s take the substance abuse issue. Whether its because of pain or mental anguish or just because we can’t stand our lives sober, we turn to substance abuse. Here is the deal…that pain or that mental anguish or the circumstances that make life a living nightmare sometimes…LOOK AT ME REALLY CLOSELY…they may NEVER go away this side of heaven.

BE SURE TO READ THIS PARAGRAPH!!!

Perhaps our trust in God means we trust his words about our resurrected body that will live forever without any of those issues. For that matter…and DO NOT MISS THIS…perhaps none of these issues will ever be right this side of heaven. To stand here and say that they will would be to treat our humility like a steering wheel and proclaim some prosperity or moralistic gospel.

No…the question is:

Will you trust God for every aspect of life, turn in repentance from the areas of fracture, and come to Him in humility seeking the satisfaction that only He can give?

I don’t know where you are at this morning...

I know I have some of my own areas and those are deeply personal and incredibly shameful for me. I know that my failure in those areas, though, always stem from a lack of trust in God’s design for my life as I go to gratify my own desires apart from Him.

I know that you probably don’t have to think long. If you are having a hard time, just imagine this…what if we could sit you in a chair in front of 10,000 people (think seahawks stadium) and plug you up to a computer. What if we set the search parameters for just this past week and typed in the query pleasure or self-gratification and then watch the highlight reel start playing in front of everyone? How long would you stick around as every thought, every action, every word, every website, every self-righteous move, every drink, and every slander was played? What would be the thing that would make you get up and run out of that stadium?

Look at me here...I know that is grossly over-dramatic and perhaps even bordering on cruel to lead you through that thought experiment. But the reality is that there is someone who did have that view in real time this past week of your life. And to downplay the gravity of that is the very move of pride that James is addressing. And so, I don’t know about you, but I want to come back in a move of repentance. When that move of repentance is widespread and includes all of us…that is called revival and God has turned entire nations upside when revival breaks out.

Maybe you need to turn in repentance to God for the very first time...

Will you pray with me?