Sermon Tone Analysis

Pardon me for repeating myself, but...

James, like many biblical writers, says much about an alternative lifestyle, but it has nothing to do with LGBTQ.

The OT prophets foreshadowed and the non-Gospel NT writers looked back on an alternative lifestyle most fully proclaimed by Jesus.

Much is being said in our society about cancel culture and being “woke.”

For true believers, cancel culture isn’t our problem because we are already part of a counter-culture called the Kingdom of God whose inhabitants shouldn’t have to be “woke” to true injustice because we should never have been asleep.

As we’re going to see today, we cannot hold to the culture James calls the world and the counterculture called the Kingdom of God at the same time and still be considered friends of God.

To be the culture’s friend is to be God’s enemy.

Is the scripture wrong when it says the spirit God breathed into us intensely covets what the culture offers?

But God’s grace is sufficient for those who will repent.

God is hostile to those who look at others with contempt, but the faithfulness of those of low status will find grace.

[James 4.5-6 (JMT)]

The two kingdoms, God’s an this world, are conflicting cultures and when we try to live in both, conflict is the result.

Verse 5 is one of the most difficult in James.

It’s obvious James is quoting something but no one knows exactly what.

There is no exact verse in or out of the Bible that matches exactly.

James apparently is paraphrasing something lost on us.

This is seen in the difficulty of translating the Greek here.

One translation carries the OT idea that God is a jealous God who gave us life and will not tolerate rival lovers for those who claim to be his children.

Another possible translation is that the spirit the King put within us has turned to bitter, intense envy and jealousy.

We need to learn the lessons of both.

We are never going to be happy trying to live the values of two conflicting cultures.

Jesus kind of covered that when he said we can’t serve God and mammon because we would wind up loving the one and hating the other.

God gave us life, yet his children were and are squandering that life lusting for what the culture offers.

I heard someone say envy is wanting what someone else has and jealousy is plotting how to take it away from them.

Fortunately, verse 6 is less murky.

James is quoting Proverbs 3.34.

Here, the word pride means those who look at others with contempt, as beneath them, less entitled to be treated as fellow humans.

The Greek means God is openly hostile to such people.

It doesn’t mean God doesn’t love the proud, but they are incapable of receiving that love until something knocks them from their perch.

Barclay gives us three reasons pride gets in the way of what God offers.

First, they have no sense of their own need.

Second, it cherishes its own independence; it will give up control to no one.

Third, it cannot be forgiven for it has never done anything that needs forgiving.

Humility was lacking in James’ church and in the American church.

In addition to saying humility is the opposite of pride point by point, other things can be added.

Humility has met God and knows one is not God.

Humility cannot view others as beneath it because humility never forgets from whence God has redeemed it.

Key to verse 6 is a point James makes twice: God’s grace is sufficient.

How can a believer live the alternative lifestyle of the Kingdom in a world so hostile to it?

Grace here means the ability to meet the demand.

The Kingdom life makes demands of us, but the King supplies what is necessary to meet the demand if it is received in humility.

CS Lewis wrote this about his conversion in his autobiography Surprised By Joy.

“I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England.…

The Prodigal Son at least walked home on his own feet.”