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Real Submission
“Get Real”
A Study of James
James 4:1-10
Recent research is shining light on the importance of male spiritual leadership in the home.
Among their findings is the reality that 130 million of our nation’s 162 million men don’t attend any church.
This, despite the fact, that 75% of them grew up with some sort of church background.
Research has revealed that if a child is the first person in a household to become a Christian, there is a 3.5 percent probability that everyone else in the household will become Christians.
Not very high at all.
If the mother is the first to accept Christ, the percent goes up and 17 percent of the homes will see the remainder of its members trust Christ.
But if the father is first, there is a 93 percent probability that everyone else in the household will follow.
When father goes first spiritually, good things happen at home.
Let’s all pray together that God will call even more men to spiritual revival and renewal.
Never has there been a generation in our nation, where is has been more important than now.
Men are the leaders of the home.
Men are in every way responsible for the leadership of their family.
In fact, they will be held accountable for the way they lead.
This thought links perfectly to our topic in James this morning.
We are going to be talking about real submission.
If there is one thing that men want to do, it is to make a difference in this world.
If fact if we are honest, all of us would say that we want to make a difference.
We want to interact with culture, we want to talk with our friends about God, but we often do not know how.
On one hand we have most Christians saying we need to stay out of the world.
There are versus like what we will look at today that say if you are friends of the world, you are an enemy of God.
Then we have verses that say, “Be in the world, but not of it.”
Jesus even prays before he dies that we would not leave the world, but that we would stay in it.
Growing up in church I was taught that the world in which we live is a horrible place.
A place that is beyond saving.
Within the church you have two extremes when it comes to culture and how we interact with it.
Build bubbles to keep it out and keep our kids from it or immerse ourselves so we relate to culture and then there is nothing different about us.
There was a poll several years ago.
People asked, “what groups of people do you dislike the most?” top 3 answers, serial killers, child molesters, evangelical Christians.
Why?
I think it is 1) because we build a bubble around ourselves (We appear self-Righteous) or 2) because there is nothing different about us.
(We appear like hypocrites.)
In this Series in James, we have been studying this letter written to Christians who were not acting like Christians.
It is the same today as it was in the 1stcentury when James wrote this letter.
The church he was writing to was struggling with the same problem.
How do you interact with the world around you? How do followers of Jesus interact with the world around them?
James 4:1–10 (ESV)
1What causes quarrels and what causes fights among you?
Is it not this, that your passions are at war within you?
2You desire and do not have, so you murder.
You covet and cannot obtain, so you fight and quarrel.
You do not have, because you do not ask.
3You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, to spend it on your passions.
4You adulterous people!
Do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God? Therefore whoever wishes to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God.
5Or do you suppose it is to no purpose that the Scripture says, “He yearns jealously over the spirit that he has made to dwell in us”?
6But he gives more grace.
Therefore it says, “God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble.”
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.
This is one of the most action-packed section of verses in the whole book of James.
Many say this passage is the pivotal point in this letter.
When we think about the culture around us.
We see it as something very different from the church.
And in many ways, it is, but our culture has become incredible spiritual.
Many people are asking questions about God and having conversations about spiritual things.
Just look at the spirituality section or the self-help section on Amazon.
This is a problem for us as Christians.
Most of us want to make a difference in the world around us but we do not feel adequate to take Jesus into our world.
In his book “Too Christian, Too Pagan”, Dick Staub said this, “In my observation most Christians are either too Christian or too pagan.
The Christians who are “too Christian” are very comfortable with the Christian subculture but are ill at ease when in the world.
On the other hand, Christians who are too pagan are at ease with the world but fail to integrate their faith into their everyday life.”
Taking Jesus into our world requires fully engaging both our faith and our world.
Yet few of us have learned to live a fully integrated life of faith in the world.
Which leads us to where we need to be.
Staub says, “The call of following Jesus will lead us to be too Christian for our pagan friends and too pagan for our Christians friends.”
That is what we are going to examine today.
So, let’s pick up what James says,
1What causes quarrels and what causes fights among you?
Is it not this, that your passions are at war within you?
2You desire and do not have, so you murder.
You covet and cannot obtain, so you fight and quarrel.
You do not have, because you do not ask.
3You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, to spend it on your passions.
James starts this section by asking what causes fights and quarrels among us and in us.
These wars come from our desires for pleasure, which are constantly fighting within us.
Last week, we talked about envy, jealousy and selfish ambition.
He picks up with this again.
He says, you want something, you can’t have it, so you fight.
It almost sounds like the church he was writing for was filled with a bunch of little kids.
Good thing, we have learned our lesson and don’t do those things anymore, right?
In verse 2 he says we don’t have things because we don’t ask.
Then he says in verse 3, you ask but don’t get it, because you ask wrongly.
We ask for things that will satisfy our pleasures, which is the equivalent of earthly wisdom.
James is connecting the fights that we experience within our relationships and within ourselves to wisdom and whether we have wisdom from God or from the culture around us.
At the end of chapter 3, as he is talking about envy and selfish ambition, he is now showing what leads to those things.
Rivalry, pride, strife, things James would say are things of the world around us.
Let’s talk about desires for a second.
Desires are not always bad.
A lot of times instead of saying desire we say, “I hope, I wish.”
Every parent has hopes and dreams, desires for their kids.
Not always a bad thing.
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