God’s Grace is Greater

James 4:1 – 10

 

Growing up we were often told to “choose our friends wisely.” Great advice. One of my favorite sayings about friends (or brothers), and most often used on my boys, is “If he jumped off of a bridge are you going to jump off too?”

 

Friendships can exert a tremendous influence in our lives, especially when we’re young. Back in high school it often seemed like different groups of friends rotated through who they were mad at during a given week, and everyone else in the group better be mad at that person too.

 

What’s really unnerving is that those same concepts apply to international relations. Most international treaties include some measure of “security agreements.” That’s basically how the world came to experience WWI.

 

Two countries were at odds, Serbia and Austria-Hungary, and a Serbian national assassinated the Austrian archduke, Franz Ferdinand. Suddenly bigger more powerful countries, friends, were dragged into a conflict that became global war because they were legally and honor bound to fulfill “security guarantees.”

 

Serbia jumped off a bridge, metaphorically speaking, which led to Russia, France, and G.B jumping off after them. Austria-Hungary jumped too, leading Germany and the Ottoman Empire to jump as well. Choosing certain friendships led to nations being at war with each other, becoming enemies with each other.

 

The same is true when it comes to our spiritual condition, our relationship with fellow believers, and our relationship with God. In our passage today James uses very strong language when warning his hearers against worldliness, going so far as to tell them that choosing friendship with the world means being an enemy of God.

 

But believers don’t have to remain there. God made a way, and through James’ writing, God’s Word tells believers how. So let’s read God’s Word together: James 4:1 – 10.

James devoted the previous bit of his letter to talking about the two different sources of wisdom and their respective fruits. He especially emphasized how peace that is sown by peacemakers brings a harvest of righteousness. What he describes here, is the exact opposite of peace.

 

Clearly there was some serious issues in the church that James was addressing in his letter. Believers, and even leaders, were saying one thing and doing another. They professed faith in Christ but there was no visible evidence of that faith.

 

After closing on a positive note in 3:18, James returns to the situation at hand within the church. It was a situation that was anything but peaceful because of the divided congregation.

 

• Worldly desires from wrong motives drive division and strife.

 

James leads here with not just one rhetorical question again, but with two. The intensity of this line of questioning is seen in the doubling of what causes… in the first question. The second question can only be answered with a yes.

 

What causes quarrels and fights among you? Is it not your passions at war within you? James identifies the source of conflicts: their cravings. This implies the very physical feelings associated with the bodily appetites. His hearers were hungry for whatever they wanted.

 

The issue here, is not so much the inherent evil of worldly desire as it is how everyone’s worldly desires by nature conflict with each other. Not all desires can be satisfied at once or without canceling out a different desire.

 

As with temptation, these conflicts can be both internal and external. They can’t be limited to those conflicts within the heart of each person and so isolated to personal moral problems. That’s beginning of the conflicts within you.

 

James describing it as being at war was quite appropriate. He’s using collective language as if he were talking about a single person, but this had become the nature of the church. The battles within each person had been surfacing and becoming the battles within the body of believers.

 

That same deformed desire that gave birth to sin in chapter 1 is seen throughout James’ letter leading to conflict wherever active faith is not exercised. Evil desire is indeed a reality within every human being and must be confronted. This is why Paul talks about crucifying the flesh and dying to self. The self is always interested in itself.

 

This confrontation though becomes harder and painful when it is raised within the fellowship of Christians, within the church, which is what James is doing here. It’s not a surprise that these issues crept up in the church. The church after all is made up of many selves that are naturally interested in themselves, but it is indeed called to be more interested in others than themselves. James has already addressed that well in his letter.

 

And so people desire, and they don’t have so they murder. People covet and can’t have it, so they fight and quarrel. Human nature is that simple. James may be speaking figuratively, or maybe not. People have certainly killed for little.

 

Ask any parent why their kids fight. Usually it’s because one kid has what the other wants. That’s basic human nature. Bitter envy James called it in our passage last week. Folks want and they want and they want, and sometimes folks will go to some pretty wicked lengths to get what they want. And the church isn’t immune to doing that too.

 

The reason James gives why people in the church are lacking what they want is that they don’t ask God. James established back in chapter 1 that God gives generously to those who ask, and that every good and perfect gift is from the Father above. So much strife could be avoided if folks just asked God. But there is a caveat, an important distinction that James makes here.

 

Those that are fighting among each other and waging war within ask God, but they don’t receive anything. They don’t receive what they ask for because they ask with wrong motives. They ask because they want to satisfy their passions, their worldly desires.

 

God loves to bless His children; Scripture is clear about that. God answers big prayers and little prayers. And God also says no to big prayers and little prayers, and He also says not right now. The key to asking God is here in verse 3.

Believers Motives behind asking God matter. God answers prayer according to His will, not ours. One of the things that have really stuck with me from my seminary classes is this: that prayer is less about asking God for things and more about seeking to align our own will with His. Jesus taught this in the Lord’s Prayer: “Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”

 

Strife and division in the church arises when believers stop seeking God’s will and give in to seeking their own will instead. Just like a lack of mercy was evidence of James’ hearers’ sin of favoritism, and a lack of good work was evidence of their lacking faith, now their active hostility toward each other is evidence of their conflict with God.

 

Remember that with same mouth people bless God and curse those created in His image. When conflict arises within the body of believers because they are being self-centered rather than God-centered, their real issues is with God. They’ve turned away from God and towards the world.

 

• A friend of the world is an enemy of God.

 

Very abruptly and just as harshly, James calls out his hearers as an adulterous people. Throughout Scripture God’s people are depicted as God’s bride. The church is referred to as the bride of Christ. Israel is referred to as the wife of the Lord in Isaiah 54 and God considered her idolatries as adulteries. Just look at the prophet Hosea.

 

Here in James the spiritual adultery is the same as being an enemy of God. Instead of being faithfully married, James’ hearers had, by their evil ways, turned their b ack on God and were having an affair with the world.

 

James pulls no punches. Once redeemed by Christ, being part of the bride of Christ, His church, going back to the ways of the world is like being unfaithful to your spouse. That’s the picture James is painting here. It’s a serious thing to keep trying to live both lives. That issue of doublemindedness comes to a head here.

 

James audience, believers then and today know this. They know better. They know Christ has made them a new creation, but crucifying the old self is such a hard thing to do. So they try to navigate both. And fail. You can’t serve two masters.

The status of unbelievers is enmity with God, being enemies of God. Paul wrote in Romans 5:10, “For if, while we were God’s enemies, we were reconciled to him through the death of his Son, how much more, having been reconciled, shall we be saved through his life!” Why would believers want to go back to that state? Worldly desire.

 

But there is an even greater desire at work, not our own. James refers to Scripture here in v.5, but he’s not referring to a specific verse. Rather he’s referring to the whole of Scripture. God breathed life into mankind, he gave the spirit of life that is in every human being from the moment of conception.

 

And Scripture attests well that God is a jealous God. God calls Himself a jealous God in the Ten Commandments, “You shall not bow down to them or serve them, for I the Lord your God am a jealous God,” when giving the commandment against making idols.

 

And the prophet Zechariah relayed God’s words to the people saying, “Thus says the Lord of hosts: I am jealous for Zion with great jealousy, and I am jealous for her with great wrath. Thus says the Lord: I have returned to Zion and will dwell in the midst of Jerusalem, and Jerusalem shall be called the faithful city.”

 

God’s people are His bride, and He is jealous for her. Even when the people of God are playing both sides of the fence, God is still greater. But he gives more grace. Literally in biblical Greek, “but he gives greater grace.”

 

Even when His bride chooses the wily ways of the world, God gives greater grace. He shows unmerited favor to His adulterous people. How awesome is that? How great is our God? Greater than our desires, our passions that cause strife. Greater than our sin that brings forth death. Greater than death itself.

 

That grace is there, but not everyone will experience it. Quoting Proverbs 3:34 here, James says “God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble.” Pride, pride is what keeps people from God’s grace. Not that God can’t overcome people’s pride, He can, but He opposes the proud.

 

• Humility before God is key to unlocking God’s grace.

 

What follows here in our passage today is an intense flurry of imperatives from James. He hasn’t given such intense exhortation in his letter until now. Here is the answer to how to be friends with God instead of the world, repentance.

 

The failures in the corporate and personal Christian faith of James’ hearers now have a way of correction in these steps of spiritual self-discipline that James details here. James understood repentance to be a lifelong practice for every believer. All fill into sins that undermine faith and relationship to God, and all must return to Him for the restoration of whole-hearted commitment.

 

James doesn’t call for the church to repent and submit itself to any human authority, not even his own. Rather, he exhorts believers to submit to God. The Greek word submit in this verse is literally the opposite of the Greek word oppose in the previous verse.

 

The call here is to stop resisting God in anything, and this implies that James’ hearers knew the will and the truth of God and what it was to do it. Because James recognized that conflicts among one another in the church are symptoms of conflict with God, that all conflict resolution should begin with a renewed submission to God by the personal act of submission to Him.

 

When discussing conflict resolution in seminary, my professor heavily emphasized that before we can resolve a conflict with a brother or sister, we must first resolve our conflict with God. Before the steps in Matthew 18 can be carried out, we must first do what Jesus told us in Matthew 7, take the log out of our own eye. We have to get right with God before getting right with each other.

 

Friendship with God begins with submission to Him. Breaking it off with the world, involves resisting the devil. We don’t have to attack evil; we just need to resist its influence. Evil can’t force the human will, but rather it is dependent upon it, like a parasite.

 

The devil is the active opponent of God and His people, but he resorts to his lying, deceptive ways. Temptation comes from within humans, the devil just exploits it. The total depravity of the human will lends itself to the devil’s purposes. Wherever envy and selfish ambition are present in the conflicts of the body of believers, the devil is there.

Then James gives believers a promise, draw near to God and he will draw near to you. Rather than being opposed to God, believers are reconciled to Him and draw near to Him, and God draws near to them. His children are never more than one step back towards Him away.

 

“Sinners and double minded” James calls his hearers. The people in the church he’s writing to are the ones who doubt when they ask God for wisdom, they are the double minded and unstable ones. They are sinners, they are friends with the world, and therefore enemies of God.

 

Each of the exhortations of these verses is a means of entering into and returning to an intimate relationship with God. You can see the progression, from submitting to God and resisting the devil, to a mutual drawing near, and then “washing” the hands, and finally a purifying of the heart.

 

Sin is what causes spiritual uncleanness, and the appendages of the body often represented acts of sin. Jesus’ blood cleanses the body, and the heart from sin. Notice the order of operations here in these verses.

 

Many think that they have to be clean before they can approach God and submit to Him, but that’s not the case here in James. God, the Father has already planted His Word in those He’s chosen for the new birth. He didn’t wait for anyone of His children to be clean before choosing and saving them.

 

No, He took them as they were and He cleaned them. Jesus told Peter in John 13 when Peter refused to let Him wash his feet, “Unless I wash you, you have no part with me”, and then later Jesus said, “You are already clean because of the word I have spoken to you” (John 15:3).

 

Be wretched and mourn and weep. When evil desire within the believer’s heart is acknowledged and attacked, then the condition of the heart can truly be mourned. Laughter will become mourning, joy in the ways of the world will become gloom.

 

And again, James exhorts everyone, humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will exalt you. Jesus himself taught this. “Whoever exalts himself will be humbled, and whoever humbles himself will be exalted” (Matt. 23:12). The first will be last and the last will be first. The greatest must be least and the least will be greatest.

Self-seeking behavior and attitudes is part of the conflict that arises within the church, and God opposes the proud. The same exaltation that is promised to and encouraged of the believing poor back in chapter 1 can also be the joy of the formerly double minded believers who have humbled themselves.

 

Because God’s grace is greater than the world and your sin, through humility and submission to God, you can overcome what causes divisions and strife and draw closer to God.

 

Our worldly desires and sin are cause for mourning and weeping. Our sin grieves the Holy Spirit; it ought to grieve us as well. Psalm 30 tells us that “Weeping may tarry for the night, but joy comes with the morning.” Our sin rightfully should causes us to weep, but the truth that God’s grace is greater brings such glorious joy.

 

James wrote this to believers, not unbelievers. These are people who professed faith in Jesus Christ as Lord, and yet lived and behaved as the world around them does. The same is true today as it was for James’ original audience.

 

Only through humility and submission to God can we stop having quarrels and fights among us, and win the battles within us.

 

Only through humility and submission to God are we washed from the mud and filth of this world with the blood of Jesus Christ.

 

Only through humility and submission to God can truly realize the greatness of God’s grace and when do we find ourselves running to the Father, only to find Him right there drawing near to us.

 

Let’s pray.