October 29, 2023 | James 4:1-10 | Pastor Chris Baker
Good morning, First Baptist Church!
We’re going to be in James 4 today.
Our family had the opportunity to catch the high school’s fall choir and orchestra concert this week. Many of you were participating in that as either singers or instrumentalists and you did an excellent job.
Remington, our 2-year old, wasn’t exactly thrilled at the start of the concert. He was fidgeting and kicking the lady in front of us and doing his best to be a tiny terrorist. But when the music started, he settled down magically. I was holding him and he was really still. As the music wore on, I noticed he hadn’t moved in a bit so I look down and sure enough, he’s asleep. So I got to enjoy the rest of the show in peace. And anytime one of the other kids would notice him they’d say something and I’d threaten them. Don’t disturb the peace.
We get momentary peace here, and when we get it we want to grab hold of it. Peace is where we left off in chapter 3. And it’s the idea that drives us into chapter 4. I’ll go ahead and tell you the sermon in a sentence. Genuine faith is marked by the pursuit of peace.
That’s the argument James makes in these first 10 verses of chapter four. The problem, though, is that his audience seems to struggle to be at peace with one another. Let’s read together
Read James 4:1-10
Humans are not at peace by default. When left to our own devices, we gravitate toward war. That’s not my opinion. It’s a fact pointed out in Scripture and it’s even attested to by historians. I love it when science or academia affirm the Bible and act surprised, don’t you?
It wasn’t all that long ago the New York Times released a study about peace and war. They looked at the last 3,400 years of recorded history and found that humans were at peace 8% of the time. There were 268 years without war in the past 3,400—and that’s defining war as active conflict that has claimed more than 1,000 lives.
(https://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/06/books/chapters/what-every-person-should-know-about-war.html)
In the midst of one of those wars, general Robert E. Lee wrote a letter home to his wife on Christmas Day in 1862. He contrasted the hatred that drives war with the love of neighbor described in Scripture:
What a cruel thing is war; to separate and destroy families and friends, and mar the purest joys and happiness God has granted us in this world; to fill our hearts with hatred instead of love for our neighbors, and to devastate the fair face of this beautiful world! I pray that, on this day when only peace and good-will are preached to mankind, better thoughts may fill the hearts of our enemies and turn them to peace.
Hatred instead of love for our neighbor. That’s what James is getting at as we open chapter 4. War here isn’t so much talking about nation-states (though I think the principle holds true). He wants his original audience and us to understand that our hearts are going to default to division and that division leads to war—fighting and quarreling between one another.
Remember, James is writing to Christians here. He must know something about their lives. He knows they’re prone to argue with one another and so on the heels of telling them wisdom leads to righteousness that is marked by peace with one another he tells them that they aren’t there yet.
Yes, wisdom leads to peace but these folks aren’t marked by that peace yet. They’re still a work in progress. They complain about one another, envy one another, plot against one another and James wants them to knock it off.
So he gets right to the point. The big point is that genuine faith is marked by the pursuit of peace. To understand that, first wee see that
Disunity among God’s people comes from you
Verse 1: where do quarrels and conflicts (wars and fights), where do they come from? James is like a doctor diagnosing a patient. He asks a couple of probing questions.
I’m getting very familiar with the folks at Missouri Orthopedic Institute with this whole wrist thing. But no matter how many times I go, I have to fill out the same information. “Did this happen because of an accident? How much pain are you in? Do you take any medications?” The answers haven’t changed since August, but they ask every time.
James is not that repetitive. He goes right to the source. “What is the source of wars and fights among you? Don’t they come from your passions that wage war within you? 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. 3 You ask and don’t receive.
You find yourself in conflict with others. Where should you start when you’re looking for the source of the problem? Here’s a practical thing you can do in the privacy of your own home when it comes to conflict resolution.
When you find yourself frustrated with another person, when you’re angry, when you’re so mad at someone you can’t see straight I’m going to show you where the source of that problem comes from. Here’s what you do. Go to your bathroom. Stand in front of the mirror. Bow your head, close your eyes, count to 10, then look up again. The source of your conflict will be staring at you. Not every time—but a lot more than you’d like to believe.
Broken relationships on the outside are often a reflection of a problem on the inside. In verse 2, he gives
two examples, you desire and do not have so you commit murder. See David and Bathsheba in 2 Samuel 11 for a vivid illustration of the way lust can turn into murder incredibly quickly.
Secondly, you covet and cannot obtain so you fight and wage war. Our outward actions which harm believers, friends in Christ, and our outward disunity both betray our inner selfishness. Covetousness and envy are essentially selfish. They represent a self-focused, self-centered existence, and the good life cannot be had by essential selfishness.
Because true wisdom, James has already told you in James 3:13-18, true wisdom, heavenly wisdom comes from above. And what is the first principle of true wisdom? The fear of the lord. But the first principle of selfishness is the fear of me, the awe of me, the respect of me, the concern for me. True wisdom is totally opposite from selfishness. True wisdom cannot be had in a selfish heart, and covetousness and envy and all of the outward actions which they result show an essentially selfish heart. And so those broken outward relationships which result from this kind of worldliness show the inner problem.
But he doesn’t stop. In the second half of verses 2 and verse 3 he gives two other examples: Prayerlessness and unanswered pray.
He says, look, do you pray? And he suggests that many of his readers aren’t praying. The fact that you are not praying is in fact an indication that you don’t look to God for satisfaction. That’s not the place you go, you look somewhere else for satisfaction. You look to how you can get it for yourself. You look for it to some other source. But you don’t look to God for the answers to the real, basic, deepest, most profound and legitimate need s of life. You don’t look to God. You have not, because you do not ask. So he points to prayerlessness as an example of a heart problem.
So, too, are selfish prayers. Lord, give me _______. Fill in your blank. Maybe it’s a corvette, or a new truck, or a some other material thing that we want—but don’t need.
We ask God, looking to Him to give you the wrong satisfaction. James addresses wrong prayers here. What he’s talking about is seeing God as a means to your ends, instead of the end itself. You look to God as the One to give you your desires, however warped they may be, instead of the one who is the desire of your heart. Do we pray to God for the stuff we desire or do we pray because God Himself is our desire?
James addresses both the actions and the attitudes that lead to division here. Church, honestly evaluate your life today and ask God to do the same through the Holy Spirit.
What do your relationships say about your heart? What does your marriage relationship say to you? What do your friendships say to you? Students, do you care more about being accepted by your friends than having God as your priority? What do the boyfriends and the girlfriends that you choose say about you? Do you care more about the acceptance of a male and a female friend, a boy friend, a girl friend, than you do about being faithful and loyal to God? Young married couples, you hit the hard places in marriage. You’re unhappy, you have a spouse who is inattentive, who has disappointed you deeply, and it’s not what you were expecting. Do you care more about God, or do you care more about your own
happiness? “I’m just not happy, I’m just not going to stay in this relationship.” Do you care more about loyalty to God? Do you care more about pleasing Him? O, do you care more about satisfaction to yourself?
The rest of us, what are the things that really satisfy you? Where are the places that you are going to fill the void in you? Is it toys, homes, popularity, cars, power, ambition what is it? Where are we going and what does it say about our priorities? Broken outward relationships and wrong priorities in relationships provide the evidence of an inner problem, James says.
And then he says this in verses 4 and 5, friendship with the world means forfeiture of fellowship with God. You can have it one way or the other, but you can’t have it both. God will accept. no rival in our hearts. James says that worldliness is really spiritual adultery, if you try to be married to Christ and then be joined to another at the same time.
We’re tempted to be like those we’re around. We’re refugees in a world that does not abide by the same standards of our true home. So we’ll be tempted to pick up the mannerisms and attitudes of what we see everyday.
And looking inside won’t fix it. That’s why we see beginning in verse 6 that unity among God’s people comes from God Himself.
Unity among God’s people comes from God
6 But he gives greater grace. Therefore he says:
God resists the proud
but gives grace to the humble.
7 Therefore, submit 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, sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded. 9 Be miserable and mourn and weep. Let your laughter be turned to mourning and your joy to gloom. 10 Humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will exalt you.
In verse six, James points us to the gospel to find unity. God gives a grace greater than quarrels. Greater than gossip. Greater than all ours sin. God’s grace is not only the source of our new birth, God’s grace is not only the source of our becoming Christians, God’s grace is not only the source of our justification—being declared to be right the sight of God, God’s grace is also the source of our growth. God’s grace is the source of our sanctification. God’s grace is the source of our ability to be separated from the world.
We live in a fallen and sinful world that is in rebellion against Him. God’s grace is the source of our sanctification and our victory over worldliness.
James is giving us a word picture of life in verses 6-10. And it’s a dark picture. The world lives one way, God’s people live another way.
You can’t love God and love the world. You can’t be a follower of God and be a follower of the world. You can’t be a friend of God and a friend of the world. That’s a dilemma that we all face in one form or another. Our sinful heart wants what this world offers—even though it leads to broken relationships with God, ourselves, and others.
So James says not to look inside for help. Instead, look to God.
We’re told that the solutions to our problems are to look within and to find some strength or wisdom we didn’t know was there. I didn’t have to google very long to find this played out in the self-help world.
The message today is a simple reminder of the wisdom that lies within each and every one of us. It is just important to remember to create avenues of tapping into that space of inner knowing.
Our relationship to ourselves is the most important and valuable relationship that we will ever have cultivated.
It is so important to establish a consistent connection to a loving relationship with our inner being and to develop a vital foundation of self-trust.
(https://www.embodymylife.com/blog/the-answers-lie-within)
I share that because it sounds like a million other vague self-actualization principles I’ve heard from well-meaning folks. But church, it’s anti-Bible. It’s the opposite of Scripture. If the answer lies within, you don’t need the gospel.
And there is a spiritual equivalent to this message. Many of the sermons you see on TV or the 30-second clips you see on social media are that same message. There’s a subtle danger that lies within swapping the grace-alone gospel of Scripture for the try harder gospel of the world but dressing it up in biblical language. You just need to slay your giant or sow your seed and it’s all going to work out.
When we think that way faith becomes nothing more than will power. Just believe harder and you’ll have all your answers to all your problems, and if you have problems it’s because you are not believing hard enough. And James is emphatically not giving that answer to this battle here.
He says that God gives a greater grace. He piles up an enormous challenge, that challenge of worldliness. It’s within you, it’s around you, it’s everywhere, you’re struggling with it every minute of every day of every week of every month of every year, and he says, God gives greater grace. I know your circumstances are hard. He gives greater grace than that. I know that the temptations are profound. He gives greater grace than that. I know that the challenge is unimaginable. He gives greater grace than that. We’re in a mess but He gives more grace than the mess. We are weak but He gives more grace than our weakness. We are tired but God is tirelessly on our side, He is never less than sufficient, He always has more to give. We may be beaten but He is never beaten.
He is ready to give grace and His grace is greater not only than all our sins, but all the challenges and temptations that face us day by day. And James is saying that we must look to God for fresh and greater aid, not within, but look to God.
HIs answer has both a passive side and an active side. Yes, you have to admit that you don’t have the resources in yourself and that only God has those resources and only He can give those resources, and that those resources are more than sufficient to answer the need of the day, but there is something else you need to do as well, and James spells that out in verses seven through ten. We can sum it up in the word “obey.”
Obedience is the proper response to God’s grace, and it’s not only the proper response to God’s grace, it’s the tool that God’s grace uses in our lives, it’s the instrument of God’s grace. Don’t think that relying on God’s grace means passivity. Don’t think that relying on God’s grace means that you are inactive. No, you walk in obedience to grace.
Have you counted up the commands in verses seven through ten? Look at them: submit, resist, draw near, cleanse, purify your hearts, be miserable and mourn and weep (over your own sin), humble yourselves.
These are all commands to obey. God gives us a grace to receive—that's a free gift not earned by anything we do so that no one can boast—and He gives us commands to obey. And as James has shown us over-and-over the way we express genuine faith born from God's grace is to obey God’s commands.
Ligon Duncan boiled James’s commands in these verses down to four directives. I found them helpful, I hope you do as well. Trust in God’s grace and then walk in His ways and James says his ways are: Fight, Fellowship, Focus, and Forgive. Fight in verse seven. Fellowship in the first part of verse eight. Focus in the second part of verse eight. Forgiveness in verses nine and ten.
James says in verse seven to submit to God and resist the devil. Two key commands are given in verse. That language is military language. Submit here isn't passive. It's active allegiance to God. It doesn't mean passivity.
Part of the army oath of enlistment says that “I will obey the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me.” That’s a submission to authority that must be fulfilled with action.
Submission sounds like you are sort of relinquishing, you’re giving up, you’re tapping out, but the fact of the matter is, submit here means active allegiance, active allegiance to God.
It doesn’t mean passivity it means being ready to do what God sets before you.
Resistance is the other side of the coin. Resistance means to man the defenses to be prepared for conflict with Satan. James is simply reminding you that when grace invades your life the battle is only just beginning, and for some reasons Christians forget that.
We think that when grace shows up the battle is over, and James is simply saying to you here, you need to be in the mindset that grace is there for the fight, grace is there so that you can pick up the armor, grace is there so that you can get into the fight, into the conflict. It doesn’t end it, it begins it, and we need to remember that. Resistance shows up when we overcome the temptation to sin. James has already spelled that out for us earlier in the letter. And let me just remind you, church, that if you can’t remember the last time you resisted temptation or overcame a sinful desire with the help of the Holy Spirit—it’s probably not because you’re so holy you don’t need to repent anymore. It’s more likely that it’s because you’ve stopped resisting.
That’s fight. Now, fellowship. Look at what he says in the first part of verse eight, draw near to God and He will draw near to you.
James is calling you to cultivate fellowship with God. That’s thing one that you need most for the fight of the faith. If you want to look less like the world and more like Jesus, if you want to be at peace with the people around you, you need more God and less self.
You need time in His Word. You need to worship Him—both on your own six days a week and on the Lord’s Day as we gather. You need to pray. You need to spend time thinking about how good He is.
John Piper said it well: God is always doing 10,000 things in your life, and you may be aware of three of them.
(https://www.desiringgod.org/articles/god-is-always-doing-10000-things-in-your-life)
There’s a lot of truth in that and if you want to find out a fourth thing, spend more time with Him. Sing, pray, read, think about Him. Draw near to Him.
It’s not some mystical experience. It just means growing in you awareness that God, while He’s so big that He spoke the universe into existence, is still so personal that He is intimately involved in the everyday details of your life.
Fight, fellowship, and focus. At the end of verse eight James is talking about finding focus in the midst of the double-mindedness that all our sinful hearts are drawn to.
On the one hand we want to follow God, and on the other hand we want to follow
after the world, and he says, don’t be double-minded sinners, purify yourself.
James is calling us here to purify our lives, to do spiritual pruning, to do some spiritual weeding in our garden. He wants us to be focused on God and that means pruning things that detract from that focus.
Isn’t it interesting, by the way, that first James we draw near to God and then we prune. He doesn’t say, “Get your act together so that you can draw near to God.” You can’t get your act together unless you’ve been drawn near to God. You can’t ever get your act together.
But, it’s “Draw near to God” and then work on the pruning. Don’t try to fix yourself up enough that you will then be able to draw near to God. Draw near to God and only then will you be able to work on the pruning that needs to be done.James is calling for a thorough purification of our lives. This is what the older Christian would have called mortification, killing sin, going after sin in the Christian life.
Finally, he speaks of forgiveness, verses 9-10. Be miserable and mourn and weep. Let your laughter be turned to mourning and your joy to gloom. Humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will exalt you.
That’s the language of repentance. It, again, mirrors the Beatitudes in Matthew 5.
James draws us back into the realm of relationship with the people sitting next to you here. What happens when you see your sin and how it has hurt someone else? You mourn, maybe you weep, your laughter is turned to mourning and your joy to gloom. That’s the language of repentance.
Grace alone that enables us to do each of these four things, to fight, to fellowship,
to focus, and to seek forgiveness through repentance. The fact of these things
in our lives is an evidence of God’s grace at work in us. That’s how authentic faith makes itself known.
If we’re going to pursue peace with one another, we have to look into our own hearts and acknowledge that a lot of the brokenness in our relationships is our own fault. We repent of our sin. We draw near to God and submit to the truth that peace is only possible when we give Him the right authority. Disunity comes from me. Unity comes from Him.
And when we embrace that truth, what’s the natural outcome? It’s what James leaves us with. Verse 10: Humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will exalt you. Do you want to lead a peaceful life? Humble yourself before the authority of our good God and trust that He will bring about the peace you desire. Let’s pray.
Questions for Further Discussion & Reflection
Certainly, here are 15 discussion questions based on the sermon about the lack of default peace in humans and the pursuit of peace:
What do you think about the claim that humans are not at peace by default and tend to gravitate toward war? Do you agree with this statement based on your own observations and knowledge?
James is addressing Christians in the passage. Do you think his message about disunity and division is relevant to Christians today? Why or why not?
The sermon highlights that genuine faith is marked by the pursuit of peace. How do you understand the connection between faith and the pursuit of peace in your own life?
What are the sources of division and conflict among God's people, as outlined in James 4:1-3?
When faced with conflicts with others, have you ever looked within yourself to find the source of the problem? How did your own preferences and struggles impact the conflict?
The sermon mentions that broken relationships on the outside are often a reflection of a problem on the inside. Can you share any personal experiences or examples of this?
What do you think James means by "selfish prayers"? How do your own prayers align with the idea of seeking God as the end itself rather than a means to an end?
The sermon discusses the idea that you can't love both God and the world. How do you navigate the tension between worldly desires and your faith in daily life?
The sermon suggests that unity among God's people comes from God Himself. How does this concept resonate with your understanding of building unity and peace within the church?
How do you interpret the commands in verses 7-10, such as "submit to God," "resist the devil," "draw near to God," "cleanse your hands," and "purify your hearts"? How can these commands help in achieving peace and unity?
The sermon emphasizes the importance of fellowship with God to find focus and purity in life. How do you maintain a sense of fellowship with God in your daily routine?
In the sermon, repentance is described as mourning and weeping over one's own sins. How do you approach repentance and forgiveness in your own life and relationships with others?
The sermon concludes with the idea that humility before the Lord leads to exaltation. How does humility play a role in the pursuit of peace and reconciliation in your life and community?