James 4:6-10
Well, we want to think tonight
on James chapter 4, verses 6 through 10. So if you’d like to make
your way there. Last week we looked at verses 1 through 6.
Tonight we’ll look at 6 through 10. And then next week we’ll
look at verses 11 and 12. And this whole section, if you
look at maybe the heading in your Bible, depending on what
yours says. Mine says, warning against worldliness. I have as our sermon title, the
world, the flesh and the devil. Those are our three classic enemies
as Christians. And so there’s a mouthful in
all these little sections we’ll look at. There is tonight as
well. And so let’s give our attention
to God’s word, James four, six through 10. This picks up the
thought from last week, And it begins this way, but he gives
more grace. Therefore it says God opposes
the proud, but gives grace to the humble. Submit yourselves
therefore to God. Resist the devil and he will
flee from you. Draw near to God and he will
draw near to you. Cleanse your hands, you sinners,
and purify your hearts, you double-minded. Be wretched 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. Well, this passage is a mouthful,
and I wanna talk to you for a minute, maybe to set this up, about the
Christian life. So when a person hears the gospel,
and God regenerates their heart, and their new heart reaches out
to God in faith and says, I want the forgiveness of sins offered
in Jesus Christ, they begin this lifelong, or as Martin Luther
called it, an ongoing or perpetual life of repentance. A lot of
people think that we repent just once, because how does our gospel
presentation go? Now, you don’t want to go to
hell now, do you? Right? That’s how we start. And so if
you don’t want to go to hell, all you need to do is say this
prayer. Okay? So say a little prayer. You’re
a Christian, and that’s it. It’s like you stick your bus
pass in your back pocket, your train ticket in your back pocket,
or your chariot ticket. So when the chariot swings low,
you grab the ticket and say, here you go, conductor, take
me on to heaven. Well, the Christian life is a
little more complex than that. We are sinners, and yes, we come
to Jesus for the first time, repenting of our sin. and seeking
his forgiveness and moving from darkness to light. But we understand
that Christians still struggle until they’re glorified, right? We still struggle with the temptations
of the devil. And so we have to work hard to
hear the voice of Christ. We still struggle with the ways
of the world and all that it offers. And so we have to read
the word of God and not listen to the world. But our biggest
struggle, I believe, is our flesh. The apostle Paul calls the remaining
sin in us, the flesh. I’ve given y’all the example
before of what that’s like. In my childhood house, You know,
during the energy crisis of the Jimmy Carter days, we had electric
heat, and so big heating bills, and an elder in our church bought
us a wood stove and a load of wood, put the wood stove in,
burned wood all winter. Our house was balmy warm for
little to nothing, and we didn’t even have to crack the windows
to let a little cold in, because that thing got so hot. But every
night we’d stoke the fire, get a 600 degree wood stove going
and you go to bed toasty, sleeping under sheets in the wintertime.
But in the morning when you would go down as the fire died down,
you’d open the wood stove and all you would see was a blanket
of gray ash. But what would happen if you
scraped back that top layer of gray ash? You’d see red hot coals.
And I think that’s a lot like the remnant sin in our lives.
The fire has been burned down because it has been subdued in
Christ. We’ve been given the Holy Spirit.
But what does it take to get those red hot ashes back to a
raging 600 degree fire? Well, just a little kindling,
a little fuel, a little wood, and you’re back to 600 degree
heat until it dies down again. And so every Christian deals
with the world and deals with the devil, but deals with their
own flesh. And so the Christian life is
a life of ongoing repentance before Almighty God. And one
of the things that I think we have to recognize in our Christian
walk, though we have come to Jesus and though we’ve said to
Him, look, I’m no good at this Christian life business. You
come in and take over, you be the king of my life. You kick
Satan out of the cockpit and let him fly this thing. You know,
whatever image we say, we say we’ve submitted to God, but how
often is it? The answer is daily. But how
often is it that we take back over? I’ve got this, God. My checkbook’s got enough in
it. My charisma’s got enough in it. My can-do spirit’s got
enough in it. We dethrone God daily. and enthrone ourselves on our
lives, and it doesn’t go well. And that’s what James is really
attacking in chapter four, all of it. He’s saying to Christians,
particularly in the last section we looked at, you’re idolaters.
Okay, that wasn’t very nice, was it, to hear that last week.
Remember, that’s when the preacher goes from preaching to meddling.
when he sticks his finger into your heart. And so James said
to us last week, he said, your passions have taken over your
life. Your desires have taken over
your life. You covet, you murder, you fight, you quarrel, you’re
prayerless, you’re adulterous, you’re friends with the world,
and you have enmity with God. We all should have left here
kind of weeping and in sackcloth and ashes, shouldn’t we have?
Well, we covered verse six last week. which says God gives more
grace. God opposes the proud. He gives
grace to the humble. So we want to begin with that
tonight, that verse, because he’s going to waylay us again.
He’s going to take the two by four of the scriptures and whack
us on the head again. It’s just the way it is. But
I want you to notice before we really dig into this, two key
words that sort of bookend this passage. If you look at the end
of verse six, he says, God approaches the proud, but gives grace to
the, go ahead and say it, the humble. And then look at the
end at verse 10 was the very first word. Humble yourselves
before the Lord and he will exalt you. And so let me say this before
we dig in. Every day when we dethrone God
and enthrone ourselves, it’s what we do, right? Every day
when we do that, God is there waiting for us to say, you know
what? I’m gonna pop that crown off
and I’m gonna bow back at his feet and he takes us back. He receives us back. It’s in
humility that God brings us back to himself. So we think of this
passage, there’s three verses that are really strong. There’s
verse seven, there’s verse eight, and there’s verse nine. And I
think the beginning of each of these verses and all the words
that follow have a lot to teach us. Look at first at verse seven,
it says, submit yourselves therefore to God, and then the benefits.
Resist the devil and he will flee from you. So in humility,
because God gives grace to the humble, bow yourself, submit
yourself therefore to God. Here’s another way to think of
it. We come to church or maybe we’re reading our Bible during
the week and the word and the Holy Spirit convict us of our
sin. Remember what Hebrews chapter
four verse 12 tells us? God’s word is sharper, than a
two-edged sword. It pierces the heart, it cuts,
gets down to the joints in the marrow. It’s basically that Bible
verse is saying, God’s word does a CT scan on you, right? It does a PET scan. It does all
those scans that take all your money, right? And it does far
better. God sees, God’s word pierces
you. It cuts you up. It sees all the
nooks and the crannies. And so we submit ourselves to
God, and there’s a sense where it’s saying, submit yourself
to this diagnosis that I know you don’t like, right? How many
of us, you know, we leave church and we say the proverbial, the
preacher went from preaching to meddling, or we hear, I got
my toes stepped on today. And it’s not the preacher doing
it, it can be, but it’s the word and the spirit, right? And so
we submit ourselves to God even when we don’t like what we see,
even when we don’t like what we hear. Now let’s give maybe
an analogy of life. You got some ache and pain and
so you call up the doctor. He decides to see you. She decides
to see you. So you go in and he gives you the diagnosis. She tells you what the prescription
is. And you say, well, thanks, Doc, but no thanks. I think I
like the consequences of suffering more than the side effects of
the cure. We leave church like that sometimes,
don’t we? No thanks, God. I think I’m doing all right.
I hear what you’re saying, but I don’t know. No. That’s what
goes on in our heart, right? And so we’re weighing, do we
put God on the throne or do we put ourselves on the throne?
And James is just plain, submit yourselves to God. Submit yourselves
to his lordship, his kingship, his judgments. And then he goes
on to give, I think what’s a very vivid promise, that ought to
jog our memory, resist the devil and he will flee from you. I
can’t help but think of Jesus in the wilderness. He didn’t
submit to himself and his hunger pains. He didn’t submit to himself
and his desire to rule the world. He didn’t submit to himself the
ability to jump off the spire and call down angels. He could
have done all that. But he submitted himself to his father. He submitted
himself to the father’s testing and temptation of Satan and purification. And what did he do? He resisted
the devil. Three times the devil came to
him. Oh, you’re hungry? Make these
stones bread. Man shall not live by bread alone. Jump off the
spire and call down the angels. Don’t put the Lord your God to
the test. You see all the kingdoms of the world. If you bow down
to me, Satan said, you can have them all. Serve the Lord and
him only. And so what did Jesus do in that
situation? He submitted to God by submitting
to the word and recounting that word back to Satan. He resisted the devil. And what did the devil do? It
says he basically slithered off back across the desert’s hand
from where he came. Think if Adam had done that.
Think if he had resisted the devil, oh my goodness, this world
would not be cursed. We would not be dead in our sins
and trespasses apart from Christ. There would be no cancer cells.
There would be no achy knees, no tears, no crying. We would
be living in perpetual beauty and the presence of almighty
God. And since Satan did what he did and Adam did what he did
and all that’s happened happened, we have the hope. of all things
being made new, that Eden will be restored one day. But when
God says to us, submit yourselves to him, he promises blessings
and he promises help and grace. And so that’s verse seven. It’s
rather loaded. How about verse eight? Draw near
to God and he will draw near to you. Cleanse your hands, you
sinners, and purify your hearts. You Double-Minded. I have a funny
little book I think I’ve told you about. It’s about the little
girl who grows up in the Episcopal church and so she and her friends
are always playing church and it’s a wonderful little set of
stories about a little girl’s view of church. But there’s one
time where she’s preaching and she preaches this passage, cleanse
your hands you sinners and purify your hearts you double-minded.
And I’m sure her three and four year old audience had no idea
what she’s saying. But I think we do have some insight
into this. When verse eight begins this way, draw near to God and
he will draw near to you. We have this idea of worship. Drawing near to someone we love.
We get close to somebody. We speak, we say face to face,
eyeball to eyeball. COVID has broken all of that.
We’ve stopped shaking hands. I think we’re back to fist bumping
now. We’ve stopped the elbow bumping or the eye nod. And I
think are we done with the six feet away thing? but to draw
near to someone is an intimate relationship. And so to draw
near to God is a very special thing. And you think about all
the images of the Bible where God draws near to people. In
the garden before sin, he walked with Adam and Eve. They had daily
physical presence together. Some of you who are traditionalist,
maybe you still eat meals at the table. Maybe you still get
out a real napkin, or at least a nice paper one, and you eat
around the table face to face. That’s intimate fellowship. You
think about back to the garden again, when God made Adam, he
breathed into him the breath of life. You think about Jesus’
life and his ministry. It was always person to person,
face to face. There was a lot of touching in
the sense of making people whole. And we live in a world that’s
very fractured. We live in a world that’s blown apart. Even in what
should be our intimate relationships. Today, I went to lunch after church with
my parents. And I’m a people watcher. I see things, observe
things, and always make my judgments, as we all do. And I saw a family.
And this is a family that looked like they had been to church
together. The dad was looking at his phone. The children were
looking at their phones, and the wife was scurrying around
getting the napkins, the cups, the drinks, and all the stuff.
And I thought, they’ve just been to church together. They’ve probably
heard the most important words they’ll ever hear until the next
Sunday. And they’re detached. They’re
at the table together, but they’re detached. I thought how interesting
that is. That’s a slice of life that tells
you a lot, that even somebody who’s just been to church, just
been to worship, just sat under God’s word, I’m assuming, they’re
not drawing near to one another. And so when he says here, draw
near to God, you have to think back to the whole context of
this passage. What has James just said? Hey,
y’all are covetous. Y’all are idolatrous, your passions,
your desires, your prayerlessness. Who, after you’re told that you
stink at being in a relationship, right? That’s a good way to put
it, isn’t it? You’re terrible at this relationship, wants to draw near
to that person. Which of you men, after your
wife says, you’re a terrible husband, says, come here, honey,
let me plant a big one on your cheek. There’s really an aversion,
right? And so who wants to go near to
God after he’s just said, you’re covetous, you’re an idolater,
your passions, your desires, your murderous thoughts, and
on and on. But that’s the blessing of this
passage, verse six, but he gives more grace. The depths of your
sin, the reality of the blackness of your heart, the hardness of
your heart, the how many times you’ve enthroned yourself and
dethroned God. He’s always gonna let you draw
near because of Christ. He’s always gonna let you. Think
of the prodigal son. That father had every reason
to say, uh-uh, no more. Tomorrow I’m going down to the
lawyer’s office. And what do we do with our children? We write
them out of our will, right? He put more into his will, didn’t
he, for that son. And then he stood on the porch
waiting for him to come home. And then when he saw him from
a distance, all beat up and ragged and nasty and smelly, probably
had fleas, he runs and he embraces him and he parties. This, my
son, was lost and now is found, fatten the calf, you know, stoke
up the fire, get him some shoes, get him a robe and get him a
ring. And that’s what God does for
us. Draw near to God and he will draw near to you. That’s really remarkable, isn’t
it? I mean, let that sink in. As much as you push yourself
away from God by your sin and your rebellion, he still says,
come on home, come on back. But there’s some words here connected
to this drawing near. Drawing near has this idea of
worship. And so in worship, verse eight goes on, it says, we need
to cleanse our hands. If you were a good Jewish person,
and remember the Jewish audience here of James, you didn’t go
to church without dipping your hands. put your hands in the
basin, you purified your hands. It may have been ceremonial,
there may not have been hand sanitizer there at the synagogue
or at the temple, or even some good dial antibacterial soap,
but at least you put your hands in the water and it symbolized
my outer self is now clean. And then it goes on to say, Purify
your hearts. Cleanse your hand, you sinners.
Purify your hearts, you double-minded. So the hands, the outer body,
but the heart, the inner body. And we can’t enter the presence
of God without a sense of two things. One is how unclean we
are, and the other is how clean God can make us. Do you remember
when Isaiah had the vision of heaven And God called him to
be his servant to Israel. And he says to himself, God,
I’m so glad you chose me. There has never been a better
guy than I. Israel is gonna get saved because
I’m eloquent. I got charisma, I’m styled right. And you couldn’t have picked
a better prophet. Now he pronounces a malediction
on himself, doesn’t he? A woe, woe to me for I’m a man
of unclean lips. And what did the angel do? He
took a coal from the altar and he touched the lips of Isaiah
and cleansed him and made him ready to be God’s mouthpiece
to Israel, both before and during and after the exile. And really
when we come into the house of God, there ought to be a somberness
to us. There ought to be, maybe it’s
the Greek Orthodox, I think, they put the baptismal font near
the entrance into a Greek Orthodox church. You walk in the back
and you walk right past the font and you remember. By walking
past it, I was washed, I was made clean. But we aren’t too
symbolic these days. But when we walk into worship,
we ought to realize it is a privilege. It is by the blood, under the
blood, because of the blood. And that’s why it’s important
for us every Sunday morning in particular to confess our sins
as a church and as individuals. We come bumping into the Holy
God, We recognize who he is, who we are, and that we need
to be made clean. So cleanse your hands and purify
your hearts. And he calls us sinners and he
calls us double-minded, but we gotta know in the back of our
head when he punches us with those, he cleanses us, he forgives
us, he washes us. And then verse nine is the third
main command he gives in this passage. And this is one that,
Boy, it’s really not a popular one. Be wretched. Mourn. Weep. Let your laughter be turned
to mourning and your joy to gloom. Humble yourselves before the
Lord and he will exalt you. Be wretched. I mean, this is
gross, but it’s expelling what’s in your tummy, right? Be wretched. You need to have such a distaste
for your sin that you expel it from your body. I was told you
don’t talk about things like this in polite company. You just don’t. But it’s what
he says, be wretched, be afflicted. I think of some places in the
scriptures that talk about the trauma of sin. people shaking,
people violently ill because of their sin and they’re sitting
in sackcloth and in ashes and they even, we were joking about
this yesterday, they even put dung on their head in their mourning
because they realized how awful things were because of sin. We aren’t horrified by sin anymore.
We call it mistakes. We call it imperfections or,
you know, maybe our little white sins. But what is sin before
God? It’s an affront to his holiness.
And the least little sin to the greatest, biggest sin all meant
the cross. And so sin ought to horrify us
because sin in the garden of Gethsemane horrified Jesus, why
did he weep? Why did he pray? Why did he long
for God to take away the cup of his wrath? Why did he sweat
droplets of blood? His body was in such terror over
the wrath of God due for sin, and he knew he was going to drink
that cup, and if God had another way, he would have taken it.
Well, not really, because he knew it had to be done. But be
wretched, mourn, and weep. Think of our shorter catechism.
And it says about repentance unto life, or the first time
we become a Christian. It says, with grief and hatred
of our sin and apprehension of the mercy of God and Christ and
the judgment that is due to us for sin, we do turn to God and
endeavor to follow him all the days of our life. So there’s
a grief and a hatred of our sin. There’s a understanding of the
righteous judgment of God And then the larger catechism adds
a wonderful little word that I love. We realize the odiousness
of our sin. It stinks. It smells. There are things that when we
smell them, we just, you know, we can’t deal with it, right?
Do we ever gag over our sins? Do we ever look in horror or
feel the emotion of how awful our sins are? There’s a proverb,
I can’t remember where it is, but I do remember it. And it
speaks of the prostitute. It’s in the book of Proverbs.
It says, she does what she does and she wipes her mouth and says,
I have done no wrong. Don’t ever lose a sight and a
sense of the stench and the filth, even the wretchedness of your
sins. God never loses sight of it, but also never lose sight
of the riches of the blood of Jesus. It’s a both proposition,
right? If we’re not careful, we’ll gain
a sense of forgiveness and it’ll become a sense of entitlement.
And then our sins will become nothing. We won’t think of them.
What James is saying here is really what Jesus taught in the
Sermon on the Mount. Blessed are the poor in spirit.
Blessed are those who mourn. Blessed are the meek, or the
submissive. And as you walk through the Sermon
on the Mount, you see a person who understands who they are
before God, and then it goes on to say, you’ll inherit the
earth, and even in persecution, you’ll be just fine. And so God
is calling us, challenging us here to look, to look at our
sin realistically, to look at God the judge realistically,
and then to run to his grace, for he opposes the proud, but
gives grace to the humble. And he ends verse 10, like he
began in verse six, humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will
exalt you. Think of the life of Jesus. Not
a rosy life, born, made under the law, uh, born in a very low
condition, suffered the indecencies of this life, suffered the miseries
of, uh, being under the law, but also suffered the miseries
of mistreatment. And he went to the cross and
to be quite plain, his naked body hung in public, most shameful
thing that could have ever been done to any human being. And
it was done to Christ. But he was laid in the tomb.
And I love how one of our theologians of the day says when he was laid
in the tomb, that was the beginning of his exaltation. Why? You think
being dead is not being exalted? He was buried with the rich.
Remember Joseph of Arimathea laid him in a tomb, and then
God raised him from the dead. He appeared on the earth 40 days,
and then he was taken up into heaven in the sight of many,
where he is now seated at the right hand of God Almighty. And you know, we may deal with
a lot of sin in this life, our own and others, but when we become
glorified, And then when we judge the righteous and the unrighteous,
both man and angel, as God promises, boy, what an exaltation that
will be. So in your struggle with sin, in your struggle with
worldliness, in your struggle with Satan’s temptations, do
not lose heart. This is the way of the Savior.
This is the way of the master, so it will also be the way of
his students. Let’s do pray together. Lord,
give us grace to keep our head in hardship, Help us to draw
near to you and to resist the devil. Keep us humble. Help us
through hardships. We remember earlier, James, blessed
are those who persevere under trial. Because after a time of
steadfastness, you show us the fruit and we long for that. So
hear us and help us as we make our prayer in the name of Christ.
Amen.