I. Introduction
A. James 4:1-12 has a lot in it, a lot of very practical, helpful things for us to feed on. So, I’ve set two weeks aside to glean from this passage.
1. This morning we will address what I think is the main point of the passage, and then next week, we will go back and pick up all the extras, including the last two verses, which we won’t even look at today.
B. The point James makes here is about personal conflicts in the church. But his reasoning is built on five foundation stones, five Biblical truths James brings together to make his point. Before reading our passage this morning, I’d like to briefly survey these foundational truths, which will help us understand what James is doing.
1. There is a close connection between idolatry and adultery in the Bible.
a. In the OT when God’s people began to worship the gods of the peoples around them, in order to vividly portray the gravity of what they were doing, God often spoke of their idolatry as adultery.
b. If you want to read a very graphic example of this, read about Israel’s idolatry, which led to their being exiled in Babylon, in the prophecy of Ezekiel 16:15ff.
c. You see, God is the husband of His people and His people are His bride.
d. And when they are unfaithful to Him, when they go after other lovers beside God, they are committing spiritual adultery.
e. Spiritual adultery is more serious, more weighty, more dangerous than marital adultery, of course. In fact, it is the root of all other sin.
2. God is a jealous God.
a. Dozens of times in His word God says He is a jealous God. E.g.,
(1) In the ten commandments, after He forbids idolatry in the second commandment: You shall not bow down to them or serve them, for I the LORD your God am a jealous God. Exod.20:5
(2) Exod.34:14 You shall worship no other god, for the Lord, whose name is Jealous, is a jealous God.
b. Because God loves His people so passionately, He is jealous of our love for Him.
c. In human marriages, if my wife developed an attraction to another man, that man is just another man, conceivably he might even be a BETTER man than me.
d. But in our marriage to God, He knows that if we give our love to someone else, we are not just attracted to another god; we are attracted to a false god; we are falling in love with a lie. And that means that we are cutting ourselves off from our lifeline, which means we just don’t get it, and ultimately we are destroying ourselves.
3. The world of mankind has an alternative way of thinking and living than God’s way.
a. In this passage, when James refers to the world, it is not the world as our planet, nor is it the people who inhabit it. It is this rebellious system where man gets to indulge himself with whatever he wants without respect to God.
b. Of course, the system of truth taught in God’s word is totally God-centered. He is the beginning and the end of all of history. And all things are by Him and for Him and through Him.
c. But the world has an alternative system of thinking, a system of thinking which is contrary to God, a system of thinking which is based on the deception of the evil one and began in the garden.
d. And in this alternative view of the world, man is at the center of all things. Man is the one who decides who he is and what life is for and what is right and wrong.
4. The fourth foundation stone is the principle of prayer.
a. God loves His children.
b. And one of His expressions of that love is that He invites us to pray, to bring our requests to Him.
c. And He loves to answer His people when they pray. He loves to give them what they ask & need.
d. BUT just like any good parent, He doesn’t like giving His children things which are bad for them, things which will harm them. So, God is not in the business of providing His children with idols, so they can worship someone or something other than Him.
e. So, God’s people must come to their heavenly Father with the right attitude, not wanting to merely indulge their own passions, but wanting things which can be enjoyed in the context of their love for Him.
f. But only God knows us completely, and sometimes we ask Him for things which He knows we desire for the wrong reasons. And so He asks us to trust Him, and teaches us to pray, “Yet, not my will but Your will be done.” (Luke 22:42)
5. The fifth and final foundation stone upon which James builds his teaching in this passage is the gospel of grace.
a. In spite of the fact that people commit spiritual adultery by coveting things of the world, and even indulging in them, the good news is that God’s grace in Christ is greater than human sin, and able to overcome it.
b. We might assume that God our husband would repudiate us and divorce us when we turn to other loves, but no! Amazingly, He is a gracious God who is ready to have us back and restore us to Himself.
c. This gospel of grace, of course, is rooted in what Christ did upon the cross, where He bore our sins as our substitute, such that our sins are forgiven.
d. Over the years of pastoring, I have counseled a number of people who are struggling to decide whether to take their unfaithful spouse back or to pursue divorce. And one of the things I regularly say is, “If they are not heart-broken over what they did, if they are not ready and willing to commit their love to you and repudiate the other lover, then you definitely should not take them back. If they want to be friends with their other lover, they can’t be your spouse.”
e. And it’s similar with God. To appropriate His gracious willingness to take us back, a person must humble him/herself before God, mourn over his sin, and come to Him, draw near to Him. Then God will lift him up to a place of gladness, forgiveness, eternal life, and nearness to Him.
C. Now, keep these five foundation stones in mind as we read James 4:1–10,
1. 1 What causes quarrels and what causes fights among you? Is it not this, that your passions are at war within you? 2 You 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. 3 You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, to spend it on your passions. 4 You 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. 5 Or 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”? 6 But he gives more grace. Therefore it says, “God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble.” 7 Submit yourselves therefore 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, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded. 9 Be wretched 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.
II. Now I’d like to look at the flow of reasoning in this passage.
A. James sets out in v.1a to address the root cause behind the conflicts being experienced in the body of Christ: “What causes quarrels and what causes fights among you?”
B. And this is his answer: 1b “Is it not this, that your passions are at war within you? 2a You desire and do not have, so you murder. You covet and cannot obtain, so you fight and quarrel.”
1. He says that the conflicts between believers are caused by conflicts within believers.
2. They have divided hearts, not hearts purely devoted to God.
3. So, they desire things, and when others get in the way of acquiring these things, or threaten the possession of them, fights break out.
4. But it’s all because of worldly things we desire and covet.
C. Then he says that we’re going about getting the things we want in all the wrong ways. We ought to go the Lord and ask for the things we want: 2b “You do not have, because you do not ask.”
D. But sometimes people do ask, but they ask in an inappropriate way: 3 “You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, to spend it on your passions.”
E. Whether you covet and end up fighting with one another, or whether you ask for what you want just to indulge yourself, either way you show yourselves to be adulterers, lusting after worldly lovers instead of loving the Lord who is your bridegroom: 4 “You 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.”
F. Don’t you realize, he goes on to say in v.5, that when our affection strays to other lovers, it provokes God’s jealousy toward us?
G. But even in all of this, God’s grace is great enough to cover our spiritual adultery if we will humble ourselves before Him: 6 “But he gives more grace. Therefore it says, ‘God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble.’”
1. Such an important but here: “But he gives more grace.”
2. More grace? More than what? More than our sin. He gives grace that is more than our sin!
3. But He doesn’t give it to the proud; God opposes them. He “gives grace to the humble.”
H. Then he concludes his exhortation by urging people to get busy humbling themselves before God and repenting of their love for worldly things and their double-mindedness: 7 “Submit yourselves therefore 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, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded. 9 Be wretched 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.”
III. What James says here is so important for us to hear!
A. This concept that conflicts are caused by idolatrous desires in our sinful hearts is not a human insight into the psychology of human relationships. This is divine truth, for God sees right down into the depths of our hearts.
1. If you were having conflicts with your spouse and you went to a professional marriage counselor, you might get help on how to:
a. communicate better,
b. compromise with each other,
c. steer clear of controversial subjects,
d. understand the triggers which cause each of you to react the way you do.
2. Now all this can be helpful, but, as we see here in James, none of it gets to the real issue.
3. At the heart of conflicts is wrong desires. That’s why we react with anger when someone prevents us from having or getting what we want.
4. The problem goes deeper than our interpersonal skills, deeper than our childhood experiences, deeper than our habits, even deeper than our thoughts. It goes down to the level of desires. There is something wrong with us, something wrong with what we desire.
5. Conflicts are but the symptom, sinful desires are the disease.
B. This doesn’t just apply to conflicts. It applies to almost all of our problems. It applies to our worries, our fears, our anger, our shame/embarrassment. It applies to a struggle with lust or porn. It applies to discouragement, frustration, impatience, bad habits, stinginess, discontentment. It applies to our struggle to put up with difficult people or with physical maladies.
1. All of these problems, and many others, are rooted in sinful desires, idols we cherish and get identity and security from, idols we think give us life. We are adulterers!
C. And thus it is that each Christian is in a constant battle with idolatry and adultery.
1. And if that isn’t blatantly obvious to you in your own experience, then you don’t understand what’s going on in your own heart.
2. John Calvin said the human heart is an idol factory, and so it is. Our hearts mass-produce idols.
3. The world has many very appealing things which can lure us away from Christ.
4. We have sinful hearts, and that means worldly things appeal to us, worldly things like: being our own god, like doing what we feel like doing, like doing whatever we want today and not worrying about the consequences tomorrow. We don’t like to have to always submit to someone else.
5. Here are some more worldly things we love: we love the praise and approval of other people; we love esteem; we love to be highly thought of. We don’t like having to wait for the end when God will finally express His approval for us.
a. Colossians 3:1-14 says to “Seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. 2 Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth.”
b. But we love putting our confidence in tangible things we see and touch now, rather than in invisible things which are promised but not yet possessed.
6. It is these kinds of evil desires James is talking about. They lie behind all our superficial struggles.
7. Weeding, getting rid of unwanted plants — if you don’t get the root, it’s just going to come back.
D. So, what do you need to do?
1. Well, the first things we need to do is to realize that there is a sinful form of contentment. It’s when we are content with our sin, with our idolatry, with our adultery. And there is a sinful form of peace. It’s when we’ve made peace with our sin. And if we’re not going to indulge in this sinful form of contentment and this sinful kind of peace, we’ve got to be determined to discover our sin and to deal with it the way God tells us to deal with it (Psalm 139:23-24).
a. And since we treasure these idols, we desperately want to protect them, so we have within us great natural reluctance to have them exposed for what they are.
b. But how can we read this passage and think that it’s OK to avoid dealing with our sins? How can we read this passage and think that the pain of humbling ourselves and repenting isn’t worth it?
c. We’ve got to ask ourselves: Do I want God or do I want my idols? Jesus said I can’t have both (Matt.6:24).
2. The second thing is, asking for God’s help, to begin to analyze and realize.
a. James here traces their conflicts back to their idolatries.
b. And we’ve got to trace our struggles back to our idolatries.
c. Do you recognize your idols? Can you name them? Are you able to discern what is going on in your heart and life? Do you see that your surface problems have root causes in your desires? Do you recognize your desires as evil? Do you recognize your idols for what they are?
d. Are you able to diagnose what deep down adulteries are bubbling up in the struggles of your life?
e. The issue is not whether we are adulterers, but how we are adulterers.
f. There are plenty of usual suspects in 21st century America with its comforts, pleasures, securities.
g. So, the first step is to make a commitment to investigate. The second is to analyze and realize.
3. The third step is what you do when you have realized your idolatries and adulteries.
a. And some of us already know right now what idolatrous desire we struggle with, what unholy desires are causing other symptoms in your life.
b. You know, one thing which happens is that we get used to sinning. It stops bothering us. It doesn’t pierce us anymore like it should. Our conscience no longer is in agony when we sin.
c. If this is the case, then what we need to do is what James says to do: be wretched and mourn and weep, turn our laughter to mourning and our joy to gloom, humble ourselves before the Lord.
4. Some people live to avoid pain. They can’t try to work out conflicts because the process is too painful. They can’t investigate their past because it’s too painful. They can’t dig down into their motives or try to figure out their sins because it’s too painful. They’re just trying to survive without any more pain than they already have.
5. But sometimes we cause ourselves more pain by the things we do to avoid pain.
6. God says He is our comforter, but He doesn’t mean He won’t allow us – and sometimes even command us – to experience pain. Remember what Paul says in 2Corinthians 1:5, “We share abundantly in Christ’s sufferings, so through Christ we share abundantly in comfort too.”
7. And here in James 4:9 is one place where God commands us to experience pain. “Be wretched and mourn and weep. Let your laughter be turned to mourning and your joy to gloom.”
8. Stop laughing! Sin isn’t funny!
a. Imagine a guy sitting at a bar with some buddies who are ribbing him about the affair he’s having with a woman in the office. And he’s laughing along with them. What he doesn’t know is that he has butt-dialed his wife and she’s listening to the whole thing! Is it funny to her? Her heart is being shattered while he laughs. Well, our adultery isn’t funny to the Lord either!
9. But God doesn’t just call us to feel bad. He calls us to return to Him. And He calls us to reform our ways.
a. If we are living in sin, then we need to cleanse your hands through repentance and through submission to God.
b. If we are double-minded, then we need to purify your heart.
E. But James doesn’t leave us there. He leaves us with some precious promises.
1. If we resist the devil, he will flee from us (7).
2. If we draw near to God, He will draw near to us (8).
3. If we humble ourselves before the Lord, He will exalt us (10).
4. The emotional pain isn’t the end of the story. The story ends with being near to God. The story ends with being exalted by God. The story ends with God picking us up & holding us in His arms.