James 3:13-4:4, 7-8a
Who is wise and understanding among you? By their good life let them show their works in the meekness of wisdom. But if you have bitter jealousy and selfish ambition in your hearts, do not boast and be false to the truth. This wisdom is not such as comes down from above, but is earthly, unspiritual, and devilish. For where jealousy and selfish ambition exist, there will be disorder and every vile practice. But the wisdom from above is pure, peaceable, gentle, open to reason, full of mercy and good fruits, and without uncertainty or insincerity. And the harvest of righteousness is sown in peace by those who make peace.
What causes wars, and what causes fights among you? Is it not your passions that are at war in your members? You desire and do not have; so you kill. And you covet and cannot obtain; so you fight and wage war. You do not have, because you do not ask. You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, to spend it on your passions. Unfaithful creatures! 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. …
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.
"God and Google"
The internet is an amazing thing. Anything you could ever want to see… anything you could ever want to know… anything you could ever want to buy… right within the reach of your finger. *click* *click*
And to make the process even easier… they have the latest and greatest search engines to find all of these things for you. There is webcrawler, yahoo search, msn search, ask.com… and on and on. And one of the most popular of all of these is google. I have a personal theory that google is popular because people like to say “google.” Yeah… I googled you the other day. I’m going to go home and google that.
There is information instantly available that once was hard to come by. If knowledge is power, than all the power in the world is available with a single computer. And it is not only information… all of those toys we’ve been dreaming of… we can pricewatch, download pics, customize, even “buy it now” with free shipping! Anything you could ever want… well… almost anything.
While doing a search for “true happiness” will bring up close to 24 million… yes… 24 million websites… I know for a fact that not a single one of them will lead me to true happiness. The only guarantee I can give you… is that each and every one of them wanted me to buy something. It is for this reason that the internet can easily be seen as proof of our greed and selfishness.
It is filled with many things that we think we really… really want. Our hearts desire… just a click away. And the number of websites out there that cater directly to us trying to fulfill our every need is just a testimony to how we live our lives. We seek things in the world to make us happy. We seek for things in the world to fulfill us. We seek for things in the world to fill that empty spot within us.
And this is not something we have just picked up recently. 2000 years ago… James was writing to his audience addressing this same problem. Now, we have already spent several weeks working through the book of James and he has been leading us to this point. If you recall several weeks back, James started us out by calling us all to be doers of the word. In chapter two he taught us about who our neighbors were and called us to reach out to everyone. Here in chapter three he turns it to the “heart of the matter” if you don’t mind my pun. The heart of the matter for James… rests in your heart.
Let us look again to verses 13 through 16. James writes, “Who is wise and understanding among you? By their good life let them show their works in the meekness of wisdom. But if you have bitter jealousy and selfish ambition in your hearts, do not boast and be false to the truth. This wisdom is not such as comes down from above, but is earthly, unspiritual, and devilish. For where jealousy and selfish ambition exist, there will be disorder and every vile practice.”
Brothers and sisters, there is a very important point to be made here. James writes two things… first “By their good life let them show their works” and “if you have bitter jealousy and selfish ambition in your hearts… there will be disorder and every vile practice.” In both instances, what is in the person’s heart directly effects what comes out of them.
James makes it simple… either you have God in your heart, or you have greed, lust, selfishness,… all the things of this world in your heart. <> John Calvin used to use a wonderful illustration to push this point home. He used the example of a horse and rider. Now… a horse can truly have only one rider, that is, one person guiding the horse. If it is a good rider, the horse will travel good paths. If it is a bad rider, the horse will be led into bad paths. Likewise, we can only have one rider guiding us. It is either God or the world. If God is our rider, then we will do that which is good. If we have something else as the rider, we will truly look to serve that which is bad. And it really is easy to tell which you have in your heart simply by looking at how you live.
It is easy to tell when someone has God in their heart. They really do have true happiness. You can tell it in the way they live… content, happy, willing to serve, willing to do. Those who don’t, you can tell that as well. They are discontent… seeking desperately to fill that void which only God can fill. Seeking pleasure after pleasure trying to fill that void. And as I said before… there are 24 million websites out there claiming they have the answer to fill that void… some of them for as cheaply as only $9.99!
James speaks to us yet again on this matter. I pick him back up at chapter four verse two, “You desire and do not have; so you kill. And you covet and cannot obtain; so you fight and wage war. You do not have, because you do not ask. You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, to spend it on your passions. Unfaithful creatures! Do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God?”
When we seek to fill the void with things of the world we come up empty. As James says, we covet and cannot obtain that which we seek. We fight and wage war. And even when we can get our hands on earthly pleasure, it is fleeting and does not fill the void. James brings up another really good point on the matter as well. Not only do we seek selfishly the things of this world, but we further assault God’s ears by praying that they be given to us.
Now if I were to put a modern spin on James’ response… it would be something like “God doesn’t work through e-bay!”
Brothers and sisters, I ask a simple question… how does God work. I turn one last time to James, 4:7-8. “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.” Now this might seem like a backwards answer to the question of how does God work. But, James has already given the answer and this is just the icing on the cake.
You seek true happiness? It can’t be found on google… it can only be found in God. How want to fill the void? It can’t be filled by e-bay… it can only be filled by God. Finally, remember that what is in your heart directly effects what comes out in your everyday life… so make sure it is God in your heart rather than something else.
Here is the “rubber meets the road” part of the sermon. I have said many times that we are called to be disciples. This is not an easy thing nor a short term kind of thing. It takes really living in the way of God. It takes putting God at your very heart… and as James tells us… with God in our heart, with God as our rider… we will begin to live the life as we have been called to live. For remember… as we draw near to God… God draws near to us.
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
