The Devil goes to church … did you know that? He has his favorite pew. He has his favorite hymns. He loves to see a church stuck in a rut because that’s a dying church. He loves a divided church because constant conflict keeps the church distracted from what it’s supposed to be doing. He’s divided whole denominations and has ground ours almost to a halt over this gay marriage and gay ordination issue. This is nothing new. The Apostle Paul lamented to the church in Corinth: “But I am afraid that as the serpent deceived Eve by his cunning, your thought will led you astray from a sincere and pure devotion to Christ” (2nd Corinthians 11:3).
Satan knows the Bible as good as anybody here ... and he loves to use scripture to destroy a person’s faith. Remember how he tried to persuade Jesus to throw Himself down from the Temple roof? He argued from scripture, quoting Psalm 91:11-12: “If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down, for it is written, ‘He will command His angels concerning You, and they will lift you up in their hands, so that you will not strike your foot against a stone’” (Matthew 4:5-6).
Take note! Satan does not always try to ruin our faith by saying “the Bible isn’t true.” He often tries to destroy our faith by affirming some passage and using it to led us into disobedience. His aim is to confuse us and, by confusing us, destroy our faith. The word of God alone keeps faith alive. If we cleave to it, Satan can not tear it away from us. So he studies it. He studies how to distort it and pervert it by “plausible misinterpretation” … not absurd misinterpretations because they are far too easily detected and corrected.
What makes Satan happy is when he can get Christians to believe that Proverbs 15:6, for example, justifies the accumulation of wealth in a world of hunger; that 2nd Thessalonians 3:10 abolishes charity; that Romans 9:16 makes evangelism superfluous; that 1st Timothy 2:4 means that God is not sovereign in conversion; that John 10:28 means a “Christian” can do whatever they and still be saved; that Hebrews 6:4-6 means there is no security and assurance for God’s elect.
What did Jesus say when Satan quoted the Bible? He quoted Deuteronomy 6:16: ‘Jesus answered him: ‘It is written “Do not put the Lord your God to the test.”’ (Matthew 4:7).
Satan’s aim is to destroy our faith and to destroy our church. If he can destroy our faith, then we’ll destroy our church for him. And if he destroys the church, our faith will follow.
Besides distorting God’s word, some of Satan’s favorite tools are pride and arrogance. But his most subtle is the one that James is going to be talking about this morning. It’s the notion that Christians can have it both ways … that we can be in the world, of the world, and still be a part of the body of Christ at the same time … that you can, in fact, serve two masters. As James has been saying … and will say again in Chapter 4 … the answer is “Nay, nay!”
In 1st John 3:10, the Apostle writes: “By this it is evident who are the children of God, and who are the children of the Devil: Whoever does not practice righteousness is not of God, nor is the one who does not love his brother.” “Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this,” says James, “to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world” (James 1:27).
James says there are three things that can destroy the peace and harmony in a church: passion for the world’s pleasures, partnership with the world, and pride.
James starts out chapter 4 by asking a question: “What causes fights and quarrels among you?” Then he answers the question by asking a second question: “Don’t they come from your desires that battle within you?” What causes these fights, says James, is our passion for pleasure. “You want something but don’t get it,” James writes. “You kill and covet, but you cannot have what you want. You quarrel and fight” (v. 2).
This is not the first time that James mentions this in his letter. In James 3:14-16, he writes: “But if you harbor bitter envy and selfish ambition in your hearts, do not boast about it or deny the truth. Such wisdom does not come down from heaven but is earthly, unspiritual, demonic. For where you have envy and selfish ambition, there you find disorder and every evil practice.” In 5:1-6, James discusses the dangers of riches and he again mentions ‘murder’ … “you have murdered the righteous person. He does not resist you.” It is clear to James that our passion for pleasure has a devastating effect on the life of Christ’s church.
It is not hard to see the truth of James’ words. Envy affects the way you look at your brothers and sisters. Those who envy others will hardly be friendly with those whom they envy. They may hate them, gossip about them and put them down … even avoid the altogether.
The cure for jealousy and envy? Prayer! “You do not have because you do not ask God. When you ask, you do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives, that you may spend what you get on your” … what? “… that you may spend on your pleasures” (v. 2-3).
For the sake of peace in the church, we must be thankful for the things that God gives us. If there is no gratitude, no thankfulness in our prayers but only asking, only petitions for more of this or that … then James says we pray wrongly and God will not give you what you ask for. If we only ask God for things so that we may indulge in them for the sake of the satisfaction of our desires, God will not hear them.
A prayer of gratitude … a prayer of thanksgiving … will be answered with the peace that only God can give. Even if we don’t ask for a single thing, God will help us with the strength that our hearts and minds are always searching for. Those who seek to satisfy their desires will never find satisfaction. As soon as one desire is satisfied, two or three or more pop up demanding that they be satisfied … causing new unrest in our hearts. The answer to this kind of unrest in our hearts and in our church is found only in undivided submission to God and contentment with what God, in His wisdom, gives us. If I am satisfied, if I am grateful for what I have, for what God has given me, then I’m not looking around and giving everyone else the stink eye because they have what I think I should have in order to make me happy and content.
Our peace is also disturbed by our partnership with the world, which plants these desires in our hearts and then promises to fulfill them. To be specific, James does not simply mean the world or people in general. After all, there are many good things and good people in the world. Perhaps the Apostle John can give us a better idea of what James is talking about: “Do not love the world or the things in the world,” John writes in 1st John 2. “If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world – the desires of the flesh and the desires of the eye and pride in possessions – is not from the Father but is from the world” (v. 15-16). When James speaks of the “world,” he means these things … the desire for pleasures and riches. These things do not come form God but from the world where the Devil works … as far and as much as God, the Ruler of Heaven and Earth, allows him.
James uses harsh words to condemn the attitude of those who live according to what the sinful world has to offer. He calls them “adulterers.” They are guilty of the sin of “spiritual adultery.” It is a term or a metaphor used in the Old Testament to describe those who were unfaithful to God. The Lord Jesus used it to describe the people of Israel who rejected the Messiah: “For whoever is ashamed of me and my words in this adulterous and sinful generation,” Jesus preached, “of him will the Son of Man also be ashamed when He comes in the glory of His Father with the holy angels” (Mark 8:38).
People who love the world more than God are, in fact, idolaters. They expect this world to give them everything they need for body and soul. They pursue happiness in the wrong places and they still call themselves Christians and wish to be members of the church. They want to have their spiritual cake and eat it too. They do not want to choose one over the other. They seek partnership with the world and also with the covenant of God. There is an old saying that goes: If you marry someone who is exactly like you … one of you is unnecessary. The same is true of the church. If there is no difference between what the world believes and practices and what we believe and practice, then why waste a perfectly good day off coming here, amen?
James leaves no room, no doubt, that this is impossible. Whoever is a friend of the world … whoever seeks their happiness in worldly pleasures … can not be a child of God. Whoever is a friend of the world is an enemy of God. Sorry, folks! You can’t have it both ways.
Here is why it is so disruptive to the unity and peace of the church. If I try to have it both ways, my relationship with God suffers … and if my relationship with God suffers, my relationships with the people in my life and the people around me suffers. It does not mean that we should isolate from the world altogether. This would make it impossible to do our jobs, to do our shopping, to be a light and a witness for the world. But we need to heed James’ warning and be careful that sinful, worldly desires do no find their way into our hearts.
Jesus warned us: “No one can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other” (Matthew 6:24). We cannot be double-minded … double-hearted … which, again, takes us back to the beginning of verse 7: “submit yourselves, then to God.” Our dedication must be to God only. Only through undivided submission to God can our relationship with God and with each other be joyous and peaceful and helpful and fruitful.
What causes fights and quarrels among you? Do you remember what they are so far? They are “passion for the world’s pleasure” … “partnership with the world”… and the final one is … [drum roll] … pride!
“Resist the Devil,” says James, “and he will flee from you” (v. 7). “come near to God and He will come near to you” (v. 8). The Devil is the one who is always trying to pull the children of God away from their Father and push them into pursuing the sinful things of this world. He is the one who conjures up feelings of pride and arrogance which stand in the way of our undivided submission to God. Instead of submitting to God, we rebel against God and that leads to discord and destruction, both for the individual Christian and for the Church. Those who proudly go their own way must not expect anything from God. In fact, pride tells us that we don’t need anything from God.
The original sin in the Garden of Eden was pride. The serpent enticed us to take a bite of the Tree of Wisdom by promising us: “For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened and you will be like God, knowing good and evil” (Genesis 3:5). Pride tells us that we don’t need God … we don’t need anybody. We can handle anything that comes our way. We don’t need any help. We don’t need to rely on anybody else. We do no like to hold up empty hands for someone else to fill. We like to ball our hands into fists and make things happen ourselves and fill them ourselves.
“Resist the Devil, and he will flee from you. Come near to God and He will come near to you” (v. 7b-8a). We must remember, brothers and sisters, that our fight against the desires of the flesh and the temptations of the world is a difficult one … an ongoing one … a life-long one. But more importantly, we should always remember that Satan isn’t invincible. He has already been defeated by our Lord Jesus Christ!
Those who proudly go their own way must not expect anything from God but those who are humble will receive more than they expect. When we are humble and realize that we cannot find peace or salvation by our own “wisdom” … our own intellect …our own strength and cunning ... we end up back at the beginning of verse 7 again: “submit yourselves, them, to God.”
True freedom … spiritual freedom … comes when we submit to God. Freedom from desperation … freedom from not being able to find what we are looking for. When we move closer to God … when we submit ourselves to God … God will give us everything we need … and more. When we trust God to move closer to us when we move closer to Him … when we trust God to give us peace … He will fill our empty hands with His grace in Jesus Christ.
To receive this grace of peace, we must not be proud but penitent. We must not be proud. We must be humble. That is why James urges his readers … and us … to “wash” their hands … to purify themselves in verses 8 and 9 … to repent of their sins … to not be double-minded … and to be humble before the Lord. If our pride demands that we exalt ourselves, we will be humiliated. But when we humble ourselves before God, if we exalt Him, then He will draw near to us and let us live in communion with Him. We will enjoy a wonderful and loving relationship with Him. We will be safe with Him now in the present, and our future will be secure as well.
This grace in Jesus Christ will satisfy our need for peace and salvation. We deserved to die because of our sins, because of our pride, our sinful inclination to pursue the pleasures and the passions of the world. This grace is undeserved but it is the only thing that will indeed give us true happiness.
And then James brings this all full circle in verses 11 and 12. How can we judge others, our brothers and sisters, if we are all children of God … children of God’s grace … relying on Him and sharing the same hope? Which leads us back to verse 1. If this is all true, how can there be fighting and quarrels in the church, the Body of Christ? If we judge each other on petty issues or judge each other because we have different points of view … if we judge each other out of spite, out of jealousy or envy, out of unspiritual attitudes, then we judge the Law which is the law of love If we don’t trust each other but judge each other, we act contrary to God’s will … for us and for this church. God’s will is that we love each other, care for each other, support each other because God so exceedingly loved us first in Jesus Christ, His Son.
It has been said that people can be like vultures. They go through life soaring above beautiful scenery but they miss it all. They see none of the beauty because they are only searching for what is dead and decaying that they might consume it. People look for the negative so that they might “sander one another … speak against each other … and judge their neighbors” so that they can feel “better than” … so they can ignore their own sin and ignore God’s law.
Are there any human vultures here this morning? I hope not because we are not like that anymore. Having been humbled before God, having been lifted up by Him, having been freed from our sin and brought into peace with Him by His glorious gospel.
Now, we should be more concerned with self-examination than with harsh criticism of others. We should be eager to forgive others just as we have been forgiven. We should be eager to let go of ego and pride so that we can humbly serve others in love thanks to Him who first loved and served us. “What causes fights and quarrels among you?” (v. 1). Stop judging and start loving, amen? The Lord has given us and this church so much to be thankful for. Never forget to give things for what you have received, brothers and sisters. Do not ask for more than what God in His goodness wants to give to you. Grow in your relationship with God through prayer and Bible study and I promise you … as your relationship with God grows stronger, your relationship with your brothers and sisters in this church will grow stronger because of the love of Christ that reigns in your heart and finds its way out into this church and this community. Amen?
Let us pray …
