Worldliness & The Jealousy Of God - James 4:4-6a Series

James 4:1 What causes wars and battles among you? Don’t they come from your desires that wage war within you? 2 You covet something but don’t get it – you murder. And you envy, but you cannot have [what you want] - you battle and war. You do not have, because you do not ask. 3 When you ask, you do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives, that you may spend what you get on your desires. 4 Adulteresses! Don’t you know that friendship with the world is hatred toward God? Anyone who chooses to be a friend of the world becomes an enemy of God. 5 Or do you think Scripture says without reason that he jealously longs for the spirit he caused to live in us? 6 But he gives us more grace

Prayer:

Oh Lord, what a bone-chilling phrase that is at the end of verse 4 - an enemy of God. If any phrase could ever send chills up our spine, it should be that one. What could be more horrible? Nothing! There’s no position we could ever be in that could possibly be worse than being an enemy of Almighty God. Those who oppose You do not win.

And who belongs to that unthinkable category? Which poor souls are in that most miserable conceivable position? Anyone who chooses to be a friend of the world. Oh dear Father, by the power of Your Spirit, use the words of Your servant James this morning to save us from the suicidal path of worldliness.

Introduction

So, if you didn’t pick up on it from the passage yet, God really, really hates worldliness. He considers worldly people His enemies. Some biblical concepts our culture agrees with. The Bible says lying is bad, murder is bad, stealing is bad – and the culture says, “Yeah, we agree.” But what does our culture say about worldliness? I looked up the term worldly in a dictionary this week – here is what it says: Worldly: experienced and sophisticated. Wise, knowledgeable, enlightened, shrewd, mature, seasoned, cosmopolitan, cultivated, cultured. I think worldliness qualifies as one of those areas where our culture and God do not see eye to eye. God says, “It’s hatred toward Me!” and they say, “No, it’s the epitome of wisdom and knowledge and sophistication.”

And that is scary, because to some degree we are always a product of our culture. When everybody around us sees things one way, it is very easy to become influenced by that. Not only that, but the reason the world sees things the way they see them is because that is the direction that natural, fallen, human reasoning points. And since our flesh is still infected with the disease of natural, fallen, human reasoning, we are constantly vulnerable. We are at constant risk of falling into worldliness, because it is the current of the river we are in, and if we stop swimming upstream for a moment, we are immediately swept downstream right into that which God hates.

So if all the forces around us – the influences of the people surrounding us, the drives and impulses of our flesh, our natural way of thinking and reasoning – if all of that is pushing as hard in the direction of worldliness, but going in that direction would make us an enemy of God, would you agree with me that this is a pretty urgent passage for us to study? That it is urgent for us to learn exactly what worldliness is, how to avoid it, and how to recover once we have fallen into it? That is why there are so many warnings in the Bible about worldliness. And one of the strongest of those warnings is right here in today’s text.

We have been studying through the book of James and we come this morning to chapter 4 verse 4, where James just explodes on the readers with a very strongly worded warning.

James 4:4 Adulteresses! Don’t you know that friendship with the world is hatred toward God? Anyone who chooses to be a friend of the world becomes an enemy of God.

God and the World are Enemies

There is nothing subtle about the way God talks about worldliness. He doesn’t mince words – God and the world are bitter enemies.

John 7:7 The world … hates me because I testify that what it does is evil.

The world hates Jesus Christ. And the more you become like Jesus, the more the world will hate you.

John 15:19 … I have chosen you out of the world. That is why the world hates you.

The world hates God’s Word, they hate His people, and they hate Him. And God isn’t exactly crazy about them either. The world is the object of God’s wrath.