1What 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. (James 4:1-10)
You can look at this passage in three distinct parts. The first part: the source of conflicts. The second part: spiritual adultery. The third part: resolving conflicts God’s way. I entitle this sermon: Toward Spiritual Wholeness. To understand this sermon, you have to think back to last week where we made a distinction between true wisdom and false wisdom. True wisdom hinged on this two-fold idea that God is for God’s own glory; and secondly, that God has a divine purpose for our lives, but only if we choose it.
James grows this idea by saying that True Wisdom, since we would select it, as it is the smart thing to do, has to embrace God for who God is and move into a lifestyle which arcs toward eternity or toward Spiritual Wholeness. Let’s go to verses 1-2 again.
1What 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.
What we see happening here is almost all of us get into conflict and quarrels. Right? I mean, anybody here in the last year…no quarrels, no fights, just peace in your world? Sometimes our quarrels are birthed out of legitimate wrongs, legitimate sins, legitimate harms. Sometimes quarrels are legitimate. Not all fights are evil. But the type James is describing here is the type of conflict that’s birthed out of a disordered heart. The conflict is not external but rather internal. It’s not really what’s going on around you. It’s not your crazy cousin. It’s not your loony boss. It’s something going on inside of you. Really the quarrels that are occurring have everything to do with you. It’s not circumstantial. When you boil this truth down, it comes down to selfishness.
If you want to be spiritually whole, if you want to stop the fighting in your life; then stop being selfish. Now I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking in your head, “Pastor Jonathan, you make it sound so simple.” If it were really that easy and that straightforward, my life wouldn’t be in the mess that it is now. I’m going to tell you what, if you deal with your own selfishness, God will deal with the other person’s problems.
In an anecdote from the desert fathers is a story about two monks who had lived in harmony for years. One day one of the monks grew bored with the monotony of their routine, so he said, “Let’s do something different. Let’s do as the world does.” His fellow monk had been out of the world so long that he had forgotten, so he asked, “What does the world do?” “Well, for one thing, the world quarrels.” His brother monk asked, “How does the world quarrel?” The other replied, “See that brick? Place it between us and say, ‘The brick is mine!’” Wanting to accommodate his friend, he put the brick between them and said, “The brick is mine!” The monk who suggested the quarrel paused for reflection and felt the compulsion of their years of friendship. So he said, “Very well, brother. If the brick is thine, keep it.” And so ended the quarrel. I want you to see that the monks were not so stupid as to not know how to quarrel; but rather, the transcendence of the selfishness. Historically, monks became monks because they gave up their land rights, their farms, and they were familiar with the fight over bricks, it is significant to have possessions when they are so scarce. People used to come to monks because they could see deeper into issues because they’ve surpassed their own selfishness.
So James’ point in the first three verses is that the heart of all relational conflicts is selfishness. The selfishness goes further than what we just talked about, look at verse 3: You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, to spend it on your passions. At some point, God didn’t give them something they really wanted. I mean, as silly as it might sound, they didn’t get into the college they wanted to or they got broke up by a boyfriend or a girlfriend. At some point, they didn’t get what they thought they deserved, and so they said, “Forget you, God!” Then they bailed.
They didn’t want Jesus; they wanted his stuff. They got exposed as one who thought they could put God in their debt, and you can’t put God in your debt. You don’t have anything that’s not his. You can’t barter with God. You have nothing to offer! What? Your life? He’ll take your life if he wants it. Your worship? He’ll reveal himself and stir up your affections. You have nothing to really… Do you really find yourself to be so crazy important, such a key cog in the global, universal plans of God that without you, the machine is going to break down? No, we get invited into faith. We’re not a necessity for God’s sovereign will to occur at the end game. This is all good news. I don’t know that you’re hearing it that way, but it’s good news.
Let’s go to verse 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. James is saying that in the context of first century friendship, you cannot be deeply involved with God if you’re spending your most intimate time with the “world.” If you really know God, then you can’t really know the world because there’s not enough space for you to really know God AND the world. It’s not like knowing somebody from the internet, it means you’re deep in with that person.
Going toward spiritual wholeness means that you start picking who your friends are and where you spend your time. As you get older there are many more things and people asking for your attention, but you know you can’t give all of them your attention. So you start people and things out. I tried for years and unsuccessfully to keep everybody, but it’s just not possible. I’m an extrovert, I know lots of people and have lots of contacts, but I can’t say all of them are my friends. The same is true for you as well. Let’s go to verse 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.”
I don’t want to go too deeply into this, but I want to point out two concepts that I think are kind of confusing but you should be able to understand them in an everyday manner. The first is this: the “jealousy of God.” To understand that, you have to know that it’s not the type of jealous that is birthed out of fear or insecurity. It’s not like a jealous boyfriend type of jealous. His jealousy actually stems from what we discussed last week and that is His glory. It is jealousy from the love of His own name and the hope that you choose His goodness and grace. Let me paint a picture from the Bible. It’s like the story of the prophet who married the prostitute. The prostitute cheated on her husband, and the husband redeems her despite the fact that she deserved death because she got caught, and then instead of making her live the life of shame, forgives her, and gives her the privileges of a wife—of a queen. It is jealousy from having his honor, power, and mercy scorned by the faithlessness of a cheating spouse.
The second thing is this in verse 6: “God gives more grace.” This is theologically identical to what the Apostle Paul says in Romans 5, “but where sin increased, grace abounded all the more…” What James is saying is that the messing up isn’t the issue. The issue was never whether you could be saved, nor if you would ever be forgiven. That’s because Jesus died for all. It doesn’t matter to God who you were and what you did. It doesn’t matter that you once worshipped veal, the most non-majestic animal on the farm. Our sin increased and we were saved and our salvation was that much more valuable because of the incredibleness of our messing up. But see salvation doesn’t come to do who cannot accept it, grace goes to the humble. The people who know that there was no way that a person like me or you should have been rescued, ransomed, cleaned and put in a place of honor. This is the road to spiritual wholeness.
Do you see the picture coming together? James starts with telling us that our fighting our conflicts, it is caused by our inner self. Once we stop fighting on the inside, we’ll stop fighting on the outside. To stop fighting on the inside is to realize that God gives more grace when we understand who we really are. How many of us can really say to ourselves—I know who I am? I don’t mean superficially, nor do I mean by what you do. What I’m talking about defining who we are by a means other than adjectives used to describe our comings and goings. Let’s look at verse 7 now.
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.
How we respond to grace being turned up as a response to our closeness to the world will define whether we remain spiritually broken or strive toward wholeness. I want all of you to head toward wholeness. There is not a single one of you here in this room that should be anything less than whole. Listen, a man will not make you whole. A job will not make you whole. A certain amount of money in the bank will not make you whole. Trust me, if you filed your taxes this year, you will know that all of those things will put holes where you didn’t want them. The only thing that will make you whole is by surrendering yourself in submission to God. That means drawing near to God, as a close friend and get cozy with Him, start cuddling with God.
I know for a lot of us the big hesitation with getting close to God is the fear and stress that we will get because we will lose the benefits of the world. When you allow Jesus to be king of your life, you’re going to have strength coming to you from the Word of God—the Bible. We need to read the Bible. We need to read it like it’s our news feed. We need to read it like we’re on a date. When we read the Bible we should see the beauty of God and fall in love with Him. This is getting cozy with God, this is drawing near to Him. For others, it is to pray—converse with God. Maybe it’s accepting the help from godly people in our lives. When we do things like this we’re headed to wholeness. Let’s pray.
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