This is part 2 of the sermon started last week. We’ll read the passage again
4 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.
Fighting…constant fault-finding…unsettledness…sense of being an outsider – Christians can still participate in these uglies. Pastor James wants us to consider that the fault lies with us. Particularly, the outward friction is a symptom of desires gone bad. Last week we broke down desires gone bad into: 1) good desires genetically altered into something what is wicked. Evil is always a corruption of what is originally good. 2) Desires out of order. 3) Good desires unmet because of prayerlessness. 4) Bringing our frustrated desires to God, but asking him for reasons that will only feed our discontent, our selfishness.
Summary: there’s a lot of ways that wanting goes wrong.
To state that positively: the entrance into contentment – because that would be the opposite of wanting wrong – is a secret entrance. The gate into contentment is secured with a lock that will take some lessons to figure out how to open it.
There are some who have entered in and we have their words:
I have learned the secret of facing plenty and hunger, abundance and need. I can do all things through him who strengthens me. Philippians 4:12,13
Two things I ask of you, [God]:
Deny them not to me before I die:
Remove far from me falsehood and lying;
Give me neither poverty nor riches;
Feed me with the food that is needful for me,
Lest I be full and deny you and say, ‘Who is the LORD?’
Or lest I be poor and steal and profane the name of my God. – Proverbs 30:7-9
O LORD, my heart is not lifted up;
My eyes are not raised too high;
I do not occupy myself with things too great and too marvelous for me.
But I have calmed and quieted my soul,
Like a weaned child with its mother;
Like a weaned child is my soul within me.
O Israel, hope in the LORD from this time forth and forevermore. – Psalm 131
Contentment – which is not the negation of desire but the proper ordering of proper desires – contentment is attained in the presence of God. That’s a big truth that comes out of the words of these three men. Contentment has to do with God – gaining strength from God to face different situations; being motivated by wanting to honor God; hoping in God for the future after long experience of his help in the past.
To state that negatively…and strongly: mismanaged desires, existing in a state of discontentment, is primarily a God problem. But that’s putting it too mildly. Discontentment amounts to spiritual adultery. You adulterous people! James says to those whose desires have turned wicked, whose desires are out of order, who don’t have a habit of bringing their desires to God from a stance of a servant and steward, and not egocentrically.
In other words, selfish desires aren’t just a personal problem, but disloyalty to God. Unfaithfulness to the One with whom you’re in the most solemn covenant of all, the covenant cut open in Christ’s flesh.
Mishandled desires are normally ugly: divulging secrets or breaking confidences so that you can be at the center of attention… hitting the alcohol when nobody’s around so you can drink and keep up your reputation…faking sick so you can avoid some hard thing…lusting with private tabs behind closed doors while your family goes about their life…
But the ugliness isn’t close to being the most important thing about mishandled desires: the most important thing is that you are making yourself an enemy of God.
Well, we’ll need to explain that. Into this conversation about desires gone bad, James brings the phrase “friendship with the world.” What does he mean by that?
Well, the terrible triad that Christians often refer to as the enemy is ‘the world, the flesh, and the devil.’ We tend to understand them as the following: ‘Flesh’ is that aspect of us that deceives and destroys ourselves, especially through our passions. ‘The world’ are the non-Christians who deliberately or unintentionally steer us away from doing the right thing. And ‘the devil’ is the old, supernatural creature that kinda orchestrates all the temptation.
Well, our passage shows us that we can’t neatly separate out these three: mismanaged passions are friendship with the world which to overcome we’ll need to resist the devil. The flesh, the world, and the devil overlap significantly. It is also here implied that the world isn’t just non-Christians. Rather, the world is the value system that in another letter John boils down to wanting your own way, a craving for everything we see, and wanting to appear important (1 John 2:15-17). It’s called ‘the world’ because your wanting wrongly isn’t limited by your own knowledge and experience but is fed a global multiplex of imagination, stories, deceits, cravings that has been built up away from the Creator God.
When you are habitually fueled by selfish ambition as you think about your career… when you have gotten accustomed to the rhythm of seclusion, lust, regret, resolve, seclusion, lust…, when you allow your thoughts to be constantly interrupted by visions of people exclaiming over your newly toned body, your finely written email, your unstinting service… when you use religion for therapy, for more selfishness… when you unblinkingly indulge your temper, your appetites for sweetness and salt and excitement, your high-mindedness, your tongue…
…these aren’t just private peccadilloes…
…but also you are linking yourself to the Tower of Babel, to Babylon the Harlot, to the earthly Jerusalem that rejected the Christ, to the city of man, to the world that attempts existence away from, and is deaf to, and does not acknowledge the Creator God, the Hope of Israel, the Father of Jesus Christ. Do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God?
So, to summarize: Contentment – ordering your desires properly – comes only through trusting God. And we mean a robust ‘trusting’ which includes habits and structures of acknowledgement, gratitude, listening, presenting oneself as a servant, obedience.
On the other hand discontentment is a manifestation of infidelity to God which, remember, is a denial of your true humanity, which, remember, is an attack on the rest of the creation. James wants us to think hard about our little murmurings against the church, about our occasional dips into recalling old lustful scenes, about our fevers for purchasing more, better, newer technology. These aren’t merely foibles, weaknesses, sometimes ugly. These are treasonous. Big-time offenses because of Whom we’re slighting with inattention.
Verse 5 is one of the hardest verses in James to interpret. The initial problem is that it’s not at all clear what writings James is citing – either holy scripture or some other theological writing. But that’s ok.
The bigger problem is how to interpret the words of the verse. It’s unclear what is the subject or what is intended by “yearns jealousy.” Either, as the ESV has it, James is establishing the point that God isn’t a neutral, dispassionate observer as we are faithless to him by mismanaging our passions.
Or, the translation I prefer: Or do you suppose it is an idle saying in the writings that the spirit dwelling in us is prone to disordered, envious desires? Heard this way, James is saying that our humanity – in its current corrupted state – is very much at home with envious, disordered desires. Our default is to want wrongly. So the deck is stacked against us in entering contentment.
With either understanding of the verse there is a bottom-line point: even when you’re a Christian you will always be involved in a struggle of desires which is nothing less than a battle for loyalty/faithfulness to God. And if you remember that attentive loyalty to God is at the heart of our human calling, then you realize that our struggle is to be fully human.
No wonder that one of the reasons that as they get older the saints in Jesus Christ have an increasing hankering to rest from their labors…especially the labor of fighting the good fight for the right desires, for keeping the faith.
Now the passage turns with a definitive statement in v.6: But [God] gives more grace. Despite the real struggle, even despite the fact that you’re bringing an already corrupt and capable of further corruption spirit to this struggle, God gives more grace. Where sin rose up, God’s help always goes higher.
Who for years have yielded to sloth, depending on the government and the labors of others…
Who are stuck in a habit of procrastination: tomorrow you’re going to be done with the chips, with the Fig Newton, with the multiplied margaritas…
Who go from one fever of acquisition desire to the next…
Who dwell among drunkards and gluttons and prostitutes and thus, of course, have imbibed all their weakness of will…
Who even though at some level you know it’s no way to behave, twistedly have fond memories of being wasted with the boys. Even your memories are prone to corruption!…
To all, God gives more grace. More than the pull of the desire. Jesus came to destroy the works of the devil that have been set up in the minds and habits and affections of men and women, boys and girls, in the stories and assumptions of the culture. Hallelujah! You can change!
Who ever since teenage years overlies a shameful shade of lust, masturbation, weakness, daydreaming of the wrong kind…
Who have always reached first for self-pity…
Who have preoccupation with self for a long time set as the default…
Who moves from rendering one silent treatment {No, I’m fine} to the next…
Whose mind has been shaped by scrolling and browsing so you can barely hold an idea longer than five seconds…
Who can’t rule himself, much less any other aspect of the creation…
Whose home is pockmarked by holes in the drywall made by angry fists, whose wife has long been subjected to outbursts of rage, whose kids are used to scanning the air to see if mom’s mood requires them to walk gingerly…
God gives more grace. He’s ready to show you how to enter the secret place of contentment!
Don’t hear this cheaply, the Spirit warns. Your disarrayed desires are serious: horizontally they are behind the constant low-grade spats and bouts of moodiness and ongoing resentments and thin-skinned taking offense. Vertically, and much more seriously, they represent a disloyalty to Creator God. That’s the point of these last three verses: James wants us to view our lives always as God-ward. We live and move and have our being and act or don’t act…in God, toward God. You are constantly expressing loyalty or disloyalty to God.
And your current hijacked hardwiring has your default set toward disloyalty.
But don’t accept that! Don’t surrender to that! Don’t bemoan and stew.
Because God gives more grace. He helps those who on their own will not…cannot…come out of the pit they’ve – abetted by the world and the devil – dug themselves.
Next week…finally!…James gives us some words about how to lay hold of God’s help. For now, two closing points:
- God gives grace to the humble.
Help comes to the humble. In this context the humble are those who are prepared to change, the repentant. These humble ones are not marked by their sheepishness, their hang-dog demeanor, their blubbering of emotion. Rather (and this is a summary of next week’s verses and other passages: the humble are marked by the acronym: UFAT.
They’re willing to be uncomfortable. That’s not seeking pain for pain’s sake or any kind of self-flagellation. But repentance requires one to think or do things differently than what he’s been doing…and that always will involve being uncomfortable.
They’re faithful – they’re going to stick with the process of repentance.
They’re available – they keep showing up in places where it’s easy to repent, as many times as they need to show up.
They’re teachable. They’ve bought into the fact that there’s a real struggle within. That in several ways they’re outmatched. That God will help them, but God is One outside them and so they will have to look outside their feelings, their instincts, their assumptions derived away from God… and look to God. But not look to God simply, but look to God as He holds out the typical, ordinary means of dispensing His grace.
- Second thing, and the above has already hinted at it: James here is pointing to a process of repentance, not a switch or powerful moment.
To gain God’s help is NOT to be overcome emotionally or to hit rock bottom – – but to work yourself into and get comfortable in a WAY.
Though repentance might begin with a flash of insight or a surge of emotion, it is a process over time. And really, it’s a process that every Christian should be in throughout his earthly life.
Who are you, sir? I’m a repenting human. By the power of the gospel of the dead-for-my-sins and buried and raised from the grave Christ, I am a man being saved. Reconciled to the Creator God 2000 years ago, and now taken away from disordered desires and faithlessness to Him and learning to live toward Him. Learning to be human. Hallelujah.
Next week we finish this passage by hearing what James says are the details of repentance.
Leave a Reply