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.
Starting in v. 7, Pastor James gives seven phrases that instruct a Christian in managing his desires. Or, putting that another way, here we have mindsets, actions of the spirit, for keeping covenant with God. Yes, living faithfully with God, which is the same as living with integrity as a human.
Seven phrases starting with “submit yourselves therefore to God” and concluding with “humble yourselves before the Lord.” There’s plenty of overlap in these instructions. So much overlap that you could almost think of them as seven ways of expressing one thing. Well, maybe that’s going too far, but we certainly can’t think of these as a checklist of seven distinct items like eggs, coffee, bacon….
We should also pause over the word “therefore” in submit yourselves therefore to God. Therefore is a word that looks back, and what this is looking back to is God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble. Submit yourselves therefore…. So, these seven phrases are developing the idea of humbling yourself before God to be in a place where he will help you – particularly in your passions – be loyal to him.
Humility. As I said last week, we tend to think of humility in cartoonishly hyper-spiritualized ways: bended shoulders, perhaps wearing rags, throw in some ‘ah, shucks’…
No – humbling yourself before God which puts you in the spot of receiving grace to manage your desires and live in loyalty to your Creator – humbling yourself isn’t a look but rather begins with submitting to God. And James lists this first because submission to God is the foundation of managing your passions. Submission to God is the foundation for living loyally to God. Submission to God is the first ingredient in living the in-Christ life.
Folks, how great it is that as 2026 gets under way we’ve been brought before the great secret to contentment, to integrity, to ordering our passions, to dwelling loyally with God, to living under grace. Submit yourselves to God.
When we think of getting help from God to order our passions, to live obediently toward him, our mind often goes toward techniques. Give me a morning routine. Or tips and tricks: Don’t bring your phone into your bedroom at night. Don’t drive by the liquor store on the way home.
But here’s how someone summarized the New Testament ethic, and it’s exactly in line with James (and for that matter, Peter and Paul): “The chief act of the will is not effort but consent.” Not first, God, here’s what I’m going to do for you. But first: God, I surrender all.
Exactly a year ago I preached a sermon entitled “Calvin’s Leading Principle.” That is, here is what the great Swiss theologian John Calvin in the mid 1500s said is the first step and leading principle of living in Christ: “O how great the proficiency of him who, taught that he is not his own, has withdrawn the dominion and government of himself from his own reason that he may give them to God! For as the surest source of destruction to men is to obey themselves, so the only haven of safety is to have no other will, no other wisdom, than to follow the Lord wherever he leads. Let this then be the first step, to abandon ourselves, and devote the whole energy of our minds to the service of God.”
And a couple Sundays ago I quoted the prayer of Richard Baxter, the great English Puritan theologian who wrote this 100 years after Calvin: Lord, whatever you want, wherever you want it, and whenever you want it, that’s what I want.
Submit yourselves to God.
But Calvin and Baxter are too modern. Let’s go back to 1500 BC and hear the Spirit through Moses the Prophet: Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. 5 Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength. Deuteronomy 6:4,5
Are you, heart soul and strength, surrendered to God? I’ll say that it takes time to answer that question properly.
Also, that it’s really helpful to have someone help you in answering that question properly. Someone who knows his Bible and who has plenty of experience dealing with slippery souls. Let me explain what I mean: here’s 1 Peter 5:5 ff: Likewise, you who are younger, be subject to the elders. Clothe yourself, all of you, with humility toward one another, for God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble.
And here’s Ephesians 6: 1: Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right. These two verses clue us in to something that could happen: someone could think that he is perfectly submitted to God, but then he’s not accountable to church elders. Or he is not obeying his parents. But to be submitted to God entails submission to those through whom God is governing. A high school student who is constantly mouthing off to her mom is, by definition, bucking God’s authority. An unbaptized, unchurched person is by definition unsubmitted to God (and foreign to the New Testament).
Submitting to God in the abstract without getting around to submitting to his authority as it’s being worked out in space and time – that’s just one example of how we can fool ourselves in answering the crucial question, am I submitted to God? A competent, mature Christian can help you properly think through these things, challenge your easy answers. If he’s good, he’ll eventually raise the question of your finances and your giving to God’s Temple. Where your money is there your heart will also be. And so forth…
Here’s an idea: approach a godly person who knows their Bible and who can sniff out the bull and ask to meet with them a few times to mull this over: am I submitted to God?
Another thing to say about submission to God is that if you’re thinking through for the first time whether you’re fully submitted to God, you’re almost certainly not. Submission to God comes after conscious endeavor… it’s not a surprising realization about yourself! To quote Nietzsche in another context: it’s a long obedience in the same direction.
So when James enjoins us to submit to God he isn’t telling us to flip a switch in ourselves but to start a process. A process that is greatly aided by help from the Body of Christ.
Resist the devil and he will flee from you. There is a person, a consciousness that exists in the cosmos who can enter a situation and derail it, take it over, use it for his own means. This person/consciousness benefits from your actions or inactions. You can yield yourself to this intelligence, this power you don’t understand… and it will harm you. In fact, if you’re not consciously resisting you are in fact instrumental to him. This isn’t theater or science fiction or religious hyperbole – this is as so as the back of your knees scraping against the pew you’re sitting on. So…resist!
Before asking what it looks like to resist the devil, I’ll point out that there is a tension or paradox in Christian experience. Submit to God sounds kinda passive. While resist sounds kinda active. Indeed. And Scripture is filled with such – from a distance, head spinning – spiritual directions. Wait on God or fight the good fight? Pray or act?
All I’ll say now is that once you get into the arena both kinds of instruction make sense. There is both a sense of surrender and of taking up arms. Sentences like Paul’s will make perfect sense: But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace toward me was not in vain. On the contrary, I worked harder than any of them, though it was not I, but the grace of God that is with me. 1 Corinthians 15: 10. Letting go and letting God – well, that’s a lot of work!
So…how to resist the devil? Two main things: 1) Get deception out of your life. Say “no” to clearing browser history, to shutting off the phone when you hear someone coming down the stairs, to shoving bottles under the top layer of the trash, to secret stops. The devil is a liar, the father of lies and part of our resistance to him is planning to, thinking through how, and then actually coming out of the shadows… and then staying in the daylight. We’ll be straightforward men, Devil even if we’re sinners.
So, resist the devil by being done with duplicity in your personal life. But the chief action of resisting the devil can best be put a little more philosophically, and perhaps enigmatically: Resist the devil by developing the muscle of expanding the context. What I mean is: one of the big ways that the Devil deceives is by narrowing the frame of reference. He’s done this from the very start of his interactions with humans, getting Eve to focus on God’s one restriction for humanity rather than “you may eat of any tree in the garden.”
So, we resist the devil by expanding the context. When the Devil comes to Adam 2.0 and says ‘turn this stone into bread,’ he’s back to his old tricks: get the human to think small, to focus on his appetite and the quick fix. But Jesus, Adam 2.0, expands the context to what a human is (a being more than his physical appetites). And Jesus, Israel 2.0, recalls a scene 1400 years earlier in Israel’s history, when God led them through the wilderness, providing for them not chiefly through multiplying or altering their resources but through stretching out their resources… to teach them the great lesson: Man shall not live by bread alone. And so that’s Adam 2.0 and Israel 2.0 ‘s reply to the Devil who wants Jesus to think small: the big picture phrase: Man shall not live by bread alone.
Joseph and Potiphar’s wife.
Turn to 1 Peter 5: 6ff
6 Humble yourselves, therefore, under the mighty hand of God so that at the proper time he may exalt you [ok, we’re familiar with this language] 7 casting all your anxieties on him, because he cares for you. 8 Be sober-minded; be watchful. Your adversary the devil prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour.9 Resist him [ok, we’re familiar with this language too…but now listen to what immediately follows resisting the devil] firm in your faith, knowing that the same kinds of suffering are being experienced by your brotherhood throughout the world [when the devil comes after you and is making your life hell on earth through temptation and suffering…expand the context and think of your Christian brothers and sisters in, for instance, Nigeria and Boston and Iran]. 10 And after you have suffered a little while, the God of all grace, who has called you to his eternal glory in Christ, will himself restore, confirm, strengthen, and establish you [expand the context to include the end of this present hardship – that’s how you’ll resist the devil]. 11 To him be the dominion forever and ever [expand your context to think of the now unto forever reign of the Son of Man…what happens to you now will become part of the whole epic story of the great victory of Christ]. Amen.
Just as with submitting to God, resisting the devil isn’t a switch that you turn on in a moment of high temptation but is also a ‘long obedience in the same direction.’ Resisting the devil is something you train for, you learn, you exercise. And you’d do well to engage training partners.
Resisting the devil is a process that among other things prepares you for moments of high temptation. Our Lord’s response to the devil wasn’t a flash of inspiration – even if the Spirit brought that Deuteronomy passage into the front of his mind in that moment. It came into his mind after learning, through a long deliberation.
Man, does it take some muscle to look to the things that are unseen and not the things that are seen. It’s easy to think shortsightedly about working out, planning a marriage, making love with your spouse, evenings at home, looking out the window and see your neighbors walking down the street – only seeing, thinking about what’s right in front of your eyes, your appetites. Resist the devil. Put these in the wider context. Practice seeing all things in light of the crucifixion, the resurrection – these are the sun and moon of the spiritual world by which everything else becomes visible for what they really are.
As hopefully you’ve picked up, resisting the devil has a lot to do with knowing scripture…all the parts. And not a glancing exposure but a long turning phrases over in your mind so that they’ve stuck. There is no seeing the devil’s backside as he runs away from you after you’ve successfully resisted him… without having first often sat down on your backside, cracked open the Scripture, reading, thinking…. There is no spiritual victory over the devil apart from Scripture.
And it’s in the Scripture that you see what’s involved in drawing near to God. If you don’t know the Scripture, you’re going to hear that phrase reductively, pietistically. Oh yes, he’s mentioned giving to the church, bible reading…Now here’s the part where he tells us to go to church more often…and maybe more bible reading too. Draw near to God means more of church and Bible and prayer less of the other stuff like hunting and expanding my business. And so creeps in this disjunction between my spiritual life and my non-spiritual life.
No! No, human who’s been reconciled to God through Jesus Christ. No! Christ died for all so that those who live might no longer live for themselves but for him who for their sake died and was raised. And…if we live we live to the Lord and if we die we die to the Lord. We live and die – which is a part of a speech called merism, using the contrasts to denote everything in-between them – for the Lord, toward the Lord. Every aspect of us for the Lord, to the Lord. Drawing near to God is on purpose, (to use the young people’s phrase) with intentionality, to bring everything under the Lord’s direction.
Draw near to God. I’m in the corporate world and being promoted – that whole system, with all its traps, and at every stage I attain – it’s all been thought through as to the Lord. I’m in the arts in the 21st century – what does that mean, how to do it, should I do it – in the Lord’s light? Shopping for health insurance…which one, how much money… – in light of the Lord. Making a home…mapping out routines…dating or courtship or arranged – all in light of the Lord. Not what society hands to me…but according to the Lord. Every aspect of me drawing near. My whole body – every member and digit and connection and animating process of my life – presented to God as a living sacrifice.
Your work and your family and your stock market investing and your weightlifting could become idols if they become termination points of what you’re looking at. The solution to this idolatry is not, simply, to go to church and stop dealing with these things. That is, the solution is not to do more “spiritual” things so as to crowd out the “non-spiritual.” No, “spiritual” things like church attendance could end up being yet another termination point, a way of measuring yourself or something you cynically engage with as a deal with God so that overall you reckon with him less often.
The solution is to treat work and stock market investing and weightlifting and health insurance and gardening and trampolining and poetry writing and such as windows through which you look up to heaven and by which heaven looks down at you and the rest of the world. That is, through which God’s will is done on earth as it’s done in heaven.
But here’s the thing, most of the time we don’t know how to draw near to God with everything. So, here’s a thing: on Thursday mornings too early, some men get together to discuss what it looks like to read toward God. Brother toward God. Start a business toward God. Uncle toward God. Look at trees toward God. In all ways draw near to God.
As a mother you could get so wrapped up in your kids that your gaze ends with them. Bad! That’s called idolatry. Instead, mothers, draw near to God, not by doing more “spiritual” things or even by thinking of your kids less often. Rather, when you consider them, your thoughts don’t stop with them, but your thinking goes through them and ascends to God, and you think of them and your interactions with them as toward God and Christ. Your kids, then, have become another avenue by which you draw near to God. Having drawn near to God in this way, then the relationship of your kids and you becomes another window through which the wisdom and justice and love and authority of God are displayed into the world. God’s will done on earth as it is in heaven as you draw near to God.
In order to consider your kids toward God properly you’ll have to bring Scripture to bear. And because you don’t know the Scripture perfectly it helps to enlist other Christians – close by or dead in books – to help. So…the church is necessary for this. The Scriptures. But even they’re not termination points but windows through which we see God. Draw near to God. Worship God with all our lives.
Conclusion
There is so much to life… and worshiping God in all of it is so important… that it sometimes hits me – why should I have sit-downs of more than five minutes with Christians that don’t involve at least a little of us talking through something about the life toward God? Where we talk through in natural, non-stilted, not artificially inflated ways stuff like: What are the traits of being fully submitted to God? Let’s do some expand the context workouts to be ready for resistance. What does it look like to draw near to God in my NFL watching? Is that possible?
This is a large part of what a church is for. Let’s do it.
AMEN
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