Life Hacks (Part 8): Getting What You Want

Good morning.

Welcome to Orchard Hill.

It's great to be together.

We have been working our way through the book of James together, and James is New Testament wisdom literature.

So much like Proverbs in the Old Testament, this is New Testament wisdom literature.

And so the reason we've called the series Life Hacks is because James gives us things that are very practical, useful for ways that we live dealing with our own spiritual lives and the way that we interact with all of our environments.

And today we're going to look at James chapter 4, verses 1 through 5, 1 through 6.

James 4:1–5

And as we look at this, what I want to start with is asking you a question.

And that is, what is it that you want?

If you were to answer that question, what is it you want right now, in the next season of your life, the next year, the next five years, or in the next month, what is it that you want?

And although there may be many answers to that question here in Wexford, in the strip district, Butler County, the Chapel, we may have a lot of answers.

There's often underlying answers that tell about our more surface answers.

So you may say, what I really want is I want to thrive at my career, I want my relationship to be restored, or I'd like a relationship, or I'd like to somehow not have the stress that I'm currently under.

But often what's below kind of those wants is a desire to say, what I really want is I want to be happy, however I define happiness, and I want to be loved.

And so we we live with these wants and saying, somehow, everything that I do in life, I'm trying to somehow secure happiness for myself or the sense of being loved for myself.

Now I've heard it said that the two hardest things in life are not getting what you want and getting what you want.

And the reason I think somebody has said it that way is because when you don't get what you want, you obviously have the frustration of not getting the thing, and so you're always frustrated.

But what happens often when we get what we want is then we say, Oh, that may not be enough because what we think we want is on the surface, but what we really want is the sense of being happy, being loved, and we realize that the thing that we thought would bring us that happiness or that sense of being loved may not bring it as fully as we hoped that it would.

Now, if you pay attention to lyrics of songs, this theme runs through generations of songs.

There's an old Rolling Stones song, which was kind of classic rock even when I was growing up.

But there's a song that I used to sing to my kids when they were little and they wanted something.

You know how kids, when they're little, will whine and want something?

And so I would sing the old song, You Can't Always Get What You Want.

But if you try real hard, you just might get what you need.

My kids are in therapy now.

But I would sing it to him.

Actually, I was driving uh over to the church this morning, and one of my sons was with me, and on the radio came this song.

And I said, Do you remember this song?

He goes, Oh, yeah, I have a distinct memory of you singing this to me at a water park.

Like, yes, yes, indeed.

Uh moving forward, just to another generation, Cheryl Crow uh sang these words.

It's not getting what you want, but it's wanting what you have.

And then, even more recent, Pine Grove just released some new music this last uh 10 days or so.

And in one of their songs, they say, the question that keeps me looking is basically what I'm looking for, and it never satisfies, and it's never what I thought, saying I'm happy when I'm not.

And then a little later in the song say, I'm longing out the open window for what it is that I seek.

We long for something, and it's natural.

Something that we all do.

And James chapter 4, verses 1 through 6, I believe, in many ways is about our longing.

James 4:1–6

And here's why I say this.

Here's what he says.

Verse 1 what causes fights and quarrels among you?

Don't they come from your desires that battle within you?

So here he uses the word desire.

Our English versions are uh translations of a Greek text.

And the NIV here translates the word desire from uh English or from a Greek word that is the word hedon, which leads to the English word hedonism.

In other words, our desires to simply say, I want to get all I can for myself, is what leads, he says here, to conflicts.

Verse 2 it says, You desire but you do not have, so you kill.

Here it's a different Greek word that translates our English word desire.

It's the word epithymia, which has the idea of saying it's a longing, it's something that you say, I can't live without this.

And then he uses the word covet.

You covet, but you cannot get what you want, so you quarrel and you fight.

And to covet here is another Greek word, zelo, and it's a word that means to have a strong affection for something, a longing for something.

So what he does here is in very short order, the author James uses three different words that all connote a picture of us wanting something so desperately that we say, I'm not sure that my life can have all the meaning, all the significance that I want without this thing.

So many of us will have something like that.

In fact, I would say all of us have something like that.

But James doesn't stop here.

He says something that's kind of offensive in verse 4.

He employs an Old Testament image that the prophets Jeremiah and Isaiah and Hosea all use, which is this picture of spiritual adultery.

He says this, you adulterous people, don't you know that friendship with the world means enmity against God?

So here he's talking about our wants and the things that we long for, and instead of just stopping there and saying, So we all have these wants, he says, Don't you know that you're basically giving yourself to another lover when you say, This is what I want and what I need, and you don't take into account the things of God.

Now that may seem like an overstatement.

It may seem like an overstatement if you're churched, it may seem like an overstatement if you're unchurched, or if you don't have a lot of spiritual kind of thoughts in your in your mind.

But what James is doing here in employing this Old Testament imagery is he's saying that God is like a jilted lover in this instance.

In other words, what happens for many of us is we say, yes, I'm I'm interested in God and spiritual things, but what I really want, what I really need is this.

And if I don't have this, then I can't live.

And so we leave the love and security of the God who created us and made us, and we seek pleasure, seek our wants in something else.

And James's point here is to say that your friendship with the world, with those desires, can't be remedied, it can't be side by side with any kind of allegiance to God.

That's what he's talking about here.

And then he employs another word, and this is the word jealousy.

He says that he longs for us with a jealousy.

And we don't often think of God as being jealous.

In fact, there aren't a lot of songs about the jealousy of God.

But this is one of God's attributes that he longs for his own glory and longs for the best for his people.

And James is saying, God is like this jealous, jilted lover, because what we do is we say, I want all of my desires to be met, and we don't look to God to meet them.

Instead, we look everywhere else in this world and say, the way I want these desires met is some other way.

Here's how C.S.

Lewis wrote about this some time ago in his book, The Weight of Glory.

He said, It would seem that our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak.

We are half-hearted creatures fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us.

Like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea.

We are far too easily pleased.

And I love that image of a little boy playing in a slum in a mud puddle.

And C.S.

Lewis says, that's what we're like, because we can't imagine what's meant by a holiday at the sea, and so we we're satisfied with this.

And what he's doing is he's capturing part of what James is driving at right here and saying, saying, You and I, we it's not that our desires are too weak, but that they're not strong enough because we're not looking for ultimate satisfaction.

We're looking for some trinket or distraction or trifle to kind of give us a sense of satisfaction today rather than looking for something that's deeper.

So this passage, I think, gives us three kind of instances or indicators of our runaway desires.

Here's the first.

The first I'm just going to say is unresolved conflict.

And we see this in verses one and two.

Again, very simply, it says, What causes fights and quarrels among you?

Do you see the tie here to our fights and quarrels?

Don't they come from your desires that battle within you?

You desire, but you do not have, so you kill.

You covet to but cannot get what you want, so you quarrel and fight.

Now, the fight and quarrel language here is using some different aspects of the ways that battles happen.

The quarrel and fight in some translations are war and battle, and one of them stands for a prolonged campaign, and the other speaks of instances of battling.

In other words, some of us will be in prolonged battles with people because of runaway desires, and some of us will have just episodes of being at one another, at somebody because of our desires, our longings that we say, I need this to have life go the way that I want it to go.

And what I think James is really driving at here is this, and that is the degree to which you find yourself in conflict means that somewhere there's an unresolved desire, an unmet desire.

Think about that.

See, what we like to do is we like to think, well, my conflict with people is because they're unreasonable.

Right?

Isn't that what most of us think?

If I have conflict with somebody, it's their problem, I'm perfectly reasonable.

But what James is saying is the reason you have fights and quarrels is because you have desires that are runaway desires in your heart.

And what that desire usually is, is it's to be made much of.

It's to have something that that person can give you.

And when they threaten it or they thwart it, we end up being irritated, angry, annoyed, and we end up saying, you need to get out of the way of me getting what it is that I want most.

This is a different way of seeing conflict.

And it's easy at this point just to assign that to somebody else, but but it's significant to be able to say, maybe some of my desires are getting in the way of this.

In Proverbs chapter 18, excuse me, Proverbs chapter 22, verse 10, we read this: it says, drive out the mocker, and out goes strife.

Proverbs 18 · chapter mention Proverbs 22:10

Quarrels and insults are ended.

And what this is is simply saying is that if you're in a position where you have the capacity to control who's engaged in a situation, that if you drive out the mocker, and the mocker here is somebody who's always in a place of riding things, causing strife.

Says all the strife will go.

And a mocker was somebody who was so filled with their self-importance that they couldn't take anything seriously.

And if you've been around a while, you know how this works, how sometimes you don't even realize what a mess of relational, unresolved conflict you're in, and then all of a sudden one person's taken out of the mix and you go, Wow, did that change everything?

That's what Proverbs 22.10 is talking about.

And what James is saying is it's a result of unresolved, unsatisfied desires, runaway desires.

But don't just look and say, well, if I could just get rid of somebody, but instead look in the mirror and say, where do I have unresolved desires?

In your marriage, in your friendships, in your place of employment, in your community, wherever there's unresolved conflict, there's a desire to say, I want to be made much of.

So that's one indicator of runaway desires.

Here's another.

And I would say that this is unrequested grace.

And I say this because he says this in verse 2 and 3.

It says, You do not have because you do not ask God.

Verse 3, when you ask, you do not receive because you ask with wrong motives, that you may spend what you get on your pleasures.

Now I say unrequested grace.

I could have said unprayed prayers, but it's bigger than that.

Certainly there's a sense of somebody not praying, not going to God, but he says, even when you go to God, you ask God for something and you don't get it because you basically ask in order to get for yourself.

What's he pointing to here again?

He's pointing to a kind of selfishness that says, I'm doing this so that I can get something.

Now, now there are a lot of ways to think about this.

Some of you would say, Well, I ask God for things all the time.

And in fact, there's a whole brand of theology in the broader church that says, if you ask, you will get.

But they often don't quote the second part of this, James 4.3, that says that sometimes we don't get because we ask, basically saying, I want this for myself.

See, this is kind of like the lottery prayer.

Have any of you ever prayed the lottery prayer?

You know what I'm talking about.

I don't actually play the lottery because I think I've given you this statistic.

You have a better chance of being kicked to death by a goat than to win the lottery.

So I always feel like it's throwing money away entirely, and so I'm too cheap.

But but but the lottery prayer is this, and it's God, if you will let me win the lottery with this ticket, I will give 10% to you.

I mean it, God.

I will give you a full 10% if I win.

And what's behind that prayer is I want 90% for me.

And sure, I'll give you the the tip of the 10%, but but what I really want is I want millions of dollars for me.

And yes, I'll I'll make sure that God gets a little bit, but I want for me, and then we wonder why when we say, God, your word says we do not have because we do not ask, we don't get it.

Now that's obviously an extreme example, but a lot of times what happens is we don't actually go to God asking for God's grace, we go to God asking God to give us what we want.

I'll never forget, years ago I had a friend who got married, and he was uh well out of his twenties when he got married, and the lady that he married was well out of her twenties, and and what happened was they had both established their own patterns of life, their own way of doing things.

And when they came together, um, it was not an easy, seamless merging of lives.

It was really challenging, more challenging than either of them thought.

And I remember talking with my friend, and my first kind of default reaction was, Well, how can you solve this problem?

And I started recommending all kinds of things.

You should go for counseling.

By the way, I'm pro-counseling, pro-therapy.

It's a great thing if you find that you're in a place where you need some perspective, some help.

And so I was like, here, you need to do all these things.

And I remember my friend just saying to me very simply, he said, Here's what I've decided to do.

He said, I've decided to get up 30 minutes earlier than I normally do, and I'm going to pray for my marriage every day.

And I remember hearing that and just thinking, that's requesting God's grace.

But requesting grace, but by the way, this passage says toward the end, it says that he gives more grace.

Requesting grace means that we come to God and we say, God, I may not fully understand what I'm even asking here, but God, I'm I'm handing it to you and saying, Would you work here?

But you see, if our desires are runaway, what we do is we go to God and we say, God, I know how this should end.

I know what you should do.

God, here's my agenda.

You fulfill my agenda.

And as soon as we do that, what we're doing is we're not actually praying to God, we're praying to a genie that we want to act like God in our lives.

And then we wonder why we miss when we pray.

Here's how one author put this: he said, prayerlessness is a sign that someone's trying to run things in their own strength, for their own sake, and under their own authority.

Let me read that again.

Prayerlessness is a sign that someone is trying to run things in their own strength, for their own sake, under their own authority.

In other words, the extent to which you or I don't pray, what it shows is that we're basically saying, I want to get what I want my own way, and I don't really care.

And I don't want to be open to God redirecting me.

John Kelvin put it this way: he said, to know God as the master and bestower of all good things, who invites us to request of him and not to ask of him.

This would be of as little profit as a man to neglect a treasure buried and hidden in the earth after he had had it been pointed out to him.

Many times, what we do is we go about our lives without the resource that God offers, because we don't actually want the answer.

So we have an indicator of runaway desires because of unresolved conflict, because of unrequested grace, and then I'm just going to say because of unapologetic pursuits.

And this is verses four through six.

This is that that section that I mentioned earlier.

You adulterous people, don't you know that friendship with the world means enmity with God?

And I realize that this feels heavy when I read these verses.

But here's what I believe James is ultimately saying.

He's saying, listen, you are going to live in an environment and it was true then, it's true now.

Sometimes people talk about how hard our world is getting.

The world was hard then as well.

And what happens in our world, but I think happened then as well, is people would say, you know what?

I want what I want, and I don't care about what God says.

And in fact, what's happened in the church is that when the church used to talk about things like worldliness, now the church is kind of like, well, the world, the church, there isn't much of a of a distinction anymore.

And part of that is that what has happened is we've come to this belief that says, I can be a follower of Jesus and I can have everything good that this world has to offer to.

But what James is saying here, if you read this, if you look at it, is that if your desires are as strong for the world as they are for the things of God, then you are what does he say?

You're an enemy of God.

That's James's words.

Those aren't mine.

And I find them as equally convicting as anything I read in the Word of God.

And the reason I say this is because if I'm honest, a lot of my desires are for things that this world has to offer, things I think will make me happy or make me be loved.

And what James is saying here is if that is true, God is feeling like a jilted lover toward me, toward you, because what we're doing is we're saying, here's what I really need when God offers something so much better.

Here's uh a way to think about worldliness or the world.

This is John, 1 John chapter 2.

1 John 2 · chapter mention

And these verses have often been quoted around this idea of the world.

Verse 15 through 17 do not love the world or anything in the world.

If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is.

Not in him.

So John says almost the same thing as James, except instead of talking about friendship with the world, he says, if you love the world, if your desires are fit things that you think will fulfill you in the world, the love of the Father isn't in you.

And then he defines it for everything in the world, the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life comes not from the Father, but from the world.

Now a lot has been made of what is the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life.

But very simply, he's saying here that the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, the pride of life are all things that you're saying, I have to have or I can't live without it.

Things that you long for for yourself, things that you see, the pride of life.

He's saying, This is the love of the world.

And then he says, This the world and its desires pass away, but whoever does the will of the Lord lives forever.

And so he's basically saying, look, I want you to take stock.

I want you to understand that your unapologetic pursuits of things of this world are not serving the purposes of God, and it will all one day pass away.

In other words, everything that so easily consumes us that we say, if I could just have this, then I'd be happy, then I'd be loved, is a fool's errand.

Because even if you get it, one day it will not last, it will not satisfy.

You see, our insistence on getting our wants is evidence of our friendship with the world.

Now you may be here and you may be saying, okay, this is heavy, and this is part of why I don't like Christianity, because Christianity is always pitting the things of this world and the things I want against the things that I really need in order to get my life the way I want it.

But here's maybe a way to think about it.

Have you ever seen one of those little juicers, you know, that you like do a single thing, you put some fruit in or vegetables and you you mix it so that you can drink fruit or vegetables and have a healthy kind of shake or whatever it is that you do.

Now, if you have one of those and you decided that you wanted to use that to trim bushes in your yard, how would that go?

I mean, it has a little motor and it turns round and round and it cuts stuff up, cuts some stuff up pretty well.

How would that go?

You know the answer.

It wouldn't go very well because you would take it out, you would try to jam it onto a bush, and and the bush wouldn't fit entirely, it would chop up some of it, and sooner or later you'd burn up the motor.

Here's what I think is happening when James is talking about our our our relationship with the world, friendship with the world, is that we end up taking our blender and trying to use it to prune bushes, and then we're shocked when our life doesn't work.

Because we weren't created for it.

Some of you are here and you're saying, look, I don't know about this God and this Jesus.

I certainly don't want to give up all my desires, and yet you keep finding frustration on the other side of everything that you try.

Because you weren't made just for this world.

You were made for a greater world.

And as long as that is your longing, you'll always be frustrated.

I'll always be frustrated.

And so all of these runaway desires lead us to this question, and that is so what do I do with my wants?

The answer isn't to say, I want them less.

The answer is really to make sure that we're seeing God and seeing ourselves clearly.

And I think this is clear right in this passage.

Here's what we see.

When you find yourself wanting something, you don't just say, well, I have to stop wanting something, but we have to say, I need to see God clearly, and I need to see myself clearly.

And here's how we see God.

We see him here as jealous and gracious.

Do you see it, verse 5?

Or do you think the scripture says without reason that he jealously longs for the spirit that is caused to dwell in us?

This picture of the jilted lover saying, I jealously long for you, is part of how we need to see God, that he's saying, I know what's best, and I want what's best.

And as long as you pursue other lovers, I know you'll be dissatisfied.

See, there's a couple ways you can read this from a tone standpoint.

And I know we can't know the tone, but you may think of this and say, oh, this is the tone of anger, like you adulterous people.

I think it's the tone of sadness.

You adulterous people.

Don't you know I jealously long for something better for you than what you're pursuing?

And then it's the graciousness, verse 6, but he gives us more grace.

So he's jealous and he's gracious, meaning, even when we run from God and say, I'm going to try to fulfill all of the desires of my life apart from you, he's gracious and says, I'm going to pursue you and I'm going to offer you grace once again.

And this is evidenced in what Jesus Christ has done on the cross.

The reason you can know this about who God is and what he's like is because he's demonstrated this in what Jesus Christ did on the cross.

When Jesus went to the cross, what did he do?

He said, I long for you and I'm gracious to you even when you've run away from me.

And when you come to the cross, you come to know God as jealous and gracious all at the same time.

And having that knowledge allows you to say all of the desires that I long for.

And God is actually doing something even bigger than I can understand.

There's an old poem that has been read and posted and shared many times.

Here's how it reads It says, I asked God for strength, and He gave me difficulties to make me strong.

I asked God for wisdom and He gave me problems to solve.

I asked God for prosperity and God gave me brawn and brain to work.

I asked God for courage and God gave me dangers to overcome.

I asked God for patience and God placed me in situations where I was forced to wait.

I asked God for love and God gave me troubled people to help.

I asked God for favors and God gave me opportunities.

I received nothing I wanted, but I received everything that I needed.

My prayer had been answered.

See, when you see God as gracious and jealous, you may be able to say, I didn't get what I thought I wanted, but God was at work doing what was even better.

We also need to see ourselves clearly.

And here I see this because this text says in verse 6, God opposed the proud but shows favor to the humble.

And so what we need to do is see ourselves as one who's not entitled to everything, but as humble because that's where we experience the favor of God.

And then we need to see ourselves as the object of God's love, the pursued lover.

The pursued lover.

Who, even though we've spurned his love, he continues to pursue us.

You see, when we see ourselves that way, what we'll understand is that is that all of the desires that that are legitimate and deep within us are actually pointing to something much greater that God has already provided through Jesus Christ, but we run from.

We run from.

Oh, they may not have gotten everything temporally that they wanted, but but when they came to understand who God was and who they were, they saw that that they weren't just created for this world and that whatever was happening in their life, that God was actually working something greater than they could even understand or see.

But sometimes that's hard.

Father, we ask today that you would help each one of us here just to understand that our desires are things that you don't see as being antithetical to what you've called us to, but are things that lead us and point us to you, the ultimate fulfiller of what we long for.

We pray this in Jesus' name.

Amen.