Grace for the Lowly

Thank you, choir.

That was great.

I think we missed singing together in the third uh verse.

Beautiful, beautiful arrangement.

Thank you so very much for that.

Let me ask you to turn, if you would, in your Bibles, please, to James chapter four.

This morning we're going to be looking specifically at verses six through ten as we continue our study and reflection and by God's grace, personal application of God's Word.

But I'd like to read for you and have you follow along as I read verses one through ten, because six through ten fits in this larger context.

God speaking through James to us.

What causes quarrels?

What causes fights among you?

Is it not this that your passions are at war within you?

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.

You ask and do not receive because you ask wrongly, to spend it on your passions.

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.

Or do you suppose that it is to no purpose that the Scripture says, He yearns jealously over the spirit he has made to dwell in us?

But he gives more grace.

Therefore it says, God opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble.

Verse 7, Submit yourselves therefore to God.

Resist the devil, and he will flee from you.

Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you.

Cleanse your hands, you sinners, purify your hearts, you double-minded, be wretched and mourn and weep, let your laughter be turned to mourning, and your joy to gloom.

Humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will exalt you.

That's our passage this morning.

James speaks to us throughout this book very directly.

It's very much in our face.

It's very much distressingly pointed, and if we're not careful, we experience it as being confrontational.

This is God speaking through James to us, to you, and to me.

That's the nature of this book.

Left to myself, I would choose happy talk.

To be very honest with you, left to myself, I would rather just talk about love and joy and peace and kindness and gentleness and how God loves us, and all of that is true.

But that's where I, as a preacher and a teacher, would personally prefer to spend my time and put my focus on that.

You may have found what James is saying to us a little bit difficult.

Difficult to hear.

I have to just tell you, I have found it difficult, both difficult to hear myself, and when I preach, I preach in the first place to myself.

But you know, my job is not to just talk about what I would prefer talking about.

That's one of the reasons why it's my custom, excuse me, simply to take a portion of Scripture and over time work ourselves and our way through it.

When a particular topic comes up or passage comes up, it's not because I've chosen it for you.

I just, my job is to help you see and hopefully respond to what God is saying to us through the scripture, whatever God wants to say.

My job is not to say what I want to say, my job is even less to say what you want me to say.

Our job together is to allow the scriptures, the word of God, the revealed inspired truth of God, stand above us, and we sit or lie down, perhaps at our face, before underneath it, and allow what God has to say to have its way in our lives.

So we simply seek to expose what the scriptures say.

Bible exposition, expose, to bring it to light, but not just to bring it to light, to then try together to ask ourselves, what in the world does this mean for us, for me, for you?

What do we do with it?

James is very clear that it's not sufficient just to be hearers of the Word of God, hearers only, but to be doers.

It's very interesting when we listen to such direct things from the scriptures, there's all kinds of responses.

He's been talking to us about bitter envy and selfish ambition in our midst.

Chapter 3, verse 14.

If you have bitter envy, jealousy, and selfish ambition in your hearts, and that if, as we saw a few weeks ago, is not, should it possibly be, but since there is this, here therefore do this.

It's not what I want to talk to you about.

Um disorder, evil practices, and wisdom from below.

Not that which comes down from heaven, but that which is earthly and carnal and ultimately demonic.

I'd rather not talk about that.

I'd rather not emphasize fights and quarrels and murder and envy and adultery, either physical or spiritual, as we talked about last time.

It's very interesting how a message of almost any kind can be responded to in different ways.

And sometimes it depends upon the one receiving it and the state of our minds and what's going on around us.

I came across an interesting little story.

I don't know how often you get these emails that make their way around the world.

Um, most of those little stories and emails that people send me, uh I just simply hit delete.

Now, not yours, of course.

But you start into an email and it's this long, cute story, and I basically tend to ignore them.

I guess I'm not I'm not long, I'm short, and I'm not cute, so.

Um but this one came to me from a friend, his name is Ernie, and when Ernie sends me something, I've learned to pay attention.

This is about, well, I'll just read it.

A Minnesota couple decided to go to Florida to thaw out after a particularly icy winter.

They planned to stay in the same hotel where they had spent their honeymoon 30 years before.

Because of the hectic schedules, the husband left Minneapolis on Thursday with his wife going down there following the next day.

So the husband checked into the hotel and finding that there was Wi-Fi in the room, he decided to send an email to his wife.

However, he accidentally transposed two of the letters in her email address.

That's what happened here.

So without realizing it, he wrote his letter to his wife and sent the email off.

Meanwhile, somewhere in Houston, a widow had just returned from her husband's funeral.

He was a minister who had had a heart attack and had died.

The widow decided to check her email, expecting messages of condolences from relatives and friends.

After reading the first part of the email, she let out a screech and fainted.

Her son rushed in, and there on the screen was the following message.

It read, To my loving wife, I've arrived.

I know you're surprised to hear from me.

They have internet here.

And you are allowed to send emails to your loved ones.

I have just arrived and have been checked in.

I can see that everything has been prepared for your arrival tomorrow.

Looking forward to seeing you then.

Hope your journey is as uneventful as mine was.

Your loving husband, P.S.

It sure is hot down here.

Now, I was tempted to say that has absolutely nothing to do with what I'm going to share, but actually it does.

When God speaks to us, our response is going to be different from person to person.

Now, in the case of this silly story, which I hope is apocryphal, but I don't know, there was a mistaken address.

When God speaks to us, he never gets the wrong address.

But how we respond can vary greatly depending upon what's going on around us and what's going on within us.

The attitudes of our heart are going to determine how we respond to this portion of God's word.

So I'd like us to pray.

Heavenly Father, you know our hearts.

You know all about us.

You know us better than we know ourselves.

You know our going in and our coming out.

You go before us, you come after us, you're always with us.

And that knowledge is too great for us, not because it causes us to fear, but because it is awesome and somewhat overwhelming to realize you know us the way you do.

So, Father, I pray that as we listen to you, not just this morning, not just with this passage, but as we listen to you, we will respond in the right way.

If that's going to happen, it will be a work of your grace in our lives.

We are not by nature inclined to attend and listen and focus on what you are saying unless it agrees with us.

So, Father, help us.

Help us, help us to listen.

Not only listen, but to respond, I pray, in Jesus' name.

Amen.

So what he is saying is he gives more grace.

He says, God opposes the proud and gives grace to the humble.

Submit yourselves therefore to God.

Resist the devil, and he will flee from you.

Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you.

Cleanse your hearts, your hands, you sinners, purify your hearts, you double-minded, be wretched and mourn and weep.

Let your laughter be turned to mourning and your joy to gloom.

Humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will exalt you.

All right, let's try to get a grip on what he is saying.

Verse six.

Verse six is really the key here.

It's given in a context of all of the things we've been hearing in recent weeks.

Where James goes after us, where God puts his finger on issues and attitudes in our lives that disturb us because they are all too true, or we just resist it and go the other way.

I've told you a number of times as we've been working through James the great maturity and wisdom I had as a new believer, where I read through the book of James and I said, never again.

I'm not interested in that.

And so for years I avoided James.

Now, how's that for a mature positive response, godly and submissive?

But isn't that what we do if we're not careful?

We just don't want to hear.

And the whole context of God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble is in this context of God pressing in against us.

So greater grace, grace for the humble.

Verse 6, he gives more grace, greater grace.

Therefore he says, God opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble.

Grace.

You can define it a thousand different ways.

Two of the best for me are not getting what we deserve, but getting what we don't deserve.

Isn't that a wonderful thought?

God gives us not what we deserve if we respond to Him in faith and respond to the gospel and come as broken, simple, sinful children and respond and receive the forgiveness that he gives.

He doesn't give us what we deserve.

He gives us precisely what we don't deserve.

That's grace.

That's what the Lord's Supper is all about.

He gave Jesus what Jesus did not deserve so that we would not get what we do deserve.

That's what the cross is all about.

The cross is not primarily about Jesus' physical suffering and the humiliation and the crown of thorns that was smashed on his head, and the spitting and the whipping and the flailing and the humiliation.

That's not what the cross is primarily about.

That wasn't the suffering that was of greatest significance.

The suffering that was of significance on the cross is that which we barely know anything about, that the holy Lamb of God, who had never once been separated from his Father because he had no sin and knew no sin, he who knew no sin became sin for us.

And what that means is that our sins, your sins, my sins, were placed on him.

He didn't deserve, he didn't deserve the condemnation and damnation of his father.

And that's what happened on the cross.

He didn't deserve it.

You and I do.

He got what he didn't deserve so that we wouldn't have to get what we do deserve.

And that we may get what we don't deserve.

And that's love and compassion and mercy and a new birth and a changed heart and new inclinations and a future, a future that is better by far.

Better by far.

We don't talk enough about what happens when we die.

And for the believer, what we get, which we don't deserve, is better by far.

That's the way the scriptures talk about it.

Better by far.

If we only knew every desire, every longing, every need that we have that may or may not be fulfilled in this life, will be fulfilled to the full.

And every fulfillment, whether it's the joy of friendship or a beautiful sunset or a wonderful marriage or good kids or a good job or affluence and a life of ease, any of that, the best of that, is but the merest foretaste.

It's like the tip of the tongue on the spoon of what's to come.

And we're not to be focusing on this, but we're to be drawn more and more and more towards that which He has for us, which only partially and imperfectly is fulfilled now and will be gloriously and eternally fulfilled then.

We ought to be drawn to what happens when we die as believers.

Not getting what we deserve.

And I love this acronym, Grace, God's riches at Christ's expense.

I think I heard that the first time about two weeks after I came to Christ.

I had no idea how profound that was.

God's riches.

Riches at Christ's expense.

So it's grace.

As this passage, as this verse goes on to express, it's more grace, and more grace, and more grace.

That which we might call superabundant grace.

The more in verse 6, more grace has multiple meanings, at least two, one of which has to do with the quantity of grace.

There is an unending supply of grace.

If you go to a fast food place and you get a 64-ounce soda or whatever it is, I can't imagine drinking all of that at once.

And you want to fill up for more, you can go back to that soda dispenser and get another 64 ounces.

And if you could handle it, you could go back and get an that's that you there is more there than in quantity.

Now that's a foolish little illustration, but the dispensing of God's grace is unlimited.

Unlimited in quantity.

But this phrase more grace, there's more to it than that.

It's also talking about the quality of God's grace, a greater kind of grace, an abundant grace, an overflowing abundance of grace, a superabounding cascade of grace over us that is richer and deeper than we can possibly imagine.

And as the years and the eons and eternity goes on, it'll be only richer and fuller, not just more, but deeper and better than we can possibly imagine.

Grace upon grace, superabounding grace.

It's what John declares when he talks in chapter 1, verse 16 of the gospel.

From the fullness of his grace we have all received grace upon grace upon grace upon grace.

And it almost and is intended to overwhelm us with its richness and its fullness.

One writer compared it to the Niagara Falls.

Now there are bigger and more impressive falls in the world than the Niagara Falls, but if you've ever been there, if you've ever stood on the top and looked down, or if you've ever been on the little boat, I I think the Maid of the Mist is what it's called.

Jane and I took our honeymoon there, ultimate romantic guy, we went camping on our honeymoon.

But we went to Niagara Falls, I get some credit.

But those falls are powerful and awesome.

And if you allow yourself to just understand what's happening, it is almost overwhelming.

The image of the Niagara River, which flows north out of Lake Erie, and the weight of all of the water in Lake Erie presses down, flowing north into Lake Ontario, and for 35 miles this forms the border between Canada and New York State.

And along that river is situated the Niagara Falls.

Water.

Water.

Lots of water.

Lots more water.

Lots, lots more water.

It's estimated, I don't know how anybody ever comes up with statistics like this, but it was on the internet, so it must be true, I guess.

That in the spring flood stage, over 202,000 cubic feet of water, 202,000 cubic feet of water per second cascade over that cataract.

Cascade, they falls in every second, second after second, minute after minute, hour after hour, week after week, year after year, 10,000 years, 202,000 cubic feet of water cascading over there every second.

It's almost more than you can imagine.

It provides a limitless supply of water for those downstream.

A limitless supply of more than anybody would ever need.

This is an old-fashioned hymn.

I'm old enough to not be set, to not have a problem with the He giveth more grace.

It's a wonderful, just listen to what it says.

He giveth more grace when the burdens grow greater.

Have you experienced that?

He gives us more grace when the burdens grow greater.

To added afflictions, he adddeth his mercy.

To multiplied trials, his multiplied peace.

And when we have exhausted our store of endurance, when our strength has failed ere the day is half done, when we reach the end of our hoarded resources, our Father's full giving is only begun.

His love has no limits.

His grace has no measure.

His power has no boundary known unto men.

For out of his infinite riches in Jesus, he giveth and giveth and giveth again.

Grace.

Grace.

God's grace.

Now what this passage goes on to tell us is that this is for the lonely.

This is not for everyone.

This is not for everyone.

This is what the passage says.

God opposes the proud and gives grace to the humble.

What a God we have.

Superabundant grace.

Once we're a little bit hopefully impressed, awed with that, then we're prepared to read what follows.

This is for the humble.

This is for those who make themselves small, not those who stand tall.

This is for those who know they have a need, not for those who are self-confidence in their abilities.

This is for those who are weak, not for those who are strong.

The grace God gives, He gives to impoverished weaklings who know they have no other hope.

Not the proud, not the arrogant, not the self-satisfied, not those who are impressed with themselves, not those who want everybody to know how good they are and how right they are, but simply those who know they have nothing to bring and nothing to offer, nothing impressive, little people, little lowly people.

That's to whom God gives grace.

Humility or lowliness and grace for the humble and the lowly.

James speaks to both in this passage, both groups, those who are proud and haughty, and those who are weak and little, small and needy.

And how we respond to his message of grace depends to a significant measure out of what's going on in our hearts.

So which group do you belong?

Sometimes I'm in one and sometimes in the other, I guess, if I'd be honest.

Proud and humble.

The word proud is an interesting one in its etymology, in the Greek word for proud.

It's composed of two separate words, one having to do with above, high, and the second having to do with appearing.

So the proud is someone who appears high, someone who looks like they're high and mighty, someone who thinks highly of themselves, someone who presumes that they're really pretty good and they've got it together.

And look at all of the things that I've done.

Those who appear in their own eyes as having it together and are very quick to let you know all of the good things they have done.

It's haughty.

A haughty person looks down his nose at other people.

I can do that pretty well.

Isn't that a shame that we can do that pretty well?

You can too.

Isn't that a shame?

When we begin looking down on other people, we have forgotten who we are and the grace of God extended to us.

Those who put ourselves high and lifted up are proud, arrogant, wrong.

Those of us, or us for all of this, it's not just those, it's me, it's you.

When we're not content to know our place before God, that's haughty, that's arrogant.

We can only assume one position before God, and that's with hands outstretched, ready to receive that which we do not deserve.

And we raise clenched fists and we demand affirmation and we demand all kinds of things, how people treat us, how people look at us.

And we don't deserve, we are not that.

We don't have anything to offer and anything to bring.

It's the lowly, the humble, the needy.

Humble is a very simple concept.

It's to be lowly, to be content in the place that God has put us, to not rebel, to not assert ourselves as though we owe our ode something, to not demand anything, to be seen by others to be right, to be seen by others as qualified, competent, that's the antithesis of humility.

To assume the place that a wise and loving God has put us, to accept with patience and trust and perseverance the painful circumstances that our wise and loving God allows us to be in.

That's humility.

Not to rail against it, but to accept and trust who God is.

There's a dramatic contrast between the proud and the humble.

He was the bright and shining one of all of God's creations.

He was at the pinnacle.

But what it says there that he did, and this goes to the core of what sin is, he asserted himself and he said, I'm not satisfied with this.

I want this and I demand that.

And five or six times in this passage, he says, I will, I will, I will, I will, and ultimately says, I will be like the Most High God.

The ultimate example of one who had nothing, nothing to complain about.

Yet that wasn't sufficient.

He needed more.

That's the core of what sin is.

The archetype of that is Jesus, Philippians 2.

He did not regard with and demand a display of his equality with God.

He just simply didn't demand that everybody saw it and everybody knew it.

But he humbled himself to the point of the humiliation of the cross and the agony of the separation with the Father.

And Jesus in the garden, not my will, but your will be done, is not just a nice saying to have on the wall, just a plaque on the wall.

We're supposed to get that plaque off the wall and into our lives.

That's what humility is.

Lord, you know what you're doing.

I don't know what you're doing.

I just know this stinks.

I just know this hurts.

I just know, I just know, I just know.

But what I know more than all of that is I know who you are, God.

You are good.

You see things.

Good you are, and good you do.

What you do, you do well.

You do precisely as you please.

You do always and only as you please, and what you please is right and good, even though it feels and seems wrong and painful and hard, and it is painful and hard, it doesn't mean that's not God's good purposes.

And so we learn to submit and to persevere in trials and difficulties and to accept our lot in life.

The difficulty with this is that there is practically nothing within you and me and our natural selves who is content with that.

We are truly sons of Adam and daughters of Eve.

And in our flesh, in our lower nature, unaided by the divine sovereign work of God, we are not prepared to say, Lord, have your way.

We might say, okay, you're bigger than I am, so I know you win.

I guess I can't do anything about it.

That's not submission.

That's not humility, that's just being overpowered.

And that's not what the gospel is all about.

So he goes on, and verses seven to nine provide an antidote to this assertive arrogance, which is bound up in our hearts.

Let me read seven through nine.

Submit yourselves, therefore, to God.

Resist the devil, and he will flee from you.

Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you.

Cleanse your hands, you sinners, purify your hearts, you double-minded, be wretched and mourn and weep.

Let your laughter be turned to mourning and your joy to gloom.

Now, what is he saying here?

He's giving us a series of exhortations, rapid fire, there's nine of them.

Boom, boom, boom, boom.

Submit, resist, draw near, wash, purify, grieve, mourn, and change.

What is he doing?

What is that to say to us?

He's giving us the antidote, the that which resolves the terrible poison that is in our hearts of our assertive arrogance.

He commands us with distressing clarity of what humility before God involves.

These nine exhortations are an expression of a humble heart that is aware of its actual state.

These are not natural responses, not a one of them, not a one of them.

They are supernatural expressions of grace in the heart of someone whom God is enlightening their minds and their hearts, and we begin to see ourselves every once in a while as we really are.

No rights, no demands, nothing that we deserve.

But I worked for that.

Well, who gave you the ability to work for it?

Well, she gets this or he gets that.

Well, you're not them.

And so all of these things well up inside of us.

So uh submit therefore to God.

It's really a summary of all of the rest of them.

There's nine of them here.

We'll touch on them very, very briefly.

But this matter of submission to God, submit yourselves to God is what they are all about collectively.

And there is nothing in our wayward and wandering hearts that is drawn towards submission to God.

And there is nothing in our culture that affirms this.

There's little or nothing in our upbringing and our thoughts and all.

This is this is not a normal response.

Submission here means more than just obedience.

Behind the word submission, there is the idea of surrendering your will to another person.

Submission.

We submit our wills, we we surrender our demands and we we accept the will and purposes of another person for us and for our lives.

I don't like to submit.

Do you?

No.

Not by nature.

We want what we want.

And for us to truly say, have your way, O Lord.

That's what submission is all about.

One writer described this series of exhortations in verses 7 to 9 as submissiveness training.

I like that thought.

Submissiveness training.

What a strange thought that is, certainly in our day.

Ever since the 70s, assertiveness training is very well known.

There's all kinds of courses out there on assertiveness training.

Do a quick Google search on assertiveness training, and within a split second, 600,000 web pages popped up.

If you do a Google search on submissiveness training, other than the pornographic sites, most of the few that are there are talking about how to train puppies not to pee when they're excited.

Isn't that a commentary on our hearts and our society that submissiveness training is for the dogs?

For the dogs?

Submissiveness training is called discipleship.

It's called the Christian life.

It really is.

And it is for little, needy, helpless people.

Resist and draw near.

These are active terms.

Submissiveness training involves resisting the enemy.

I won't go into it now, but the weapons of our warfare, even the sword, are primarily defensive, not aggressive, not offensive.

There's a lot of.

There's a place, but the primary focus of the New Testament in terms of spiritual warfare is resisting the devil, not going out and attacking him.

He comes and attacks us, and we stand, we stand firm.

And it takes all of the weapons of the warfare to stand and stand firm.

Resist, resist.

It's an active term.

Defensive warfare against someone who is beaten but infinitely stronger than you and I are.

And there's all kinds of verses that talk about this.

The battle is the Lord's, and we stand, we stand firm, we stand courageously, we stand fearlessly, and we resist the enemy, and he flees from us.

Or does he really flee from us?

Or the one who is in us and the power of God that is in us?

Wash, pure, while drawn near, didn't really touch on that.

Draw near, that phrase is almost always used in the Old Testament to the priests going into the presence of God.

And it's talking about the intimacy that believers may have with God.

Intimacy with God.

And that's an active kind of a thing.

These are both active terms.

Wash your hands, purify your hearts, talks about both our behavior and the attitudes of our hearts.

Talks about grieve, mourn, wail, change.

And as people have reflected on what James is saying here, they've often cited James' older brother, Jesus, statements.

Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of God.

In other words, fortunate, fortunate indeed who know, really know and acknowledge their spiritual need.

Fortunate are we when we really know and acknowledge our spiritual need.

Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.

In other words, fortunate indeed are those who understand their plight, the consequences of sin and their separation from God, and the grief that this causes both them and God.

Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the world.

Fortunate indeed are those who willingly humble themselves and receive the gift of God that is graciously offered to them.

And finally, verse 10, humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will exalt you.

He gives grace, more grace, superabundant grace, and he calls us to not resist that grace, but to respond with lowliness, without aggressiveness towards God, without demanding our rights, demanding that people see us in a certain way, demanding that we get what other people get.

But being content to receive what a good and righteous and all-knowing God, who has your interests at heart, even when it's walking through the way of suffering and pain and death.

And the tax collector.

We need to pray.

Heavenly Father, unless you do a work of grace in our lives, we don't want to hear this and we won't respond to you.

Oh Father, would you by your grace enable us to see ourselves as we really are and to see you as who you really are.

May we make ourselves small and vulnerable before you like little children.

Without becoming like little children, we will not see the kingdom of God.

Oh Father, take away self-satisfaction and arrogance.

May we respond by faith in Christ.

May we receive the gift of salvation.

May that which Christ has done for us be our experience as we come to you in faith.

And as we have come, many of us, will you keep us small?

Not self-impressed.

Oh Father, you are so great.

We want to just allow that water of grace to rush and flood us and flood our souls.

Oh Father, I pray for that response in Jesus' name.

Amen.