Stop Fighting People and Start Fighting Sin / James 4:1-12

Well, if you are a guest with us this morning and you do not have a copy of God's word, please grab that Pew Bible in the seat in front of you and you can follow along and you can take that Bible home with you if you do not own a Bible.

But um the big numbers are the chapters and the little numbers are the verses to help you follow along.

We will be looking at James chapter four, the entire, well, not the entire chapter, but um one through verse 12.

We have been walking through James and seeing how James is giving us these various tests of genuine authentic faith that is demonstrated in our lives and how we walk before the Lord as professing Christians.

And now James is uh he's he's being a spiritual surgeon, just cutting away at the heart more and more as we go on and on.

And here in chapter 4, verses 1 through 12, James is addressing the issue of the heart.

James knows that the biggest threat to you and my faith isn't persecution, but the quiet pool of the world and our flesh.

Before he warns about enemies outside of us externally, he exposes the war that goes on inside of each and every one of our hearts.

And that's what we're gonna focus on this morning.

And I want us to center around this theme.

Friends, you must reject worldliness because it always breaks your relationships and puts you in conflict with God.

You must reject worldliness because it always breaks your relationships and puts you in conflict with your God.

So, in order to understand the war around you, according to James, you first have to face the war that's going on inside of you.

Let's look at verses one through three, and I want us to focus on this.

Your biggest, your biggest battles as a Christian are not around you externally, they're raging inside your own heart.

The longer you're a Christian, we can sometimes be tempted to think most of the causes of my sin and temptation are the people in my lives, or my earthly circumstance, or my job, or my family dynamic, or whatever uh idea we can present that's outside of our own hearts.

But according to the Bible, the source of our issues normally begin in our own hearts.

Look at verses one through three.

James starts with a question: What is the source of wars and fights among you?

Now, the implication here, because again, James is an elder in the Church of Jerusalem.

He's speaking to a group of Christians who are part of a church, which I would assume they have fights and quarrels happening in their community.

They are fighting, they are having conflict.

And he's saying, What is the source of the fights and wars among you?

It's a rhetorical question.

Think about that.

If James asked that, I wonder if he actually allowed, you know, if he was having a conversation with the church in Jerusalem and let them answer, maybe he would say, Well, it's Susie because she gossiped about me, or it's Tom because of this thing.

James says, Don't they come from your passions that rage war within you?

That would have silenced everyone, wouldn't it?

We're ready to like point the finger, and James is like, no, the the Bible points the finger at you.

You, verse two, you desire and do not have, you murder and covet and cannot obtain, you fight and wage war.

You do not have because you do not ask.

You ask and don't receive because you ask with wrong motives, so that you may spend it on your pleasures.

So James starts, starts right out what is the source of your relational conflict?

He refuses to let us blame our circumstances, to blame people, to blame anything other than our own hearts.

The source of your conflicts, of the conflicts we all face, is not mainly outside of you, according to God's word, it is the passions and cravings inside of you.

Now, let me be clear external factors definitely play a role, don't they?

If someone mistreats you and sins against you, you're not a robot.

It affects you.

However, the biblical categories we have is those things externally, they provoke you, but they don't force you to sin.

So we can never say, well, you just make me so angry.

That's theologically inaccurate.

No one can make you angry.

They can provoke you and you can choose to respond in sinful anger.

James says the source of these fights and wars and quarrels are your own passions in your heart.

And notice in just three verses how often James uses this war language.

He uses the language of war repeatedly, and scripture agrees.

Uh, Paul, Paul describing in Romans chapter 7 his own Christian life, this battle, this tug he feels inside of I want to obey the Lord, but I also find this struggle in my flesh tempting me to do the very things I hate.

Romans 7 · chapter mention

He says, When I want to do what is good, evil is present with me.

For in my inner self I delight in God's law, but I see a different law in the parts of my body, waging war against the law of my mind, and taking me prisoner to do to the law of sin in the parts of my body.

What is his response?

What a wretched man I am, who will rescue me from this body of death.

But praise be to God.

He doesn't stop there.

We have verse 25.

Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord.

So then with my mind I myself am serving the law of God, but with my flesh the law of sin.

Okay, let's all just find comfort.

The apostle Paul struggled with his Christian life, okay?

The apostle Paul said, I love God's word.

When I look at the Bible, I want to obey God's word, but I also find in my flesh this, this, this tug in me that wants to do the opposite of God's word.

So if Paul can say that, friends, we're in good company this morning, okay?

But notice the language Peter uses in 1 Peter 2.11.

He says, Dear friends, I urge you as strangers and exiles to abstain from sinful desires that wage war against the soul.

If that language doesn't wake you up, I don't know what will.

This is for all of us.

He says, We uh the the spirit desires what is against the flesh.

These are, I'm sorry, he says, we are strangers in exiles, called to abstain from sinful.

He doesn't focus on actions, though that is important.

Sinful actions are important.

He says, abstain from sinful desires that starts in your heart that wage war against the soul.

Think about that.

Your desires are not neutral, they are active.

Your sinful flesh, your sinful passions and desires are actively trying to get you to oppose everything you love about your Savior.

Galatians 5:17, Paul says, For the flesh desires what is against the spirit, and the spirit desires what is against the flesh.

Galatians 5:17

These are opposed to each other so that you don't do what you want.

Now, the Christian life is not a yin-in-gang.

It's not a Marvel movie where we're like hoping the good guy wins or anything like that.

No, we are battling against an already defeated foe.

However, this is a spiritual reality.

We have a great evil residing in our hearts that is directly opposed to the work of the spirit in us.

And we have to engage in that battle so that our flesh does not win in waging war against our souls.

This is why it's so important to strive for holiness, to actually put forth some holy sweat, so to speak, to work towards your own sanctification, because there is an active force residing in you as you sit in this sanctuary seeking to corrupt your faith and to make you look more like Satan than Jesus Christ.

Even if you are in Christ, we still must work.

But James again makes it clear: your outward conflicts often reveal your inward conflict.

So if you're constantly finding yourself in difficult situations where you're responding sinfully, whether it's in anger or pride, whatever it is, that external behavior, that external action is only showing what's going on internally in your heart.

Sometimes we get focused on just external behavior, which then will lead to behavior modification.

But the word of God says, no, no, no, no.

You have to trace that back.

As James says, what is causing these fights and quarrels among you, don't they come from your passions that wage war within you?

James, and the word of God encourages us, we have to start inward.

And let's be clear, I'm not saying desires are inherently evil because they are not, right?

We can desire good things to a sinful extent.

Think of it as, you know, a fireplace.

If you have a fireplace in your home, if you light a fire in that fireplace, as long as it stays in that fireplace, then everything is safe.

You have no concern, you're not concerned your house is going to burn down.

But if you decide to set up your Christmas tree right next to the fireplace, and somehow that fireplace or the fire in that fireplace escapes and lights your Christmas tree, well, then now that fire is dangerous, isn't it?

That's like our desires.

We have to keep them in check and in accordance with the Spirit of God, seeking to bear fruit in keeping with repentance.

Because here's the danger with desires.

They can easily become what I like to call ruling desires.

When even a desire for something that the Bible calls good can turn into an idol, so to speak, where it climbs the staircase of our hearts and usurps Christ from the throne of our hearts, and we say, Well, I need this thing in order to be fulfilled.

I need this thing in order to feel whole.

And when desires become demands, peace evaporates, friendships crack, and marriages are strained.

Let me give an example.

When we take a good desire, like let's say a husband coming home from work, and in his mind, he thinks, I expect when I walk in for the kids to be well behaved, for the house to be clean and in order, and for me to smell dinner cooking.

And you walk in and one kid is dropkicking the other, your wife is handing the baby to you, saying it's your turn, and there's no food in the fridge.

And now the husband is angry at his wife because he had this desire, which turned into a demand.

And when that demand wasn't met, he feels sinned against.

And James confronts the seriousness of our sinful anger.

If you look back at verse two, he says, you desire and do not have.

Now, this might sound completely out of place.

You murder and covet and cannot obtain.

You fight and wage war.

You do not have because you do not ask.

It's like, wait a minute, James, that is a serious, dramatic jump.

How are we talking about murder?

You're saying we we murder and covet?

Now, I'm fairly sure that James isn't meaning some church members were literally murdering each other.

I mean, talk about church division.

That would really split a church.

I think what he's doing is he's staying in step with other teaching in the New Testament in similar language of how sinful anger is often connected to hatred and even murder.

So when James says you murder, I think context is showing us he's more referring to the heart posture of sinful anger and how wicked it is in the eyes of God.

He's capturing the same warning Jesus gave in Matthew chapter five on the Sermon on the Mount, verse 21 and 22.

When Jesus himself said, You have heard that it was said to your ancestors, do not murder, and whoever murders will be subject to judgment, then he now elevates the law.

He says, But I tell you, everyone who is angry with his brother or sister will be subject to judgment.

Whoever insults his brother or sister will be subject to the court.

Whoever says you fool will be subject to hellfire.

Now, Jesus is not teaching that if you ever just have an angry moment in your life, you're condemned to hell and you're some grave sinner.

He's talking about a heart posture of ongoing sinful anger in which you are uh hating someone, resenting someone.

He says that that is leading you to judgment.

Whoever says you fool will be subject to hellfire.

So, according to Jesus, any type of sinful anger, contemptuousness, bitter hearts are committing murder in seed form.

That's what Jesus is getting at.

1 John 3.15 says, Everyone who hates his brother or sister is a murderer.

And you know that no murderer has eternal life residing in him.

That's that's convicting.

Let me just read that again.

Everyone who hates his brother or sister is a murderer, and you know that no murderer has eternal life residing in him.

John says, here's another test of salvation.

If you profess the name of Jesus, if you say that the wrath of God hung over your head and yet Jesus stepped in and took the wrath on your behalf, you trusted in Christ for your salvation, you understand the peace and reconciliation that Jesus secured on your behalf, and yet you profess that name and you live a life harboring sinful anger and unforgiveness towards others, you do not know Jesus.

That is what John is saying.

Think about it.

There will be no bitter, angry people in heaven.

You can't take your anger with you.

It's not something you can harbor.

And John gives strong language.

If you hate your brother or sister, you are a murderer and you know that no murderer has eternal life residing in him.

When I read passages like that, I appreciate now an understanding throughout the New Testament of this language for Christians when it comes to uh division in relationships and disunity.

The Bible always uses this language of like earnestness towards reconciliation.

It's not like a let's sit on our hands and let that person go first.

It's like, no, the first person who's aware of a breakdown in the relationship, go preserve unity, keep the bond of peace, forgive, extend mercy.

We are called to action because the Lord is not content with his children misrepresenting his heart.

Forgiven people forgive.

And the Lord Jesus takes sinful anger, hatred, and bitterness very seriously.

You don't have to shed blood to murder someone in God's eyes.

You only have to murder them in your hearts by hating them.

Now, I just want to add a disclaimer: there are many people in this building who have suffered great harm at the hands of other people who have sinned against you in horrible ways.

That there's a whole nother sermon for another day just on the topic of what does biblical forgiveness look like, which I would say equals reconciliation of a relationship depending on confession and repentance.

But what the Bible and what James is talking about here is a type of anger in which we as professing Christians are seeking our own vengeance through our hatred and bitterness and resentment towards someone in a way that displeases the Lord.

But he also gives us this warning that our desires even shape our prayers.

He encourages them in verses um three.

He said, or I'm sorry, the end of verse two, you do not have because you do not ask.

Verse three, you ask and don't receive because you ask with wrong motives, so that you may spend, spend it on your own pleasures.

James is saying, you either don't pray or you pray wrongly because selfish ambition is driving your request.

So he's saying you're not receiving some things because you're not even going to the Lord and asking.

And then some of you, you are asking the Lord for certain things, but he's saying no because of your heart posture is one of selfishness.

You're asking God to just be a vending machine for your own desires.

And God lovingly, we all need to receive this this morning.

When we pray, God does lovingly at times say no.

He says no to prayers that feed your pride rather than glorify him.

Now you might say, well, wait a minute.

1 John 5.14, Cam says, this is the confidence we have before him.

If we ask anything, he will hear us.

Well, you gotta pay attention to the wording, the wording.

If we ask anything according to his will, he hears us.

When we study our Bibles and we see what God wants for us, and we take our Bibles and we simply pray back God's word to him.

So when we pray things like, God, make me holy like your son, that's God's will.

When we say, God, help me to abstain from this temptation that I keep falling into, that's God's will.

So when we ask in accordance with his will, he will grant us what we ask.

He will hear us.

But what go what's going on in this church that James is addressing is they seem to be treating God as like a spiritual vending machine where they just pick what they want that they think will please them and they say, God, give me that.

Now, don't get me wrong, we should take our desires to our Father.

He's a father.

He loves his children.

He wants to bless us and give us joy.

However, you want to please your father by what he says pleases him, not what you think pleases him.

So, how do you line up your desires with God's desires?

Love the Lord your God with all your heart, my soul, and strength.

Seek to have his word dwelling in you, and guess what?

You will think his thoughts after him.

You will make requests that are in accordance with his word.

So all of this is very convicting because James is very pastorally just pointing the finger back at these Christians, saying, the issue, friends, is starting in you, in your hearts.

We got to ask ourselves sometimes, where are we blaming someone else for the war that's starting in our own hearts?

I mean, we live in a culture, man, that's very, you know, there's a lot of pop psychology.

There's a lot of like all of your issues are outside of you.

You're born kind of neutral and you're just shaped by your environment.

Your parents are the problem.

And don't get me wrong, some of y'all do have some jacked-up parents.

But again, anything in your life is a provocation.

It's circumstantial.

It does shape you, it does affect you.

But praise be to God, these things are not determinative if you're a Christian.

Your identity is in Christ, which means you have the power to change because the Spirit of God is indwelling you, which means just because you grew up in a certain household, or because some horrific event took place in your life and caused you great pain and shame, none of those things are determined for, well, now I'm going to forever be this type of person.

Or you got to understand, I respond to people this way because this happened to me when I was 15.

It's like, no, because if you're in Christ, you have the promise that God is changing you.

That is a promise from the Lord.

And praise be to God.

That means every Christian is never a slave to their circumstances.

You can change.

That's why the Bible can tell us things like give us commands such as do not be overcome by evil, but rather overcome evil with good, which means that's a possibility for us to do.

So praise be to God.

That is the beauty of the gospel.

He makes us new creations, puts his spirit in us, and says, No, you are not a slave to anything that has transpired in your life because I am making something new in you.

We should celebrate that.

But he says we must be on guard from blaming others, but rather looking in our own sinful passions and desires that go astray.

We also need to just do some self-examination sometimes and just prayerfully consider, Lord, where has a good desire quietly grown into a godlike demand in my heart and life?

Where are there desires that even your word might call good, but I am promoting them to a godlike demand, to which if I don't have these demands met, then I am sinning against others to get what I want, or I'm questioning God and his goodness because I'm not getting what I demand.

But even if that's you, which it is, because it's all of us, we must remember this: God gives greater grace when you humble yourself and you confess your sins.

This is why every Sunday we have a portion of confession in our pastoral prayer.

We want to encourage us to be reminded like, listen, we are broken people who are weak.

Though we love Jesus, we are desperate for his help.

That's why we sing songs like the last song we just sang, because we do need him every hour to help us obey him.

But when we humble ourselves, God gives greater grace when we submit ourselves to him.

So if the war within you is intense, James now shows how that internal war often spills over into spiritual drift that leads us to wander away from the Lord in verses four through six.

And I want us to look at this.

You Commit spiritual adultery when you befriend the world.

You commit spiritual adultery when you befriend the world.

Look down at verse 4 to verse 6.

You adulterous people, don't you know that friendship with the world is hostility toward God?

So whoever wants to be the friend of the world becomes the enemy of God.

Or do you think it's without reason that the scripture says the spirit he made to dwell in us envies intensely, but he gives greater grace.

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

Now I don't know about you, but imagine if me and Zayn sent out a church email and said, You adulterous people, how would you receive that?

This is strong language, especially for these uh saints who were like Jews converted to Christianity, where like adultery in the Mosaic law was like, you know, the death penalty.

And now James is saying, you adulterous people.

Now you must understand here this language of the world, like what does James mean by that?

The world is not just, I think how we modern Christians tend to define that as just like the culture, entertainment, though that plays a part.

Biblically, the world is used as the entire spiritual system of loves, desires, and values and priorities that operate under Satan's dominion and stand in direct opposition to God.

It's a worldview that is completely opposed to everything God stands for.

This is what 1 John 2, 15 through 16, uh 17 warns about.

He says, Do not love the world or the things in the world.

If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him.

For everything, not some of it, he doesn't say just for the music, for the movies, he says, for everything in the world, the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride in one's possessions is not from the Father, but is from the world.

And the world with its lust is passing away, but the one who does the will of God remains forever.

John is warning against desires that promise life, but ultimately still life.

That's what the world does.

It dangles something out in front of you that seems enticing, but then it leads to emptiness and a guilty conscience.

And John is saying, do not love the world or the things in the world, because if you love the world, then you cannot love the Father.

You cannot be a Christian and divided.

You can't say you're a Christian and say, Well, I love God, but I also love all these things that oppose God, and I'm just not ready to give them up.

According to John, the love of the Father is not in you if that's how you live your so-called Christian life.

And listen, this isn't unique.

James is writing this centuries ago, and it was an issue, and it's an issue today for Christians who are trying to follow Jesus.

And it just, it just might manifest and look differently, right?

There were certain privileges that James and people in his day and age didn't have that we have that are now temptations for us.

Things such as media that shapes your affections more than scripture.

There are some who unfortunately have podcasters and news pundits who disciple them more than Jesus Christ and his word.

Possessions that can subtly become your identity, where people find their identity, their joy and their worth based on what they own.

Now, here's the tricky part of all these things I'm going to describe here.

I don't know if I've ever heard a professing Christian stand up and verbally say, I find my identity in this thing, or this possession that I have makes me feel whole, but it's demonstrated in their actions and in their thoughts and in their responses.

Another act of world or temptation of worldliness is secret lust that poisons our souls, where we say we love Jesus and his word, but we know we're harboring lust for sinful things that bring us a level of joy that we know contradict the Bible and the gospel.

Or coveting that is demonstrated in what drives our spending, where we recognize we might say, yes, everything belongs to the Lord, and I'm to be a steward, but the way we steward is what benefits us the most.

Or finding our identity and our ethnicity in a political party, in a particular culture or tribe rather than Jesus Christ.

All of these things are just forms of worldliness because that's what the enemy would want us to do and to delight in, to find our hope, our fulfillment, and our identity in anything other than Jesus Christ and his word.

And James says friendship with the world is hostility, or some translations use the word enmity toward God.

Now that is strong language, if you really think about that.

When that language is used throughout the Bible, it is not in the best sense.

Now, you might think this I've never seen a Christian say, or a professing Christian rather, say, I hate God.

Like no one would say that.

But when you love what God hates and reject what God commands, your life displays hostility toward God.

Think about that.

Even if you don't verbally say, I hate God, but if the way you habitually live your life demonstrates that you love things that completely oppose God and things that God says he hates, well, then by default, you are an enemy of God.

You are opposing everything God loves and says, this is not for your good.

This is for your good.

And you're saying, Great, I'm going to pursue the things that I think are good.

So you may never say I hate God, but when you love what God hates and reject what God commands, your life is displaying that you seem to have some kind of fundamental opposition to God.

Romans 8:7 says this the mindset of the flesh is hostile to God because it does not submit to God's law.

Romans 8:7

Indeed, it is unable to do so.

Now, in Romans 8, Paul is describing your life before you came to Jesus Christ.

You once had a mindset set on the flesh and was hostile to God.

So for someone who professes to be Christian or a Christian, if you are in Christ, the question is, why on earth would you go back to such a mindset?

If God delivered you from that enmity, why would you entertain and flirt with the sinful things of the world in a way that demonstrates like you are like trying, like a dog returning to his vomit, as Paul says?

It's like you're you're reverting back to the very enity that God saved you from.

You have the mind of Christ, and yet you're tempted to give in to a mindset of the flesh, which is hostile to God.

This is why the Bible makes it very clear, and I know this is hard to say, but those who are apart from Christ are not neutral.

They are enemies of God.

They have a mindset set on the flesh, and therefore, by default, they are hostile to God, which is why we as saints are on a rescue mission to share the gospel of Jesus Christ with every unbeliever we know in hopes that that hostility will be vanquished through the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Think about Ephesians 2.16, describing all of our testimonies when he talks about Jesus saving sinners when we were once dead in our sins and trespasses, the work of Christ on the cross put the hostility to death, according to Paul.

Think about that.

Every last one of us in this room, if you were, if you were a Christ follower, before your conversion, you were hostile to God.

God's wrath hung over you.

I love how Jonathan Edwards just uses this word picture of God like having a bow and arrow pulled back and aimed at you and ready to let it go.

And yet Jesus stepped in front of you and took the wrath of God on your behalf.

And when that happened, he put the hostility between you and God to death.

And instead of hostility, there's now what?

Peace, love, reconciliation.

You're now an adopted son or daughter of the king.

But he he goes on and uses this language here of God.

Um, if you look at verse five, or do you think it's it's without reason that the scripture says, the spirit he made to dwell in us envies intensely.

But he gives greater grace, therefore he says, God resists the proud but gives grace to the humble.

I I love that language.

He he envies intensely over his children.

Or some of your translations might say you use the word jealous.

He's jealous over you.

Think about that.

That's how God thinks of his children.

Now, I'm not talking about like sinful jealousy, right?

That's foolish middle school stuff.

We're talking about divine envy and jealousy for his prized possession, whom he sent his son to redeem.

He's talking about covenant love.

He's saying God does not just rent space in your soul, he sends his very spirit to indwell you.

You are his temple.

He makes home in your heart.

That's how much he loves his children and is for us and is active in our maturity and sanctification.

Uh, turn over to 2 Corinthians chapter 6, real quick.

2 Corinthians 6 · chapter mention

That's page uh 1026 in the Pew Bible.

But 2 Corinthians chapter 6, Paul captures this beautifully, beginning in verse 16.

2 Corinthians 6 · chapter mention

So if you are a disciple of Christ this morning, this is what's true of you.

2 Corinthians chapter 6, beginning in verse 16.

2 Corinthians 6 · chapter mention

And what agreement does the temple of God have with idols?

For we are the temple of the living God.

So think about that.

If you're a Christian, you are the temple of the living God.

Just ponder that this this morning.

You are the temple of the living God.

As God said, I will dwell and walk among them, and I will be their God, and they will be my people.

Therefore, come out from among them and be separate, says the Lord.

Do not touch any unclean thing, and I will welcome you, and I will be a father to you, and you will be my sons and daughters to me, says the Lord Almighty.

That is the type of intimate relationship we have with our Father who dwells within us.

He desires to be near, even knowing all of your brokenness and weakness and sin.

He talks like that.

He is envious for us, he is jealous for us in a positive, redemptive sense.

We belong to him through covenant love.

His jealousy is protective.

He knows nothing destroys you faster than the worldliness that captures our hearts' desires.

But then in verse 6, we see that grace explodes onto the page in James's words.

He says, But he gives greater grace.

I love that language.

He gives greater grace, grace that is greater than our sin.

Some of you know that song.

I love that.

We can never, according to Richard Sivs, we can never outsend the mercy of Jesus Christ.

He has an abundance of grace for the abundance of our sin and foolishness.

So if worldliness has pulled you away, has enticed you, James now shows you the only way back home to the Father in verses 7 through 12.

And we'll look at this.

You return to God by walking the path of humble repentance.

Look down at verse 7.

Therefore, in light of all I have just said, therefore submit 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, sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded.

Be miserable 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.

Don't criticize one another, brothers and sisters.

Anyone who defames or judges a fellow believer defames and judges the law.

If you judge the law, you are not a doer of the law, but a judge.

There is one lawgiver and judge who is able to save and to destroy.

But who are you to judge your neighbor?

Therefore, submit to God.

Sometimes we read verses and we say, Amen, but then we walk away from our Bibles and say, But how do I do that?

How do we submit to God?

Well, to submit to God is to bend your will, is to bend your desires and ambitions under God's good authority and obedience to his word.

That is how we submit to God.

And God's authority, friends, is not restrictive, it's restorative.

It's freeing.

God is not a spiritual killjoy who doesn't want his children to have any fun.

He wants you to have the fullness of his very own joy, but in accordance with his will for your lives.

So the commands of scripture are like guardrails that keep you in step with God's love.

His commands lead to flourishing and joy and a clear conscience and freedom for anyone who lives under them.

So submitting to God is just bending our will to his authority, which is good, his desires for us, and godly ambitions as we walk under our Father's good authority.

But then he follows up and says, And you must resist the devil, which means, friends, you must resist the devil.

Like you're called to do something.

You have to actively resist the devil.

Now, again, I say this often, I and I don't mean to hurt anyone's feelings, but I don't think James means like the devil is literally following you around.

Like once you leave the church, he's in your car and he's trying to trip you up all day.

You're not significant enough for the devil to be following around.

You don't have that much influence, no matter what you may think.

But going back to what we talked about, the world, right?

Which is the system of the Satan's dominion and influencing the world in every way that's opposed to God.

James is saying, resist that.

Resist the devil.

Now, many Christians, when you hear language like this, you think of spiritual warfare and resisting the devil as like all this like spooky demonic encounters and things like that.

That's not what the Bible centers our attention on.

Though spiritual warfare is real, there's absolutely a heavenly realm we cannot see with our human eyes that is surrounding us every moment of every day.

But spiritual warfare is more often a refusal to submit to God's goodwill and authority, as we just talked about.

Satan's greatest weapon is persuasion, not spectacle, to convince you to believe things that are unbiblical, to convince you to live in ways that are opposed to God, not some demonic, you know, encounter and things like that.

Satan whispers in our ears that subtle temptations that are enticing us are, oh, that's that's not a big deal.

You deserve this.

Or God is holding out on you.

Go ahead and pursue that thing.

No, spiritual warfare is the husband who is tempted to not lead his family.

Spiritual warfare is refusing to just forgive someone when God's word calls you to forgive, as God in Christ has forgiven you.

Spiritual warfare is letting anger lead to sinful actions and thoughts.

That is spiritual warfare because those are spiritual realities that are in opposition to God that'll lead you down a path that is destructive for your soul.

And the way we resist the devil is by refusing and combating lies with truth, starving our sinful desires, and rejecting the values that the world promotes.

And when we do, James gives this promise he will flee from you.

That is a command and a promise.

We are to resist.

And as we do, we have the promise, the enemy will flee from you.

Think about that.

And that fleeing is not because you're some mature Christian.

It's not because you're more powerful than the enemy.

It's because you're simply submitting to your father's good authority and his word.

And the enemy realizes, like he did when he tried to tempt Jesus, this ain't working.

Think about when Jesus was tempted in the wilderness, what was his ammunition?

The savior of the world, being tempted by the devil himself, quoted the Bible.

And the devil fled from the Lord.

And that's what we are called to do.

And as we do that, we are also called to draw near to God, which means, friends, you are to draw near to God.

You are called to do something.

Flee from Satan and flee to your heavenly Father.

Draw near to him, and you have the promise that he will draw near to you.

Who would not take God up on that?

Think about that.

God puts in his word right here for all of us to read: if you draw near to him, he promises to draw near to you.

If you take that initiative, he will meet you and bless you and help you flourish in your walk with him.

That doesn't sound like a stingy God who doesn't want to like have a relationship with his people, does it?

He wouldn't give us promises like this if that were the case.

Resist the devil, he will flee from you, but draw near to God and he will draw near to you.

Now, how do we draw nearer to God?

Well, you know the basics.

Pursue the ordinary means of grace, Bible intake, prayer, fasting, corporate worship, fellowship with the saints, but also repentance, ongoing repentance, which means turning from sin, but turning also toward God.

Repentance is relational, it's not a mechanical aspect of the Christian life where we just stop doing stuff, but it's also the putting off and the putting on.

And when you turn toward God, even in your weakness, he draws near to you in strength and love.

He meets humility with welcome, weakness with grace, and repentance with restoration.

But we have this exhortation that James gives to cleanse your hands and purify your hearts, which again means you have work to do.

The Christian life is one of work, of working towards holiness.

Because repentance reaches both the behavior and the desires of our hearts beneath the behavior.

We can't focus on external behavior modification.

We have to trace the root because Jesus always looks at the heart.

So, yes, stop the sin, stop the fights and the corals, as James is getting at, but first you got to start with starving the motives in your heart that are feeding the sinful fruit that is happening externally.

If you never get to the heart, then you're just going to be stapling dead fruit, or good fruit rather, on a dead tree.

But he goes on, James calls us to grieve our sin because treating sin casually keeps you enslaved to it.

Friends, temptation is temptation because the sin we're tempted by is enticing.

If temptation, like if sin wasn't delightful momentarily, none of us would be tempted by it.

We would look at stuff and be, I mean, think about it.

You can vision right now, I'm sure, you can visualize something, maybe it's a food or whatever, some experience that you have no appetite for because of a previous bad experience with that thing.

So maybe you, I don't know, you got hurt or you got injured or you ate something that was terrible, and now you're like, I have zero appetite for that thing because I connected to a negative experience.

Well, that's not sin and temptation.

We look at sin and our flesh is enticed by it.

We're, we're wanting, we feel a pull towards it.

And James and the word of God encourages us if you want to change your behavior, you have to replace your desire for that sin with a greater desire for Jesus.

You have to get to the root of what is manifesting sinful fruit and replace it with a greater desire for Jesus Christ.

And if you don't do that, well, then guess what?

You're not addressing the root of your temptation.

You're simply just stalling it.

And temptation, friends, is a form of self-inflicted suffering.

It's a whole cycle, right?

You give in, you have a guilty conscience, you confess and you say, Lord, I'll never do that again.

You do it again because when the temptation comes, it's enticing in the moment.

Your flesh and the enemy dangles in front of it, it dangles it in front of you.

You give in, and then the our flesh reveals the truth.

This is empty.

This this just leads to guilt.

This leads to shame.

Now I'm confessing the same thing again.

These are the things James is warning against.

He says, grieve your sin, because treating sin casually keeps you enslaved to it.

But then he gets into this language in verses 11 through 12, and we'll we'll end here, that we must judge rightly and not arrogantly.

Now, there's lots of people who aren't familiar with the Bible who love to throw out, you know, only God can judge me, right?

I mean, Tupac made that popular for the entire nation.

Only God can judge me, or oh, I thought Christians aren't to judge.

And there might be some confusion about that.

Because I mean, James says here, if you look down at verse 11, don't criticize one another, brothers and sisters.

Anyone who defames or judges a fellow believer defames and judges the law.

If you judge the law, you were not a doer of the law, but a judge.

There was one lawgiver and judge who is able to save and to destroy.

But who are you to?

Judge your neighbor.

Okay, so some might think there's a dilemma here.

Like, so am I to judge people or am I not supposed to judge?

I feel like the Bible says both.

James is warning against sinful judging of others who are Christians.

He does not forbid the kind of judgment Christians are commanded to exercise.

What James is forbidding here is judgment that tears people down, judgment that assigns motives to people's hearts, or pretends or makes you pretend like you're sitting on God's throne.

This is why in some situations I try to help Christians be careful about, especially if you're married, because we're all guilty of this.

Be careful not to determine other people's motives.

You're not God, you're not omniscient, you have no right to say, well, you did this because of this.

It's like, well, love hopes all things, believes all things.

We give people the benefit of the doubt.

I don't know your heart motivations.

I could ask, but hey, is this motivating why you're doing that?

James is warning against sinful judgment, in which we sit on the throne of God and sinfully condemn and look down on others in our self-righteousness.

But scripture, friends, does call Christians to judge other Christians.

So for example, Galatians 6.1 encourages Christians, commands us to pursue restoring another sinful brother or sister, but one, but doing so in gentleness and love, which requires judgment, right?

You're judging their intentions of their heart, their sin.

We're called to evaluate all things spiritually according to 1 Corinthians 2.15.

In John 7, we are called to judge with righteous judgment.

And Proverbs 27, verse 5 says, better and open reprimand than concealed love.

Proverbs 27:5

So as Christians, we are called to judge in the sense of helping other Christians be accountable to the Lord and to walk in holiness.

We must discern doctrine and sin with humility, never with cruelty, self-righteousness, assuming motives, and never acting as if we are God.

In conclusion, in these 12 verses, James is exposing the war inside of each and every one of us, the seduction around you in the world, the pride that keeps us from repentance.

But he also offers you and I the hope of greater grace that if we humble ourselves and submit to the Lord and resist the devil and reject worldliness and draw near to God, he will help us.

And here is your hope.

With passages like this, sometimes this can sound discouraging.

Like, man, the Christian life is hard.

I feel like I'm always just battling sin, the world, and the devil, and I'm always falling short.

And when James teaches things like this, we know we cannot resist worldliness on our own power, but we can't submit to God without his help.

And we cannot walk this path alone.

And that's why we celebrate Jesus and his earthly ministry.

Because Jesus perfectly submitted to the Father.

Jesus perfectly resisted the devil.

He perfectly obeyed in your place.

His spirit empowers our repentance.

His grace fools your obedience, and his presence makes holiness possible and desirable.

The worst thing you can do when you hear sermons like this is walk out of here and say, I will pull myself up by my own bootstraps and I will do all these things, James says.

And you're going to face plan as soon as you get home.

And you're going to be discouraged.

You're going to feel shame.

But what we do is know, God, give me the grace to imitate you and to rest in the fact that you already know I'm going to fall flat on my face.

That's why you hung on the cross to save me.

And plead the righteousness of Jesus who obeyed in your place.

We got, we gotta, we can't love the gospel and completely neglect the fact that Jesus lived for 33 years.

That 33 year of life is very important, friends, because it is a perfect life of righteousness that when you come to faith, God gives to you as if you lived that life yourself.

And that's where we find our hope to press forward to seek to be faithful.

Amen.

Let's pray.