Transcript

Let’s go to James right quick. James 4, alright? James 4 as this pastor is writing to actually his scattered church. They’ve been persecuted. They are scattered abroad. Ah, I don’t know, we don’t know exactly how many and where but they are suffering people but we find out that even through times of suffering and difficulty and sorrow, the flesh and sin still finds its way to act up, and so he, James gets down to brass tacks. He gets down to just dealing with the stuff that needs to be dealt with and, ah, so we get to James 4 and we’re gonna talk about humility. Humility.

Notice it there, James 4 beginning in verse 6 and going through verse 10.

6 But He gives a greater grace. Therefore it says, “God is opposed to the proud, but gives grace to the humble.” 7 Submit therefore to God. Resist the devil and he will flee from you. 8 Draw near to God and He will draw near to you. Cleanse your hands, you sinners; and purify your hearts, you double-minded. 9 Be miserable and mourn and weep; let your laughter be turned into mourning and your joy to gloom. 10 Humble yourselves in the presence of the Lord, and He will exalt you.

Some years ago, there was a front page story in our newspaper of a man who was living with a woman he wasn’t married to and he beat and strangled this woman and two of her three children to death. And one, the smallest child, I think, actually survived. And we see these horrifying stories and it’s shocking to us and I don’t really know if there’s all that much more evil in the world or if it’s because we have these, this endless number of 24 hour news cycles and they’ve gotta talk about something, so they’re bringing every horrific tragedy and heartbreak issue that’s out there, ah, and keep putting it in front of us, putting it in front of us, putting it in front of us, and by the way, I, I, I’m trying to and I think you need to try to turn that stuff off more and more and more. They’ve got, they’ve gotta keep their ratings up so the more horrific it is, so the more horrific they can make it, ah, there is something to fake news, there is something to the fact that they create narratives and create stories. But nevertheless, we hear these reports of, um, some disgruntled employee, ah, he wasn’t treated right or he wasn’t included in whatever at work, or maybe he was dismissed from the job, so he thinks the only right thing to do is to go in and murder, massacre, 8, 9, 10, 12 of his coworkers. We just hear these reports and it seems like they just kind of regularly come up and we think, “What is the issue?” I think, now there’s some obviously sometimes some physiological issue literally in the brain organ, there’s some things like that, that, um, they’re kind of above even, even medical science’s ability to comprehend and understand, but I think in most cases there is a deep spiritual issue that underlines all of this. We’ve become a God-rejecting secularist people. A God-rejecting secularist people.

I thought for many years, you know, what, what, 1960 or somewhere in there when they took prayer out of schools and, um, can you, can you just think in a moment back when in basically every school they had a Bible reading time and a devotion and a prayer. That went on for many many years in schools. Can you imagine by the time a student gets to be a junior or a senior, how many times he’s heard from the Bible about God’s love, he’s heard from the Bible about God’s forgiveness, he’s learned from the Bible about suffering even though it wasn’t right. Could that not be a great help when some of these kids are deeply troubled and they want to seek vindictively to hurt their classmates because they’ve been left out or they’ve been excluded, or they’ve been bullied? When you strip away God’s truth, what are you left with? Something is going to fill that vacuum and what have we filled it with? There’s only one thing left and that’s total abject worldliness, totally a materialistic, temporal, secular mindset that this world is all there is so the purpose of life is for you to glean and squeeze out of this present life all the pleasures, worldly pleasures that you can get.

So think about that, if that’s all there is, if that’s all we’re gonna teach kids these days that all you’ve got is just, ah, 60, 70, 80, 90 years you might be on the earth, so squeeze out of it whatever pleasures there are because after that, there’s nothing else worthy living for. Okay, if that’s what you’re gonna teach kids, there’s a certain percentage of young people and just people in general who are going to logically deduce, “Okay, if the pleasures of this world are all there is, then if you rob me of those pleasures, it’s logical for me to do whatever I have to do to get even.” Because think about it for a moment, if you believe there is a God, you believe there’s eternity, you believe we have an eternal soul, and you believe there’s an eternal heaven, a bliss and joy and pleasures forever, and you believe there’s an eternal hell where you’ll be faced with the wrath of God and suffering forever, if you believe that, then whatever you have to do to go to that eternal heaven is worth it. Logically speaking also, if there is no heaven and there is no hell and this world and its pleasures is all there is, if somebody robs you of that or you feel they’ve robbed you of that, then whatever it takes to get back, that’s pretty logical.

That’s what you’re left with when you become godless, when you become a secular people, and this whole concept that, um, we don’t need God, we do not need moral absolutes, we do not need objective truth, that every single person is their own god and their own truth, you just be true to your lust and your desires and that’s wonderful and we’re all gonna applaud and we’re all gonna celebrate today. We’ve even got one political party that’s given themselves wholly over to this. Now look, there’s a lot of ungodliness and wickedness surrounding Republicans, okay? Now I don’t know a time in my life when I voted for a Democrat, just being real transparent, but that don’t mean Republicans are godly or good all the time either, by the way. But nevertheless, if you saw the last Democratic Presidential Convention when they had the prayer time, it was awful, the kind of jeering and, and, and disrespect and brazen, ah, just hostilities in the room when the man tried to pray. It’s just, it’s just a whole enveloping and embracing of rebellion and godlessness, and for whatever reasons, the Democratic party has embraced this and made it much of their mantra. Read the Democratic party platform. It’s atrocious. It just is. My point being that’s just a symptom of a culture that’s heading away from God and you’re gonna have more and more and more of this stuff.

Now as I think about it, and I’m not saying this is empirically scientifically the fact, I’m not a socialist though I have a degree in sociology, that is that if you’ll think about it, when you see these people doing these rash things in our culture I was talking about earlier, ah, murdering and massacring and then the investigators come in later and very often the investigators come to this conclusion: we don’t really have a conclusion. Well, he was bullied or he was kind of a loner in society or whatever, and he decided to kill a bunch of people. Well, if there’s no eternity, if we, if we’re not made in the image of God and there’s no eternal souls and you burnt me, you’ve left me out, you’ve cheated me of what I think I ought to have as far as worldly pleasures, then it will give me pleasure to hurt you. Why isn’t that okay? What moral absolute do you have to tell me that’s not okay if you throw God out?

It’s again, it’s just a logical conclusion in a godless, secularist culture, and when you look at why people do these things, one of three things usually comes to my mind. 1. They, they feel like they’ve been robbed of the pleasure of companionship. Somebody left them out, somebody jilted them, whatever it is. They’ve been robbed or denied the pleasures of sexual fulfillment in some way, shape or fashion. Or they’ve been robbed or denied of financial or material things. Almost always if you dig down through it, somehow they think they’ve been denied in one of those three areas. Now the only way we’ll see a real substantial change, substantive change is that there is a turning back to God, a true and genuine spiritual awakening in this land.

Now getting to our text, James is writing to a people who claim to know the Lord and there’s always, I think, I mixed bag. I think you have true believers who are backslidden and then you have people who join the church who really don’t know God, but nevertheless these are people who claim to hold to God and at the same time are walking after the pleasures of the world as their primary or main pursuit. We talked about that, ah, last time when we talked about pleasure, is it, is it friend or foe, and remember there’s a biblical balance to all of that. So the point is James is saying, “You guys need to quit rising up in pride and assuming you know the right way to live and you know the right way to find pleasure and you know the right way to find meaning in life. You need to humble yourselves and get out of that position and do what the Lord has told you to do.”

So first of all, let’s talk about humility concerning self. Humility concerning self, and as I told you, only the Gospel and the power of the Holy Spirit can bring a man to what I call a sweet Gospel humility where he sees what he is and therefore he finds himself humble before God and grateful to hear and learn of God. But we begin in verse 6 with this phrase where he says here, “But He gives a greater grace.” He’s already been reproving them about giving themselves over to the pleasures and the lust of this world and they’re getting into a lot of fights and fusses in the churches over that, he even says some of you are murdering,” or at least you’re led to the point where you feel like murdering somebody, and he said that the problem is you’re not responding to the greater grace. You could say even an ever-increasing grace.

God gives you grace so that instead of living for the temporal pleasures of this world, you have an extra enablement. God saved you who put in you a new capacity to see through that and to make God himself the purpose of your life and God’s wisdom the pattern of your life. So your life begins to become centered on God and the things of God, not like a worldly secularist who only knows this world and does not know God. His point is you’ve been given this grace if you’re God’s child, why in heaven’s name are you living for the world like you haven’t been given this grace? Grace is an extra capacity to do that, to find God and to find pleasures in God and find pleasures in obeying God instead of just the pleasures out in the world. You know, there’s a real balance here because the pleasures of the world are not all evil. There are common graces we can enjoy but it’s the heart motive that says, “I want those pleasures even if I dishonor my God.” No, the Christian can’t walk in that. He says, “I enjoy those pleasures as long as they’re in the flow of me honoring my God.”

So this supernatural enablement is so that we might lean on and trust God’s word and not trust the fallen, empty, counterfeit philosophies of secularism, that is, we humble ourselves to say, “God, You’re right, the world is wrong.” One step further, we humble ourselves to say, “God, You’re right, Your wisdom is right, Your word is right, and all notions or inclinations that come through my heart and mind contrary to that, I call them wrong.” Do you call yourself out? You ever been called out before? “Man, he called me out.” Do you ever call you out? Then why aren’t you? That’s the pattern of Christianity, the word of God exposes, makes bare the reality of a bad motive, a bad viewpoint, a bad attitude, a wrong perspective, we make something a 9 that outta be a 2, and God calls us out and so you agree with God against yourself. Do you understand that? You agree with God against you. That’s humbling yourself. And by the way, that’s a joyous way to live because you, you get to say, “God, am I not a fool? God, am I not stupid?” Now that’s the way I talk about me. You might be more dignified than that about yourself but you need to get over yourself because you’re stupid too because you do stuff every day that the Bible says will hurt you and you’re still doing it. That’s pretty stupid.

So agree with God against yourself. “God, I see Your word and I see my attitude and I’m struggling with it but I want You to know, God, I confess and agree with You that’s not where I ought to be.” That’s humbling yourself before God and before the word of God. So one must nurture this, this growing pattern of humbling ourselves and calling ourselves out before God.

Notice what else he says here to back up this, this, this truth that you’ve been given grace to be enabled to agree with God and bear witness against yourself and call yourself out because, verse 6, “Therefore it says, ‘God is opposed to the proud, but He gives grace to the humble.'” Now here’s what happens, when you say, “God, what I desire is right even if Your word says it’s wrong. What I enjoy is right for me even though Your word says it’s wrong.” When you do that, you’re being proud. You’re lifting yourself up to say, “I’m wiser than God is and so, God, that’s the way it is.” So God says that’s prides and God says, “I want to tell you something, I am opposed to the proud.” When you’re proud you’re basically saying, “Okay, God, come on. Come on, see what You got.” You know what God says? Literally when it says God’s opposed to the proud it means God says, “Alright, here I am. Let’s, let’s have at it.” Have you learned you can’t out-punch God? That’s what he says happens. If you’re God’s child, you slip into the flesh, you raise yourself up to say, “I know the things that God says are wicked and wrong and not, not, not true and I am not calling myself out, I’m in the process of, of, of excusing myself and affirming these things even though I know they’re against the word of God.” And God says, “Okay, I set Myself up as being opposed to you.”

I, I heard this story this story years ago. Remember the story of Johnny and Bobby? You remember that story? Johnny was talking to Bobby one day and Johnny said, “Hey, Bobby, you know what? My daddy has a list of men’s names on a piece of paper of all the men in this town that he can whip and your daddy’s name at the top of the list.” Well, Bobby said, “Is that so?” He said, “Yes.” So Bobby goes home to his daddy, “Johnny said that his daddy has a piece of paper and on that paper are the list of the names of all the men in town that he can whip and your name’s at the top of the list.” He said, “Alright, I’ll see about that.” So goes to the boys, the other boy’s house and knocks on the door. A man comes to the door, he said, “Sir, I’m So-and-so’s daddy. My son tells me that your son said that you’ve got a name of all the men in town that you can whip. My name’s at the top of the list. Now what are you gonna do about it?” He said, “Well, I guess I’ll have to take your name off that list.” That’s what God’s saying to you, “Okay, you gonna line up against Me, well, I’m gonna line up against you. Let’s see how you can do.”

That’s exactly what that verse means, God is opposed to the proud, so you don’t want to walk in that. So that’s what he’s saying because if you’re a child of God, that strikes a little bit of terror in your soul and it should because God loves you and God doesn’t want you to go on in pride because pride will ruin you and hurt and ruin those around you.

I as we have been talking about the things that have been being stated by prominent leaders in Baptist circles and professing evangelicalism when, when men stand up and begin to say that the things the Bible calls sins maybe, kinda, sorta really isn’t a sin we used to think it was, when men begin to stand up and say, “Well, women are not preachers but it kinda, maybe, sorta is okay sometimes if they’re preaching to men, if they’re not really in the office of pastor.” All this fanciful intellectualizing language. You know what they’re doing? They’re saying, “God, we don’t think You’re all that wise. We think we can kinda bend it around, shift it around, move it around, and kind of change our position on this because this will help us get along in the culture.” And God says, “It’s not the culture you need to worry about. When you raise yourself up in pride, you don’t understand something, you claim to be Mine, I’m opposed to the proud. My punch is a lot harder than the culture’s punch.”

Humility about self, and when I say humility about self I mean repenting of thinking about self first, because humility is not thinking low of yourself, humility is really just forgetting yourself and saying, “God’s smart. God’s wise and I want to flow with Him.” Remember, pride is the sin that made the devil the devil. Remember, pride is the base foundational sin that made Adam and Eve fall in the garden of Eden. So humble yourselves. Agree with God and bear witness with God against you. Remind yourself that you received a sin nature, a rebellion against God at conception. Remind yourself that the Bible says you came forth from the womb speaking lies. Remind yourself that in us there is no good thing. The Bible says there is no one righteous, not even one. Remind yourself that naturally and rightfully apart from God’s grace you are the object of God’s wrath being wholly offensive to him. Remind yourself that your salvation is wholly and absolutely of grace, not of works, not of effort because there’s no inherent virtue or goodness in me to perform anything that might possibly please God. Remind yourself that any goodness in your life is due to either common grace or redemptive grace. It’s all God’s work through man. Remind yourself that your heart is a lying heart, your heart is deceitful and wicked and it continually seeks after evil apart from Christ’s presence and the information and corrections of the word of God. Remind yourself of what you are. Remind yourself that we have no real self-esteem problem because self shouldn’t be even considered. We need to have Christ esteem. In other words, humble yourself. That’s what he’s saying here, humble yourself. Don’t be swollen up in pride, living a lifestyle with the conscious attitude that, “God, You’ve given me the grace to continually catch myself, bear witness against myself, and realign myself with the word of God and I want to live with that kind of sweet humility before You.”

He elaborates in verse 7 and simply says, “Therefore,” or rather, “Submit therefore to God. Resist the devil and he will flee from you.” Submit here is, again, that military term. I don’t know of a time in the New Testament where the word “submit” is not a word that comes out of the military. It literally means “to get in your rank; stay in your lane; stay in your proper place.”

I was talking with a pastor brother the other day and we were talking about a young man, and I think he’s a good man and he, but he’s got some issues, and I said, “What do you think?” And he said, “I tell you what I think, the boy don’t know his place.” Well, that’s what this means here. You need to know your place and that’s under God in submission to God.

Can I just say to you, could you imagine what it’s gonna be like on judgment day when all these people on all of our airwaves spouting off the most blasphemous, vile viewpoints and positions that radically go against the holiness and the, the, the, the virtuous and moral teachings of God. Can you imagine what it’s gonna be like when they face God in the judgment? Now brother, listen it’s one thing to have sin in your life and struggle with it and be humbled by it, be broken over it, and be fighting it. We’re all in that race. We’re all fighting that fight. But it’s quite something else, the Bible says, to embrace and promote and celebrate that which God calls wickedness.

That means they’re not in any way submitting themselves to God but God says as a Christian you have that grace upon grace, to have that capacity to walk surrendered in unconditional surrender to God. It’s actually the imperative mood in the aorist tense and what it means is this is a command that you do this and make this your position going forward. It’s a one for all decision, now walk it out and that’s really happens in conversion. At conversion there’s a surrender to God’s authority and then you spend the rest of your life striving in the grace God gives you to keep walking this out before the Lord and before his church.

The last part of verse 7, he says submit to God and resist the devil. It’s the same aorist tense. It means, it’s, it’s, it’s declaring a new status between you and the devil. It’s, it’s like declaring, “You’re no longer my boss. You’re no longer my influencer. You’re no longer my pattern. I have a new Commander in Chief. I have a new loyalty and that is to God. This is the direction I’m going in.”

Now remember, Satan, the Bible calls him the god of this world and so what does Satan want you to do? If he’s god of this world, what does he want you to love? He wants you to love this world. It doesn’t mean you don’t enjoy a good meal or don’t enjoy some things that are in the world, it means you look to this world as the end-all. Satan wants you to live that way. So you have to declare once and for all, “I’m resisting that. I’m not going along with that. I’m going along with the Lord.”

So humility concerning yourself. Don’t rise up in pride. Consider yourself under God’s authority in the flow of his teaching for his glory.

Now let’s go quickly to the next thing, humility concerning sin. Look at it in verse 8, he says, “Draw near to God and He will draw near to you. Cleanse your hands, you sinners; purify your hearts, you double-minded.” So we draw near to God, he draws near to us. We draw near to God in faith and in repentance and he draws near to us more in grace and in pardon and in protection. The prodigal son is such a good example of this. He turned to head home and God helped him all the way home, even prepared the father’s heart for when he arrived home.

God brings grace to help you along when you determine to walk with him. He says, “Cleanse your hands.” What are the things you’re putting your hands to that displease God. Here’s God’s word to you: stop it. Quit it. Just stop it. Some of us struggle with anxiety and discouragement even depression and one of the primary keys to that is to look at yourself and say, “Stop it! Quit thinking that way. It’s not true. The Bible says think on what’s true.” So just quit letting your mind go all those places when you don’t know those things are true.

I have a friend and I teasingly tell him because he knows I’m the same way, I say, “You know, you’ve been through some terrible things in your life and some of them actually happened,” because you allow yourself to live in the reality, “Oh, this is gonna happen! That’s gonna happen!” Well, it might but it hasn’t and you don’t know that it’s going to so stop it. Get that out of your thinking. That’s sin to let your mind go there. I don’t know why I got on that because I’m talking about hands, but my mind came into it.

But so whatever you’re doing that’s not in the will of God, remember you’re under a new authority now. You’re to walk submissively to him. You’re not in league with Satan and if you’re doing things that make him happy, quit it. Get it out of your lives. You’re being double-minded. You’re trying to walk with God and walk in the world at the same time. Just can’t work.

Well, let’s hurry on to the other one, humility concerning sanctification in verse 9, ” Be miserable and mourn and weep; let your laughter be turned into mourning and your joy to gloom.” Now these are all imperatives. These all refer to evidences of true repentance. Now what he’s saying is you know you’ve been involved in wrong, you know you’ve been loving the world, you know the thing you’re doing is evil and you know what? You’ve been having a good time enjoying it. You need to prove your God’s child by showing a sorrow about the fact that you’re doing it. You need to show that your God’s child by mourning the fact that you did those things and can I go a step further? You need to be mourning about the fact that you desire to do those things. Did you hear me? I, I can’t, I can’t, I can’t be like some charismatic teachers and say if you’ll jump through this hoop or quote this formula, boom, you’ll be zapped and you’ll not have that trouble anymore. No, there’s some things that are raging in your old fallen wicked heart until the day you go home in glorification, but you ought to mourn about the fact that it’s there. It ought to grieve you that it’s there and never give you joy in any way that it’s there. Can I get an amen right there? As children of God, we don’t joy in things even though they’re in our hearts, even though our desires go there sometimes, we don’t joy in it because we know it dishonors our God and it breaks our hearts that it does.

That’s what he’s saying. You ought to be mourning over these things. That’s why Jesus said in the Beatitudes, “Blessed are they that mourn. Blessed are they that are poor in spirit.” Now in this case, these are, this is a case of real open wicked backsliders, so they ought to really be broken and weeping over their sin, but in, in everyday Christianity we walk that balance of a mourning of our old fallen nature and its desires, and when, whenever we participate in sin at the same time we walk in a joy that Christ loves us and forgives us and joyous that he gives us grace – listen to me – gives us grace so that we can’t enjoy the sin our flesh desires. Yeah, you did it, you partook of it, you embraced that sin and then it made you sick. Thank God for that grace that it made you mourn. You don’t laugh anymore. It broke your heart. That’s what he’s saying. You’ve got to learn to view sin rightly. As the old Puritan said, either you’re killing sin or sin’s killing you. One of the two.

Now in summary, verse 10, “Humble yourselves in the presence of the Lord and you’ll be exalted.” Now look at this reversal, verse 9, mourning, be miserable, weep. You’ve been laughing and I’m gonna tell you, God’s saying, you ain’t got anything to laugh about. You outta be sad about what you’ve done, what you’ve been doing. You’ve been joyous but you don’t have anything really to be joyous about. You’re a fool to think that sin is not gonna have payday. Sin always has a payday and it’s not a good payday. But then he turns around in verse 10 and he says now humble yourselves in the presence of the Lord. Get yourself back right with God and he will exalt you, literally he will lift you up. He’ll hold you up. He will give you new refreshments.

Can I say this to you, are you listening, I’m gonna tell you something, something powerful and profound. Are you listening? Everybody listening? Anybody here not listening? Raise your hand if you’re not listening. He will forgive you and lift you up and then there’ll be a new joy, a new laughter, a new rejoicing with God. He’ll lift you up in this life, he’ll lift you up in the world to come. There will be exaltation in your soul over the ever-abiding, ever-present, unending faithfulness of God’s forgiveness of his own. Listen to me, you can’t out-sin the grace of God but you can sin yourself into misery and discipline of God, but you can’t out-sin the grace of God. He will forgive you. He will lift you back up with forgiveness, with joy, with peace, with contentment. Isaiah 32:17 reminds us, “And the work of righteousness will be peace, And the service of righteousness, quietness and security forever.” Yield yourself to God, humble yourself afresh and find in him your all in all.