Welcome back to our Bible study on the book of James. It’s great to have you with us again.
I’m Lori Brown and I’ll be your host today.
We’re going to be covering James chapter 4 and we’re following on what we were learning last time in chapter 3 where James is talking about how we use the tongue and what kind of wisdom there is. There’s godly wisdom and there’s earthly wisdom. And then he rolls right into this section here on conflicts and disputes.
But first, let’s read chapter 4 as we get started here.
Those conflicts and disputes among you, where do they come from? Do they not come from your cravings that are at war within you? You want something and do not have it, so you commit murder. And you covet something and cannot obtain it, so you engage in disputes and conflicts. Adulterers! Do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God? Therefore, whoever wishes to be a friend of the world becomes an enemy of God. Or do you suppose that the Scripture speaks to no purpose? Does the Spirit that God caused to dwell in us desire envy?
But God gives all the more grace. Therefore it says, God opposes the proud, but 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 hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded. Lament and mourn and weep. Let your laughter be turned into mourning, and your joy into dejection. Humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will exalt you.
Do not speak evil against one another, brothers and sisters. Whoever speaks evil against another or judges another speaks evil against the law and judges the law, but 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. So who, then, are you to judge your neighbor?
As I mentioned, last week we were covering in chapter 3 the tongue and two kinds of wisdom. Godly wisdom and earthly wisdom.
And in this section here on conflicts and disputes, it’s always important to remember that there’s no punctuation in this letter in the way that James wrote it.
And that’s true of every New Testament letter.
Letters were written in all caps. There wasn’t spacing between the words. There weren’t any periods or commas or exclamation points. There weren’t chapters, and there certainly weren’t specific verses.
Everything just ran together in one.
So if you think about James writing this letter, his train of thought is unbroken between chapter 3 and chapter 4.
James talks about the tongue. He talks about two kinds of wisdom. Now he’s talking about this double-mindedness, friendship with the world versus friendship with God.
And he really says, as we start off here in verse 1, where are these conflicts and disputes coming from among you?
Now remember, this letter is going out to several churches, to Jewish Christian believers in several different areas around the Roman Empire and around Asia Minor.
And there’s conflicts and disputes among the believers that are arising in each of these churches.
And James is saying to all these believers, do you know where these conflicts and disputes come from?
They come from your own desires. These deep-seated cravings that are inside you.
This is what is at war within you.
And he spells it out. He says, you want something and you don’t get it. So you kill and have murderous thoughts and you covet something so desperately and you can’t get it. So you become someone who likes to dispute and argue and be in conflict with others.
And really a good translation of this here would be, you fight and make war. Used in a hyperbolic sense, of course.
This is similar to Jesus when he’s speaking in Matthew 5:21-22.
Now James follows this with, you don’t have, because you don’t ask. And when you do ask, you ask with wrong motives.
You ask because you want to seek your own pleasures. You ask wrongly. There’s no wisdom in the way that you’re asking.
Just before this, James has already outlined the kind of wisdom we need as believers. Wisdom that’s pure, peaceable, gentle, willing to yield, full of mercy.
But we have all these conflicts and disputes because you’re not employing the godly wisdom that James just laid out.
If we are employing that godly wisdom, then why are we having conflicts and disputes among ourselves? The truth is we’re just not employing godly wisdom.
In these situations, when we’re having conflicts and disputes, and in the church that James is writing to, we’re all employing earthly wisdom in our relationships with one another. We’re not employing godly wisdom.
We have cravings and desires, and we seek pleasure in a way that’s at war within us because we’re double-minded.
Basically, we’ve got one foot in the world and one foot in Christ.
And here James says, don’t you know friendship with the world means you are an enemy of God?
Ouch!
James is saying, I know about your suffering.
You’re not just suffering from external persecution and external oppression, external forces in the society that are pressing in on you.
You’ve got all of that happening. You are a suffering church.
But you’re also suffering because you won’t fully commit to Christ. You are at war within yourselves. You have one foot in and one foot out. You want to be friends with the world and you want to be friends with God.
Jesus talked about this in the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 6:24, when he said,
No one can serve two masters. You’ll either hate the one and love the other or be devoted to the one and despise the other.
No one can serve two masters.
It’s no surprise this teaching shows up in James’ letter here because, as we know, the Sermon on the Mount was very influential for James in the writing of this letter.
But even after all of that, in verse 6, James says, But God gives all the more grace.
God gives.
And here James is circling back to this theme of God’s great generosity.
James is saying, even though you’re doing all this, even though there’s disputes and conflicts and you have murderous thoughts in your heart and you’re fighting and quarreling and you’re grasping after things and you’re only seeking after your own pleasures and you’re wanting to be...
The root word here for pleasures is hedonistic.
You seek pleasures. You seek personal gratification. You are uninhibited and unchecked in your desire and trying to fulfill every pleasure available to you in this world.
So pleasure is your master.
God is not your master.
Pleasure is your master.
And that is the opposite of the law of liberty or the law of freedom that James talked about earlier in 1:25 and 2:12.
The law of freedom that Jesus offers us sets us free to live fully into Christ and to be filled, like filled to the brim, and to experience a kind of joy that escapes us otherwise.
James is basically making the case here that you’ve exchanged the law, the Old Testament Mosaic law, bound by rules and regulations.
You were bound by that, and now you’ve bound yourself to pleasure.
You’re still a slave.
You’re not free.
You’re still a slave to these things. And yet Christ has come to make you free.
So live into your freedom.
It’s important for you to choose, for me to choose.
Which thing do we want?
Do I want the world? Or do I want to be an enemy of God?
Because Jesus says, no one can serve two masters.
No one.
You know, my favorite quote that I read this week came from Adewuya in the African Commentary on the Letter of James, and he writes,
There’s an old West African proverb that says, the man who tries to walk two roads will split his pants.
And I cracked up when I read that because it’s like such a great visual of the silliness of trying to serve two masters, of somebody trying to live for the Lord and seek their own pleasures and also trying to pursue God.
We can’t really pursue God and complete self-indulgence at the same time. They’re at odds with one another.
Jesus said, I came that you might have life and life more abundantly.
And life more abundantly won’t come if we’re trying to serve two masters.
But even in all of that, even though all of this is happening, persecution and oppression from without the community, conflicts and disputes within the community, believers who are double-minded, they don’t know if they want to serve Christ, if they want to serve the world.
In the midst of all that, James writes this word of encouragement.
But God gives. All the more grace.
God is over-the-top generous to us, even when we’re struggling, even when we’re trying to serve two masters.
And because God gives grace all the more, then we get this instruction from James on what our lives can look like in verses 7-10.
Because God gives grace, submit yourselves to God, it says in verse 7.
And submit yourselves to God really serves as this umbrella statement for verses 7 through 10.
Because God gives grace, submit yourself to God.
And then James lists a number of things under that umbrella of submission on what it looks like to submit to God.
I think it’s a great strategy when you come across a list of things in Scripture to actually just take out a piece of paper and write it down.
We could have done this also in chapter 3, verses 13 through 18. That’s a great exercise in that section where it talks about godly wisdom and earthly wisdom. Take a piece of paper and at the top of the page write godly wisdom on one side and earthly wisdom on the other side. And write down all the things that James says about each.
It really helps to cement what are the differences between those two types of wisdom.
One of my seminary professors said that the Bible is often more descriptive than prescriptive. And I’ve always remembered that.
So I’m always trying to think, when is the Bible describing something for me?And when is it prescribing something for me?
And here in James chapter 4 is one of the more rare instances of the Bible being prescriptive, prescribing what we are to do. And so similar for this section in 4:7-10. I’d encourage you to take out a sheet of paper, write down all the things that we are responsible to do in these verses, and all the things that God is responsible to do.
This gives us the opportunity to really look deeply and say, what do these verses mean for us?
Because God is gracious, because he’s overwhelmingly generous to us, so generous that we can’t even begin to get our hands around the generosity of God.
Number one, submit ourselves to God.
Don’t be double-minded. Don’t have one foot in and one foot out.
Resist the devil. If you resist the devil, the devil will flee.
And here the devil is really a proxy for the ways of the world. If you resist the ways of the world, if you resist the temptation that the devil is trying to impress on you about the ways of the world, the devil will flee from you. Those desires will dissipate.
And then in verse 8, it says to do something else.
Draw near to God. When we draw near to God, James writes, God will draw near to you.
And I love this dichotomy here where we resist the devil and the devil flees. The devil runs away from us.
But when we draw near to God, God runs to us. So we’ve got resisting evil and that evil runs away from us and we’ve got drawing near to God and God runs towards us.
Makes me think of the prodigal son, how the father ran towards his son as he was coming back home.
Cleanse your hands, purify your hearts. Again, more Old Testament purification language
Lament, mourn, weep. Here we’ve got Old Testament displays of repentance.
Humble yourself before the Lord and the Lord will exalt you.
This comes from Proverbs 3.34. To the humble, God shows favor.
This humble yourselves language also has echoes of Luke 14 and Matthew 23 where they write, All who exalt themselves will be humbled and all who humble themselves will be exalted.
James is saying, look, the Lord is for you.
The Lord who is generous beyond measure is giving you enough grace to be able to do all the things that I’m laying out here for you to do.
He wrote in James 1:5, if any of you lacks wisdom, ask God who gives generously. And you can lean into that godly wisdom which will teach you how to respond to one another or how to act when you’re persecuted, how to endure suffering when it comes, how to be in relationship with one another even when it’s difficult, how to live with integrity, bringing what you say and what you do into agreement. And above all, how to release the belief that only pleasures of the world can satisfy you.
Let’s live into the law of freedom. Let’s trust God for an abundant life. Let’s humble ourselves before God and trust God’s great generosity to give us everything our heart desires, truly desires in our innermost person.
And above all, don’t split your pants!
All right, that’s it for chapter four.
We’ll see you next time for chapter five.
Thanks!
