Dennis Tuuri

We’ll be talking about the text of scripture we’ll read today at several different levels. First, the text went into a particular historical context involving the nation of Israel and the Roman Empire. Secondly, it goes to a church or a group of churches. And third, it also has application at the personal level.

Before we read it, I just wanted to mention that this text and other teachings of course I think were critical in weaning the church away from the temptation of the zealots to deal with Rome and deal with the oppressing Jews in an ungodly way. By the time of the coming of our Lord in judgment in AD 70, the church was essentially, I think, doing just what it was supposed to do. Texts like the one we’re going to read today were significant to that and has particular significance for our day and age as well, which we’ll talk about.

Okay. Text is James 4:1-10. The title is “Are You an Enemy of God?” Please stand. James 4:1-10.

“Where do wars and fights come from among you? Do they not come from your desires for pleasure that war in your members? You lust and do not have. You murder and covet and cannot obtain. You fight and war. Yet you do not have because you do not ask. You ask and do not receive because you ask amiss, that you may spend it on your pleasure.

“Adulterers and adulteresses, do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God? Whoever therefore wants to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God. Or do you think that the scripture says in vain the Spirit who dwells in us yearns jealously? But he gives more grace. Therefore, he says, God resists the proud but gives grace to the humble.

“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, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded. Lament and mourn and weep. Let your laughter be turned to mourning and your joy to gloom. Humble yourselves in the sight of the Lord and he will lift you up.”

Let’s pray. Father, it is our great desire to humble ourselves in your presence today and in this place, and that this would train us for how to live our lives in your presence throughout the week as well. Father, we desire to be lifted up away from our sinful tendencies, our sinful actions, our sinful thoughts to serve you wholeheartedly and thus affect the prayer that we will do shortly, that your kingdom might come on earth as it is in heaven. In Jesus name we pray. Amen.

Please be seated.

Well, as I said, this text can be looked at in three levels. There was this historical situation at the time of the founding of the church. The Jews—unbelieving Jews were involved in zealotry on the one hand and Sadduceism compromise on the other. Today’s text will probably be seen more addressing the zealot side of things, and the next time I preach from James in four weeks we’ll deal with the last half of chapter 4 and deal more with the compromise of the Sadducees, which is another ditch. So today’s ditch addressed by the text before us I think is that of the zealots.

So the zealots were called zealots because they were zealous, right? They were really hot, supposedly, for the glory of God. But they would in their zealotry invoke insurrection. They would murder Roman soldiers. Okay? And so the early church—some of those zealots had converted, and I’m not blaming them—but the early church had people within it who had learned the ways of their Jewish culture and were severely distressed because of the injustice that they saw on the one hand from the persecuting Jews and on the other from the Roman government.

And as a result of this, and remember these are people that haven’t been taken into captivity, but they’ve been driven out of their places. They’re probably impoverished to a certain degree, right? They’re dispersed. And so they’ve got real problems. And in addition to that, they are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, the justice of God. And the question is, how do you accomplish that?

And what James has been telling us really throughout the epistle is don’t do it this way. That won’t work. It’s wrong. It’s unholy. Do it this way. And so that’s one level of the text for us.

Another level is that within the churches themselves, at least later at Corinth and probably here as well, within the church itself, we have struggles and difficulties and trials and hatred and slander, which is equatable to murder. And so within the church, there are people who have selfish ambition and they’re envious of the leadership and they want to rule and they can’t rule. So what do they do? They destroy the reputation of the leaders. And so you’ve got that kind of internal fighting going on in the church as well.

And then finally, you know, we can take this of course and make application to ourselves personally and think not just about ourselves in relationship to the local church or to our culture, which is good, but us personally and our own fights. Kids, you know, you could ask yourself the first question of this text. Why do you fight with your brother and your sister so much? And while the answer here isn’t exhaustive, I don’t think, I do think it’s right on. And so, kids at your level and parents at our level, we can get instruction from this text about why we fight, why we always are hassling, why brothers and sisters mix it up.

Now, it’s pertinent to us at this time in church history for several reasons. One, the significance of the zealot theme. Let me put it this way. This text was used in an excommunication and first a warning to a man of a church of like faith and practice as ours. I believe in Florida is where he was at the time. This man was advocating at the church, handing out flyers, the murder of abortionists. And so he was told don’t do that. He continued to do it. They excommunicated him. After that he went and murdered an abortionist.

And I believe he’s been executed since then. But this text was read to him, you know, by the session, because this text was a corrective to him. Would he care to hear it?

Early on after abortion was legalized with Roe v. Wade in ’73, there was no reaction. Then there was this violent reaction on the part of some Christians. It continues a little bit today, but not so much because texts like this and the preaching across pulpits in America have tamped down that sinful, rageful, murderous influence in the face of great injustice.

The scriptures teach that the murder of preborn infants is wrong. So, how do we respond to that? And so, you know, it looks like what we should do is just stop that right now. But that doesn’t work. It didn’t work. The polarization that began with the judges making the decision as opposed to working it out in states—that polarization increased. What has worked, by the way, he’ll tell us here in the text—you try to do it this way, but you don’t get what you want. Doesn’t work. I mean, so we’re not making our decisions pragmatically. We’re making them for the glory of God. It’s not glorifying to God to go shoot an abortionist. Okay?

But what does work? What’s turned the tide on abortion pragmatically? It’s been the PRCs. It’s been what the text commends of us throughout the Epistle of James. It’s deeds of love and kindness. And it’s embracing young girls who are being tempted to give up their babies to the abortionists and to help them and to encourage them and to show them pictures of their baby yet unborn.

So this text had significance and it has significance now.

This is the first Sunday after the federal judge ruled on Monday what he said about same-sex marriage—well what he said, overthrowing the definition of marriage that was placed into our Constitution 10 years ago, not as some new thing, but a simple codification of what had always been since the founding of this state and actually since the founding of this country.

We’re not talking here about some weird deal that was put in the Constitution 10 years ago. It was put in there just because lawless judges in Multnomah County decided to break the law. And so we had to make it clear in the Constitution, and myself and a lot of other people, people in this church and others, did that. Well, that all was thrown out.

And just so you’ll know, I’m going to use this as a little bit of teaching time about government. You know, government has a series of checks and balances. You got a legislature and an administrative branch. You got the judges. And in our state and in most states, you’ve got ballot referrals. In this state, in order to change the constitution, the way our government is established, you have to go to a vote of the people. Legislature can recommend it, but they can’t ratify it until the people vote. We’re a check and balance.

Now, we’re not the only check and balance. Once the constitution is set, the attorney general of our state and the governor of our state are supposed to enforce it and defend it. But in this particular suit that was decided by a single federal judge last Monday, in case you haven’t been, you know, listening to the news stories, the attorney general said, “Well, I don’t believe in that definition of marriage. I don’t think it’s constitutional. I’m not going to defend it.”

There’s some right in the Constitution now that hasn’t been seen for over 200 years—to same-sex marriage. Well, I mean, you know, if you want to argue for that, okay, we can talk it through and have discussions and then if people want to, they can change the laws, etc. But in this case, that’s not what happened. What happened was the attorney general says, “I’m not going to defend the Constitution.”

And as a result, there was no trial for all intents and purposes. Another check and balance in the American system is an adversarial judicial process with people arguing both sides, and the judge is supposed to be this referee in the middle who hears both sides, makes a decision. Only one side argued. Only one side was allowed to argue.

And folks, this is not unusual to our state. This was the sixth or seventh state in a row in exactly where this exact scenario played out, where all the checks and balances of the administrative branch, the legislative branch, the vote of the people were all overturned, ignored by some what I regard as lawless judges last week who decided just to flip all that stuff over. Rather saying he could have demanded that the state defend the Constitution. He could have let somebody else argue. He didn’t.

Well, anyway, the point is it’s really upsetting. Not because, you know, it’s a personal offense to any of us, but because our state has moved definitively now against what we all think the Bible teaches about marriage. It’s a huge deal. The foundation of a culture are families, and marriage is now been completely changed. And essentially is, and you know, a judge ruled the next day in another state and he said the definition of marriage has been tossed it where it belongs in the ash bin of history.

Biblical marriage—what we believe is biblical marriage—now it’s unrighteousness. It’s not really justice. It’s throwing everything on its head both in the process and with the end result. And so this is just like Roe v. Wade, even worse though in this case because Roe v. Wade at least was argued, but in this case it wasn’t even argued. But it has the similar polarizing effect. Rather than a discussion, a debate, calmness of heads, etc.—checks and balances—no. Revolution has happened and we’ve got the same thing. How are we going to react?

Well, some Christians just aren’t going to react. Just like in 1973, a lot of the churches didn’t say a doggone thing. Asleep at the switch. Busy doing other stuff. And then there’ll probably be to a certain degree the same kind of sinful reaction that there was to the abortion issue. And I want this congregation to be warned, exhorted by the text before us, not to do that.

We don’t get the righteousness of God. The justice of God in a culture is not advanced through violence. Okay? That’s not the way it works. It works through the proclamation of God’s word.

So culturally, it’s a very pertinent issue for us and will be for a few years. And and of course, it’s not just about marriage. It’s about all kinds of things that are being thrown out now that the nation has moved against Jesus.

As a church—church, not really a contemporary issue, although in the broader sense it is—you know, he doesn’t want wars amongst churches. Right? We’ve worked real hard at Reformation Covenant, and it’s hard work, part of the church in Oregon City. The fact is that for most of my life churches have fought with each other. Well, those Methodists are not worth it, doggone it. They wouldn’t be worth the match to set that church on fire. The pastor, a pastor who I love and who I greatly respect, told me that when I was about the age of a loner, a little younger.

“Ah, the Methodists are not even worth burning down their churches. They’re just horrible.” You’re like, what? And so there’s this discussion going on. And praise God that the church wars amongst churches in many places, including here in Oregon City, is successfully being resisted. And again, this text is application to that.

And then personally, as I said, it’s easy to make application of the text. So to each of us individually.

So this is what kind of an introduction to the text. One other thing before we get going here. I mentioned recently while preaching through this series that Martin Luther calls the church the mouth house. Right? And this is really drained of the text. Our mouths and our actions—good deeds. This is how we change the world.

This text is crucial to understand how to resist the kind of temptations that can destroy a life, that can destroy a church, and that can essentially really wreak havoc in a nation through insurrection, revolution, etc. It’s important text. All these texts are important.

What we want to do is when we’re in church, and particularly I’m talking about the sermon and the prayer, we want to do our best we can to pay attention, and I’ll try to do my best to help you pay attention. Now, we love the little sounds of children—that sound of life in the church. That’s great. But if your child, you know, makes crying kind of noises, you know, you got to realize that there are some people that prevents them from hearing.

And so it’s important. We got other ways. We got the foyer. We got other rooms that are wired. You can just maybe sometimes standing up helps quiet them. Maybe it won’t. But the point is, we want to pay attention. And you young kids, you don’t want to be, you know, walking out and going to the bathroom every 5 minutes or hanging out in the foyer. The teens, whatever it is. We want people paying attention to the preaching of the word. It’s important.

And when we pray, when God speaks to us in the word, it’s important that we hear it. And when the pastor represents us in prayer, speaking back to God and asking him for things—asking aright—hopefully that’s important, too. And that time needs to be focused. The congregation needs to be attentive and together.

Speaking of prayer, the prayer time, just so you’ll know, we tried to make it obvious in the order of worship. We’re changing the way the cards look. If you fill in a prayer card, those prayer cards right now is what we pray for publicly here. Okay? So if you got something you want just the pastors to know, big letters—”For Pastor Tuuri Only”—or if you’ve got a request you don’t really want people to know, just say “Please have people pray for me for a request that I don’t want to say what it is.” That’s okay. But understand that if you just fill out the card normally, that’s part of the public prayer of the church here in the worship service. Okay?

Well, let’s talk about this text. Let’s get back to this text now in some detail.

And so first of all we note the connection to chapter 3. As we’ve said, the book of James is not just a collection of aphorisms or short sayings or little topics that he’s addressing. There’s a flow to it. What did we see in chapter 3? We saw that if you have wisdom from above, peacemaking is the end result of that, right? Peacemaking. And what he’s saying here is the opposite of peace is war. And so he’s expanding here on the wisdom from below—not godly wisdom, but worldly wisdom.

Because what it produces, in spite of its intentions or what you might think will work and not work, what he’s warning us of is that won’t be peaceable. That’ll make you fight with your sister. That’ll make you fight with your brother. That’ll make you be disrespectful toward your parents. That’ll make you war with each other in the church. That’ll make you start, you know, slandering the leadership of the church. Okay?

Wisdom from below is what he’s sort of expanding on here. You remember what it was last week? Well, I’ll remind you. It was selfish ambition, right? And envy. What’s selfish ambition? I want to be the top dog. I want to be important. I want—and you know, God wants us to have glory, but not by seeking it ourselves. He’ll give us glory if we approach him rightly. When we want to be big people, I want my sister, my brother, whoever it is to know I’m a big person. Want my parent not to treat me like a child, right? So it’s selfish ambition, right? So it’s sinful seeking after your own status and it’s envy.

What’s envy? Well, you want what somebody else has and you can’t get it. So what you want to do is destroy it. You know, this is why in some neighborhoods if there’s a nice car there, can’t get the car, they take a key to the side of the car. They want to make it look bad.

Now, years ago, there was a case where a cheerleader, another woman, wanted to be a cheerleader at the high school. She didn’t get the job. She couldn’t be as pretty as the cheerleaders, so she took acid and threw it in her face.

Now, we’re not so uncivilized, right? But envy says, “Gee, I want what that other person has. They—mom loves them more, and I can’t get that love, so I’m going to make sure mom doesn’t love them so much, right?”

Envy tries to tear down people that we want what they have and we can’t get it, so we tear them down. So that was what he said. Selfish ambition and envy. He said it twice is the wisdom from below. And in the middle, remember what he said? The world, the flesh, and the devil. The world—earthly. Wisdom from below is earthly. The flesh—wisdom from below is sensual, self-centered. And then it’s demonic. It’s the devil. The world, the flesh, and the devil.

And what he does here, he’s going to tell us three sources for the fights. And they’re going to have these same—it’ll be the same three things. It’ll be the flesh, the world, and the devil. We’ll look at that. But that’s what he’s going to say here.

So he’s saying, first of all, such a good teaching technique for us, right? What does he say right out of the bat? Why do these things happen? Where do wars and battles among you occur? Or why do they occur, rather? Why is that going on? You ever ask yourself that? Why am I fighting? Why is that church split happening? Why is the division in the political parties or whatever it is occurring? Why?

Excellent question. Introspection, self-examination is a good process. It’s commended to us here by James. Why do wars and fights come from among you? Why is this happening? Well, that’s a good question, isn’t it?

And it’s a question that differentiates, makes a difference between the church and today’s world. What does the world say? Why people are all worked up and upset and mad and fighting? Well, it says things like, well, there’s income disparity. You got rich people and poor people. That’s why you fight. It’s that problem out there. Or you got these religions, right? And those religions—we just get rid of them. That’ll end them.

We end the fighting. The world says the reason why we have problems is because you’re a victim. It’s not your fault. It’s your sister, but you know, look what she did to you. You’re a victim. See, of their problems. And the culture today regularly—I mean, do we need to talk about it much more than just saying that? I mean, it’s self-evident that the culture now is increasingly a culture of victimization.

I’m a victim. You know the problem with being a victim? You really can’t do much about it. You remove yourself from responsibility in correcting a situation.

We accompany victimization though with villain. If I’m a victim, then there’s a villain that’s not me. There’s a villain out there that’s making me do this awful stuff, right? The devil made me do it, or whatever it is. There’s somebody making me do it. It’s the rich people. Or it’s those poor people all organized in political parties. It’s somebody else. It’s a villain out there. And what you end up doing then is you just try to destroy the villain.

If you got a real villain in the culture, somebody that’s walking around killing people, you want the police to take them out, right? I mean, if it’s a villain, you really do want to destroy them. And if our culture is—if these wars and fights happen because we’re victims, villains are oppressing us, then what’s the answer? Kill the villain.

This is the age-old process of scapegoating somebody else for my sinful actions and then killing the scapegoat as a way to make things right.

What does what does James say? He says, “Well, the problems are you. The problems are your own sinful desires. The problem is you think like the world instead of thinking like the kingdom of Christ. The problem is you’re pretty prideful and you’re not humble before God. You don’t submit to the authorities that he gives you. Right?”

That’s the problem. The problem is in you. Okay? Now, you may have all kinds of problems around you, but that’s never the reason why you sin. It’s always you. You have to take personal responsibility.

The beauty of that is there is no scapegoating of a villain. You’re turned into an actor, and instead of trying to kill everybody else to take care of your problems, one man died. The blood of Jesus Christ provided peace for the world. He took upon himself your sin and the sins of the world. He paid the price once for all so that scapegoating could get done away with. So that the endless wars that plague mankind—kill, kill and revenge, kill, kill, kill, kill—then we see in the papers yet today. All right, in certain parts of the world, that stuff would get gone, rid of. Okay.

I believe it will. I believe that as the church applies the truth of the epistle of James and the rest of the scriptures, that’s what history looks like. Getting rid of scapegoating, getting rid of victimization, getting rid of the villain story we always tell ourselves, and us accepting responsibility.

So this first question he asks is critical for you. If you think your problem is somebody else, you’ve got it wrong. He says, “These wars, these fights, they don’t come from outside. They come from within you. And the only solution to them is the blood of Jesus Christ. The grace and mercy of God to you, forgiving your sin and acknowledging you sin against people when you hate them, slander them, hit them, fight with them, whatever it is.

The blood of Jesus removes you from that sin, cleanses you as we’ll see in a couple of minutes. This is just what James tells us we’re supposed to do.

So this first source, in answer to his question, where do these things come from, is wrong desires.

So if you’re doing an outline, right, the question and then the three answers. First answer: Do they not come from your desires for pleasure that war in your members? You lust and do not have. You murder and covet and cannot obtain. You fight and war. Yet you do not have because you don’t ask.

So what’s he say? First problem, it’s your sinful desires. Now desire is not a bad thing. So the implication here is the problem is your sinful desires. You’re desiring something sinfully. You’re desiring righteousness, but you’re trying to accomplish the righteousness in a sinful way. So it’s a sinful desire. Okay?

So it’s these sinful desires that plague us, right? Whether it’s, you know, problems within a church, our children, ourselves, it’s our own sinful desires that’s the root of why we sin by striking out at others.

Now, when it says “your desires for pleasure that war in your members,” you can take that as a personal application, right? That you have things that your body wants. But I don’t think—remember that I think that what James is doing in this text is primarily corporate language. So it’s the members of the church that he’s describing here. You’ve got sinful desires going on within the members of the church. And that’s why you got church wars. That’s why you got church splits. That’s why you have people all upset with each other in the local church.

So I think what it means here is the members means members of the body. And that’s consistent with what James been saying all along. You lust and you don’t have. You murder and covet or envy and cannot obtain. See, that’s it. You covet. You want what somebody else has. You can’t get it. So, what do you do? You murder.

Now, this epistle is written by James. And remember, we’re not quite sure which James. Probably James the disciple who died early, but this is probably written early. But remember, we said when we began this, we know one thing about James. We know his name is not James. We know his name is Jacob. In the Greek, it’s Jacobus. It’s Jacob. And how we got to James is a whole long story, but it’s okay. Our English translation says James.

But understand this, the very first verse here says that this is from Jacob, and this is written to the 12 tribes of Israel. Now, Jacob is telling the 12 tribes of Israel, why do you end up with murder in your midst? Because you envy and you can’t get what you want.

Do you see where I’m going with this? Do you know your Bible well enough? Who’s Jacob? Why is it important that it’s written to the 12 tribes? Because the 12 tribes were Jacob’s 12 sons, literal Jacob. Jacob, whose name is changed to Israel, right? But the 12 tribes of Israel are Jacob’s 12 boys.

And those boys grow up and they have a situation develop where one of them, Joseph, has these wonderful dreams of things bowing down to him. He’s been given signs and assurances by God that he will rule. And he tells his brothers this—probably not the brightest thing to do. You know, if we understand the human heart, that the problem, the reason why we get wars is envy—we want to be a little careful, you know, and not putting a stumbling block in front of others. No, it’s not his fault, but you know, maybe he shouldn’t have done that.

But the point is his brothers hate him for it. They want, they covet, but they can’t obtain because the blessing doesn’t come from their desires. It comes from God’s decision. He’s decided to make Joseph a type of the Lord Jesus Christ, right? And he’s going to rule. And just as you know, Jesus is the ruler. Joseph is going to rule when his story ends up in Egypt and he gets out of the prison. He’s going to be a ruler at the right hand of Pharaoh.

Well, the brothers—all they know is we don’t like it. We want what he has. We want to be able to rule. We want to be rulers, not him. This nerd, whatever he is, right? What do they do? Well, they kill him. Well, they plot to kill him, but of course, they don’t actually kill him. Why don’t they kill him, by the way? Well, they have their reasons, but God has his reason—because he wants Joseph to be a type of Jesus. And if he’s killed, you know, the typology sort of ends.

So but what they do is they’re going to kill him. They say, “Well, let’s just sell him into slavery.” They throw him in a hole. He’s buried. He’s dead. I mean, in terms of the story or the narrative, he’s dead. They throw him in a hole. He’s buried. Then he’s brought out of the hole to become what? To be sold into slavery. And as a result of being a good servant or slave, what happens? He gets exalted to the right hand of the Pharaoh.

And through him and his agency, Pharaoh and Egypt converts to Christian—converts to the God of the scriptures. And this is really simply a picture of the whole world and what’s going to happen with Jesus. That’s how Genesis ends. It begins with creation and fall and it ends with a brand new story and a new creation in the empire that’s going to feed the whole world.

Well, what is that a picture of? That’s picture of Jesus, right? He’s killed, right? He gets brought up, but he’s a servant, right? So now he’s a servant. He comes to earth as a servant. As a servant, he dies. He gets thrown into prison, whatever it is. He’s raised up out of prison, right? He’s resurrected. He’s seated at the right hand of the father, right? And he rules from there and all the world will be converted.

He tells us to go preach the gospel. And everybody’s going to believe this wonderful story that God’s calling to himself. And that’s going to be most people in history.

So, Joseph is a picture of Jesus. That’s why he doesn’t literally die. But, but see what the significance of the story is. Jacob is telling the 12 tribes, you want something. You want the glory that Joseph has. You can’t get it, so you kill for it.

You see, again, what’s the problem? The problem is not Joseph in his dreams. The problem is interior to the heart of sinful man, fallen man. And now James is writing to Christians. They’ve been saved. But we still battle with those same desires. We want to be better than everybody else. And if we can’t get it—and we almost never can. There’s only one person in a particular group that’s better than everybody else.

We can’t get it, then we want to tear them down. We want to—we do all kinds of weird rebellious things because of it. And that’s what James is saying. He says, “Your problem is these sinful desires.”

And what were their desires? Well, he’s told us in chapter 3. The desires he’s talking about—selfish ambition, envy of the leadership and particularly in the context of the church. So they desire a position of glory. They desire rule and authority. And remember those things aren’t bad in and of themselves. God wants us to have glory. He wants the church to have power and authority from him. But he wants us to obtain that not through grasping, fighting, killing. He wants us to obtain that by what he’ll tell us here in a couple of minutes: by humbling ourselves before God. But he wants us blessed. He wants us to have those blessings.

The question is that they’re sinful desires because we don’t want them the way he wants them. He tells us about them.

So he teaches that the battles within the church he relates them to the rise and dominance of sinful passions. These passions are a lust for power. Popularity is another one, right? You want to be popular. You’re not popular. So, how do you get more popular? You try to be better, nicer. You can’t do it. So, what do you do next? You tear down the popular kids. You tell people how crummy they are, right?

And this is what James is talking about here. Very practical stuff for a church and very practical for us as individuals as well.

He then warns us—he doesn’t, but Paul does in the letter to the Galatians. In case you’re saying, “Yeah, that’s me.” And you should be because that’s kind of what we’re all like at times. Understand that Galatians 5:21 tells you that envy and murders, drunkenness, revelries, and the like. He says, “I’ve told you before, just as I also tell you and told you in times past that those who practice such things will not inherit the kingdom of God.”

You don’t get to the kingdom through those mechanisms. And in fact, if you continue and have a life dominated by those kind of practices, you’re not going to be in the kingdom. You’re going to be outside of the kingdom, right? You’re not going to be part of Jesus’s people. You’re going to be cut off. Okay? And that’s what he warns us about.

James then critiques their prayers. He says, “Well, the problem is you want, but instead of asking, you just grasp.” So, first of all, he critiques their prayer times. And the first thing he says is for most of you, like this, you don’t pray at all. You know, if you’re not praying and seeking these things appropriately, the glory from serving God and his kingdom, well, that’s a problem.

He says prayer is how you’re supposed to accomplish a lot of this stuff. You’re not praying at all. And then he says, when you do actually pray, you pray—you ask it. You ask for what you ask for in the wrong way, for your own pleasure.

Now, what are they supposed to be praying for? In this epistle, what has he already told them? God will give you this if you pray for it. Wisdom, right? Ask from God. He freely gives us wisdom. How do I relate to somebody and I’ve got this envious feeling? How do I become, you know, more gifted for the kingdom? How do I accomplish better things for you, Christ? And we’re supposed to have wisdom to do that.

But if we ask for wisdom just to get political advantage, that’s bad.

So, he critiques our prayer life in two different ways.

Now, this is Ascension Sunday, right? And remember what we said last week about meekness. The answer to all of this personal desire stuff is meekness. Meekness is not weakness. It’s being humble before God and seeking his kingdom and being governed by him. The man who wrote a grammar of the New Testament, Moulton, said this: “Meekness in popular usage has lost its nobility. The Greek word describes a strong man’s self-discipline and a wise man’s humility. One who is strong and knows it is not jealous of rivals or frenzied with partisanship for a cause that God will prosper.”

So how do you avoid that, you know, wanting what everybody else has, that kind of rivalry thing? You do it by meekness. And you do it by a meekness that understands your power, your strength, your value to God in his kingdom. It’s a strength that is strong.

Where does that strength come from? It comes from an awareness of what a lot of churches will celebrate this coming Thursday. The Ascension. The Ascension is an essential part of the gospel of Jesus Christ. We sang all these songs today. We’ll sing more about the Ascension of Christ. It’s very important. And the American church has primarily forgotten about it. And we’re left just with Resurrection, which is good—forgiveness of sins—but without Ascension.

What’s Ascension? Ascension is the culmination of the gospel of Jesus Christ. The gospel from some people’s—our church’s perspective—for years is the Ascension of the Savior King to the throne. Okay? Jesus died for our sins, was raised up, but then was he ascended 40 days later to the right hand of the Father. Why? He’s placed there to rule until all his enemies be made his footstool, through the proclamation of the gospel and through deeds of love and kindness.

The Ascension—the purpose of the Ascension is the session of Jesus, which means he’s sitting as a judge sits, evaluating and passing judgments. And the purpose of his session is the victory of his love, his mercy, his kingdom throughout the whole earth. That’s the purpose by which he rules, right? Until all his enemies be made his footstool so that all might rejoice in the blessings of salvation and kingdom life in the church.

That’s the purpose. And he’s ascended to the right hand.

Now, when he ascended, he was God-man, right? Raised, incarnated, raised up after his death as God-man. And as God-man, he went to the throne of God. And what does he do there? Well, he rules. But who is he? He brought humanity into the throne room of God. And so we have all these texts that post-Ascension, we rule with God.

Where is your citizenship? It is in heaven. The Bible says. How is it in heaven? Because we’re united to Jesus Christ who is at the right hand of the Father. What does that tell you about your rule and authority? That’s why in Revelation it says that we have the rod of Christ’s power against the enemies of his kingdom. You and I, boys and girls, men and women, you and I are seated with Christ at the right hand of the Father. Humanity has been raised up to its purpose, and its purpose is to exercise godly dominion over the world.

Now, if you get a sense of the Ascension and its implications for history, and even more importantly in terms of this sermon, the implications of who you are in Christ. You’re more than conquerors. Humanity has been brought into the throne room, and redeemed humanity now rules for God in the world.

Now, we don’t do it with guns. We do it with prayers. We do it with praises. We do it with helping people. And God tells us that as we do those things for him, the world is changed. That’s how the world will be conquered, by the proclamation of the gospel of Jesus.

Now what I’m trying to get at is this. If you understand the power, the authority, the strength, the majesty, the glory that you have in Christ at the right hand of the Father because of the Ascension. If you understand that his Ascension is your ascension and that’s why your citizenship is in heaven, you don’t need to worry about rivals. You don’t need to be envious of people. You don’t need to be, you know, threatening about, you know, trying to grab this or that other thing that you want.

You should have a quiet confidence to you that avoids these sinful desires that is the very source of the fights and the problems that exist in our life.

So understanding the message of the gospel—the whole gospel, not stopping at the Resurrection and the forgiveness of sins, but moving on to identifying who we are at the right hand of Christ. An understanding of that full gospel—we can call that the full gospel. That prepares us to avoid the kind of envious jealousies, coveting that leads to fights and murder, etc.

This is what the church began to understand in the mid-30s. This is what the church grew in a knowledge of so that by the time AD 70 happened and the tremendous persecution of the Christians occurred—both by Romans and primarily by the Jews and then the Edomites come in to do their bit. When all that happens, you know, the church can rest, knowing that they’re affecting—by even their martyr deaths if necessary—the advance of the kingdom of Jesus Christ. And that’s just what happened. That’s just what happened. That’s what we need to know.

We need to know the Ascension. We need to know its significance for us. And as we come to grasp that, then we know that the destination of our lives is one of power and authority. And we don’t need to have envious rivalry against other people. All right.

Quickly now, the second source of the difficulties is found in the next verse, and this source of difficulties is friendship with the world. Right? So he says: “Adulterers and adulteresses, do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity?” That means hatred. If you’re friends with the world, it means you’re hating God. Friendship with the world is enmity against God. Whoever therefore wants to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God.

Now some people think this is actually the core verse. What are you going to be—a friend of the world or a friend of God? And he tells them, “Double-minded men, don’t be like that. You have to have a singular devotion to be a friend of God like Abraham, your father in the faith. Right? You got to be a friend of God. And you can’t do that if you want to be friends with the world.

If you want to use the world’s pragmatic policies and the world’s way of evaluating friendship, the world’s way of getting ahead in business, all the fallen world’s ways of doing things—that is enmity against God.

Now in our particular world a lot of it’s informed by Christianity, right? So you know, you have to understand that by “world” here it doesn’t mean businessmen. In this country, we formed by the gospel for the most part. I’ve always thought it was funny that people get upset if the church is administered like a business. Why shouldn’t it be? If the business practices are godly practices, of course God wants us taking care of our economics here in this church properly, right? Of course it’s good to learn, you know, from Christian businessmen, ways of doing things better.

So he’s not talking about business. He’s talking about the fallen world and its way of doing things specifically. He’s talking about the world of the zealots here primarily—that you’re learning their ways. And you can’t use zealot ways to bring in the kingdom of God. And if you try to do that, have a friend with those revolutionary missionaries and then also be a friend with God, no. It doesn’t work.

He says, “You’re an adulteress.” Now, what does that mean? Now he’s using Old Testament language, right? God is married to us. We’re his bride. We come to this wedding table every week, right? We’re the bride of Christ. And what—and as a bride, he goes on to say that the Spirit zealously yearns for you.

The Spirit of God—and there’s different ways to interpret this, but I think that’s the right way to think of it. God’s Spirit zealously yearns for you to stop your sinful envying. Yes. But more than that, he is jealous of you, right? Our God is a jealous God.

Understand that jealousy is not a bad thing. Sinful jealousy is, but that’s not what God has. He has a proper jealousy. If you’re jealous for your husband or wife and try to defend them against attacks from somebody, that’s not a bad thing. That’s just what God does.

So God is jealous. But what he’s talking about here is just like he talked about in the Old Testament prophets. When God’s people start to befriend the world and its ways and try to do that still married to God, you’re an adulteress. You need to be wholeheartedly committed to your husband, Yahweh—Jesus, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. That’s your husband. And you need to be wholeheartedly committed because he is wholeheartedly committed.

And he will brook no rivals for your affections. He will brook no rivals for what you want to do with your life and how you’re going to run your life. If you’re not running at 100 percent for Jesus, he says you’re an adulteress. And that’s not a good place to be in the Bible. You know, women or men that committed adultery were stoned. They were judged. These are strong words from James. These people are feeling kind of threatened by them as they should be, because they’re doing horrible things.

They’re engaging in, you know, party politics and this sort of stuff in the context of the church. They may be actually murdering people, and they’re doing this because they’re friends with the world rather than wholeheartedly committed to God.

He says, “You can’t do that.”

“Or do you think that the scriptures say in vain the Spirit who dwells in us yearns jealously?” He says—Philip’s paraphrase puts it this way: “What does it say? It says, ‘The Spirit of Passionate Jealousy is the Spirit he has caused to live in us.’ The Holy Spirit is a spirit of passionate jealousy for your fidelity. He loves you and he wants you to love him and him alone. And when we’re friends with the world, we’re committing adultery. And when we do that, you know, boy, it’s time to repent.”

So the second source of the problems—the first source is sinful desires. The second is worldliness. And the third source is ultimately pride.

So now he gets down to the section where he calls them to repentance. But he gives more grace. He’s got a Spirit who zealously yearns for us. He warns us, “Don’t be friends with the world and try to be friends with me, too. You have to be my wife, not the wives of a couple different people.” And it’s frightening to us to hear that kind of language.

But he then gives us the assurance: “But he gives more grace, right?” The Spirit zealously yearns for your devotion, but he gives more grace. He knows you’re sinful. He knows you’re framed—that you’re but dust. And he gives grace to you. But it’s a grace that is accompanied—a grace that is in relationship to repentance, which is exactly what he talks about next.

The passage essentially concludes with calls to repentance. Therefore:

“So here’s the end of the matter. Submit to God. Resist the devil and he will flee from you. Draw near to God and he’ll draw near to you.”

So at the end we had the flesh, we had the world, now we’ve got the devil. And specifically, he’s telling them: God abases the proud but draws near to the humble. Right? He says, “God resists the proud but gives grace to the humble.”

Now in your text, he says that basically twice, and in the middle are all the imperatives telling you to repent. But they’re begun and ended with the promise that God gives grace to the humble. So all of this is an explanation of how to humble yourself before God. How you’re going to have humility.

So this is what we do. Therefore, submit to God. Resist the devil and he’ll flee from you. No problem. You’re stronger than him. Just resist him. He’ll run away from you.

Draw near to God and he’ll draw near to you. Right? So we come near and he’ll run to greet us. The prodigal son, when he turns and draws near to the Father. The Father races out to greet him. That’s how God is with us.

Cleanse your hands, you sinners. Stop doing things wrong and purify your hearts, you double-minded. That’s instructive. Stop doing things wrong and then cleanse your minds as well. Purify your thoughts. We’re Greeks, we think, well, the problem is thoughts. Well, no. Desires happen through actions. So he begins by saying, stop doing bad things. And then he says, stop having the wrong attitudes, heart attitude, or your mind.

And it works that way. We don’t wait for a change of heart before we start doing what’s right and stop doing what’s wrong. You don’t train your children that way. I hope you train them to be godly hypocrites. You know, who try to do things right even if they don’t feel like it. Some people call it hypocrisy. It’s not. It’s godliness. You do what’s right. You close your mouth, right, if you need to.

If you’re name calling your brother or sister, I don’t care what your heart is yet. And it’s an amazing thing because as you do the right stuff, your heart will change, too. That’s the way it works. And that’s why the order here is “Cleanse your hands, purify your hearts.” You’re double-minded. You can’t be double-minded and please God.

“Lament, mourn, weep. Let your laughter be turned repentance to mourning and your joy to gloom.”

Okay. So when we repent, we should—as we work our way through stopping doing sinful actions, stopping having sinful thoughts, it’s accompanied by a deep sense of remorse that we hit our brother or that we yelled at our parents or that we, you know, slandered a church member or that we had murderous thoughts toward a judge in Eugene. We repent of that. We weep, we mourn. We cry out to God for grace. That’s what we’re supposed to do.

Lament, mourn, weep. Let your laughter be turned to mourning, your joy to gloom.

And then at the end: “Humble yourselves in the sight of the Lord, and he will lift you up.”

What a delightful end to the message. Right at the end, what’s the last thing he tells to us in this section of 10 verses? He’ll lift you up. He promises to raise you up. You feel bad about your sins—great. That’s good. Understand that God is a God of blessing and promise. He will lift you up. He will lift you up. We don’t need to fear that our Dad is too severe somehow. No. Grace, right, is what it’s all about.

The grace is stronger than every other instinct. His love for us and that grace says that if we humble ourselves before him, before his authorities, his people, do the right things, think the right thoughts, develop the right emotions—you know, God is right there with us the whole time. And he is lifting us up. Where? Just up out of our sins? No. He’s restoring us to the right hand of the Father in Christ. He’s reminding us of who we are. He’s reminding us of the victory that we doubted and so we ended up doing all those silly, stupid, sinful things, right?

He reminds us of our authority and power—ascended with the Lord Jesus Christ to the right hand of the Father.

May the Lord God grant us think a little bit on Thursday about Ascension, what it means to get rid of the sins that are the cause James tells us of wars, fights, murders, sinful actions. All of this is solved ultimately by an understanding of the Ascension of us and our Savior.

Let’s pray. Lord God, we thank you for this text. Help us to understand it. Help us to meditate upon it. Help us to see the clear message in it. Help us to train it to our children this week. Teach them and train them in it. Lord God, bless us with a sense of who we are, united to the Lord Jesus Christ at your right hand. Bless us, Father, with the remainder of our worship service that we might indeed continue to be built up in that knowledge, that we would not sin against you. In Jesus name we pray. Amen. Amen.