Bible Talks - Sunday Night Church
Series: New Preacher's Night · Talk No. 1
Bible Talk - James 4
Sunday, 28 August 2005
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This passage of James deals with realising the truth about ourselves and our relationship with God, as confronting as that may be.
This issue of finding out the truth is presented in the first of the Matrix movies, where the main character, Neo, has been presented with the chance of discovering the truth that, the world as he knows it, is a fake.
Morpheus is giving neo the choice to find out the truth about the world and himself.
[play clip from the Matrix- red pill/blue pill]
I guess one of the most confronting things is to look at ourselves in the mirror and we what we’re really like.
Morpheus is giving Neo the choice. To take the blue pill is to walk away, forget this ever happened and continue living your comfortable little life until the day you die, and that’s that.
Or to take the red pill, to discover the real world, to know the truth and lie you have been living. To see just how deep the rabbit hole goes…
Well, James poses a similar situation, and I’m going to be Morpheus, and ask you the question.
I want to ask you if you are willing to find out the truth. The truth about yourself, the world and God. And I want to ask you if you’re willing to respond to it, or do you just want to return to your comfortable lives and forget the whole thing ever happened.
So what brought Neo to come to this decision?
Well, he had come to suspect that the world he was living in was a fake, and that he too, was a fake.
Like Neo, we need to come to that realisation. If you haven’t already, you need to realise that there is something very wrong with the world. We are surrounded by wars, poverty, death, pain, disasters…
Ever wondered why?
This world, I guess you could say is a fake. We can see it all around us in society, in marketing, in trends…
It’s all just temporary and will fade.
But like the world, there is can also be something fake about us. As a teenager, and I’m sure many of you would agree, that there can be a lot of pressure to be like everyone else. We all have, or will have experienced it, and there can be that temptation to put on an act just to fit in.
So why is it that we try and fit in? To try and be accepted? Why do we act the way we do?
Well James tells us. In verses 1-4 he lists off some things that we, and the world in general, have wrong with us.
Verse one tells us that the causes of fights among us, whether that be squabbles with you brother or sister, or world wars, the cause is our desires.
This is the first of two main points that we can draw from this passage.
1) Our relationships with others [and ourselves?]
Our desires, or passions are the root cause of fights and quarrels among us. As humans, we are, by nature, selfish beings. We are always after what we want and trying to get our way. It is always our opinion that’s right. Second half of verse 1: “Don’t they [fights and quarrels] come from your desires that battle within you?”
Is that how it is?
Think about any time you’ve had a fight with someone, and think about what started it? My guess is that you were after something you wanted and so was the other person.
See, us humans think we’re pretty smart.
Some of you may know, but I’m involved in the Duke of Edinburgh awards scheme which involves, among other things, completing some hikes. I was on one such hike last holidays, a gold level one. It was a four day hike from Katoomba to Kanangra. Now my walking group was myself and a good friend and some other guys from my grade who we don’t always see eye to eye with. On the second day, we set off from our campsite and went a bit too far too the right and missed the track. To cut a long story short, we wandered and argued and bickered about which way to go and where we had gone wrong. My friend worked out that we had to back track, but the others were convinced that their idea, to go in the opposite direction, was absolutely, 100% correct. So sure they were that they refused to listen to any reasoning about which direction to take.
Now after be lost for about two hours, I can tell you that tempers were wearing a little thin.
We didn’t quite get to the point that James describes where he says “You want something but you don’t get it. You kill and covet, but you cannot have what you want. You quarrel and fight.”
Those on the hike both had different opinions and wanted everyone to follow them. And they fought over it. It wasn’t an all out brawl, and no, we didn’t kill each other, but it did cause an argument.
But why? Why do we fight so much, and covet, and steal and start wars?
Well, James lays it out clearly and simply. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again; there is a battle happening within us. Our passions are waging a war, struggling for control over us. According to James, it is because of this that we fight so much, that we bicker, squabble, argue, kill…
And that struggle between our desires brings us to the second point I want to draw from this passage, that is;
2) Our relationship with God.
We’ve talked about the causes of fights and how we relate to each other, and now we can look at how we treat and relate to God.
Firstly, how do we tend to relate to others? By talking to them. If I want to get to know someone, I spend time with them, talking. And this is one issue that James deals with and brings to our attention. V.2b: “…you do not have, because you do not ask God. When you ask, you do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives, that you may spend what you get on your pleasures.”
Now to me this seems like our desires causing another spot of trouble. Part of a potential problem is that we sometimes don’t ask God for our needs. We don’t always pray regularly and prayer can become a last resort as opposed to a first resource.
The other part of the potential problem is that when we do pray, we can fall into the trap of letting our passions or desires get the better of us and we ask God for things with the wrong motives. I don’t know about you, but I don’t know how many times before an exam or something I, or people around me have gone “please God, help me get a good mark” or “please God, don’t let it rain today”.
…Back to my hike [such a useful source for illustrations!]. As I said, it was a four day hike last holidays…and it rained pretty much non-stop three of the four days. Now I can tell you, this was a challenging hike to start with, but hiking in the rain is just plain miserable. And it was in this situation that I heard many times, people say “Why did it have to rain this week?” One of the guys [who isn’t a Christian] took the liberty of telling some of us to “pray that the rain stops”.
This got me thinking. Because we’re so ‘us’ focussed, it’s always “Lord, please bring rain…but not today, any day but today”. I’m sure this prayer was uttered many a time on my hike, but is this how we should pray and relate to God? It strikes me as a ‘wrong motive’ that James talks about in verse three. Just because it may be inconvenient to us, we can end up praying selfishly.
James also outlines another potential problem in our relationship with God. Verse four says, “You adulterous people, don’t you know that friendship with the world is hatred toward God? Anyone who chooses to be a friend of the world becomes an enemy of God.” If we are to be friends with God, we have to keep our desires that war within us in check. We cannot serve or be friends with both God and our sinful desires or the world and its ways.
All these potential problems with ourselves and the world must be recognised by us. Like Neo, we should see that something is wrong, and we can do something about it!
So how then should we relate to God? What can we do?
Good old James gives us the solution. In verse 7 he tells us to “Submit yourselves, then, to God.”
Now ‘submit’ isn’t a word that we would tend to associate with something good nowadays. When I think of submission, my first reaction is to think of parents, or teachers, anyone who I have to obey who is in authority over me. And although we may not always like submitting to someone, it is usually for our own good. Yes, submission can bite, it can make us spiteful or begrudging. But submission to God is a little different, because he is perfect and righteous. No-one that I submit to on this earth is, but God is. If we never had to submit and had everything our own way, what sort of world and society would we live in?
For example, I submit to teachers who submit to the school, just like we all submit to the government (ultimately). We all submit to police officers. If we didn’t have to submit to anyone, we would be living in a lawless and chaotic society. It would be crazy! But submission maintains a balance of (somewhat) order.
And so, submission to God is similar, yet different. We may not always like it. What God asks of us may not fit in with our desires and plans. But we are told that submission to God leads to glorious things.
To list a few:
Verse 7: “Submit yourselves, then, to God. Resist the devil and he will flee from you.”
Verse 8: “Come near to God and he will come near to you. Wash your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded.”
And verse 9, “Grieve, mourn and wail. Change your laughter to mourning and your joy to gloom. 10Humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will lift you up.”
Submission to God equals strength against the devil. Submission to God equals a cleansing from sin and a close relationship with Him. Submission to God is coming before God in humility and being lifted up! What an amazing thing! We, selfish and self-centred beings who are so easily swayed will be lifted up by God!
Unlike the submission we might think of, submission under God doesn’t make us slaves, but free! And that freedom is unlike any other, it is freedom from sin, freedom from the world and its ways, freedom from the devil. We can have peace with God and a relationship with Him that was never before possible. We can clean ourselves of our sin, we can purify our hearts and we can be near our God.
All it takes is for us to change our ways and our attitudes. But we can’t fool God and just put on an act. Only if the change is sincere, can we receive all these things. If the change is genuine, we will, “be wretched and mourn and weep” because, if the change is true, it will effect us and change every aspect of our lives; our relationships with one another, our attitudes, and our relationship with God. But we won’t be left miserable, for God gives grace, and grace in abundance and he will, indeed, lift us up. We have the ultimate reward of heaven waiting for us
So, just wrapping up…
The root cause of fighting among us in all forms is our desires. We need to practise humility and self-control.
We need to rely on God in prayer and not let our prayers be governed by our selfish and sinful desires.
We need to submit to God and come before him in humility. It’s not a bad thing, but something that is fantastic!
And most of all, we need to respond. We need to decide where our allegiance lies, with the world? Or with God?
Because it cannot be both.
So what will you do?
Will you take the blue pill? And stay being friends of the world, enemies of God and carry on this way until you die?
Or will you be like Neo? Take the red pill, realise what you and the world are like, make the change and give your life over to God to live in freedom and eternal life with Him?
