1182. What Do You Really Want? pt. 2

Welcome to The Daily Platform from Bob Jones University in Greenville, South Carolina. This week on The Daily Platform, we're featuring sermons preached from the Bob Jones University 2021 Bible Conference with the theme of sanctification. In today's sermon, Pastor Will Galkin will be finishing the sermon from yesterday from James 4, 1-10. As in our day and age, we talk much of God's grace and his forgiveness, but can I tell you, God is holy and he hates idols and he hates your idolatry and he is opposed to it. And that is a good thing.

By the way, there's just those two choices on the shelf. Are you going to pursue God or are you going to please yourself and eventually going to realize that God's not going to give you your idols, right? You have not because you ask not, or you ask him this that you may consume it upon your own lust. It's not like God's going to give you your idol. So you've got to go to the world and the world loves making idols and the world, the world system, it's the collective flesh. It's really the passions of unregenerate man who have come up ways to produce the lust, the eyes and the lust, the lust, the flesh and the pride of life in such an effective way that you can even get it next day. And they dispense their idols and we take their idols and we show up to a chapel like this and we're like, okay, sing a song.

Okay. Open my Bible, take some notes, but I just can't wait to get to my idol. I just can't wait to get to that thing that kind of sues over. Novocain shots the ache of my soul.

I just can't wait to get back to those things. But, but then there are times of sobriety that we just, we kind of wake up spiritually like it doesn't work. It doesn't satisfy.

This world is broken. You know what happens is our addiction to these idols, it, it, um, we lose our spiritual edge. We don't talk about God. We talk about our successes on this earth. We don't talk to others about Christ. We, we talk about our possessions.

Where are you at with your idols? This conflicted soul probably has outward manifestations all through that text back into James three, the bitter envy and the strife, the confusion, the every evil work, the lusting, the killing, the fighting, the prayerlessness. God is against your idols. He's hostile towards our divided heart, but he's jealous for our whole heart.

He pursues us. You see the latter half of verse four, no, you not. Do you think the scripture says in vain verse five, the spirit that dwells in us lost it to envy. This is a very difficult verse to translate, let alone interpret. I mean, some people think it's the hardest or the second hardest text in all the New Testament that the first issue is that do you think the scripture, so it's referring to the Old Testament.

James is the first book written in the New Testament. So do you think the scriptures, the Old Testament says in vain that, but the problem is there's no verse that can be found in the Old Testament that makes this exact statement, but rather than looking for exact verse, I think it's not a direct quote of the OT, but instead it's this overall general truth really explain the jealous nature of God. I mean, you just go throughout the Old Testament and especially through the prophets and you see God's jealousy for his own people, but then the actual phrase, the spirit that dwells in us lost it to envy can be interpreted in two ways. It could either mean that the spirit that God's made in us actually has this propensity to constantly lost for all these other things or the second option, which I am more inclined, is that the God, his spirit, jealously longs for us that we'd be wholly committed to the father from, from really an interpretive standpoint, from an exegetical standpoint, you put out the options and you just kind of like, wow, he could go either way. But I think when you drop it into context, I mean, when you go back and you see that he actually called us adulterers and adulteresses, I think that the context lends itself to a reading that he yearns jealously over the spirit that he's made to dwell in us. God is jealous for us and it's a good thing. He's hostile against our idols and he's jealous for our whole heart.

Do you know that God's jealousy is proper? Whenever I think of the word jealous, an image comes to mind from the Twin Falls County Fair. I grew up in Idaho and the biggest thing we had going right after potatoes was the county fair. And I remember one time, I mean, we're, it's, we're, it's the eighties. Do you, does anyone here know anything about the eighties?

Take out your parents' pictures. That's the eighties. The girls would wear their hair way up.

They use like a half can of Aqua nut hair spray and it rained and all the girls' hair is down and the whole place smells like hairspray. And I remember standing by the zipper ride. Do you guys know the zipper ride?

I still see it every once while. And the zipper ride, I'm standing in line thinking, why am I doing that? And all of a sudden commotion breaks out. And then I see these two girls that went to our school, our Christian school, these two girls, and they're in a cat fight and they're fighting over a boyfriend or something. And they're just like, rare. Have you ever seen two girls really fight?

Happens all the time here, Bob Jones. And I just remember going, Ooh, I think jealousy, I have, I have zero healthy connotations of jealousy except for God. Do you know why it's proper for God to be jealous? Because he cannot break the first commandment.

God exists for God. My known sake, Isaiah 48, my known sake will I do it for, for how should my name be polluted? I will not give my glory to another thou shalt not have, thou shalt have no other gods before me and don't make graven images. Don't, don't create these idols. Don't bow down myself to them, nor serve them.

You finished the phrase. For I, the Lord thy God, am a jealous God. And God is jealous for you. Have you walked the Christian life long enough to be thankful that God is jealous for you? He hunts you down. How many of you are thankful God hunts you down? Spurgeon, it's not disrespectful. He referred to God as the hound of heaven.

I remember when traveling with Dr. Pettit in evangelism, we went to a church in East Tennessee and the pastor there had been there numbers and numbers of years. And I was just fascinated to talk to him. I said, so what do you do? Do you take a day off? And he goes, I try to slow down on Monday. And so what I do on Sunday after the service is I take my hounds.

I said, you're what? He goes, my hound dogs. I take them, I let them just run.

And I just stay out there and I kind of wrap up the week and I pray and I just kind of rejoice. And I listen to those dogs. And when they get there, they get there, they get on the scent of a coon and they just take off. And I mean, as he's talking, I just, also I remembered a really dumb book. Who's ever read Where the Red Fern Grows? That's a stupid book. You cry when you read that book. It's a dumb book. Big Dan, Little Ann. Don't, don't get me started.

I might, I might cry here. They're jumping the creek. They're circling trees. Those dogs are on the scent and they won't stop until they get their coon. How many of you are glad that God chases his own, his own sheep that goes astray again and again and again? Oh, he's against your idol.

But he's going after you. God knows there'll be no rest in the heart of his creation if the creator is not reigning supreme. He's like a husband with a doltress wife and the husband's going after and going after and going after. He's like a father going after the prodigal looking and looking and looking. You see God's grace for our divided heart. Oh, he's hostile towards our idols and yet he's jealous for our soul and he is gracious to work in us a whole heart. Look at verse six, but he giveth more grace. Oh, he resists and convicts us, but he pursues us and he empowers us. This verse, it's just a repeat of Proverbs three verse 34. God's grace is greater than our sin. Oh, our spiritual adultery, it deserves rejection.

I mean, how many times would you let your spouse cheat on you? How many times before you just walk out the door and yet God's grace is exactly opposite of what we deserve. Sometimes when we hear greater than our sin, I think we think about it's greater than the penalty of sin.

And I get this, I understand what you mean. Like I deserve hell and yet he wants to give me the glories of an eternal relationship with him, but it's deeper than that. It's a grace that's greater, like a greater kind. It's like a whole nother law.

It's like better. It's deeper and it's stronger than the power of our sin. The law of gravity keeps a million pound jet anchored to the sphere. But a greater law of flight kicks in when they push up the throttle and those turbo fans kick in and they go about 175 miles per hour and the law of flight kicks in and soon there's a greater law, something more powerful than gravity and God's grace is greater than our sin. Where sin abounded grace that much more abound. You see, I'm talking to you, you know your idols, you know your depression, you know your broken relationships and it could be you've heard this over and over and you're discouraged.

I just want you to know something. God's going after you. If you have ears to hear this morning, the hound of heaven's coming for your soul and if you have ears to hear, he's telling you, my grace is sufficient. I want to give you a grace that's more than your idol. I want to give you grace that's greater than your sin and yet it demands a response. Wherefore God resist the problem. It gives grace, the humble. He says, it's not like these havesies. It's not like, oh yeah, I need God to kind of do a work but I want to keep my idol.

No, you can't go in two directions. And here James, he's the exhorter and there's like 40 exhortations in his book and if this was Paul, Paul would have just kind of launched into this Christology of grace and he would have just said, you know this grace is found because of the death and burial and the resurrection of Jesus, not James. James is this flat out. He said, okay, you want grace, then get on your face and brings us to really the prescription for our divided heart. You see every demand that God makes is met with his all sufficient grace. He has more than enough grace to enable every believer to live a committed life, but it goes to the lowly of heart. It's almost like James gives us a little booklet and this booklet has three different parts, but he has an introduction.

He's got a conclusion and he hands us this little booklet. In fact, if you're here this morning and God's stirring your heart, you know what you ought to do is you ought to go find a quiet place this morning or this afternoon and you ought to just think about your idol. Maybe even write down these are my idols and you go to verse seven and you'd pray your way through these. You'd say, Lord, I need grace.

You give grace the humble, so Lord help me be humble. That introduction to that little booklet, that prescription booklet, he says this, submit yourselves to God. Submission to God.

Where there's no submission, there's no humility. Submission is the act of the will. It's not my will but thine be done. It's like you've been loaded up with all the grace that's necessary to obey and now it's time to obey. You've got all of God leaning towards you. His initiative is going your direction, but now it's your responsibility to take that grace and obey the commands of God and so you're going to submit yourself to God. You're going to place your desires under God's desires. It's really what you did at salvation. If you are a child of God, you remember the time he said, I can't save myself and my pride. I can't save myself. I humble myself before God and ask that you'd save me through the finished work of Jesus Christ alone. If we were to illustrate it, you've got your desires and God has his desires and there's conflict because your desires are contradicting God's desires. You know, I had a light bulb moment like four years ago.

I was looking through this passage for another context and I was thinking about one of my idols and the light bulb was this. God will never submit to you. You know that? Never. He can't.

He won't. It was like a light bulb for me. I thought of an idol that it's just not God's will for me to ever have.

Most idols, it could be that you're supposed to have them in a different time. This is an idol God never wanted me to have. I just remember going, I was just like, Lord, forgive me. And I volitionally mentally submit. I may not feel like it. My emotions may not yet be caught up, but I yield to your desires.

You take this little prescription book and the introduction tells us about submission, but then we see part one is to declare which side we're on. He says in verse seven into eight, resist the devil. He will flee from you. Draw nigh to God. He will draw nigh to you. Resist the devil.

Just because you submitted to God, just because you prayed after a Bible conference service, just because you went to some service or a professor was teaching or you read something or watched a cool little video and your heart was emotionally stirred. It doesn't mean that the fight is now over. No, he says, resist the devil. Submit yourself to God, but keep on fighting. How many of you wish there was some little pills we could take and never struggle in sin again? Raise your hand, right? Pass the Kool-Aid.

I'm drinking. I can't tell you how many times the best of intentions. I prayed with the best of intentions and I stood up and the temptation was staring at me right there.

Who's ever been there? But he says, you can resist now. Why? Because the God who was resisting you in your idolatry is now with you and fighting that battle against the enemy. Resist the devil and he will flee from you. You see the devil would attack trying to seduce by putting the evil desires. Be sober, be vigilant. Your adversary, the devil is a roaring lion seeking whom he may devour.

Be ready. Put the whole arm of God. Finally, brethren be strong in the Lord, the power of his might, but on the whole armor of God, you see God resists our pride and idolatry and we submit to him.

Guess what? God through his spirit and his word, we have all the means, everything that pertains to life and godliness in Christ Jesus and he will flee from you. Temptations come in seasons. I can remember as a college student, I just want you to know, I came to college. I went to Bible college, Wisconsin, Northland. I came so messed up, so broken, so, so many idols, so many addictions.

There were seasons. My sophomore, junior year, I was so worn out by myself. I remember one time waking up, like waking up, it was like my junior year, I was just so weary of my own failures. I just, I slammed my elbows on my knees and I just said, God, if you don't deliver me today, I'm going to die. How many thankful that God's greater than our sin? Oh, your idol's big, but God's bigger. Resist the devil, draw near to him. You can come close to the Holy One because of the cleansing work of Jesus Christ. He made a way, Hebrews 10, he's the perfect sacrifice. He's the perfect high priest. You see, when we move towards God, I mean, I mean, we turn towards God, he's walking, we walk, he runs, we run, he flies. Draw an eye to God. It's the prodigal, the most beautiful picture. I've heard, I was listening to a sermon series on the prodigal son, the most beautiful picture is that, that son, he's got his head down. He can't even look up. And his dad plows into him with a hug. I don't know where you're at.

I don't know what idol you're dragging. Go to the father. Do whatever it takes. Get up in the morning earlier, go to bed, like, like turn off the devices at a certain time and get three by five cards and climb in your bunk and just read the scripture. Go to bed with the dwell out app, just pounding the scripture into your brain.

Do whatever it takes. I remember when I was here in seminary, I set up a class with God. I just broken Shire. There was a prayer room and I just had said a certain time at three. I had three hours in the course of the week. I, it was in between classes and I didn't study.

I'd just go over there, just set up a class with God, get notebooks and start journaling through sermons to listen to sermon series on things. I was just kind of having this flashback, just driving in this morning. I pounded out Romans six, seven and eight with Dr. Menick on cassette tapes.

You guys remember cassettes? I've listened to one sermon. I put it back in. I'd listened to it twice because you know what? I just felt, well, I remember reading about Martin Luther comes to Roman seven and he slams his elbows down on the taxi goes, you will yield.

That's where I was. I was just desperate. New Testament examples of people who want God, they climb up trees, they push through crowds, they touch this garment, they rip up roofs, they weep at his feet. Do whatever it takes to draw near to God.

Just declare what side you're on. Just submit yourself to God. Resist the devil.

Draw near to God. But then not only do we declare which side we're on, we deal with our sin completely. Cleanse your hands, these sinners, purify your hearts. You double minded, clean up your sinful actions. That's cleanse your hands.

It's like take responsibility for your own sin. Like go clear your conscience. Go seriously, go deal with whatever is bothering you in your relationships with others. I mean, seriously, go, go deal with the things that you stole. Go, go take care of that. Restore those things. I mean, just do whatever it takes. Delete the apps.

Delete the friend carefully. Be radical. One Puritan said, crush the tunnels. Don't let there be any escape back.

No little secret path to that treasure that so offends God. I had this guy come up to me and he goes, hey Will, I'm just really strong with like looking at porn on my phone and I just thought maybe like you could keep me accountable and so Will, will you keep me accountable? And that was my job, by the way.

I was, I was working at a camp and that was my job. I was, I was like the camp staff counselor and he's like, can I, can you keep me accountable? And I said, no.

I mean, he kind of goes, huh? I said, seriously, I'm not going to keep you accountable, dude. Why not? Well, how many other people right now are keeping you accountable? Like five, six.

How's it working out? I said, throw away the phone. Go throw it away right now. There's a dumpster. Go throw it away.

He goes, no man, it's like 700 bucks. I said, exactly. I think Jesus would probably said, it's it's better to go to heaven with no phones than to go to hell with a phone.

They crushed the tunnel. Like clean up your sinful actions. Like, like be radical, but purify your hearts.

You double minded, like get down to this level that we're talking about. Lord, what do I want? Lord, let the word renew my heart that I love you more than anything else. Oh Lord, help me treasure you greater than everything else. Blessed are the pure in heart. Lord, let me deal with my sin completely, but then determined to have true repentance. It's been a long time since we've been afflicted, mourn and wept where our laughter turned to morning and our joy to heaviness. You know what? We're giddy about our sin.

We're very carefree and nonchalant. You know, I've got some friends that poke me deeply. They poke me about materialism. They poke me about moral purity. They poke me about fear of man and arrogance. I got some dudes that get right down to the level and they just go, this was about 20 years ago. I'm still friends with this guy and I were talking on a landline.

Do you guys know what landlines are? They're right by the stack of cassettes and I'm talking to him and we were talking about something and he goes, so what about this with this, this? And I go, oh yeah, do that, do that. And I asked the Lord to forgive me. And he asked a question that pierced me so deeply.

I remember hanging up that phone and walking out into the woods and just weeping. When's the last time you just wept before the Lord because of your idolatry? Like you really want to love Jesus, like your affections want to love Jesus but your affections are so wrapped up in something that breaks and cannot satisfy.

And when's the last time you just, you were afflicted, you mourned, you wept. It brings us to the conclusion of our little booklet, the prescription booklet. Remember the introduction, submit to God and then part one, declare what side you're on, part two, deal with your sin completely, part three, determined to have true repentance. And then this conclusion, well it kind of goes full circle. Just like the desires of my heart produce relational brokenness which produces desires of my heart that produces relational brokenness.

Guess what this does? If there's a humility, there's a closeness to God and if there's a closeness to God you see a wonder and well there's a submission and then there's a dealing with sin and then there's a closeness to God and there's a cycle that starts to take place as you just walk with the Lord, this humility with the Lord. Verse 10 was he say, humble yourself from the side of the Lord and he will lift you up. That's all that the Christian life is. It's just a humble walk with God, right?

What does the Lord require of you? But to walk humbly. I mean it's just like day after day. Every, every sanctification passage is just a facet of the same thing. I mean you walk in the spirit and you will not fulfill the lust of the flesh or abide in the vine.

I mean you go to every single one of these sanctification passages and what do you see? It just keeps on pushing you towards a relationship with God found only in Jesus Christ. You see your idol this morning will humble yourself from the side of the Lord and he will lift you up. You see a brokenness of your own heart come to the Lord. He will make you whole.

You see something not right. Run to the Lord. He'll find you.

Humble yourself from the side of the Lord and he will lift you up. The kid turned 18 and he just left. He didn't want any of his parents stuff. He didn't want any of his parents faith.

He just left. No goodbye and over the next four or five years there's not one text message, not one I love you, not one phone call. Every day those broken parents pray for their boy. Every day they weep at the breakfast table.

Every day part of the heart aches. One day there's a knock at the door and the dad opens up the door and sees his son who's aged about 20 years and five and the first words out of this kid, the dad can't even hear the words barely. This boy just weeps and the dad grabs him and he pulls his son's head on his chest and the boy's just weeping. I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry. And dad had a joy. I mean dad just turns to go get mom like he's crying and he's got joy and he goes to get mom and the son is so overwhelmed he falls on the he doesn't even go into the house. He just falls right there and mom and dad come back and he's on the ground.

This boy's on the ground weeping. I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry.

What do those parents do? I know God does. Humble yourself inside the Lord and he will lift you up. So how many of you know some of your idols but you really need God's grace?

Would you lift your hand? Well then aren't you glad we don't have to go through a priest? Aren't you glad we can go through the high priest Jesus? Aren't you glad God's grace enough for this moment right here? So humble yourself in the side of the Lord and he will lift you up. You've been listening to the conclusion of a sermon by Pastor Will Galkin from the 2021 Bob Jones University Bible Conference. Thanks for listening and join us next time as we'll hear more soul-stirring sermons on The Daily Platform.