Making Peace with God and Man

We're gonna be looking at verses one through 12 of James chapter four tonight as we continue our series through this New Testament letter, James four, one through 12. What causes quarrels and what causes fights among you? Is it not this, that your passions are at war within you? You desire and do not have, so you murder. You covet and cannot obtain, so you fight and quarrel. You do not have because you do not ask.

You ask and do not receive because you ask wrongly to spend it on your passions. You adulterous people, do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God? Therefore, whoever wishes to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God. Or do you suppose it is to no purpose that the scripture says he yearns jealously over the spirit that he has made to dwell in us, but he gives 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. Be wretched and mourn and weep. Let your laughter be turned to mourning and your joy to gloom.

Humble yourselves before the Lord and he will exalt you. Do not speak evil against one another brothers. The one who speaks against a brother or judges his brother 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 only one lawgiver and judge. He who is able to save and to destroy, but who are you to judge your neighbor? Let's pray. Father, once again, we thank you that you are a God who speaks to us and that your words are living and powerful and sharper than any two-edged sword, able even tonight to discern the thoughts and intentions of our heart. Holy Spirit, would you take these powerful words, these living words, and change our lives? Would you conform our wills to your will? Would you conform our behavior to your law, our thinking to your truth, our affections to your beauty? We pray this in Jesus' name, amen.

You can be seated. In seminary, our professors taught us to assume that if a New Testament writer addresses a particular problem, that problem was probably not some theoretical problem in the church. We can rightly assume that it was an actual problem that the writer is dealing with. If Paul, for example, repeatedly tells the Philippian church to rejoice, we can assume they must have not been rejoicing as they should have been. If Peter continues to tell his readers to endure suffering, then we can assume they must have been suffering. So in light of this interpretive principle, what must have James' audience been dealing with?

Think about the territory we've already covered in this book. In the first three chapters of his letter, James has repeatedly dealt with matters of conflict between Christians. He's addressed partiality. He's condemned neglecting the needs of others. He has warned against harsh and cruel speech.

He has called for repentance of jealousy and selfish ambition. Evidently, the readers of James' letter, whoever they were, didn't get along very well. They had conflict issues. Strife and infighting were the order of the day. You know, the presence of strife in the church is not a problem that's unique to James' time, is it?

We're all too familiar with it. Conflict is all too often present even today, so much so that a Jewish philosopher once made this conclusion about Christianity. He said, I have often wondered that persons who make boasts of professing the Christian religion, namely love, joy, peace, temperance, and charity to all men, should quarrel with such rancorous animosity and display daily towards one another such bitter hatred that this, rather than the virtues which they profess, is the readiest criteria of their faith. In other words, according to this Jewish philosopher, the way you identify Christians is who are the ones fighting so much? Jesus said, by this all people will know that you are my disciples if you have love for one another. Now, if that ought to be true of us, then we ought to do all we can to avoid quarrelsomeness, to avoid fights and disputes with our brothers and sisters in Christ. No doubt there is a time and a place to fight to the death, to die on the hill, to wage the good warfare.

But the text before us tonight reminds us that there is also a time when fighting is sinful, when dying on the hill is anything but courageous. The difference, as I hope we'll see tonight, between the noble fighting that we ought to be engaged in and this ungodly quarrelsomeness that James is dealing with, comes down to our personal ego. Why are you so full of fighting and quarreling, James asks? Because you're so full of pride.

Because you're so full of yourself. James has just addressed the inability of earthly wisdom to make peace. And that's because earthly wisdom is driven by the engine of jealousy and selfish ambition.

It will never lead to peace in the church. So how then are we to live at peace with each other and demonstrate the love that Christ says will be the distinguishing mark of his disciples? That's the very question that our text tonight answers. And if we were to summarize the point of this text, it would be this, conflict between Christians is indicative of conflict with God. Therefore, if we are to make peace with each other, we must first make peace with God.

So with that in mind, let's walk through our text tonight. First of all, James describes for us the immediate cause of conflict. The immediate cause of conflict among Christians. We see this in verses one through three. Let me read it again. Verse one says, what causes quarrels and what causes fights among you?

Is it not this? That your passions, and that word passions there, are those things that excite us in sinful ways. Your passions are at war within you.

You desire and do not have. So you murder. And there's, of course, more than one way to murder. You can literally kill someone in anger. But I think James' context here suggests murder in a figurative sense. Sort of like Jesus uses that term in the Sermon on the Mount when he says that unjust anger merely in your mind or heart makes you liable for murder. James goes on, you covet and cannot obtain, so you fight and quarrel.

You do not have because you do not ask. You ask and do not receive because you ask wrongly to spend it on your passions. And there's that same word again that he used in verse one. Passions are those things that excite us to sin. So at the heart of the quarreling and fighting within the body of Christ are sinful passions inordinate desires for what we do not have, anger that leads to a murderous spirit, covetousness for what others have, and even prayer that is motivated from a self-centered, self-serving heart. The immediate cause of conflict between Christian brothers and sisters is our desire to have what we don't have, particularly when we see others enjoying what we don't have. And make no mistake, we're not simply talking about desiring and coveting the material possessions of others.

It certainly includes that. These inordinate desires that lead to envy and strife are often desires for many things beyond the material. In fact, it is probably more often than not the non-material stuff that we covet.

Things like the reputation that other people have, the opportunities that other people enjoy, the position or influence that others around us seem to wield. We want it for ourselves and we don't have it, so we dwell on it and we grow jealous. Of course, we tell ourselves it isn't jealousy. We're masters of self-deceit.

We don't tell ourselves we're envious. It's just a virtuous desire to be used by God like other people are used by God. Or it's just a noble desire to serve and be useful to the kingdom like everybody else is serving and being used in the kingdom. And so we add these desires to our prayer list as if somehow that baptizes and redeems our selfishness. But deep in our hearts is this nefarious hidden drive to be noticed and needed and praised and promoted. You covet and cannot obtain, so you fight.

You ask and do not receive because you ask in order to spend it on your passions. The immediate cause of Christian conflict is the frustrated desire to want more than we have of the position and possessions of others. And I think in our most honest moments, we realize that much of the conflict we have with other people is really not a frustrated desire to be useful to God.

It's a frustrated desire to be noticed and to be made much of. So the immediate cause of quarrels and fights is our selfish passion for that which we do not have. But then James goes deeper by pointing out the root cause of conflict. It turns out that my problem isn't just the competitive spirit towards my fellow Christian.

No, it's much worse than that. This brings us to our second point which is the root cause of the conflict. The root cause of quarrels and fights in the church is a competitive spirit towards God Himself.

My problem isn't primarily a jealousy problem with other people. It is an idolatry problem with God. Look with me again at verse four. You adulterous people, do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God?

And let's just stop there for a minute. It seems as if James is changing the subject out of the blue. He was addressing the problem of conflict in the church, problems between one Christian and another Christian. But here in verse four, he suddenly starts addressing problems between a Christian and God. He goes from talking about quarrels and infighting in the church to talking about worldliness. What is James' train of thought here? Is he changing subjects midstream?

I don't think so. I think in verses four and five, James is actually deepening his analysis of the quarrelsome Christian by peeling back another layer of the proverbial onion in order to expose the root cause of conflict and fighting in the church. So let's follow his logic carefully. He begins with his conclusion by saying, you adulterous people. Now that's Old Testament metaphorical language for idolatry, you idolatrous people. So whatever it is that he's about to say, it's going to mean that his readers are acting idolatrously.

Look at his next statement. Do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God? In other words, the vice that James has just addressed in verses one through three is now described as friendship with the world. So the quarrels and fights that issue from a heart consumed with pleasure and envy are indicative of worldliness.

Now that's very interesting, isn't it? If I were to ask you what does worldliness look like, you would probably describe certain outward behaviors that are overtly typical of people who hate God. Maybe things like illicit sexual activity or gross materialism, substance abuse. And you'd be right, those are certainly worldly things. But James points out that worldliness involves not only loving the stuff of this world, but also loving the spirit, the character of this world, its values, its orientations, its attitudes. Some of which may appear on the surface to be very benign, almost spiritually minded, but are in fact worldliness, malignancies of the worst sort. Needless quarreling and fighting is typical of people who love themselves above all. And loving oneself above all is typical of those who hate God and hate his standards. So a quarrelsome spirit then, regardless of how minor it may seem to us, is a denunciation of one's loyalty to God in favor of friendship with the world. And James says, whoever wishes to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God.

Why is that? Well, it's because God demands absolute devotion. He refuses to share the throne of your heart with any other little g gods. Verse five, do you suppose it is to no purpose that the scripture says he yearns jealously over the spirit that he has made to dwell in us? God's jealousy, his demand for absolute devotion is really a quality of his perfection.

Think about it. God is perfectly righteous, he's perfectly good. And if he truly loves us, he would want us to love the highest good. He would want us to believe the absolute truth.

He would want us to delight in the deepest beauty. He wouldn't want us to idolize anything that is less than perfect. And so he doesn't want us to worship anything other than himself.

His jealousy is a valid jealousy, a righteous and good jealousy. But when we align ourselves with the world by embracing the world's attitudes, the world's behavior, we incur the displeasure of our good and jealous God. So quarrelsomeness is a characteristic of a worldly person and worldly people have put themselves at odds with God, which means to be quarrelsome and covetous and envious is to be idolatrous. The point is, godless conflict with other Christians is really conflict with God.

And Christians, this raises the stakes exponentially. When we are quick to fight each other because we love ourselves so much, we're not merely sinning against fellow believers, we are committing an affront to the grace of God that amounts to idolatry. We may not consciously think that we're declaring that our allegiance lies with the world rather than with God when we quarrel and fight, but folks, verse four makes it clear that that's exactly what we're doing. And God will tolerate no rivals.

We must be wholly his or we are not his at all. So just to summarize these first five verses, if your life is characterized by quarreling and fighting, you've got a selfishness problem. You may mask your selfishness behind 100 different lies.

You might even mask it behind a life of fervent prayer, asking God but asking wrongly in order to spend it on your passions. None of that changes the fact that your driving motive is one of preoccupation with self. And in fact, that preoccupation with self is indicative of an even greater problem. It's indicative of a deep-rooted idolatry in which you have declared yourself a friend of the world and thus an enemy of God. So the immediate cause of conflict is jealousy of other people. The root cause is idolatry of the heart.

So what is the solution to conflict? We see it here in verses six through 10. And this section contains both a principle to remember and a command to obey. First of all, there's a principle to remember in verse six. James says, but God gives more grace, therefore it says God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble. Now this is a reference to Proverbs 3.34.

It's a conditional promise. If we humble ourselves, which is the opposite of what the Christian is doing in verses one through three, if we humble ourselves, God promises to give us grace. He promises to give us his favor. Instead of enmity, there's friendship with God. This makes humility essential, doesn't it? Saint Augustine once said, if you ask me what is the first precept of the Christian religion, I will answer first, second, and third, humility. God requires humility. Without it, we have no hope of making peace with each other.

We have no hope of making peace with God. But Augustine also said that God gives what he demands. He demands humility, but he gives humility.

The graciousness of God means that even though his standard is very high, his standard is perfection, even though his standard is that high, he enables us to live up to that standard. First, by crediting to us the righteousness of Christ. Christ became pride for us that we might become humble in him. But also by bringing us to the point of actually practically displaying the righteousness of Christ. Church, God is teaching us humility, and all the while he is treating us as if we're already humble.

That's the gospel, that's the good news. God makes high demands of us, and then graciously gives us everything he demands. So there's a principle, a conditional promise, which means there's something we're gonna have to do, but even our doing is covered by and fueled by the grace of God. So what is it that we're supposed to do? What is this command we're supposed to obey? We're supposed to be humble. We're supposed to be humble.

How do we do that? Verses seven through 10 tells us. Verse seven, submit yourselves therefore to God. Verse eight, draw near to God, and he will draw near to you. Verse 10, humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will exalt you.

These three imperatives reiterate essentially the same thing. Submitting to God, drawing near to God, humbling yourself before the Lord are essentially synonymous. The way we submit to God is by drawing near to him in humility. The way we draw near to God is through humble submission. The way we humble ourselves before the Lord is to draw near in submission to his will. So these three actions toward God, submitting to him, drawing near to him, humbling ourselves before him, are inseparable. We can't have one without the other two. How do we do these things?

James gives us very specific instructions. One is negative, and three are positive. First, the negative. We do these things by resisting the devil. In other words, we submit to God by not submitting to the devil. Just like you can't be friends of the world and friends of God, you cannot submit to God while submitting to the devil.

They're mutually exclusive. God requires absolute devotion. But then there are three positive imperatives. First, we draw near to God by conforming our actions to his will. We draw near to God by conforming our actions to his will. Verse eight says, cleanse your hands, you sinners. This is obviously metaphorical.

It's not like those useless signs that hang in the restrooms of fast food restaurants, giving meticulous instruction on how to wash your hands, literally. No, James means behave morally. Cleanse your hands morally. Live a life that is compliant with God's moral law. Are you acting murderously toward a Christian sister?

Stop it and treat her like the bride of Christ in your actions, in your behavior. Are you coveting the opportunities and skills and esteem of your Christian brother? Stop it and begin to serve and promote him in your actions. So first of all, we draw near to God by conforming our behavior to God's will.

But that's not enough. Secondly, we draw near to God by conforming our minds to God's truth. Verse eight again, purify your hearts, you double-minded. Purify your hearts.

Now, heart is a big word. It can refer to the seat of our physical life. It can refer to the seat of our spiritual life.

It can refer to the seat of our mental thought life. The context makes it clear that James is referring here to the seat of our mental life because he addresses the command specifically to the double-minded. Purify your hearts, you double-minded. It's not enough that we mechanically conform our outward behavior to God's law. We must also conform our minds, our belief system, our thought processes, our reasoning to God's truth. It's possible to act humbly toward other people while still believing in your mind that you are God's greatest gift to humanity. But how hypocritical that would be, instead we must conform our actions to what God says is good and our thinking to what God says is true. Thirdly, we draw near to God by conforming our emotions to God's verdict. By conforming our emotions to God's verdict. If God says we're guilty of behaving and thinking like worldlings, we ought not be glib and dismissive about it as if it's really not that big of a deal.

No, it is a big deal. Verse nine is not a feel-good verse. It's quite the opposite. It says, be wretched, and mourn, and weep. Let your laughter be turned to mourning and your joy to gloom. I remember years ago my daughter asking me an amusing and telling question. We were at some event where the audience was predominantly charismatic, and she was observing the noticeable distinction between the way they conduct themselves in worship and the way we, Presbyterians, conduct ourselves in worship. And she turned to me in that event and said, Daddy, what's the difference between charismatics and Presbyterians? And she said, you know, other than the fact that they're happy.

Now, I don't think she meant anything derogatory by it, although I definitely gave her the hairy eyeball for saying that. I just think in her own mind she couldn't resolve this noticeable gap between emotional expression and worship in these two very different theological camps. Now, I'm not saying that overt expressions of positive emotion are inappropriate in worship.

Certainly, I'm not saying that. But there is a theological reason why Presbyterians are inherently more restrained in their expression than charismatics. Not that all Presbyterians are restrained for the right reasons, nor that all charismatics display emotion for the right reasons or in inappropriate ways. If we are a sober people before the Lord, I pray it is because we take sin seriously. If we cannot mourn and weep before the Lord over our sin, we don't rightly understand the depth of our sin.

I don't mean to pour cold water on anyone's enthusiasm, but there is a danger of being far too unaware of our own depravity and far too shallow in our contemplation of the holiness of God. Jesus said in Luke 6 25, Woe to you who are full now, for you shall be hungry. Woe to you who laugh now, for you shall mourn and weep. You see, you can laugh at your sin now and mourn on Judgment Day. Or you can mourn over your sin now and rejoice at the sight of Christ when He breaks through the clouds. It will be those who have taken their sin seriously in this life that will be able to dance and rejoice and feast and laugh in the next.

C.S. Lewis married Joy Davidman shortly before she contracted an incurable disease and died. As Lewis grieved the loss of his wife, he began to write about his grief, and he wrote this. He said, The pain I feel now is the happiness I had before. That's the deal. In other words, Lewis realized that had he never loved his wife Joy, he wouldn't have had to deal with the pain of losing her. If you're going to love something that deeply, you're taking a risk because there will be great pain if you ever lose that love.

That's the deal. And I think of that quote when I read James 4 because in a sense the Gospel reverses Lewis' thought. He said, The pain I feel now is the happiness I had before. The Gospel says, The pain I feel now over the sinfulness of my fallen condition is the happiness I will have one day in glory. We can experience the sorrow and mourning and pain that accompanies repentance now in this life rather than trying to mask that pain and cover it up with some sort of pretend joy. Then one day that pain will give way to true joy, joy unspeakable and full of glory. The pretend joy now will yield eternal sorrow then or sincere sorrow now will yield eternal joy then.

That's the deal. And so we are called to submit our mind, our will, and even our emotions to God. That's what humility before the Lord looks like. I want to briefly comment on one more thing related to verse 8 before we move on.

Some have read this command to draw near as some sort of work that we do to manipulate God, to get Him on the hook, to control God. It's not because that would be contrary to grace. Remember, James' audience is composed of Christians, so he's not speaking of salvation here. He's speaking of restoration of fellowship.

This isn't giving us the grounds of justification. It's giving us the starting point of renewing broken fellowship between God and His child. We cannot claim that we took the first step so that God would take the next step.

Even His invitation for us to draw near to Him and the promise that follows of Him drawing near to us is gracious on God's part because nothing obligated Him to make such a promise, and yet He makes it. So we have a selfishness problem that is really a deep-seated idolatry problem, but God gives grace as we humble ourselves through submission to His will, to His truth, to His verdict. The last point then is the test of resolved conflict. If God has truly dealt with our self-centered quarrelsome spirit and our idolatry, if we have sincerely submitted our mind, will, and emotions to Him, then there will be visible fruit. The constant quarreling will diminish. At least the quarrels caused by our disobedience will diminish.

And James gives a very visible proof or test or evidence that progress and sanctification is being made. Look at verses 11 and 12. Do not speak evil against one another, brothers. The one who speaks against a brother or judges his brother 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 only one lawgiver and judge, he who is able to save and to destroy, but who are you to judge your neighbor? You see, slander and pride go together. Slander is the fruit of which pride is the root. If you deal with your pride, you're not going to be given to slander, to speaking evil of your brothers and sisters in Christ. And if you're not given to slander, you're reducing the quarreling and fighting that was typical back in verse 1.

The ability to not slander others is a test, it's a proof that this tendency to relish conflict, this tendency to be quarrelsome has indeed been mortified. Now I wish we had more time tonight to dig into verses 11 and 12, but just notice briefly the grounds James gives for why slander is evil. Slandering our brother is evil because it is at its heart a slandering of God's law. It's wrong to slander our brothers and sisters in Christ because at its heart it's a slandering of God's law. This connection between slandering another Christian and slandering God's law means that it's not a general sort of judgmentalism that's being condemned here. There is a time and a place to judge others.

We can go to other scriptures and see that very clearly. But no, what is being condemned here is the sort of judgmentalism that judges the morality of others on the basis of my own preferences and my own inclinations rather than on the basis of God's clear cut revealed will. If judging others is wrong on the basis of the fact that it is an attack on God's law, then the sort of judgmentalism that James is condemning is the kind that makes its own whims and its own ideas the standard of righteousness.

That's wrong. This kind of slander then, as one theologian said, is not a transgression of merely one commandment, but a transgression against the authority of the law in general and therefore against God. James is saying don't judge others according to your own made-up standards because that is to put yourself in the place of God. To morally judge the actions and attitudes and motives of others by some standard other than God's standard of morality is to demean not merely those whom I judge, it is to demean the very law of God itself. I wish I could say more, but we're running out of time, so your homework this week is to go home and read Romans 14 in light of this text, James 4, 1 through 12.

Meditate on those two in relation to each other. John Calvin said it is evil when we confidently condemn in others whatever does not please us. In doing so, we assume to ourselves what peculiarly belongs to God. So one of the tests, one of the proofs that we have indeed received the grace God promises to the humble is that we will stop being quarrelsome with our brothers and sisters in Christ.

More specifically, we will not charge them with sin simply because they've crossed us. We will have made peace with God by submitting to Him and His word, and by doing, we will make peace with our fellow Christian. By way of applying this text to our lives, let me encourage you, Christian, to learn to love genuine Christian unity. If you don't see sincere unity as a beautiful thing, you'll hardly be motivated to mortify a quarrelsome spirit. Learn to love Christian unity. Secondly, honestly identify your lusts.

What are those things that you are willing to selfishly fight about in order to obtain? It's a lust. It's an inordinate desire.

Learn to identify them honestly. Thirdly, don't be fooled by worldliness. You know, worldliness often masquerades as religious and spiritual zeal. It feels very virtuous at times, and yet it's worldly.

It's enmity with God. Fourthly, realize that humbling yourself before God simply means obeying God and hating sin. At the end of the day, to be humble before God is to obey God.

Fifthly, if after all of that you are still incapable of restraining your tongue from speaking about everyone else's faults, then start over because you've not yet humbled yourself sufficiently before God. And finally, do all of these things with the recognition that God's grace is sufficient for these things. God resists the proud, but he gives grace to the humble.

Let's pray. Father, thank you for the grace that's ours in Christ. We don't ever want to take that grace for granted. Lord, the very words we've read tonight are gifts of grace from you. They're given to us who are prone to fight needlessly, selfishly, proudly. You correct us where we need it because you love us like a father. Help us now to respond to that correction as submissive, humble sons and daughters. We pray in Jesus' name. Amen.