Submitting to God (Part 1 of 3)

Here is a big difference between outward, grudging, conforming, conformity to rules, and genuine submission to God. But how do we know if our submission to God's authority is genuine, if it's heartfelt, if it's real? Today on Truth for Life, Alistair Begg walks us through some practical pointers found in the book of James.

We're going to read simply from verse 7 to verse 10. Submit yourselves then to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you. Come near to God, and he will come near to you. Wash your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded. Grieve, mourn, and wail.

Change your laughter to mourning and your joy to gloom. Humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will lift you up. Now, just a prayer together before we turn to this. We come, Lord, in a spirit of genuine humility, to bow before you, the living God, and to open our hearts and minds to your truth, the Bible. We pray for the help of the Holy Spirit, both in speaking and in hearing, so that we might understand and in understanding, that we might trust and obey, and that you will conform as increasingly to the image of your Son, the Lord Jesus Christ, in whose name we pray.

Amen. Well, actually, we're beginning where we left off last time, and that was, we had reached verse 6, and mercifully so, because the first five verses were distinctly uncomfortable—challenging us in relationship to our potential worldliness, confronting us with the danger of saying that we're friends of God while living as friends of the world, failing to face up to the fact that all of our aggravations and acrimony actually emerge from inside of ourselves. And just when we were almost overwhelmed with the sorrow of it all, we came to verse 6, and were greatly encouraged as we went out with the phrase, He gives us more grace in order to be able to do what he calls us to do, and in order to see who and what we are before him. A number of people came to me because they were a little disconcerted by what we had to say about God's opposition to hearing prayer.

And it was quite fascinating to me, and not something that took me by surprise. And it was a reminder to me, and I think to each of us as we thought the things through, as I talked with some people, that we have to allow the Bible to adjudicate on all of our thinking, so that when it says that God opposes the proud, it means exactly what it says—that God is actually opposed to those whose hearts are turned away from him, that he does not hear the cries of those who defy his right to rule, that he is resistant to those who have exchanged the truth of God for a lie and who worship and serve the creature rather than the Creator. But it is not hopeless, because there is an abundant supply of grace for those who will humble themselves before God, admit their real situation as sinners in need of a Savior, and become the beneficiaries of all that has been provided in the Lord Jesus Christ. And it's for that reason that we turn with great frequency here to the parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector.

We won't turn there again now. But as I wrote the reference again in my notes this week—I actually wrote parenthetically in my notes—I wonder how many times a month I find myself turning to this passage. Because it really is the passage, in many ways, for Parkside Church. It's the passage for people who regard the possibility of getting into heaven on the basis that God grades on the curve, and that as long as we are in a position to be slightly better off than the group that is around us, then presumably we will be fine. And that is why we go again and again to the words of the publican and the man who knew himself to be a sinner, who wouldn't even look up to heaven but just said, God, be merciful to me.

I just really am a sinner. And the fact of the matter is, this morning, if you've come and you're wondering about what it means to know God, if you're thinking about it, and you've perhaps come out of a background that suggests to you that what you need to do is get yourself as fit as you possibly can for an approach to God, I want you to know that all the fitness that God requires is that you see your need of him. All the fitness that he requires is that you see your need of him. Because by nature we do not see our need of him. By nature we are resistant to him. By nature we are not seeking him.

By nature we are running from him. And therefore, it is a great and glorious experience when suddenly, in taking even ourselves by surprise, we find ourselves saying, You know, this wonderful offer of salvation in Jesus is just exactly the thing that I need. God resists the proud, but he gives grace to the humble. Flauvel says, They that know God will be humble. They that know themselves cannot be proud. They that know God will be humble.

They that know themselves cannot be proud. And Augustine, as he reflects upon the proud assertions of his younger days before he came to know the Lord Jesus, he said, As pride was the beginning of sin, so humility must be the beginning of the Christian discipline. Now, you will notice, if your Bible is open—and I hope it is—that what you have in verse 6 is essentially repeated again in verse 10. Verse 6 and verse 10, with the emphasis on humility, bracket what is then given to us in verses 7, 8, and 9. I think that that is important to keep in mind, and I hope that that will become clear as we work our way through the passage. Just in case any of his readers are tempted to go into flights of fancy over what it means to be humble and how humility would be expressed in the living of life, James, as we would expect by now, provides these practical pointers along the pathway of Christian discipleship. And I've tried to summarize them in a variety of phrases, and I'll give you the phrases as we go along.

And the first is this. Submission to God is the outworking of a truly humble heart. Submission to God is the outworking of a truly humble heart.

And the word that is used here is hupotasomai, which is actually a word that emerges from the military. And it means to align oneself under the authority of another. To align oneself under the authority of another.

And the real test of the humility of our hearts is to be seen practically in the way in which we align ourselves under authority. We are, again, by nature, those who oppose authority. We don't like to be told what to do. We don't like to be told where to go.

We want to be where we want to be and do what we want to do and go to bed when we want to go to bed, and go to school if we feel like going to school, and so on. And all of the things that you deal with as a parent, with these unruly rapscallions called children, are indicative of the anti-authoritarian streak which is a fundamental part of human nature. And therefore, it is an expression of God's amazing grace when a man or a woman or a boy or a girl says, You know, I am going to align myself under the authority of God. It is not a grudging obedience. It is possible to be obedient without being humble. Those of you who have served in the military know the imperative nature of obeying commands. And in many instances, you would be honest enough to say that the feeling of your heart did not go with your obedience to the command. Indeed, you may have been vociferously opposed, character-wise and perhaps in a number of ways, to the individual who issued the command, but you obeyed. And so there was ostensibly a measure of submission, but it was a grudging obedience.

When James talks here to the believing person about submission to God, he's not talking about grudging obedience, but he's talking about a joyful, happy abandonment to the will of God—a joyful, happy abandonment to God's will as it is given to us in God's Word—throwing ourselves, if you like, wholeheartedly and happily into the doing of God's will, calling it our delight to discover his truth, delighting in the law of the Lord, meditating on it day and night, not simply because it is duty but because of the privilege that attaches to it. And so, ungrudgingly, we line up under his command. The distinction between that which is apparent on the outside and that which is true on the inside is masterfully recorded for us in the anecdote concerning the small boy in the days before seatbelts in the back seat, in the days before those buckets that you strapped the little characters into. And his mother was driving in the car, and he was in the back seat, and she told him it was imperative that he sat down. However, he was in his position of authority in between the two seats, heading for the rearview mirror as an emblem on his forehead if she had to stop very quickly. And she could not get him to sit down. And so she stopped the car and applied the pow-wow method. She did the pow, and he did the wow. And then she got him back in the seat, and they continued down the road.

And they had gone only about a hundred yards when the voice from the back seat said, I may be sitting down on the outside, but I am standing up on the inside. And I don't know where you are. Only God knows where I am.

Those who know me best will have an inkling. But there is all the difference in the world between a formal posture of conformity and the happy, wholesale submission to God. Our friends and neighbors will know something of it, because submission to God is revealed in submission to others. So when you have a recalcitrant child, he does not submit to God no matter what he tells his youth group leader. If he will not tidy his bedroom at his mother's request, he does not submit to God. If a wife is contented, nagging, like a dripping tap, she does not submit to God. If a husband is bombastic, sarcastic, demanding, unloving, hypercritical, he does not submit to God. If a man will not submit to civil jurisdiction, he does not submit to God. So you see, the idea of submission to God—and it's very easy to take, for example, verse 7a, take it out of the context in which it is set, take it out of the entire context of the Bible, and make it a kind of cozy, personal, experiential encounter with God—the kind of thing that you can do lying in your bed, as it were, when nobody's around. Oh, I submit to God. Well, fine, that's easy. But when your wife says to you, could you go down the stairs and get a glass of water for me? And then we'll find out just how much your devotion as you lay horizontal is expressed when you get vertical and mobile.

Well, let's move on. Submission to God is the outworking of a truly humble heart. Secondly, active allegiance to God involves sustained resistance to the devil. Active allegiance to God involves sustained resistance to the devil. There are two sides of one coin, if you like. You see how important it is, again, that we don't dislodge statements of the Bible from the surrounding statements.

Because if we do, we do a disservice to the context and therefore to its application. The approach of the devil in the Garden of Eden was deceitful, appealed in many ways to the egos of Adam and Eve. The reason that God doesn't want you to do this, said the devil, is because if you do this, you will be as God. Wow! That sounds attractive! And you'll know everything. Fabulous! And you'll be able to enjoy the things that he's keeping from you.

Terrific! Every one of them a flat-out lie. And unless we understand the ploys of the evil one and become awake and alert, we will so easily succumb to his nonsense. How, then, do we exercise a resistance movement? How do we resist the devil so that he might flee from us? Well, we could say many things in response to this, but let's just say three, and briefly. Number one, we resist him humbly—humbly!—in the awareness of the fact that we can't resist him apart from the strength that God provides. That's the significance of verse 6. He gives more grace. Submit to God, resist the devil.

How am I going to do that? He gives more grace. The hymn writer says, I have no strength but thine to lean upon. When Paul attacks the issue of the Christian warfare in Ephesians chapter 6, he starts in exactly the same way, when he says, Finally, be strong and put on the full armor of God.

What's missing? Finally, be strong in the Lord and in his mighty power. Strong in the Lord and in his mighty power. To say, Come on now, be strong! is an invitation to disappointment and despair, because we're not strong.

And we collapse with relative ease. So the exhortation is aligned with the encouragement. Be strong in the Lord and in his mighty power.

Now go ahead and do this. But we need to be humble enough to say, I have no strength except the strength that you provide. Which is hard for most of us who feel that we can handle most things. The starting point is, I can't. And until we say, I can't, we'll never really be able to say, I can. And it seems so obvious, doesn't it? So if we come to resist him humbly, we may do so also confidently.

Confidently, how can we say that? Because of the promise. Resist the devil—that's what we're supposed to do—and he will flee from you.

He will flee from you. The two great dangers in relationship to the devil and Satan and so on are either to become totally preoccupied with him so that everything we see and experience, oh, that must be the devil that did that. There were books for a period of time about ten years ago that had demons everywhere. The demons were all over the place. And the people were reading the books, and it drove me nuts, because they would come and tell me, you know, I saw a demon, and I was up in your office, and he was on the ledge and all this kind of thing, and said, Okay, thank you.

I'll get back to you. So the one hand is to be completely preoccupied with demonic activity, and the other hand is to deny its existence entirely. And in both instances, the devil wins a great victory. Because over here he gets us thinking about him constantly, which is a wrong and foolish thing to do, and over here he gets us denying his existence altogether, and he says, Well, this is terrific. He doesn't even believe in me.

I'll be able to sneak in on him quietly and catch him while he's unawares. That's why Peter says, Stay awake and be alert, for the devil is a-roaring Ryan, going around looking for somebody to devour. So in other words, the clarity of Scripture helps us. Humbly—incidentally, in saying what I'm saying, I'm not denying the existence of demonic activity. I'm not saying that at all.

He's just pointing out the extreme. Humbly, confidently, and biblically, insofar as the only way to beat him is to use the weapons we've been provided. And what are the weapons that are provided? Two—the sword of the Spirit, which is the Word of God, and prayer. We read for homework in Matthew chapter 4, Jesus being tempted in the wilderness by Satan, and Satan comes to him and says to him, You know, if you throw yourself down from this point, all the kingdoms of the world will be yours. And every occasion, with every temptation, it reads, Jesus replied, It is written. Then the devil comes back the second time, and he quotes the Bible to Jesus. Because he's a clever rascal.

That's why you have to be discerning, folks. The fact that somebody quotes the Bible or holds the Bible or says something about the Bible is not the issue. The issue is, what are they doing with the Bible? The devil was happy to quote the Bible. The devil understands the Bible. That's why he even quoted it to Jesus.

No, we mustn't be unaware of his schemes. But it is by the sword of the Spirit that we might defeat him. Because it is in the clarity of the instruction of God's Word that the temptations that come our way are addressed and may be resisted. And by prayer.

By prayer. We're going to come to the notion of communion with God in just a moment, but it is interesting, when you read the Gospels, to discover the occasions in which it says, very briefly and almost parenthetically, And Jesus went away into a quiet place, and he prayed. Or Jesus went into a mountain, and he prayed. You have it, for example, in John chapter 6, when after the feeding of the five thousand, and the people are in a great, enthusiastic throng, they want to come and make Jesus king.

They've decided that he must be the prophet that comes into the world. And then John just says, And at that point Jesus went away by himself into a mountain. He had to resist the temptation that came at him as a result of the enthusiastic response of the people, back in the quietness of his own place, in communion with the Father. Father, help me here. I pray to you, I must resist these temptations.

You're listening to Truth for Life with Alistair Begg. We'll hear more about submitting to God and resisting temptation tomorrow. As we learned today, God's word is one of the weapons we're given to help us resist the devil's temptations.

To use a weapon effectively, though, we need to be familiar with it. And that's why every day on Truth for Life, we teach the Bible with clarity and relevance. We also offer many free or low-cost resources, all to help you grow in your faith and to become more confident as you face spiritual battles. If you benefit from the daily Bible teaching you hear on Truth for Life, or if you've enjoyed the low-cost resources or free online access to archived messages, devotionals, and more, you have one of our truth partners to thank. Truth partners are your fellow listeners who come alongside us with regular prayer and monthly giving.

If you've been listening to Truth for Life for a while, would you join this important team today? You choose the amount you want to give. It only takes a few minutes to sign up.

You can do it online. Go to truthforlife.org slash truth partner, or call us at 888-588-7884. And as a truth partner, if you pledge $20 a month or more, we invite you to request not one, but both of the books we recommend each month. Today, we're recommending a book called Radically Whole, Gospel Healing for the Divided Heart. This book explores the practical teaching found in the book of James, which focuses on the oneness that ought to be evident in believers, but often isn't.

Too often, our behavior fails to reflect what we say we believe. So as you read Radically Whole, you'll be able to identify where this division shows up in your own life, and you'll learn how God's grace can help you close the rift. Request your copy today when you become a truth partner or when you give a one-time donation at truthforlife.org slash donate. Now, as summer is ending and the kids are headed back to school, this is a great time to resume an organized Bible study. So do you know someone who is new to Christianity, maybe someone who is interested in learning more about what Christians believe, about the hope we have in Jesus? Well, at Truth for Life, we have recently released a new 13 lesson course that will guide you step by step as you lead a friend through the foundational truths of the Bible. The series is called The Basics of the Christian Faith. The study comes with a leader's guide for you, a companion guide for your friend. Together, you're able to explore what it means to trust in Jesus for salvation, why we're called to be baptized. There's a section on prayer, understanding God's commandments, the ministry of the Holy Spirit, among other key teachings. Best of all, Alistair does all the teaching. You'll each listen to messages from Alistair, then you'll meet to discuss the lesson, and you'll be able to answer questions your friend may have. Find out more about the basics of the Christian faith study, go to truthforlife.org slash store. I'm Bob Lapine. We learned today how important it is to resist the devil, but what does that actually look like? Tomorrow, you'll hear the surprising answer. The Bible teaching of Alistair Begg is furnished by Truth for Life, where the Learning is for Living.