Well, if you have your Bibles, please take them and turn with me to the book of James, where we have spent this summer putting our way through this book and finding James in his own very direct way coming after us. Several of you have spoken to in the last couple of weeks and in talking about your reaction to the series, I am a little concerned because many of you, I think, have felt more than anything condemned. And that being because James doesn't pull many punches. He does definitely come after you. But I don't think a spirit of condemnation is what James would have his readers take. And I want to just step back for one brief moment as you're turning to the text and again, think about what James is about in his book. And I think as I have sat in it and I have listened to Sandy preach it and as I have studied it myself, one of the things that I think the main thing James is concerned about is that the content of our lives match up with the content of our faith. That our faith and our life be increasingly integrated and seamless and united and consistent. The fact of the matter is none of us in this room who our Christians lives the consistent, the perfectly consistent life. If you're visiting among us and you say, surely you Christians don't practice what you preach, I say to you, you're right. And I say that on behalf of my own heart and my own soul, I don't live out hardly a portion of what I believe. And certainly my hope and my prayer increasingly daily, weekly, monthly, yearly that more of my life next year will conform to the gospel of grace than it does this year. But I readily confess to you that I and I believe all of the rest of us within earshot struggle with the same thing to live out and to integrate this gospel of grace because it is utterly foreign. The more you study it, the more you realize the gospel is utterly foreign to the ways of this world. And it ought to impact how we eat, how we sleep, how we play, how we work, how we study, how we parent, how we as children engage our parents, how we interact with one another, how we engage our neighbors, how we mow the lawn. The gospel impacts every aspect of life, and when James talks about wisdom, he's not talking about some heady intellectual philosophical discussion, he's talking about having the power and the guidance and the inspiration of God impact every facet of our lives. And so ultimately taking everything, every aspect, every nook and cranny of our lives captive to the obedience of Christ. That's what biblical wisdom is, that's what James's concern is. And James knows that not only is every aspect of our life constantly in struggle, to be in conformity to the gospel, but he knows at our heart of hearts we struggle. And we're turning here to James chapter 4. And I'm asking you to pry open your ribcage because James the heart surgeon is coming after your heart. Chapter 4 is about your heart, your wild heart. Let us turn and let us read this chapter, James chapter 4 from verse 1 through the end. This is the word of God. What causes fights and corals among you? Don't they come from your desires that battle within you? You want something, but you don't get it. You kill and covet, but you cannot have what you want. You quarrel and fight. 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. You adulterous people, don't you know that friendship with the world is hatred towards God? Anyone who chooses to be a friend of the world becomes an enemy of God. Or do you think Scripture says without reason that the spirit he caused to live in us envies intensely, but he gives us more grace? That is why Scripture says, God is opposed to the proud but gives grace to the humble. 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. Brothers do not slander one another. Anyone who speaks against his brother or judges him speaks against the law and judges it. When you judge the law, you are not keeping it, but sitting in judgment on it. There is only one law giver in judge, the one who is able to save and destroy. But you, who are you to judge your neighbor? Now listen, you who say, today or tomorrow we will go to this or that city, spend a year there, carry on business and make money. Why? You do not even know what will happen tomorrow. What is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes. Instead you ought to say, if it is the Lord's will, we will live and do this or that. As it is you boast and brag. All such boasting is evil. Anyone then who knows the good he ought to do and doesn't do it sins. All men are like grass and all of their glory is like the flowers of the field. The grass withers and the flower fall, but the word of our God stands forever. Amen. Won't you pray with me? Gracious God, there isn't a consistent heart in the house. But we rejoice that you love sinners. We rejoice that your business is with sinners. And so we come to you and we offer up to you our chest. We want you to do business with our heart of hearts, to change us, to make us more like Christ. Won't you speak to each and every one of us now through your word, this we pray in Jesus name. Amen. Many of you will know the name of Tom Landry, the late great coach for the Dallas Cowboys for so many years. And it is told, and I don't know if it's true or not, I don't know if it's one of those apocryphal stories that surround a man like Tom Landry or not, but it is told that a Christian on one occasion came up to coach Landry and was rather indignant about one of his coaching protégés, who was also coaching in the NFL at the time, and was professing to be a believer in this and this Christian came up to coach Landry and said, can you believe that he calls himself a Christian? He carries on the way he does, he goes after his players, he yells and screams at them and berates them. Can you believe he calls himself a Christian? Tom Landry is reported to his, smirks with a small smile from on it said, well, just imagine what he'd be like if he wasn't a Christian. You know friends, the gospel starts with us where we are. The marvelous thing about the gospel of grace is it doesn't demand that you somehow measure up to something and then you're accepted by Christ. Christ receives you just as you are. Billy Graham has made that him just as I am, globally famous and it's glorious and it's true. Just as I am, I can get to Christ. And marvelously, wondrously, lovingly, he doesn't leave us where we are. As one man has said, I'd rather be with the man who's one foot out of hell heading toward heaven than with a man who's one foot out of heaven heading toward hell. And James is writing to a people that obviously are in need of having their lives made more consistent to their gospel faith. And it is clearly his message throughout this whole book, this issue of consistency. And here in chapter 4, he is going after our heart of hearts and dear friends, when the gospel comes to you, it comes after our hearts. God is not content to have decent looking people on the outside. He's not content to have you and I just behave correctly to have a behavior modification program that makes you a little more nights, a little more civil, a little more cordial. That's not God's business. His business is to go after your heart of hearts. And when it comes in, when the gospel comes, it comes to break your heart. Now by break, I don't mean to disappoint you. I don't mean to hurt and to shatter and to wipe out your hopes, although if they're Aaron's hopes, he will do that. But that's not his purpose to disappoint you by breaking, I mean, to tame as if to break a horse because our hearts at their root roots as we see here in James chapter 4 are wild, courageous, rebellious, and James has turned this chapter in to look at our hearts. And what he gives us in this chapter is three different peaks. I think three different peaks at the way, the rebelliousness, the wild, wanton, rebelliousness of our hearts, reveals itself and then he also offers to us a cure. And here are the three areas, and I want to look at it this chapter therefore in this way. It's not exactly chronological, but I think it follows the logic of James chapter 4, and that's why I want to go this way. Peak chapter 1, a peak one that he gives to us of the wildness of our heart is found in the first five verses in the self gratifying desires that are so prevalent within us. And then the second peak he gives to us are found in verses 11 and 12 when he exposes our self-righteous judgments of others. The third peak he gives to us of the wild rebelliousness of our hearts is the self-sufficient planning that we presentively do as verses 13 to 17, and he gives us the cure, he gives us the antidote. He gives us the means by which to be tamed by God in verses 6 to 10. So I wish to follow that outline though as I say, it's not exactly chronological through the text, I think it follows the logic. And I want to look first of all then at the first peak he gives to us, at the wildness of our hearts, and has to be found in verses 1 to 5, the very self gratifying desires that plague us all. And he starts with the question, what is the cause of all of our fighting? What is the cause of all of our quarreling? Is it not the desires that are battling, or as another translation puts it, warring within our bodies, within our members, within our personality, within our being? These are stunning words, they're ferocious words. Look at him, he says, you kill, you covet, now some of you are reading that you go, what kind of church is James writing to? Surely it can't be Presbyterians, Presbyterians don't get that excited about anything, all right? So they surely are not that aroused, they can't be us. But James is writing to all of the believers, this is not just to one church that is particularly messed up. He's writing a general letter to all of the churches, to all of the brethren out there, which means this, James has presumed that this is going on in all of our families, in all of our churches. He is giving counsel that we all, even here at Second Presbyterian Church, need to hear that there is battling, there is quarreling, there is fighting, there is warring. Now the fact of the matter is, we've learned to, we've learned to paper that over a little bit, we've learned civil ways, excuse me, to carry out our rivalries. I spent a lot of time, this vacation, Diana and I went to Norway, and we were staying with 13 family members in one house, five of those family members are under the age of six. Now you know Diana and I are expecting our first child in November, so Diana and I were studying these five rather carefully and watching their parents, because we need all the help we can get when we are thrown into that pit. I don't mean that negatively, but I just mean, well, anyway, you can tell I'm a little apprehensive about this fatherhood thing. While I was watching these children, and it's, one of the things that struck me as I was watching them was just how dramatic life is for a kid. I mean, there they are, the cycles of incredible euphoria and laughter and giggling and screaming in delight, cascading down suddenly into hysterical terror and anger and anguish and raw, and you thought Jesus came and went and came and went all in a single day, and those of you who are parents, you know exactly what I'm talking about, you wonder how in the world a kid can ride out the roller coaster of his heart, day in and day out, in the same day all these cycles. Now I would think of you wrenching. I think that children are reviewing something to us about the incredible energy and drama of our own hearts. Children don't know how to hide it. We adults, we've gotten pretty good at figuring out how to hide the energies and the vigor and the strength of what we want, when we want it, and how we want it. Children don't know how to do that, they'll snatch, they'll grab, they'll grit their teeth, they'll stomp, they'll do anything they can to get what they want, it's life and death. The rest of us have just figured out other ways to kind of mask the measure of energy that's in our own hearts because I would submit to you, we're not less dramatic in the heart, we're more so. The stakes are bigger for us. We set our eyes on bigger things. We don't get quite so aroused over legoes, but we will get aroused over certain other things, will we not? And our hearts are wildly vigorous, and James is drawing that out, and I want to say this, it is not wrong to have a desirous heart. It is not wrong to have a hungry heart. In fact, I love this text because it confronts the reality that we have wild hearts. Our hearts are vigorous, they're voracious, they're ravenous. And you know what? God has created you that way because your heart was made to have the eternal God take up residence there, and to have him bring all of the joy and all of the pleasure that it is, and to bring that into your heart, and to your friends, if your heart is the capacity to contain the eternal God, it's a big heart, and it's very desirous. So that's not the problem, the problem is not having a desirous heart, it's having a desirous heart that's been disconnected from that God. And that's the wildness of which I speak, and the children will manifest that in the way they'll grab or whatever they want to try to meet their own needs, and we do the same thing. If we just take off the mask and reveal that, and how do we do this? And James says we battle and we quarrel, and we fight and we kill, very striking words, very ferocious words, the reason he's using those words is because that's the kind of energy that is in your heart when you and I are engaging one another, and it happens in the simplest of things. Diane and I, we're driving to the officers retreat on Friday, and at home we had a disagreement over something rather trivial. I had a desire going one way, Diane had a desire going another way. This sounds familiar Mary folk, I mean it's, you know, we're perfectly happy, but I'll tell you, we have differing desires at times, and you just find yourself stumbling over those. Well, there's Diane and me, we're driving off, officers retreat, we're going off for a spiritual, spiritually focused occasion with the leaders of the church, driving down non-cona, neither of us are talking to each other. We get to 72, we're still not really talking to each other, finally we start to talk, we talk often on throughout that trip, we have to talk once we get there, it took us several hours to work out what was a very, what both of us would agree was a very trivial matter. Well, why do trivial matters take up so much time because the energy of the heart behind the trivial focus? You see, it's not just the trivial matter, Diane's heart engaging in my heart, and it's two sets of desires that need to be reconciled and put on the same page. And all of us are tussling with each other, you may not know it, you may not realize what's going on, but I would submit in this congregation, in the relationship you're in, there's a lot of tussling that's going on among us all, all to get what we want, and we do it in different ways, we might manipulate somebody to do something for us. Classic example, you're wanting to be complemented, haven't you figured out how to squeeze a compliment out of somebody? If you don't know how come talk to me, I'd tell you how to do it, but I just don't think I'm feeling ugly today, oh no, you're looking wonderful today, you know, you just kind of lob out one statement that you know the other person is compelled and constrained to give to you the compliment that you want, so you just sort of pull it out of them, or her. You want some encouragement, will you figure out a way that says something rather self disparaging that allows the other person to come say, oh no, that's not true about you, and then they encourage you. So all the while what's happening, you're using them, you're trying to draw something out of them, a compliment something, you may figure out how to get them to do something, I love watching people at times manipulate someone else into doing something and that person thinks it was all their own idea to do this for this person, it wasn't their own idea, the other person had set it up wonderfully and subtly, so we manipulate one another, try and draw out what we want, we get around those people who make us feel good about ourselves because we want to feel good about ourselves, so we get around those who make us feel good, those who are critical, you don't want to be around those people, it may be that what they're saying is true, you still don't want to hear it, it's like King A have, you know, Elijah says, this man never has anything good to say to me, no it's actually my case, he never says anything good, I don't want to be around him, I don't want to be around prophets who say something nice, okay, we just draw around ourselves those that will satisfy our itch, that will meet what we define as our need and our desires and we will manipulate it, we will run them over, we'll do whatever we have to do, and then there are those who hurt you, well James says you kill them, what do you mean kill, well you dismiss them for starters, you just banish them from your life, maybe a Christian brother sister doesn't matter, you banish them, or maybe you just conveniently let certain gossip things come out about him or hurt to someone else, and suddenly you poison their reputation, you poison their standing in a church, killing is another way of putting it, or there's still others that end you envy because they have what you want, now children will just snatch it out of someone's hands if they can get away with it, you know you can't just snatch it out of someone's hands but deep down you wish you could, and there's a dark spirit of envy that begins to brood to the point where if it's somebody you really envy you begin to listen for hints that maybe they're hurt, or you listen for their misery, and when you hear it you actually are made glad by it, that's what envy does, because they have what you want, you don't want them more happy than you, all of this is going on brothers and sisters in our own faith and it impacts in our own lives, I mean in our own hearts, and it impacts our community because we all are trying to gather around us those who will meet our needs, and yet we can't get satisfaction from them, so we even try to enlist God in it, according to James, and God says, I'm not going to be a party to this, as if you have not, or you ask and don't receive because you ask with wrong motives that you may spend it on your pleasures and you say to God, well now Lord you've told us to bring our petitions to you, you've told us to pray big prayers, I've given you my list of wants, why won't you come through for me? And God's response is because I won't bow the knee to your sovereign self gratifying desires, I know your desires, I create you with a desire as hard, but I don't bow the knee to your sovereign demands for satisfaction on your terms, so God says I'm not going to play that Dean, in fact God goes on to say when you are motivated and driven by your own self and your own needs and everything's got to be measured, my relationships are all measured by what they do for me and how they satisfy me and how they lift me up and how they increase my standing, that's the spirit of worldliness says James and it's that which renders us enemies with God, that's acting like an enemy of God, why? Because in trying to satisfy your own hearts desires with your timetable, your agenda and your demands, you're seeking to have your heart satisfied apart from God, you're seeking to be satisfied independently of Him, you're seeking salvation apart from grace, you've made yourself arrival to Christ,
and this is a problem, let me get quickly to the second and I'll spend less time with the second and third peaks in the interest of time, the James gives to us, the second peak into the wild rebellion of our hearts, in addition to our desires, is our self righteous judgments versus 11 and 12, we are judging and we're always prone to judge fellow Christians, church people are notorious for going after each other and eating each other up, I suppose everybody is this way but it's just that much more distressing in the church when you know that this is a place where we're called to love one another, Jesus says, they will know you are my disciples, if you have love for one another, not if you eat each other up, and yet the fact of the matter is we're all good at eating each other, yeah there are people you like, there are also people you don't like, and what do you do about them? Those that you are not particularly fond of, and James is saying here we are all too often prone to judge them and we forget who they are, there are brothers and sisters, there are people for whom Christ died, there are people that Christ has saved, there are people to whom you and I are related for eternity, do you realize that in death you can't get rid of your brothers and sisters in Christ, they follow you to heaven, God's going to force you to reckon style whether here or there, but you will be reconciled because they're your brothers and your sisters for eternity, we've forgotten that, when we judge them, but James goes on he says you're not only judge them, you judge the law, when we think no wait a minute, I'm not judging God's law, I just don't want to be around them. James says you've forgotten that God's law calls you to love your brothers and sisters, so what you've basically said is God, I overall like your law, but as it applies to that particular person or those people, you overstep your bounds, you've asked too much, I'm sorry, I can't go that far, I'm going to judge them, you obviously aren't judging them Lord, so why don't you let me do it, let me go after them, and so not only have you judged God's law and you set up a rival law, you've set up a rival judge to God himself, and let me tell you this, if you're like me at all, this is the way your judgment works, it's according to yourself, in other words you judge another person according to your strengths, and where they happen to be strong and you weak, well that's not part of the law, all right so that doesn't count, what counts is where I'm strong and where I'm good and where they aren't, and so you yourself become the rival law, you yourself become the rival judge, you see how something as simple as slandering or defaming or criticizing someone else is really ultimately rivalry with God himself, the wildness of your own heart, assuming a place that does not rightfully have, there's a third peak James gives to us, versus 13 to 18 or 17, the self-sufficiency of our own plans, I used to based on this text years ago, I used to occasionally when I'd be saying goodbye to a friend I'd say, it's been great seeing you, Lord willing I'll see you again, and the reaction was always, I'm so morbid, you know I mean come on, get a life, you know, Lord willing you'll see me again, and I was admittedly I was being playful and joking, but there's a certain sense in which probably we take far too granite the future, and those of you who've been diagnosed with terminal illness, those of you who have lost loved ones recently, you know that tomorrow there are no guarantees don't you, the plans that you had could very easily be disrupted and destroyed, we tend to live as if the future is ours, hold the future in our hands, I'm the captain of my own ship, the master of my fate, God says you don't even know what's going to happen later today or tomorrow, let alone next year, we tend to think that success is in our hands, that by the grit of my teeth and the prowess of my intellect and my talents and gifts and resourcefulness and shrewdness, I can make things happen, and God says if I wasn't there to help you and assist and make this all happen, you'd be going down the tube, you see we tend to think that our futures in our hands, our successes in our hands, even our life is in our hands and James says what are you brother and sister but missed, mourning missed that blows away the heat of the sun, you see all of this is not condemning planning, please don't hear that, we are a planning church, we encourage you to plan and to be very intentional about your lives, that's not what this is talking about, it's not against planning, it's against the kind of planning that says I can do it by myself irrespective of what God is doing, it's the kind of planning that was in my heart when in college I at a moment of sheer frustration and perversity said I banged my fist on my desk and I said I'm going to do God's will whether he wants me to or not,
I want you to think about that statement, I'm going to do God's will whether he wants me to or not, it's an absurd statement isn't it and actually it was funny once it came out of my mouth I had to laugh but man it said a lot about this didn't it and the will the self-sufficient determination this is what James is going after and we close by looking at what James has given to us as a path to a changed heart and he says it there in verse 6 through 10 and what he is saying is this you're a hungry people you're desirous God's wired you up that way you're voracious in what you want
but you're not going to get it by trying to satisfy yourself and you're not going to get the righteousness you seek by trying to judge others and you're not going to get the success and the fulfillment and the additional glory you want by seeking it out on your own terms come to God he gives more grace you ought to underline those words he gives you ought to circle the word more it's what's emphasized in the Greek text quite literally it reads greater he gives grace he gives greater grace you're hungry you want satisfaction you want to be accomplishing things in the world you want righteousness and you want rightness that's all well and good but you're not going to get it on your own terms and you're not going to get it through the grit in the in the in the fist of your own hands you're going to get it by humbly submitting and receiving the grace the greater grace of God he longs to satisfy your heart and that's why James out of nowhere is saying you're hungry and you don't have you kill and you covet you don't have you pray and you don't receive but God gives a greater grace and therefore he says submit yourselves to God what's the path to that grace the path is to humbling your wild restless rebellious hearts humbling your hearts submit yourselves therefore to God and resist the devil he will flee from you and come near to him he'll come near to you all of that is to say align yourself to this God come to him he is the giver of greater grace then you could ever amass for yourself come to him feast on him yield yourself to him grab your heart and and pull it out pull it away from its warring desires and funnel it to this great grace giving God that's what he is saying and it isn't easy either it's a call to repentance he says wash your hands you sinners purify your hearts you double minded in other words grab a hold of that and turn the other way repent of those false pursuits repent of those self gratifying lusts and the call to mourning and grieving it's not because God's trying to take away your joy it's not in contradiction with Paul who says rejoice always again I say rejoice what he is saying there's friends this is serious business and it's going to cost you something to yield and submit to God you want an example of this Jesus in the garden of Eden I want you to think about the Savior the perfect man who's ever the perfect man the only perfect man who's ever lived the sinless one and he stood in the garden of Eden he said father I don't want to drink this cup I don't want to drink this cup nevertheless not your will but mine be done and the Savior had to wrestle there for an hour and he sweat as drops of blood to gather his own heart his perfect heart his desirous heart and to gather it up and to yield it over to the giver of greater grace and dear friends if the perfect sinless son of God has to go through that to get his own heart in a place where it is truly not my will but vine be done what do you think it's going to be like for you and me who are sinners to bring our hearts to the place of not my will but vine be done it's going to be a struggle you have to have to expect a struggle but here's the promise those who humble themselves before God he will lift them up what's amazing as I read James 4 is that that's the desire of all of our hearts to be lifted up self gratifying desires to be lifted up we judge others ultimately to be lifted up we seek future profit and success an additional glory why to be lifted up will I ask you this question would you rather be lifted up by yourself or would you rather be lifted up by the king of kings and the lord of lords and the giver of all great grace can you lift yourself up high enough that it even compares with what he will do to raise you up you see he is the giver of the greater grace and therefore let our hearts let our hearts be tamed close with us there are really only two prayers it's been said that are prayed in this world one is not my will but vine be done prayer of Christ the prayer of James chapter 4 God answers that prayer with greater grace but there's another prayer it's not thy will lord but mine be done you know God answers that prayer too it's called hell and that's really our choices not our will but his be done heaven or not his will mine be done that's hell may we make the right choice but it's prayed father we we have hearts that are wildly fiery in their desire we all too often go astray seeking out our own provision for ourselves forgive us gracious lord it is our desire to pray the prayer of Jesus not our will but vine be done because in your will is the greater good and the greater joy and the greater pleasure and the greater blessing and the greater grace so we ask you to help us grab a hold of our hearts and offer them up anew and a fresh take our lives lord and let them be fully consecrated lord to thee amen is that not to cry of our hearts that that God would take our will and make it his that God would take our hearts and make it his throne he is the king of hearts he is the lover of hearts he is the giver of greater grace so go forth from this day seeking not your own desires on your own agenda but seeking the greater grace that is in Christ Jesus and bring your heart to him and to give you the strength to go forth that way receive his blessing the Lord bless you and keep you the Lord make his face to shine upon you and be gracious unto you the Lord lift up the light of his countenance upon you and give you his gospel peace both now and forever more