WELCOME
PRAYER
SING WORDS
SILENCE
Okay we left off in James 4:5 where he asked:
5 Do ye think that the scripture saith in vain, “The spirit that dwelleth in us lusteth to envy?”
We talked about this passage and how James was in all probability citing a general message from the Old Testament or apocrapha rather than a specific passage.
He continues, saying:
James 4:10
Meat
May 3rd 2015
6 But . . . he giveth more grace. Wherefore he saith, “God resisteth the proud, but giveth grace unto the humble.”
At verse seven James then enters into a series of eleven directives, saying:
Submit yourselves therefore to God.
Resist the devil, and he will flee from you.
Draw nigh to God, and he will draw nigh to you.
Cleanse your hands, ye sinners; and
purify your hearts, ye double minded.
Be afflicted,
and mourn,
and weep:
let your laughter be turned to mourning,
and your joy to heaviness.
11. Humble yourselves in the sight of the Lord, and he shall lift you up.
Okay, back to verse 6.
Again, in verse five James has said that “the Spirit of man lusteth to envy” and now adds:
“But he (meaning God) giveth more grace. Wherefore he saith, God resisteth the proud, but giveth grace unto the humble.”
James has been talking about envy and strife and of the crimes which grew out of it including wars and fightings and other lusts of Man.
And it seems – I could be wrong – but it seems like James suddenly realized amidst his rant of against all the products of evil that God is there for those who believe and out of his own mind – inspired or not – claims:
“But in the face of all this GOD gives more grace.”
We are naturally filled with envy and strife which leads to warfare and fightings and the like BUT (thank God) God gives us more grace.
He enables us to thrive and survive – and without Him and His grace our survival, even as believers, would be impossible.
As I have dived deeper into Christianity – especially with a greater conversion to the importance of love – I have come to believe that I – Shawn McCraney – is getting better in terms of growth and maturity and ability.
Four days ago God showed me otherwise. As some quick background I was born in East LA and lived in a town called Whittier until I was ten.
From six years of age until ten I had to learn to survive in an environment of second generation Hispanics who attended the local public school.
There were frequent altercations. Add in that my older brother used to get me in his car drive to places where the local Hispanic kids hung out and then set up fights between me and them I have some background prejudice in my flesh – which I thought was entirely gone due to the presence of the King in my life.
Last week as I sat writing in an almost empty Einstein’s a Hispanic male, well dressed and groomed and a man I had seen many times before came and took a seat right next to me.
He was on his phone talking loudly and bounding his back against the window.
By doing so his shoulder was hitting the bar at the base of the blinds and swinging it out from the window almost knocking over my precious and evil Diet Coke.
I tried patience. I tried gently pushing the blind back into place to notify him that his actions were infiltrating into my world.
I cleared my throat. Nothing. Then I recognized some of his vulgar Spanish. This obliviousness combined with his vulgarity moved me to lift the blind from behind him and put it in front of his shoulder.
In a flash I became the recipient of a very strong combination of English vulgarity.
And God’s – at least from what I could tell – did NOT grant me more grace. In fact, it seemed like He wasn’t present at all as I responded to him in Spanish with a few choice commands.
And things got ugly. Even though I apologized to him when he got up to leave, I made an enemy that day and the weight of my failure – along with all the history of past failures orbiting around this very similar situation – came crashing in on me.
“Oh wretched man that I am,” was the theme of my heart for the next four days.
But in the face of this unfortunate failure I was able to clearly see how much I rely on the presence and grace of God to keep this carnal, utterly evil flesh of mine in check . . . and how far afield I am from the life of our King.
Simultaneously I was reminded of the grace and goodness of God in spite of myself which pushed me deeper into a desire to have even less of these failures than I have had in the past.
In saying that God gives us more grace it seems that James was reminded of another passage of scripture – this time quoting directly from Proverbs 3:34 which says:
“Surely he scorneth the scorners; but he giveth grace unto the lowly.”
The implication is that in the presence of our failures God gives more grace but not to the proud but to the lowly, the humble.
This line from Proverbs is what seems to cause James to add (in verse 6)
“God resisteth the proud, but giveth grace unto the humble.”
Simply put, the proud are those who have an inordinate self-esteem, who have a high and unreasonable conceit of their own excellence or importance – in relation to others and in relation to God.
It is THE sin.
We have the ability to become proud of almost anything, believing or possessing an inordinate self-esteem relative to our strength, beauty, wisdom, accomplishments, children spouse or family, country, talents and skills, rank, or even religion.
Ironically we can become proud of our humility, our poverty, our ability to forgive or generosity.
False humility can be as prideful as arrogance. So what we want to deal in is truth which begins with a reasonable and rational view and description of the facts surrounding a situation.
In other words people can have beauty or intelligence or wealth or skills but ascribing them to their proper place and origin precludes them from pride.
This of course is much more likely when someone sees who they are in relation to who God is.
In this light it’s really difficult for pride of any kind to truly abide.
And in this case the heart is not lifted up, entitlements are not demanded, he defers to others and their needs over their own, and he is honestly humbled before his God.
Pride steps beyond this and grants a person a degree of self-estimation or importance which is not warranted by a contextual reality.
One of the terrifying things about God is He sees all things AS THEY ARE and therefore abhors arrogance.
When I was dabbling in Eastern Metaphysics I remember reading a story (I think from Herman Hesse) which told of a most beautiful woman in India who was pursued by many men.
One man was particularly persistent in his attentions, coming to her home daily and seeking for her to become his wife.
One day the woman told the man:
“Give me three months and then come back. If you still insist then to marry me we will.”
The man agreed and departed. In the meanwhile the woman began to do two specific things.
First, she fasted, and only consumed water and juices to sustain life. Secondly, she took everything that came from her body – wastes of every kind – and
Collected them in large metal tins.
When the man returned three months later the woman came to the door. Her hair was brittle, he skin saggy and covered in sores, her eyes dreary and dead-like.
The man screamed! “What has happened to you,” he cried, “where did your beauty go?”
The woman walked him to the tins in the yard at the back of the house and pointing to them said, “theirs is my beauty.”
God, seeing through beauty that is skin deep, knowing the genetic origins of height and strength, having the inside scoop on how wealth is derived, hates the pride of Man.
Proverbs 8:13 The fear of the LORD is to hate evil: pride, and arrogancy, and the evil way, and the froward mouth, do I hate.
I cannot help but think of the selfie face girls make when I read that line of the forward mouth.
In opposition to a forward world with proud looks and proud hearts it is not a mistake that as a means to save the world God employed a lowly savior, a man despised acquainted with grief, who was put to death in the most humiliating way.
And in direct relation to all of this we read that God simultaneously “giveth grace unto the humble.”
So while He certainly is not a respecter of men he does give favor to the humble.
The respect He does not give is related to the stations of life people inherit or attain, favor to the humble is related to the heart-felt response people have to all of lifes’s circumstances –whether they be bountiful or lacking.
Is God the benefactor of their praise or themselves . . . or something else?
In light of what he says in verse 6, James now gives us the eleven points we mentioned earlier. Most of them relate to humility in one way or another.
Submit yourselves therefore to God.
Yield ourselves to His views, His ways, what He deems good, what He seeks.
The more acquiescence we make to Him the more He will respond – whether they are submission to His correction or blessing.
Such submission is possible when we realize a couple of things about God.
First, that He is not only on our side and does what is best for us all things considered but that He is capable of doing all things and has the best view on how to do them.
It’s difficult but it’s also what pleases Him – this reliance and trust on Him and Him alone – especially when we are presented with alternatives – and then the submission to Him and His ways.
The second thing that makes submission to Him easier is when we realize who He is relative to who we are.
Pride suggests that He needs us humility suggests we aren’t worthy to lift our eyes in His direction.
James argument says plainly that God gives grace to the humble, THEREFORE
Submit yourself to God – an act of humility.
Number two:
Resist the devil, and he will flee from you.
On the one hand he says, “Submit all of ourselves to God” (and then in the complete opposite direction) “resist the devil, and he will flee from you.”
The Greek for resist is “ANTH IS TA MEE” and it means to take a stand against.
James plainly says resist the devil and He will flee from you. Interestingly, in the face of evil attacks Jesus says:
Matthew 5:38 Ye have heard that it hath been said, An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth:
39 But I say unto you, That ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also.
At first glance this seems like a contradiction – or at least paradox.
But we have to note that Jesus direction was to NOT resist evil actions coming from men toward our person and James was to stand resistant to the Devil and this would cause him to flee.
It’s utterly ingeneous. As Christians we are commanded to suffer for Christ’s sake and to take rebuff from individual human beings for His cause and sake.
But as a means to avoid operating from the same fleshly platforms we are to simultaneously resist the devil as soon as he tempts us to employ the flesh.
The interpretation of James and Paul is made amazingly clear by Paul in Ephesians 6 beginning at 11 where he says:
11 Put on the whole armor of God, that ye may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil. (James advice)
12 For we wrestle not against flesh and blood (Jesus advice), but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places. (James advice).
And then, he gives us insight on exactly HOW we resist the devil, saying . . .
13 Wherefore take unto you the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to withstand (same Greek word as James uses) in the evil day, and having done all, to stand.
14 Stand therefore, having your loins girt about with truth, and having on the breastplate of righteousness;
15 And your feet shod with the preparation of the gospel of peace;
16 Above all, taking the shield of faith, wherewith ye shall be able to quench all the fiery darts of the wicked.
17 And take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God:
18 Praying always with all prayer and supplication in the Spirit, and watching thereunto with all perseverance and supplication for all saints.
Getting back to James and his advice to resist the devil it is an easy claim to make and say but JUST what does it look like.
I used to believe in the human rhetoric that resisting the devil looked like Joseph’s response to Potipher’s wife – that at the first wiff of Satan we run.
This is an approach many people teach to resisting the devil but to me it seems like we are using flesh to resist flesh in such things – and again for me – it doesn’t work . . . not in the long run.
Paul actually gives us the way to resist Him in Ephesians – we can curse the darkness all day long or we can arm ourselves with light.
In this away circumstances cannot dictate our lives but rather we dictate the outcome of our circumstances.
So as a means to resist the Devil and to war against principalities in high places Paul presents us with the illustration of putting on spiritual armor which, once we are equipped, will have the ability to withstand Satan’s appeals.
The part of this invisible armor include:
Standing (not running by the way) but standing with
truth about loins,
having on the breastplate of righteousness
our feet shod with the preparation of the gospel of peace
But “above all things,” taking the shield of faith, wherewith ye shall be able to quench all the fiery darts of the wicked.
the helmet of salvation,
and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God: and finally
praying always with supplication.
AGAIN – if you want to be best protected from Satan resist him by possessing the truth, wrapped in the Righteousness of Christ, being prepared with the Gospel of Peace, holding the shield of faith, wearing the helmet of salvation (knowing you are saved, I would say), and bearing the Word of God (also known was the sword of the Spirit) and finally prayer.
James gives another insight – an interesting one at that saying:
“Draw nigh to God, and he will draw nigh to you.”
The line gives insight – not rock solid answers but insight – into one of the most quizzical questions in Christianity – how does God relate to us?
In 2nd Chronicles 15:1-2 we read:
And the Spirit of God came upon Azariah the son of Oded:
And he went out to meet Asa, and said unto him, “Hear ye me, Asa, and all Judah and Benjamin; The LORD is with you, while ye be with him; and if ye seek him, he will be found of you; but if ye forsake him, he will forsake you.
First of all I realize that this is an Old Testament construct so in the dispensation of the Good News I can’t say that the same principles apply.
I say this because if, through Christ, we have been adopted into God’s family and have the right to call Him Papa the concept is confusing.
Certainly, as our Papa, God is always present, always wanting, always ready to receive us into His arms.
Add in Jesus teachings of shepherds who will go and seek the lost sheep and we have more paradox present.
Bottom line – this teaching is paradoxical in the presence of other parts of scripture.
Welcome to biblical Christianity.
So it forces us to look closer to each apparent conflict and see them for what they are and what they are saying.
For example, in the case of the lost sheep or lost coin they are lost and need help returning to their proper place.
Add in that they are non-human characters and we discover items that need His help.
However it seems that in the case of human beings – especially human beings who have been in a relationship with Him like the Children of Israel, he will run to us but only once we have decided to run to Him first.
The parable of the Prodigal Son is a tremendous illustration of this as the father allowed the prodigal to leave. And He did NOT seek him out but let him suffer and decide for himself that he would return.
Of course after making this decision to draw back to his father we see the father doing the unspeakable in Eastern cultures and running to receive him.
This seems to be the principle of which James is speaking.
Remember, he is not writing to the unsaved here but to the saved from the House of Israel . . . and he is reproving them for wandering in a number of ways – including the advice
“Draw nigh to God, and he will draw nigh to you.”
I believe that when it comes to loving and worshipping and honoring and desiring God He wants it to come from us freely.
No compulsion. No force. If you want me in your life come to me. When you do you will receive love like no other. But you have to desire it first.
Of course we cannot come literally any nearer to God than we always and already are – He is always around us.
But I don’t think we can ever hope for his company while we prefer to remain at a distance from him.
James continues with his fourth point
Cleanse your hands, ye sinners; and
Because he is writing to converted Jews this may be a reference to Isaiah 1:15-16 where that prophet said:
“Your hands are full of blood; wash you, make you clean; put away the evil of your doings from before mine eyes; cease to do evil.”
Though the heart is the seat of motives and intentions the hands are emblematic as representing all that has taken root in the heart and carrying out its desires.
Washing the hands, therefore, represented putting away of sin and is once reason the Jews were such great washers.
Of course Jesus brought in the idea that all evil came from the heart and that is what needed to be cleansed (which led to some of His disciples eating with unwashed hands – a criticism of His followers being unclean) so James is absolutely referring to imagery from the law that is telling them to put away their sin.
Again, the idea ties in with submitting to God, to resisting Satan, and to drawing near to God first.
Most of the commentaries I consulted supported the Old Testament notion that in order to truly come to God and have Him hear us we have to put away our sin.
May the living God forgive me if I’m wrong but I not only do not think this is right I do not think its possible.
I also believe the idea, in the end, discounts the Good News and compromises the finished work of Jesus.
It’s all – all – all a matter of the heart. It is NOT a matter of the hands. Human hands – no matter who the human is – are metaphorically ALWAYS stained by sin.
We run the risk of returning to the flesh to overcome the flesh when we accept notions that suggest we have to have clean hands to come to God.
One of the reasons for this is because for the person of faith – LISTEN – for the person of FAITH the hands were cleansed nearly two thousand years ago.
This is FAITH friends. To trust and believe that Jesus took sin and nailed it all to the cross and that our hands HAVE been cleansed once and for all . . . and that it is incumbent upon us, as believers in His finished work to then live and act accordingly.
In other words someone who claims to believe Jesus paid it all, all to Him I owe but it then trying to clean their hands so as to be worthy to approach God places the work of Jesus under their feet.
If he did what we claim He did I would think we ought to live and approach God in His name fully convinced of the fact and not reverting to a place where we think some sin remains . . . that we need to clean in order to be right with Him.
I think James gets far closer to the point in the fifth point saying (or adding)
“purify your hearts, ye double minded.”
By adding this James seems to recognize that the putting away of outward sin is like putting a bandage on cancer – the problem is deeper.
In other words, if the heart is wrong nothing will be right.
We tend to speak in superlatives in the faith about being born-again and getting a new heart.
This is true. But we might liken it to receiving a new vacuum cleaner for a house that is filthy.
It’s going to take some time for the new machine to suck out all the grime and dust that has accumulated over the course of our unregenerate lives.
In scripture we are told to let the word renew our minds. With the mind of man residing more in the heart that anywhere else in scripture the idea is that while we have received a new heart when we first believed and received its going to take some time (through exposure to the Word) to clean out all the residual junk – even if we have believed and been saved.
Obviously James is speaking to believers here but it doesn’t stop him from telling them to still purify their hearts, whom he calls, “ye double-minded.”
James says all the way back at the beginning of his epistle in chapter one verse 8 that the “double-minded,” man is unstable in all of his ways.
Here he brings the charge of double mindedness home and applies it to them.
We might even be tempted to believe that most of the underlying reason that James has written in the first place is that his audience was guilty of “double-mindedness.”
One foot in the world, one in heaven.
And when the heart is not decidedly fixed it is really really difficult to stand strong, to completely submit to God, or to withstand the wiles of the Devil.
Double mindedness is akin to having a gap in the armor. Because of James continued reference to these believers reaction and relation to either people of substance or material substance itself, I can’t help but believe that their double-mindedness was tied to loving the wisdom from below while laying claim to give allegiance to the wisdom from below.
He has appealed to humility, to submitting, and now to cleaning the heart because their hearts are set upon two standards.
As a means to assist them in removing the world from their lives he adds some direct advice, numbers 6-10 saying:
6 Be afflicted!
7 And mourn
8 And weep
9 And let your laughter be turned to mourning
10 And your joy to heaviness.
Can you imagine meeting with a pastor and having them tell you this – preach this to you, hope this for you?
The advice seems to be given in direct evidence of their double-mindedness and sin – and so James is seeking to get them to make a stand on one side of this two-sided platform.
When I meet with people of faith or said faith I quickly try and discover the heart beating within their chest.
Show me a person with a heart for God, a heart for truth, a heart for doing well but a weakness for sin and I’ll show you an encouraging word, and message of hope and love.
But show me someone who justifies sin, discounts God, downplays the import of Him as the focal point of Christian living and you’ll hear advice like:
6 Be afflicted!
mourn
weep
let your laughter be turned to mourning
and your joy to heaviness.
When he says be afflicted the word means “endure hardship,” proving that they had been turning to the elements of the world to pacify their sufferings.
And it seems, from his references to laughter and joy that they had been receiving the wages of sin in this world rather than sorrow and humiliation.
Isaiah touches on the concept, saying in
22:12-13
“And in that day did the Lord GOD of hosts call to weeping, and to mourning, and to baldness, and to girding with sackcloth:
But behold joy and gladness, slaying oxen, and killing sheep, eating flesh, and drinking wine: let us eat and drink; for to morrow we shall die.”
James finishes up with this drive of his teaching, which began as a plea to humble themselves and so it’s no surprise that he wraps this topic up with a reiteration, saying in verse 12:
11. Humble yourselves in the sight of the Lord, and he shall lift you up.
“Take your appropriate place in the dust on account of your transgressions, on account of your attitude, on account of your pride, and then – and possibly only then – HE will lift you up.”
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