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Midtown Presbyterian Church

The Great Con | You Can Serve Two Masters - James 4:1-10 - Clint Leavitt

Sermon Resources:

  1. “The eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing.” -Ecclesiastes 1:8
  2. “Desire alone, of acquiring goods and possessions for ourselves and our nearest friends, is insatiable, perpetual, universal.” -David Hume, "A Treatise of Human Nature"
  3. "I can't get no satisfaction." -Mick Jagger, "Satisfaction"
  4. “In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by a relatively small number of persons who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.” -Edward Bernays, "Propaganda"
  5. “Our enormously productive economy demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfaction, our ego satisfaction, in consumption…The greater the pressures upon the individual to conform to safe and accepted social standards, the more he tends to express his aspirations and his individuality in terms of what he wears, drives, eats, his home, his car, his food, his hobbies. We need things consumed, burned up, worn out, replaced, and discarded at an ever-increasing pace. We need to have people eat, drink, ride, live with ever more complicated and, therefore, constantly more expensive consumption. ” -Victor Lebow, "The Journal of Retailing: 1955"
  6. Harvest Queen vs. Homecoming Queen: https://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/1991/november-25/murder-envy-and-harvest-princess-what-really-poisoned.html&sa=D&source=docs&ust=1723312423553888&usg=AOvVaw1ZO4y_-tCOr2mrBn_u6LFG
  7. “We have tended to turn the Christian faith into a relationship with a God who is the divine vending machine in the sky, there to meet our every want. Unhappy? Unattractive? Unsuccessful? Unmarried? Unfulfilled? Come to Christ and he’ll give you all these things you asked for. We forget that God is not primarily in the business of meeting our wants. When we make him out to be, we squeeze him out of his rightful place at the center of our lives, and we put ourselves in his place. God is in the business of being God - of redeeming and restoring and forgiving and healing and loving. Christianity cannot be reduced to meeting peoples’ wants, and when we make it so, we invariably distort the Gospel message.” -David Henderson, "Culture Shift"
  8. "I Will Never Cast Out," by John Bunyan
  9. Examen resource: https://www.ignatianspirituality.com/ignatian-prayer/the-examen/

Duration:
40m
Broadcast on:
11 Aug 2024
Audio Format:
mp3
(upbeat music) - You're listening to a sermon for Midtown Presbyterian Church in Phoenix, Arizona. If you'd like to learn more about Midtown and its ministry, please visit us at midtownprez.org or follow us on Instagram or Facebook. - Amen. Thanks Luke for the good news of the gospel today. And thanks you guys for showing up. Thanks for being here today. It's always a joy for me to see each of your faces. Glad you're here. You guys, you all got out of bed this morning because you wanted something. It's true. Maybe like me, you wanted to go on a walk before it got unbearably hot outside and you have a creature that lives in your home that needs exercise. Maybe that was you this morning. Maybe you just wanted to have some time alone before the chaos monsters called your children emerged from their layers. Maybe, maybe you are more like my wife and you just needed a nice cup of caffeine to start your day. I've learned in the Levitt household, Emily's alarm is always the one that goes off, but she does not wake up to her alarm. I wake up to her alarm. And so gently I will kick her to turn off her alarm and then I wake up, I'm the first one out of bed and she's still not out of bed. I get to the kitchen and I perform my daily magic trick which is making the coffee. And I press the coffee bean grinder in and it's like I'm pulling a rabbit out of a hat suddenly poof Emily appears around the corner. It's amazing. Magic every morning in the Levitt house. But the point, the point is this. Every one of us is in this room today because of one thing, desire. We all wanted something or a series of some things and those desires led us to make the radical choice to get out of bed and into the world. Desire to one degree or another motivates everything we do. Which means desire is often a beautiful and good thing. Desire is what makes it possible for us to be passionate about our work. So what makes us caring parents or neighbors or friends, it's what compels us to make good food or make good art or enjoy good company. But if at any point desire becomes something that we are unable to control, if at any point desire takes the steering wheel of our lives, if our personal pleasure or satisfaction becomes the ruler of our lives, we get into trouble. Because it's good as desire can be, it's also one of those things that's never, ever satisfied. As the great poet in the book of Ecclesiastes in our Bibles put it, the eye is not satisfied with seeing nor the ear filled with hearing. Fast forward to 1740, David Hume, the great philosopher, put it this way, desire alone of acquiring goods and possessions for ourselves and our nearest friends is insatiable, perpetual, universal. And maybe most importantly to those of us in this room who love rock music in 1965 on our great modern poet said, "I can't get no satisfaction." Yeah, make jagger, baby. What every one of those great minds and artists are getting at is a fundamental component of our human nature, that our desire is infinite. And because we are finite, because we are limited people with one body and one mind and one heart and one job and one life, we constantly feel a deep sense of longing. We have infinite desire, but we're trying to satisfy it with finite things. And that often means that the human condition is one of perpetual turmoil. And there's maybe no better cultural moment to prove that than our own right now. See, America, especially over the last few decades, has been built on a simple notion. Personal pleasure, the pursuit of your desires, is the primary aim of life. We've all been saturated, grown up in that culture and trained to pursue our desires full bore. Get what you want, when you want, how you want it, and it will lead you to satisfaction. Much of it is derived from a guy named Sigmund Freud, he's a neurologist in the early 20th century. Freud had research that concluded that most humans make decisions not based upon rational thinking, but based upon desires that are often unconscious, below the surface things we don't even realize are driving us until we really reflect on them. We all have automatic impulses longing for pleasure in our brains, and we tend not to act rationally, but irrationally based on desire. Which means we are more prone to manipulation from the outside and self-deception from the inside than we'd ever really like to admit. And that actually isn't a new concept, by the way. Freud brought that up here for us, and it's been used in America, but the writers of the New Testament talked about this a long time ago, they had something similar, they called it the flesh. There's something in us that is compelled to pursue us over everything else. But when people in the US realized that they could make money off of that desire, they capitalized. Fun fact, Edward Bernays, he was Sigmund Freud's nephew. He's now called the father of modern advertising, because he came up with a way to monetize our flesh, our desires. He rallied political and economic powers after the two world wars when the economy was kind of down a bit. He rallied political and economic powers to say, hey, what if we just capitalized on people's psychology? What if we used propaganda, and that's the word he used? What if we used propaganda to convince people that they need more? If you want to make money, that's all you have to do. Just convince people that they constantly need more in their life, and he wasn't shy about this. He literally wrote a book called Propaganda. This is what he said American culture is like. He said, in almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our societal contact or ethical thinking, we are dominated by a relatively small number of persons who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. This isn't a conspiracy. This is just what is true about the US. It is they who pull the wires, which control the public mind, and the world that Bernays described is the world we live in right now. Friends, at this moment, teams of psychologists, you will never meet. Have access to your email if you have a Gmail account, and your photos if you have an Instagram account, and all the things you share on Twitter or Facebook or Pinterest, Facebook is an old social media site for those that don't know. Your web searches, your phone conversations, they're listening, and they have algorithms that are hard at work determining what you want before you know you want it. And every day, they're feeding you thousands of advertisements telling you that you just need to pursue your desires, pursue your pleasure, and you will find satisfaction. Just a couple weeks ago, I was talking with the buddy, and I noticed he was wearing some really nice shorts. Short, recognize short games. It's really important. Good shorts in Phoenix, Arizona, matter. I recognized his shorts. They're amazing, and I complimented him. Guys, literally an hour later in my web browser, there was an ad in the margin for the shorts that I complimented. Our culture is listening. They're trying to capitalize on our desires. There's another marketer in the 1950s who wrote about this. This is a real quote. I couldn't believe when I read this. This is Victor Lebow. He said, "Our enormously productive economy demands "that we make consumption our way of life, "that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, "that we seek our spiritual satisfaction, "our ego satisfaction in consumption." The greater the pressures on the individual to conform to safe and accepted social standards, the more they tend to express their aspiration and individuality in terms of what they wear, or drive or eat. His home, his car, his food, his hobbies. We need things consumed, burned up, worn out, replaced and discarded at an ever-increasing pace. We need to have people eat, drink, ride, live, with ever more complicated, and therefore constantly more expensive consumption. Welcome to church, friends. That's the world that we live in. And the truth is that most of us, in this room, I think, are pretty smart people. Most of us think, yeah, I know that's happening. Like, I see the ads, I know what's going on, but I mean, I'm wise. I don't give in to that sort of thing, right? The data would say the opposite. The average American home in the last 50 years has tripled in size. The average American family has not tripled in size, just for the record. We consume twice as many material goods now as we did 50 years ago. In America, we have 4% of the world's children and 40% of the world's toys. And according to a recent study, half of Americans report believing that they would be happier if they could spend more money. And those are just the people willing to admit it. And it's not just America out there, friends. It's in us. Take some time, do an audit of your heart. Ask yourself, do you ever have a thought that you really just need a little better house, or a little better salary, and then you'll have peace? Do you ever think that you really just need a little better city to live in? Maybe a good group of friends, and then you'll have peace? Do you ever think that you just need that new relationship, that new life stage, and then you'll have peace? We all do this. Our spiritual lives even get corrupted by this sometimes. A few hundred years ago, there was a guy named John. We call him John of the Cross now, which is an epic name. But John of the Cross, he wrote this piece where he talked about spiritual gluttony. He said that sometimes we can bring this sort of thing into our spiritual lives, and we think that just one more spiritual book, or one more prayer practice, or one more church service, or one more emotional spiritual high will bring us final peace, or people who are constantly pursuing our own personal pleasure. Because deep down, most of us have put our desires, our cravings in the driver's seat. Most of us have made pleasure our ruler. And the problem with that is it's not working, friends. It's a con. In the culture where we've embraced that notion the most, restlessness is our default mode. In conversation after conversation, I have with everyone in this room, restlessness is a default mode for us. Anxiety is our nation's neurosis, fear and worry over not having enough or holding on to what we have. That's the fuel for most of our decisions. We can't get no satisfaction. We're continuing in a teaching series here at Midtown called The Great Con. We're going through the book of James together. And each week we're looking at a different con, a different lie, that our culture hands us. We tend to believe and buy into, and how James, in his letter, responds and says, "Guys, now you're missing it, that's not wisdom. "That's not truth, that's not what it means to be human." And as it turns out, being ruled by our desire for pleasure or comforts, that's not just an American problem. It's a human problem. James dealt with this very thing in his early church community. He had strong words from him, he had strong words in the passage we're going to read. They're words that expose the problem, but they're also words that we'll talk about this morning point us to the solution. How we can be ruled by the right things in our lives. So friends, if you have a Bible, open it with me. To the book of James, this is near the backs of your Bible, so if you're flipping there. James chapter four, starting in verse one is where we're going to be. I will read through verse 10. If you don't have a Bible, that's okay. The word's going to be behind you on the screen so you can follow along there. James chapter four, starting in verse one. Those conflicts and disputes among you, where do they come from? Do they not come from your cravings that are at war within you? You want something and you don't have it, so you commit murder. You covet something and cannot obtain it, so you engage in disputes and conflicts. You do not have because you do not ask. And you ask and do not receive because you ask wrongly in order to spend what you get on your pleasures. Adulterers, do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God? Therefore, whoever wishes to be a friend of the world becomes an enemy of God. Or do you suppose that it's for nothing that the scripture says God yearns jealously for the spirit that he has made to dwell on us? But he gives all the more grace. Therefore, it says God opposes the proud that 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. Purify you hearts, you're double-minded. Lament and mourn and weep. Let your laughter be turned into mourning your joy into dejection. Humble yourselves before the Lord and he will exalt you. This is the word the Lord. Thanks be to God. Friends, back in the day, people used to fight with each other. Just back in the day, that's super primitive. I know we're evolved, peaceful people now. Back in the day, people used to fight. And James talks about that here in verse one, some context leading up to this passage. Most scholars think the letter of James is a written version of a sermon or speech given by a guy named James who was the brother of Jesus. And all throughout this letter, James is writing to the early church in Jerusalem, helping them to recognize a crucial difference in their spiritual lives. A difference between profession of faith and possession of faith. That is, the difference between saying you believe something and actually having that thing work itself out in your life. His whole point throughout this whole letter is that Christianity is not just about adopting a set of beliefs or ideas that you ascribe to in your head. Instead, for James and the rest of the scriptures, Christianity is about taking the good news of Jesus' life, death, and resurrection and laying it on your soul in such a way that it changes everything about you. Which means James is threading an important needle here. On the one hand, he's not saying what many people in our culture like to say. Which is that what you believe doesn't really matter as long as you're a good person. We love that notion in our culture. What you believe doesn't really matter. James knows that what we believe really does matter. What we believe about human nature. What we believe about God and other people. We believe about money and wealth. Those things matter. But they aren't the only thing that matters. See, James is saying it's not enough for us to just say a prayer or ascribe to certain beliefs if they don't actually change our heart. If they don't actually shape the way that we show up in the world. In fact, in James' eyes, if we have that kind of faith, if we have a faith that just says we believe certain things and doesn't actually back it up with behavior, that sort of faith is dead, useless, worthless. If your beliefs aren't changing your life, it's very possible you don't actually believe what you say you do. That's what James and Jesus and the scriptures tell us over and over again. And so life of following Jesus, it's an integrated life. It's one where our head and our heart and our hands are all aligned by Christ's way, by Christ's work. And that means we will become fundamentally different people. It means that our pleasure and our desire will no longer be in the driver's seat for us. Our cravings, our longings, they no longer dictate how we show up in the world. Instead, we are to be shaped by the practices and priorities of the kingdom of God. It's a loving God and loving your neighbor, loving your enemies, practicing confession and forgiveness, like Luke just walked us through. Refusing to use others as a means to our end, seeking the flourishing of others, even when it comes at our own expense. That's the new paradigm that James has been outlining throughout this whole book. And now he gets to chapter four, and he really starts to cook. Yeah, that one just for Daniel. I got to snort out of Daniel on that one. In many ways, this passage, it's a crescendo to what he's already been saying for the last chapter. He points out a specific example here in chapter four, verse one, to illustrate where the profession of faith might not be matching the possession of faith in the church. It's the example of conflict. Those conflicts and disputes among you, where do they come from? He asks, because back in the day, people used to fight. Friends, the truth is that James's words speak just as convictingly to us today. We are quarrelsome people. There is no part of human life that is untouched by conflict. Where's the show up for you? Conflict with your parents, with a sibling or siblings, your roommate, your neighbor, your political enemy, that person at the back of the plane who stands and walks down when the plane lands so they can get out first, maybe. Your coworker, maybe your spouse. During premarital sessions with couples, Emily and I will always walk through healthy communication and conflict resolution strategies for people. And one thing we always mention is that the journey that I'm embarking on in marriage is certainly a journey of saying this is the person I commit to loving for the rest of my life. But it's also the journey of committing to be willing to fight with that person for the rest of your life. Is this person someone you're willing to sit in hard disagreements with? Is this person someone you're willing to have conflict with because conflict is part of our human condition? And notice James's focus here. It's not just general conflict. He says the conflict is among you. Remember, he's writing to Christians. He's talking specifically to people who say they follow the Prince of Peace, who are committed to love and forgiveness and reconciliation. And he says you, church, you're on the hook for this too. Which I'm sure comes as a complete shocker. The church sometimes gets it wrong. Sometimes we mess it up. Super weird, right? Inviting, rumor spreading, obsession with power, belittlement of others, doctrinal divisions. We're just as fractured and just as fracturing as anyone else. And the truth is that it's often because the church fails to live differently than the world that the world chooses to reject the church. When we fail to embody Christ's humility and love and compassion and embrace our own pride or self justifying or self elevation, all the world sees in the church is a mirror to themselves with some nice gold religious plating around the edges. Oftentimes the church is the biggest obstacle to the world seeing Jesus. And that's what James is seeing in his own time. And it grieved him deeply. But notice he doesn't just call out the problem. He also encourages them to dig deeper. He asked, where do these conflicts come from? He's trying to get underneath the conflict to try to get to the source because conflict is a symptom. James wants to know the sickness. Because only when you know the sickness can you really find the cure. I think it's worth noting and emulating James's posture here. James's question is always a good question to ask in our own lives when conflict comes up. When you're angry, when you're fighting, when your chest tightens and your breath shortens, it's often good to ask, where is this coming from in me? Where is this rooted? See, the truth is the conflict is just the outward expression of some deeper spiritual and emotional pain. It's the bubbling up of some other buried thing, which means conflict is often an opportunity. If we listen well to our conflicts, if we use our conflicts as reminders to probe in a deeper reflection, what we find is that we can actually start to work through them well, work through them with maturity. But that means we have to reorient ourselves in the way James encourages us to hear. Seeing conflict, what most of us end up doing is saying, this is their problem. They messed up, they're the reason, and I'm angry towards that person. The problem is always out there, and James says, no, no, no, turn that finger, here. How are you contributing? What's going on in you? What's the reason that this is bubbling up in you? He forces us to ask what if we were willing to start with us, and in doing that, just asking that question, James quickly comes upon the sickness that leads to conflict. He says this, do they not come from conflicts? Do they not come from your cravings that are at war within you? That's a rhetorical question. He knows his audience knows that's where these conflicts that are rising in them are coming from. James is saying that our sickness is that each of us is a walking civil war. We are all a war of desires, cravings. There's a battle constantly happening within us over what single thing will be the driving force of our lives. And we shouldn't gloss over the image of war there. He's using a really strong metaphor for a reason. You guys, war only has one purpose, and it's to win. And the desire that we let win out in the war, going on in our hearts is no small thing. It will come to control us. It will come to take us over. That's how war works. See, each time that you choose to pursue a desire, you are slowly becoming a certain type of person, slowly becoming different than you were before. And you are either becoming someone who is more in harmony with God, with others, and with the world, and with yourself, someone who has real joy and peace and wisdom in everything you do, or you're becoming someone else. Someone whose life is smaller, who sees others as a means to your end, whose life is characterized by an increasing sense of loneliness or anger or isolation. Every one of us is at all times moving in one direction or another based on the desire that we are letting win out in us. And he doesn't mince words on the sort of person we become when we let our self-focused desire for pleasure win out. There are three things he points out here in just a couple of verses that are the consequence of us letting our self-focused pursuit of pleasure win out. First thing is that we set ourselves against others. Friends of desire, for even a good thing, becomes a bad thing when it's turned into an ultimate thing. And desire for even a good thing becomes a bad thing when it's turned into an ultimate thing. When my heart, which is made to be satisfied only in the divine, infinite joy of God, when it's ruled by a different sort of craving for something less than God, it will alter everything about me and the way I show up in the world. And most notably, it will alter the way that I see you. When all of us live that way, life inevitably becomes a competitive arena and humans suddenly become less than human. We're no longer beings to love. We are now objects or obstacles, objects to use for our ends or obstacles in the way of what we want. So we do with one another. It puts us at odds with one another. I was just reading about a great example of this involving beauty queens. Yeah, I was reading an article about beauty queens. The Bachelorette fans in the room will really dig this story. Back in the 1980s, two gals grew up together in rural Iowa. And they went to the same school, they were part of the same community events, and ultimately they started competing against one another in beauty competitions, beauty pageants. And during those years, they became kind of rivals. Each of them was vying for their own spot in the spotlight in this rural Iowa town. But then later on in high school, they actually kind of both won out. One of them became Miss Homecoming Queen, which was a big deal in the small town, and the other one became Miss Harvest Queen. It's Iowa, right? That's the harvest queen, right? Homecoming queen, harvest queen. And they kind of settled the rivalry down a little bit. They're like, well, we're both kind of winners and everyone recognizes us and we have our own little part of the spotlight we can run in. But then Miss Homecoming Queen took a liking for a young stud muffin named Jim. Jim, yeah, just one problem. Miss Harvest Queen had her eyes on Jim, too. And they went back and forth, trying to earn Jim's affection. When one day they gave Jim an ultimatum, you have to choose one of us. Always a great relational practice. Definitely recommends this move here, not at all, ugly. And eventually Jim said, OK, Miss Homecoming Queen, you're the one I choose. And the whole town got hyped for them. They got engaged, they're about to celebrate this wedding. Everyone except Miss Harvest Queen. She stewed with anger. She had made her desire her pleasure, her ruler. And she couldn't handle not getting what she wanted. She especially couldn't handle that someone else who was her rival got what she wanted. So one night, late into the evening, under the wide open, Iowa skies, she visited Miss Homecoming Queen with a belt and strangled her to death. 1980s, friends, wild time in American history. But even if, friends, we aren't Miss Harvest Queen or Miss Homecoming Queen, this sort of putting desire, putting our pleasure as the primary ruler in our life, it does things to us. It sets us at odds with one another. The second thing we see that it does to us is that it escalates harm. James traces this pattern in verse two. Things oftentimes, when we make desire our ruler, they start small. We have a little craving for an experience or a person or a thing, but then that desire starts to dominate our thoughts a little bit more. It starts to pop up in our work or our school or at night when we go to bed or even in our dreams. And bit by bit, it starts to rule us. And then our imagination gets involved. We start to wonder how we might feel if we get that thing. What it will really be like when we get it, how we really do deserve it after all. And then we start to look around our lives at the people who have what we want and we start to resent them in some way. They haven't deserved that. I deserve that. We get envious in our lives. And suddenly, we find ourselves saying things or thinking things or doing things that we never would have dreamed of when we first had that craving. Things escalate when we let desire be our ruler. And at least to my knowledge, it's not resulted in physical murder for anyone in this room. But I do think that we kill each other in different ways. James seems to think so too. We have our own versions of silently killing others off. We use backhanded compliments. We ignore people. We speak badly about people behind their backs. We question their motives or whether they really deserve what they have. We constantly do away with one another. Think about it this way. What if every word that you said about someone else in the last year was put up on the screen this morning for everyone to see? What would that say about us? We don't have to be misharvested, Queen friends. We don't have to be on an episode of The Bachelorette. The devil is often more subtle than that. Third thing that we see, James points out here about making desire our ruler is that we shut off connection to God. He uses the example of prayer. He says that when we make our own pleasure, our own priorities that focus our lives, our prayers actually become destructive. As I pointed out, James isn't saying that we can never bring our wants or our needs to God in prayer. Remember how Jesus taught us to pray? He did say pray for our daily bread, our needs. But remember that our wants and needs are not the purpose or point of prayer. Remember what comes before praying for your daily bread. Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. And so prayer, according to the scriptures, is the space in which we get reoriented, we get realigned with God. It's where we listen to his voice and character. It's where we recall the redemption, the healing, the life that he's bringing into the world, his love and grace and generosity. And then it's where we're shaped by those things. We bring our desires before God and allow those desires to get shaped by his kingdom. And when we don't do that, when our desires or our pleasures become the center of our prayer lives, we will ultimately find ourselves praying godless prayers. Or even more convictingly, we'll find that we've replaced God with us. There's a great author named David Henderson who writes about this in his book Culture Shift. He says, "We have tended to turn the Christian faith into a relationship with a God who is the divine vending machine in the sky. There to meet our every need. Unhappy, unattractive, unsuccessful, unmarried, unfulfilled, come to Christ. And he'll give you all those things that you ask for. We forget that God is not primarily in the business of meeting our wants. And when we make him out to be, we squeeze him out of his rightful place at the center of our lives when we put ourselves in his place. God is in the business of being God. We're deeming and restoring, forgiving and healing and loving and Christianity cannot be reduced to just meeting people's wants. When we make it so, we invariably distort the gospel. You guys, our lives are not about us. We're not about us. Our lives are caught up in a larger story. And that story is one of endless beauty and grace and goodness. It's one in which joy and life and peace are found only in our connection to the divine center of all things and God. That's why placing ourselves in the top of our priority list doesn't work because it goes against the nature of reality. It goes against the nature of what actually is in God. And that's why James is so strong with the image he uses. Adulterers in verse four. Do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God? Therefore, whoever wishes to be a friend of the world becomes an enemy of God. He's using a common scriptural metaphor to describe God's relationship to us, a loving, committed spouse. There's all sorts of metaphors that describe our relationship to God. This is one of the most common. And here's what he's getting at. When we choose to embrace the world and by world, he doesn't just mean like spending time serving your neighbor, that actually is the opposite, right? By world, he means the underlying assumptions or stories or pursuits of the world. Things like consumerism or individualism or nationalism or whatever else. When we embrace those things, what we're really doing is undermining our relationship with God. We're deserting the love and the grace and the peace that God has made us for. And we're making ourselves present only to what the world says we need to be present to. And it puts us in the ugly position of cheating. And remember, James is speaking to Christians. These are people who claim they love God and claim to be followers of Jesus, but then their conflict, their desires, their cravings show something different. The top priority in their lives is elsewhere. And they're trying to be married and have affairs. They're trying to experience commitment and do whatever they want. They're trying to live in love and in lust. And the picture is meant to be absurd to strike us. I mean, imagine if a husband sat down next to his wife this evening on the couch. He looked her in the eyes. He smiled like he did on their wedding day and he said, wife, of all the women I kissed this week you're my favorite. Offensive, ladies in the room, what's the response? He has a different shaped nose tomorrow, right? Absolutely, that's what happens, right? James is saying to the church that we have all in our own ways, acted like that husband. For those of us that call ourselves Christians, we do all sorts of things to indicate that God is the top priority. We go to church, we read our Bibles, we pray, we even serve. But while all that's happening, we often have some part of our lives that we keep tucked away. Some other lover that we try to hold on to. Most of us like the idea of being united with God so long as we can hold on to what we really want. We like the idea of marriage so long as we can still have our affairs. And James says that destroys us. I was reading about a really strange and ugly baptism practice that existed a few hundred years back when members of the Knights Templar would be baptized and they would be baptized with their swords, but their swords would be held out of the water. So every part of their body would be immersed except their swords. And it was a way of people saying, you can have all of me, Jesus, just not my sword. And the things that I do with my sword. I'm all yours, but who I am and what I do on that battlefield, how I use my sword, that's mine to keep. Friends, what are you holding out of the water? What are the things that you're allowing, that we are allowing to rule our lives instead of God? What affairs might need to end in your life? James is clear, living ruled by your desire for pleasure cannot bring you lasting peace and happiness. It can only bring division and conflict and escalation. It will turn us all into misharvest queens. But James doesn't just expose the sickness here. He also points us to the cure. And he does that in verses six through 10. He says, God opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble. It's a quote from Proverbs three, 34. Submit yourselves 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, purify your hearts, lament, and mourn and weep. Humble yourselves before the Lord and he will exalt you. Two things I think worth bringing out that James is getting at here. First, the character of God. This is where the cure begins. Notice, this is a God who is unendingly gracious. All are running, all are cheating, all are chasing after a life for ourselves. It in no way alters God's love for us. He is simply waiting with open arms for us to come home. There's no shame. There's no inpatient foot tapping. There's no waiting for work that's good enough to compensate. When we draw near to God, he draws near to us. He's wooing us and waiting for us to come back so we can celebrate together. That's who God is. And here's the truth you guys, believing that's who God is, is often the biggest hurdle to returning to him. Because nothing else in our world works that way. We often discredit ourselves. We often think we've messed up too many times. We often think our cheating has been too much or maybe we doubt that God really ever does think that about us. The truth is that we're less gracious than God, or more stringent, more legalistic, more shaming than God to ourselves and others. You guys, if you're ever in doubt that this is true of who God is, that he is waiting to welcome us back with open arms and invite us into a life of joy and peace. Listen to the words of Jesus, who was God in the flesh in John 6. Anyone who comes to me, I will never cast out. Anyone who comes to me, I will never cast out. There's a great poet named John Bunyan who had some commentary on this that embraces the rebuttals that we often embrace to that comment. We say things like, but I am a great sinner. Jesus says, I will never cast out. But I am an old sinner, I will never cast out. But I'm a hard-hearted sinner, I will never cast out. But I'm a backsliding sinner, I will never cast out. But I have served Satan all my days, I will never cast out. But I've sinned against light, I will never cast out. But I've sinned against mercy, I have never cast out. But I have no good thing to bring with me. I will never cast out. Friends, if we want true healing from our unhealthy affairs, it starts by knowing the character of our true committed spouse. And once we do that, the task is simple on our part. Humble ourselves. Humility. We approach God with humility. And we need to remember that humility, friends, is not condemnation. To be merciless with anyone, even ourselves, never avert you. Humility means having a right view of ourselves. Just being truthful. Humility means telling the truth on ourselves. Humbling ourselves before God means telling the truth. Because with this God, the sin is not the condemnation, it's the posture of the heart. The sin is actually the opportunity to return. The sin is the opportunity to come home. And when we hear it that way, when we hear our brokenness that way, it doesn't lead us to shame, to overemphasizing, it just leads us to truth-telling. We tell the truth and let us guide us back to God. And when we do that well, it should, James says, result in a genuinely hurt heart. He powers language from the prophets here, lamenting, mourning, and weeping, to describe our posture. We don't exaggerate, we don't overshame ourselves when we return to God, but we also don't minimize. We don't push it aside. We need to learn to recognize the grievousness of what we've done. We need to learn the practice of genuine remorse because when we do, the love of God can become real in us. A few months back, I noticed that Emily was acting a little quieter around me and a little kind of more standoffish around me than normal. And knowing who I am, I'm like, yeah, this is on me, whatever's going on here is on me. So I asked her, hey, what's going on? I just noticed. And she quickly had a list of things that I had done that week that hadn't been the best. Ways I was inconsiderate or neglectful or selfish and how each of those things had hurt her. Now, I'm not a huge crier. I'm not somebody who weeps a ton, but man, my heart sunk. We're a whole seven years into marriage. I thought we had this thing nailed down, right? I thought, man, I'm so good at being a husband. No, no, no, no, no. I screwed up, my heart sunk deeply. That's how our hearts ought to feel. And that's not out of shame, friends. I knew my wife wasn't deserting me. I knew my wife wasn't leaving. She was simply being honest. She was telling me the truth. And I know she's telling me that because she knows, she longs for me to become a better husband, to become a better Christ follower, to become a better human. It was a way for me to just know and truly feel what I had done. That's our approach with God, friends. We need to listen well to God's word, learn to hear the ways in which we've missed the mark on what it means to live well with him, and learn to genuine remorse over it. And never out of shame, only ever because we know that God reveals those things to bring us more deeply into who are made to be. One practice that I think has been helpful for me, and I want to close by giving you this practice. That's one that's been embraced by monks for a long time. The monks had a lot of good things figured out. The examine is what it's been called. And the examine is basically a way of posturing your heart in reflection over your week or your day. So pick a time, 30 minutes an hour, once a week, even once a day, if you can, and spend some time being navigated by certain questions and prayer. So stop yourself before God, take some deep breaths, consider who God is, and then ask these questions. God, where was I near to you and your love? In this day or week? And reflect on those, and then celebrate those. Thank God for the ways that his spirit worked in you. And the second question, God, where was I far from you and your love? And allow your heart to sink. Allow the spirit to expose those things in you so that you can move and turn. That's the idea, that's all repentance is for Christians. It means coming back, turning around, reshaping our lives. And when you do that, friends, when you practice that sort of examine, it's remarkable you'll find that God draws near to you. He doesn't push away from you, he draws near to you, he doesn't shame you, he doesn't define you by your sin, he forgives you, he welcomes you, he embraces you. And not only that, he exalts you, do you notice that James in verse 10 ends this passage, which is pretty convicting, on one final term, humble yourself and God will exalt you, raise you up, lift you up, you are a beloved child of God. He will never cast you out. So come back, friends, put down the sore that you're holding out of the water. It's not gonna satisfy you. Leave behind your other lover, it's not gonna satisfy you. Come to his table, let him reshape you again today. Let's pray, friends. [BLANK_AUDIO]