James: Slander & Sufficiency

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 I’m Kena, and I’m going to read the scripture. the one who speaks against a brother or judges his brother. Brother speaks evil against the law and judges the law. But if you judge the law, you are not a doer of the law, but a judge. There is only one lawgiver and judge. He who is able to save and destroy. But who are, are you to judge your neighbor?

That’s so good. Here, let me help you. There we go. Thank you so much. Uh, good morning. Oh, Tommy’s going to take it. All right. Yeah, I guess that way it’s not blocking me. So people can, it’s a joke. I’ve told Trey this and I want to clear the air. The associate pastor, you’re right. It is overlooked, but I’ve told him this before.

It’s the best gig also because I, I might not get credit for the good stuff, but I also get blamed for the bad stuff. So, uh, you can give me a high five for that if you want. I’ll take that. Um, good morning. Hey, if you have a Bible, uh, open it up to James chapter four. We are, um, we’re almost done, I guess, with the Book of James.

We have one more chapter after this morning, um, so we’ll take like 18 weeks on that, and stretch it out until 2030, so, um, we’re gonna end, uh, chapter 4, um, and then, uh, yeah, honestly, this morning’s kind of a simple message, so let’s just, uh, you, you, it, we’ll see how much notes you have. Um, let me pray, uh, and then we’ll dive in.

God, we, um, we welcome you in this space. And we acknowledge we’re not saying that you’re not here, uh, but we are turning our attention to you, um, just as we did with worship, um, now we turn our attention to you with, with our minds and with our hearts. We ask that you would, uh, do what you always do through your word, which is confront us with truth.

And then invite us to a better way. And I pray that we would receive this invitation, um, that we wouldn’t, uh, turn away from it, that we would see our own lives, where we fall short, um, of what you call righteousness, which is just a better way to live, um, a way that actually leads to life and life in abundance through the sacrifice, the life, death, and resurrection of your Son.

And so I pray that you would, um, uh, respond to us as we turn our attention to you. Speak through me. You challenge us, comfort us, and convict us. We pray all this in your name. Amen. Uh, well, James, uh, is, he takes kind of a left turn. Uh, if you’ve been here the past couple of weeks, we’ve talked about, uh, the world, the flesh and the devil, right?

So James sets up this whole problem. Uh, he says everything that’s happening among you, right? There’s wars and there’s conflict and there’s, I mean, this happens in a church, in a community of people. Uh, this happens on a global scale. All the conflict that we have in the world can really be boiled down, uh, to three things, the world.

The flesh and the devil. The world is the cultural air that we live in. It’s the way of Jesus, or against the way of Jesus. It’s values and practices that, um, that don’t align with, with scripture, with the truth of God’s word. Uh, the flesh. It’s just our sin, right? It’s the part of us that we contribute to the world.

It’s the brokenness. It’s the evil bent in us that we will never get rid of this side of heaven. The desires that we chase, for instance, satisfaction and pleasure. We put others down, we raise ourselves up. And then the devil, we believe in a spiritual enemy called the devil, a being who works in our world around us and tempts us and lies to us to get us to pursue the desires of our hearts.

And live in a world, uh, that tells us not to follow Jesus. And so, he goes from there and he says, there’s these big cosmic things going on. You live in a world, you’re not neutral in this fight, right? There’s a, there’s a devil, there’s a world, you’re flesh, you are contributing to this. And then he turns, he makes a left turn and he starts talking about two sins that I think are actually really subtle, easy to miss, and that most of us would kind of write off.

The idea here is that for James to follow Jesus is, is to, for everything in your life to change, right? For everything in your life, not just your mind and not just your heart, but you’re actually, we’re going to see your speech, the way that you talk about others and your schedules, the way that you make decisions.

plans, the way that you actually orient and run and structure your life on a day to day basis, all of that, everything about who you are should be fundamentally changed, uh, by you following Jesus, the relationship that you have with God. And so James is going to draw our attention to two, two subtle sins, two sins, two, um, two ways of living areas of our lives that most of us, I think.

If we’re honest, have, have not given up to, to God, to work in and transform. And they are, uh, the sins of slander and the sins of sufficiency. And so all we’re going to do this morning is just talk about both of those and then end with a way for us to respond. So first let’s talk about the sin of slander.

Let’s read verses 11 through 12 again. Don’t criticize one another, brothers and sisters. Anyone who defames or judges a fellow believer defames and judges the law. If you judge the law, you are not a doer of the law, but a judge. There is one lawgiver and judge who is able to save and to destroy. But who are you to judge your neighbor?

Now, I want to just briefly kind of clear the air on what James is not saying. All right, James, James is not saying that we cannot call out each other’s sin. Right. James is not saying that we cannot hold each other accountable, and James is not saying that we don’t have a responsibility. All of us in this room, we don’t have a responsibility, uh, to call each other up as, as the people of God to a higher way of actually living.

James is saying that’s fine. That’s, that’s not what James is talking about. Talking about actually, James is. Kind of ripping off on his half. We talked about James has a half brother, and it’s Jesus. Jesus was James’s half brother. Uh, a lot of James’s gospel, or James’s book, is actually based on Jesus’s teachings, word for word almost.

And this is one of those passages. So, Jesus in his famous Sermon on the Mount, right? Chapter 7, verses 1 through 5. This is what Jesus says. And notice the similarities between what Jesus says and what we just read. This is Jesus. Do not judge. So that you won’t be judged. For you will be judged by the same standard with which you judge others, and you will be measured by the same measure you use.

Why do you look at the splinter in your brother’s eye, but don’t notice the beam of wood in your own eye? Or how can you say to your brother, let me take the splinter out of your eye, and look! There’s a beam of wood in your own eye, hypocrite. First, take the beam of wood out of your eye, and then you will see clearly to take the splinter out of your brother’s eye and notice for Jesus, the issue isn’t just the judgment he uses a sort of wacky illustration and I.

People sometimes wonder, is that like a, um, was that like a, a, a, a figure of speech in the ancient Near East or something to have like a wood and a speck? As far as I know, no, it’s not. It’s an outrageous, like, you imagine, Jesus is saying, imagine you see somebody with something in their eye and you have a plank of wood literally sticking out of your eye.

Like, it’s supposed to be kind of funny. It doesn’t make any sense. It’s an absurd illustration to use. And there’s all sorts of implications of it, but, but notice that Jesus is not denying. Either the wood in your own eye or the speck in the other person’s. There’s a reality that, that judgment may be needed.

Discernment may be needed. Paul echoes this idea in Galatians 6. He says, brothers and sisters, if someone is overtaken in any wrongdoing, you who are spiritual, restore such a person with a gentle spirit. And then he gives the warning. Watch out for yourselves so that you also won’t be tempted. Carry one another’s burdens.

In this way, you will fulfill the law of Christ. So the scriptures, the scriptures are clear throughout from, from beginning to end that, that there is a time and a place to, to gently, sensitively, and with a heart of compassion and a life of high spiritual maturity, call each other out. And this is a lost practice in the community of the church.

We don’t have, we don’t have a category for this kind of communal discipleship anymore. And for a lot of that, that’s a good reason. We’ve been hurt by this, that people who judge us and who criticize us often do so with a condemning attitude, um, with, with, um, A misuse of power with an overreaching authority, things like that, but our overreaction against that has caused us to, to say that anybody who judges us or who points out our flaws is not walking in the way of Jesus, according to James and according to Jesus and according to Paul.

But that is not what James is talking about here. James is not talking about. Making a judgment call. James is not talking about being called out. James is talking about something very specific. I think it’s actually a lot deeper. And so the Greek word that he uses, the very first thing he starts with, don’t criticize one another.

It’s a simple message. I said, this is easy. Don’t criticize each other. Don’t do it. The Greek word is kalaleo. Can you say that? There you go. Kalaleo means, there’s a lot of meanings it could have. One is to, um, just to, to talk foolishly about somebody. So like carelessly, you just don’t, you’re not watching what you’re saying.

Uh, but the other meaning, and most scholars agree, this is the way that James uses it, is it’s not careless at all. Uh, to criticize somebody is not just to, to passively sort of half heartedly make a comment about them that you later regret or you don’t mean. That’s not what James is talking about. James is talking about the, the calculated verbal assault.

The intentional degradation of another person’s character, another person’s entire well being. James isn’t talking about judgment at all. He’s talking about what we call slander. Slander is the specific verbal assault on another person’s character, competency, decisions, lifestyles, values, or worldview. And for James, this subtle sin isn’t something that starts with our speech, right?

He says in verse 12, it’s actually, there’s something else going on here. The issue for James isn’t just how we talk. We talked about that with our simplicity practice, right? Our speech, we, as Christians, we’re held to a high standard. Our words actually do something and they matter. And from the beginning of time, words have been used to either create and build up and exercise our authority in the world around us, or to tear each other down, to tear people down, to puff ourselves up and build ourselves up instead of the kingdom of God for James.

The speech is a symptom of something deeper. Look at verse 12. He says, who are you to judge your neighbor? He’s not attacking the speech. The speech is important, but he’s not, he’s going, he’s calling into question the kind of person. What kind of person does it take for you to actually get to the point where you can make a calculated, um, verbal assault on somebody else?

What kind of person is that? Who do you think you are, essentially is what James is saying. And so the sin of slander is this. Self righteous elevation of ourselves over others. And so what happens when we criticize and slander other people isn’t just that we speak poorly about them. It’s that by default, what we’re, what we’re doing, and we all do this, right?

We elevate ourselves. We create a, a structure. A hierarchy, there’s something about what happens in our hearts, the way that we view other people. There’s an internal bitterness that happens inside of us. When we get to the point where we can actually criticize, slander, or judge, make judgments on other people.

Dallas Willard says that when you, when you condemn someone, what you’re doing, you’re not just condemning them. There’s not just, it’s not just a word thing that you’re, it’s not about your speech. You’re actually communicating that in some way they are inherently bad and irredeemably evil. And that there is something about who they are as people that goes beyond their decisions and their choices and their lifestyles that makes them beneath you.

We use our words to put others down, but before we use our words, it happens as something in our hearts. We write people off. Uh, we make judgments about them in our minds. Even we create a hierarchy and order and we live out of bitterness towards these people. Now, James says two things happen when we commit the sin of slander.

First is that we defame the law. And what is he talking about? Well, the law, the old Testament law is, is called the Torah, right? We, a lot of us know this, right? There’s a 1600, yeah, 613 plus commandments, uh, that were meant to set the people of God apart. So if you read through, like, uh, Exodus and Leviticus and Deuteronomy, it’s those, those really nitpicky specific laws about how the Israelites were supposed to live.

Uh, but more than it was supposed to set apart the people. It was also set to regulate how they were to respond to each other. And that was the heart of the law. It was how do we relate to God and how do we relate to and treat other people. And so much so that Jesus, Paul, and James himself will all sum up the law this way.

They say, you can obey all of the law by doing these two things. Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength. And two, love your neighbor as yourself. That’s the heart of the law. James says there’s something that happens inside of our hearts when we judge other people. That’s the law that we break.

It’s a failure to actually, to live out what our calling is as Christians, which is to self sacrificially love each other. That you cannot have a bitterness in your heart and relate to the people of God out of compassion, out of love, and out of self sacrifice. The second thing that happens is you discredit the judge.

Essentially, you play God. James says there’s one judge, there’s one lawgiver, and that’s God himself. And so the sin of slander isn’t just about speech. It’s about placing ourselves at the center of the universe, that, that we consider ourselves in our day to day lives as arbiters of moral clarity, and we are self righteous agents of God’s justice.

You think back of James, uh, he says in chapter 1, verse 20, he says, Human anger does not bring out the righteousness of God. There’s an impulse that we all have when we see something we don’t like. Or when we, when, when people hurt us or when people get away with something that we know they shouldn’t get away with, or when there’s just people that we don’t like, something happens in our hearts where our immediate impulse is anger.

And at that moment, there’s a choice that we have to make. The anger, the impulse is not the sin. It’s what we do with that, right? You can, you can choose to walk away from that or you can feed it. And what happens when we feed it is we create it, we create a hierarchy that God, it just doesn’t exist. That God did not intend for us to live where other people are now beneath us and we are somehow above other people.

And for James, this is evil. This is the, I mean, this is what it means to put yourself in the place of God, to put others down, to puff yourself up and to see that there’s a, there’s a world where, where you live like this and this is your default and it reveals itself in, in the way that you speak about others.

And I want to, this is hard, I want to be clear, um, okay, like I was wrestling with this, right? Because I’m just thinking, like, this is easy. I don’t talk poorly about anybody. Like, I don’t, I, there’s very few people, very few times in my life where I have actually judged with my, with my words somebody else.

And now we’re not again, we’re not talking about criticism or like helpful criticism construction things like that I’m talking about I cannot think of a time where I like said something and maybe you guys maybe I don’t know You might know Shelby probably knows me But I didn’t ask you this there are probably times where I have but I can’t think of that and then I realized you like This the sin of slander what James is talking about.

You don’t have to speak this to do this There’s something that, a slander reveals itself in our speech, but it takes root in our hearts. And, and this, this comes across in the way that we treat people. Before it’s the way that we treat people, it’s what we think about people. Uh, people that we don’t like, uh, people that, that, that hurt us.

Our gut level reaction, um, when we are hurt or when, when people get away with sin or when people just live differently than us. Slander is the self righteous critical spirit that we hold against certain people, certain groups of people, certain types of people, certain tribes, certain communities. It’s the immediate impulse that some of us feel when others succeed and we don’t.

The sin of slander, I think, this was huge for me, this re it reveals itself in conflict. When you have conflict with somebody, what do you do? There’s something about our immediate reaction is to shy away from what we’ve, what we’ve contributed to that, and put the responsibility of change on other people.

That is at the heart of the sin of slander. In our failure, how do we respond when we fail and other people are involved? There’s a bitterness, an attitude that we have towards others. We take out our failures on others. Or how we respond when we’re judged. When people commit this sin against us, what’s our immediate impulse?

How do we respond from this? I’ve told this before, I’ve shared this before. Um, as a memory I have, a memory in college. Um, there’s this guy who’s famous for, for doing exactly this. Uh, and this is what happens when you live like this. You, you. Declare that the way of Jesus is not what it actually is. He would, it was known for standing out in the student union, sort of on the union space.

And I think every college campus probably has a version of this where, uh, he would have a megaphone, uh, use a bullhorn kind of thing. And then he’d have a, like an, a frame just kind of hung around his, his neck and it had, you know, slanderous things on it. You deserve hell. You know, God’s going to judge you.

God hates you, a certain people group or whatever. And he would yell these things at the people that were walking students, college students. And his idea was that I can judge you into the kingdom of God. Right. That God has put me in a position to, to be a prophet and prophetically speak against who you are as a person.

And people hated this guy. Like it’s safe to say nobody came to church because of. Of this guy. His name was Brother Dean. I don’t know. He’s on the news, so I could say his name. Um, I think he got kicked off of campus or something. Like he would, and then he started antagonizing people. And what would happen is you would have all these people that would kind of circle up around him in between classes.

Uh, it was kind of like, I don’t know, like a rap battle or something. Where they would, he would just say something slanderous. And then you’d have somebody like argue him. And he would say something slanderous back. And they would argue against him. And professors got involved. People would come in and try and debate this guy.

And he had nothing to say except, uh, The life that you’re living is not worth life. You deserve hell. You wanna, you wanna make God not hate you? Then do, you know, A, B, and C. And I, I don’t know. It wasn’t very effective, like I said. People, people hated this guy. That’s, that’s slander. He was really easy to make fun of.

Um, he was easy, I mean, people, he, he was like, like the de facto mascot. Like, we had Wilbur the Wildcat, and then we had, uh, Brother Dean. It was like, this is our rallying cry. We just all hate this guy. And people would say really nasty, really mean things to him, uh, about him to him. I mean, there are newspaper articles written about him and internet articles and things like that.

And people in Turkey, this is what happens, right? He became the person that, that we slandered and I wrestled with this because I, like, I want to see him, you know, see the consequences of his actions, but there was a, I mean, there was a time where that was, it went too far and I realized, like, it made me, it’s like people, the things that people were saying, it rubbed me the wrong way and then the things that I said about him to other people, it was almost like a joke, like if you didn’t have anything to say, you wouldn’t talk about the writer, you talk about brother Dean, what he said on the lawn last week and then I realized that I was, guilty of the same thing that he was doing.

I didn’t have a bullhorn and I didn’t have an A frame, but I, he became a means. Here’s what it was. He became a means for me to ignore my own sins, my own failures. My, uh, the areas that I needed to grow, my own struggles, he became a means by which I used him to feel better about myself, not by repenting from my own sin, but by focusing entirely on his.

I think that’s why we do this is we have a fear of ourselves, of our flesh. And it’s so much easier to focus on other people’s sins than our own, that we are so uncomfortable before others. What does it, what does it take for us not to slander other people with our speech, but more than that, in our hearts?

We have to be so comfortable with who we are. We have to be vulnerable enough in community. We have to know who we really are before others and before God. We have to know the broken areas of our lives. Hold those with open hands before God and say, I’m no better than the people that I hate. The people that I feel deserve the wrath of God.

Slander and a critical spirit does that. And the more we feed it, the more it grows. But James isn’t done. He moves on. And, and he kind of, again, he takes another left turn. You wouldn’t think that he would go here after talking about slander and criticism and judgment. But this is what he says in verse 13.

Come now, you who say today or tomorrow we will travel to such and such a city, and spend a year there, and do business, and make a profit. Yet you do not know what important, or what tomorrow will bring, what your life will be. For you are like vapor that appears for a little while, then vanishes. Instead, you should say, if the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that.

But as it is, you boast in your arrogance. All such boasting is evil. So it is a sin to know the good and yet not do it. Again, James, he’s using provocative language for a reason. And, and here’s what James is not saying. James is not saying it’s a sin to make plans. He says in verse 15, he says, When you make plans, instead say this, If the Lord wills, here’s what I’m going to plan.

It’s like Jesus. He says, When you fast, do this. When you pray, here’s how you do it. When you make plans, do it this way. And so the problem isn’t making plans. And I would even say the problem is not making plans without consulting God. James tells us what the real problem is. What’s the root of this sin?

Just like the root of slander has to do with our fear of our flesh. Unwilling, being unwilling to confront who we really are before God. What’s the sin at the end of, or at the bottom of this? Uh, James says in verse 16, it’s arrogance, right? It

says in verse 16, but as it is, you boast in your arrogance. Uh, so what’s arrogant about this? Well, one, it’s arrogant to assume that you won’t die tomorrow. Uh, which is not, I mean, I don’t know. That’s pretty arrogant to think that you’re just going to wake up and everything’s going to be fine. James says that’s evil.

You shouldn’t do that. You shouldn’t think that way. You shouldn’t just assume that God’s going to gift you with another life. But also, I think that the deeper issue is that it’s arrogant to build your life and to put your hope in what you can have for yourself, what you can create for yourself, and what you can become yourself.

And Jesus makes the same point. Again, James is kind of ripping off Jesus here in Luke chapter 12. He tells the parable, the story of a rich man who builds wealth for himself by being productive, by making the right moves, and by… I’m trying to create a stable life for him and his family. He says that he notices his business is doing really well and he’s run out of space for all of his crops.

And so what he does is he builds bigger barns to hold all of his crops and then he’s done. Once he fills those barns, he stops. He says, I’ll say to myself, you have many goods stored up for many years. Take it easy, eat, drink and enjoy yourself. Now, by all means, this guy is not doing anything wrong. He’s exercising wisdom, right?

There’s something wise about saying, okay, I’m being productive. I’m going to use what I have, uh, my productivity. I’m not going to be super wealthy. I’m just going to take care of myself and my family. I want to have this stable life and this is what I’m going to do. And once I’ve done that, I’m going to relax.

I’m going to take it easy and I’m going to rest. And Jesus says, you fool. He says, tonight, your very life is demanded of you. In other words, you, You’re gonna die. Why was this man foolish? Because if you think about it, what he’s, his family’s taken care of. Everything, he did everything right. By conventional wisdom, this man was a success.

By even the wisdom of scripture, being productive and using his labors to, to bless his family and all of that. I believe it was foolish because what he did was he presumed that he could be self sufficient with his wealth. And so here’s the sin of self sufficiency. It’s the self centered elevation of our will over God’s.

And sufficiency, the sin, um, there’s two things that it does. One is it tells us that we are in control of our lives. James points this out in verse 15. Instead, when you make plans, say this, If the Lord wills, we will live. So that’s the very first thing. To commit the sin of sufficiency is to believe the lie that we are in control of our lives.

James points us to the reality that our lives are like vapor, they’re like mist, they’re like smoke. They’re here one minute and gone the next. We get what that means, right? The second thing is that we assume that God’s will will always align with our will.

And so the sin of sufficiency is the false belief that We ourselves contain, within our capacities, everything we need to make ourselves happy, successful, and content. And so you think about, like, when he says, instead, say, if God wills it, I’ll do this. What kind of person actually says that? It’s kind of a, I don’t know, it’s kind of a turn of phrase.

Like, we kind of throw that around. Like, Lord willing, I’ll go to Disneyland next year or whatever. Uh, that’s right. That’s not what James, it’s not, we throw that around. It’s become part of our just vernacular, cultural thing, maybe in the south more than here. I don’t know. Um, that’s not what James is saying.

What kind of person, think about this. What kind of person actually says like, well, if God wills it, then I’m going to wake up tomorrow, and if God wills it, I’m gonna go to work. Like I always do. I’m gonna drive the route that I always drive. I’m gonna eat the thing that I always eat. If God wills it, I’m gonna work hard and do what God has called me to do.

What kind of person says that it’s the kind of person who has no illusions about the fact that they not, they cannot sustain themselves. It’s the kind of people who are, are willing to submit what they want their desires in this life to what God wants. They structure their lives around what they believe God wants them to structure them around.

This is one of the many reasons that I believe Jesus celebrated children. When Jesus says the kingdom of heaven belongs to, to these, meaning the, the children, he’s not talking just about their innocence or their youth. He’s talking about the sense that children have no, no false illusions of sufficiency.

Children know, well, maybe they do, I don’t know. Children know, um, That they depend on parents, that there’s a sense of self dependency. They depend on someone above themselves to eat and to wake up and to live their lives. Their routines are based on others. And something happens as we get older, not just in ages, but as we make progress, as we build success for ourselves, as we, um, as we advance in our careers.

We start off as children. We rely on God’s providence in our lives. We recognize that God sustains us, but the more that we grow, uh, soon our lives are no longer defined by dependency and oriented around the sustenance of God. They’re defined by independence and they’re oriented around progress. And notice, I think it’s important that example that James gives, he doesn’t call out people who say, Oh, today or tomorrow I’m going to take the day off or sit on the couch or pray or go to church or whatever.

He targets a very specific person. He’s called, he’s calling out the go getters. He’s calling out the people that. He’s challenging a life that is oriented around having more, doing more and being more. James is very intentional with the illustration that he’s using and next week he’s going to hit that even harder warning to the rich.

So good. Have fun with that. Uh, it’ll be fun when come back next week, you learn all about that. He’s challenging a life that’s so focused on making more profits and progress. It’s the attempt to find and create for ourselves a life that makes us feel good, and accomplished, and successful, and worry free.

A life that actually moves God to the periphery of our calendars. We give God our Sundays, maybe a weekday if we have time, maybe an 8. 30 on a Sunday morning to come to Bible study or Sunday school or whatever. At the end of the day, it’s the same problem as slander. In slander, we make ourselves higher than others.

In sufficiency, we make our will higher than God’s. And like slander, I think there’s a reason that we do this. And that’s, that’s primarily fear. There’s a fear that we have, not of our flesh, but of our future. We have a fear of missing out on experiences. A fear of, of not having, not getting the thing that we want.

Where it means getting married or having kids or dream vacations, lifestyles, living in a certain city, whatever. There’s a, there’s a fear that we have that we’re not going to lose that. And some of that’s really good and healthy. But when we orient our lives around not having to live in the reality of that fear.

That’s the sin of sufficiency. For some of us, it’s the fear of death. Which, again, is a healthy fear. I’m not saying we should, I don’t know, be grateful. You know, you shouldn’t be excited that your life is like a mist or a vapor. There’s something really powerful about knowing that you are going to die and facing your fear, that reality, with just a confidence and a hope.

A fear, some of us have a fear of our future. We, we… We want to measure up in the eyes of others. We don’t want to let people down. We don’t want to disappoint others with our life choices. Um, we don’t want to fail. What that fear does is it drives us to see God as a secondary option on our primary goal of building up for ourselves wealth, accumulation, stability, work hard to play hard.

These moments, we’re woken up to the reality that our life is short, our gifts. And I think that’s what James is calling us to do. Now here’s why this matters, and here’s why I think James kind of makes this pivot. Why does he talk about this? He’s talking about the world, the flesh, and the devil. Why does he talk about the sin of slander and the sin of sufficiency right after that?

I think it’s because when we let the way of the world, the lie about what it means to be happy and successful, influence our desires, and the lie that Satan feeds to us about what it means to live the good life, by default, this is what we do. We put others down. And we build ourselves up. We put others down with our slander, with our worldview.

The world says, judge, or be judged, contribute to this economy where you are, you are, you are me. Your value is measured by how you look or by how you live, or by what you do or by how others see you. And if you don’t play by those rules, then others are going to judge you. Played by the rules of the world that say to, to be happy, you have to build something for yourself.

That if you don’t achieve your goals, there’s something about a failure, something about, something failure oriented. Part of you that’s deficient. This is not who God created you to be. And by default, that’s what we do. And so the way out, um, is I think what James has been trying to get us to do from the beginning.

It’s to orient all of our lives around… around Jesus, around our relationship to Jesus. We need grace in all areas of our lives. And we talk about grace. Grace is more than just not getting what we deserve. And grace is more than just God giving us what we don’t deserve. Grace, the way scriptures describe grace, grace is the power of God doing in us what we cannot do for ourselves.

And so what we do when we choose to follow Jesus is we open up our lives to the grace of God. And that, that has to do with our eternity. God giving us the gift of salvation after we die. But it is so much more than that. Grace is a power. The power of God that we tap into when we open up our lives. Those areas of our lives, when we allow the spirit of God to infiltrate the deepest parts of who we are, and for some of us, we are fine letting the spirit infiltrate our minds with good doctrine and good theology, but we are hesitant to let the spirit of God rework the way that we speak and make our schedules.

We are hesitant to apply the grace of our life. We experience transformation where we allow it. That’s what sanctification is, right? We are justified. We’re declared righteous before God. We have the gift of salvation. But our capacity to change and turn into the people that God created us to be is wholly dependent on the parts of our lives that we open up to God and we surrender.

And I think that’s what the Christian life is about. It’s about surrender. It’s the holistic giving of our whole selves. To the Spirit of God to work in us and then through us to others. That’s what James is about. And so this week, there’s no new practice, um, but there is a response, uh, and the response is this, um, and I don’t know why we do this.

I think some of us slander others. We have, harbor bitterness for a lot of reasons, and some of us, uh, build self sufficient lives for a lot of reasons. All I can do is, is every time I come up and I teach, all I can do is give you my experience of why I think I do this. That’s the first task I have. It’s to wrestle with this, where is the bitterness in my heart towards others and where does that come from?

And for me, it comes from those two things. It’s a fear of my flesh and a fear of my future. And I feel, for me, and if you resonate with this, then you can do this as well. I feel the invitation of God to surrender who I really am to him. And that involves… Opening myself, confronting the parts of my flesh that I don’t really like the things, and you notice this, the things that I judge others for usually the things that I’m the perpetrator of the faults I find in others are a reflection of the faults I find in myself.

I just don’t want to deal with them. Self righteous spirit that I criticize brother Dean for is the very self righteous spirit that keeps me at odds with other people, prevents me from being vulnerable with others, from sharing who I am with God and with others in community. The fear that I have a failure in my future of not measuring up to my own expectations and the expectations of others pushes me to build something for myself that God has not called or required or asked me or prepared for me to build.

And so we surrender. I surrender my flesh to Jesus. I say, this is who I really am. And this can happen in a lot of ways. This happens through confession with God and with others. This happens through listening prayer, just listening to the spirit of God, allowing scripture to confront me, um, where I don’t want to be confronted.

And I surrender my future. I actually look at how I live my life, the decisions that I make on a day to day basis. And I ask the spirit of God, is this, is this feeding an ego? Is this feeding something that I’m running from? Or is this something that you’re calling me to give up?