James: Renouncing the World & Its Empty Promises

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  So we’ve been going through the book of James for quite a few weeks now, but now starting last week, we’re doing a three week mini series on the enemies of the soul.

And if you were here, we talked about all these conflicts, wars, fighting, which is happening all over the world. today, even more recently this past weekend or two weekends ago, even more. The reason all of this fighting is from the flesh, the world and the devil. And so we use John Mark Comer’s quote last week about how those three things really work together symbiotically.

You can’t pick one and not see how the others Work together as well. So, in other words, it’s not just all the devil’s fault, and it’s not just all your fault. It’s just all of us doing a lot of bad things together in harmony. And now we’re in chaos. But Comer has this really helpful line. He says this is how those three work together.

You have deceitful ideas, which is from the devil, that play to our disordered desires, which is we talked about last week, the flesh, our own sinful nature, that are normalized in a sinful society. So it’s now normal. It’s okay to do this X, Y, and Z sin because the world says it’s fine. So again, last week, verses one through three really point out the flesh or what we call disorder desires.

And our big takeaway last week was our cheaper desires must be killed. So that our deeper desires may be fulfilled. Again, we acknowledge all desires feel equal in its intensity, but they are not all equally beneficial. A lot of desires aren’t good for you, yourself. Not only that, though, we have to think about mankind.

We have to think about our family, our neighbors. Some of our desires just aren’t good for those. Around us. And so our big call last week was it’s possible to restrain your desires, to say no to the flesh and say yes to the spirit, yes to life and life in abundance. And so now that I caught you up, that was a 35 minute sermon in two minutes.

Now let’s look again in James chapter four. We’re going to read one through ten yet again, and then we’re going to tackle our next enemy, which is the world. Verse one. What is the source of wars and fights among you? Don’t they come from your passions that wage war within you? So he’s starting with the flesh.

You desire and do not have. You murder and covet and cannot obtain. You fight and wage war. You do not have because you do not ask. You ask and don’t receive because you ask with wrong motives, so that you may spend it all on your pleasures. Or hēdonē, which is where we get hedonism. Now, verse four is our focus this morning.

You adulterous people. Welcome to church, okay? Hey, you adulterous people. Don’t you know that friendship with the world is hostility toward God? So, whoever wants to be the friend of the world becomes the enemy of God. Or do you think it’s without reason that the scripture says, the spirit he made to dwell in us envies intensely.

It’s this holy jealousy to be with us and us with him. But, He gives greater grace, therefore He says God resists the proud, but gives grace to the humble. Therefore, submit to God, resist the devil, which is the third enemy we’ll look at next week, and he will flee from you, a beautiful promise. Draw near to God, and He will draw near to you.

Cleanse your hands, sinners, and purify your hearts, you double minded. Be miserable, and mourn and weep. Let your laughter be turned to mourning and your joy to gloom. Humble yourselves before the Lord, and He will exalt you. Let’s pray. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, we just invite you into this space. Thank you for preparing our hearts already, Lord, with the men and women study and, Lord, just the welcoming atmosphere and the worship.

And I just pray that we come before you, God, just honest. Uh, this passage can do a lot of different things to us. Um. Um, we can begin to think that none of this applies, that the world is out there and none of it has infiltrated here. I pray that we would have the humility and honesty to admit where the world has influenced us.

Also, God, I just ask you, Holy Spirit, to help us while we need to defend against the world. We must still love the world, love our neighbors who are far from you. So, Holy Spirit, allow us to apply this message the exact way you need us to. In Jesus name I pray. Everybody says amen. Amen. You are weirder than you think.

Amen. Yeah. Uh, now this is the thesis of Andrew Wilson’s fascinating book, Remaking the World, how the year 1776 changed everything. And he isn’t being derogatory, although some of you are weird, including me, right? But what he’s actually saying is weirder, you’ll notice it’s in all caps is actually an acronym.

And so here’s what the acronym is. It’s Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic, Ex Christian, and Romantic. Now, I acknowledge many of us in this room are not ex-Christian. We are Christians. And you’re thinking, I’m not rich. Well, look at the rest of the world. We are. But hear me out. He is saying, if you live in Arizona, if you live in America, you are weirder than you think.

He argues these seven traits. Make us different than any other group of history pre 1776. We have these set of ideas and values, how we consider morality to be what’s truly moral or not. All of these things have actually really shifted the last couple hundred years. And that’s a whole other history lesson.

But, uh, a lot of stuff has changed. The way we view our Bible. is different. The way we interpret when it says things like family is totally different than if you were to read the Bible in, say, the 1400s. And so he says, and let me be clear here, because it’s very popular just to be, you know, not grateful for our moment and all the blessings we have in this country.

He says, being weirder, Has brought us many benefits. We have increased life expectancy. We have wealth like never before, which enables us to help people like never before. There is this thing called safety that we have that some people never knew throughout history. Education for all. It’s quite normal.

Uh, for most, almost everybody in this room can read and that’s not true for most of history. You have equality in many ways. People are healthy and more. There’s a lot of benefits. But there’s also a lot of things that are pretty harmful. In this weirder culture, we suffer the most anxiety than any other age, which is silly, because we’re safer, more educated, wealthy, all these things.

But we are truly anxious. That’s something, I wrote a whole book about it. Like, we, I’m an anxious person, and it’s a part of being in this age. We also live under the pressure of constructing our own identity. If you lived in the 1400s, you were just a farmer. And you didn’t have to think, like, Oh, I want to make it big like Hannah Montana one day.

You know, you’re just a farmer. You don’t think, oh, no, I’m not rich. I don’t have enough people following me. It’s like, no, I was born and my dad’s a farmer. Therefore, I’m a farmer. So I’m pretty content being a farmer. Our pursuit of status makes us restless. The, the, the, the, the ladder always keeps getting taller, right?

So you, you, you get ahead of one group and now there’s a whole nother group you constantly have to keep getting in front of. We exaggerate the importance of achievement in a weirder culture. Everything’s about achievement, and this is why older people, um, actually begin to get depressed because they are now considered, Oh, you can’t achieve as much, you don’t have as much energy or as much time, and it’s a really sad thing to not honor our elders.

And also, we assume all outcomes lie squarely on our own shoulders, which contributes to our anxiety. We don’t assume God’s in control. We are completely in control, and it does a lot of bad things to us. Now, I found this book fascinating. We’re about to get into the Bible. Don’t worry. But what I found about that was fascinating about this book calling us weirder, he is saying we are not as unique as we think.

He wrote two chapters explaining, uh, the reader, this, these are your likes and your dislikes. This is probably what your living room looks like. You probably wear this type of thing. And I was like, oh my gosh, this is my biography. Like this, they nailed it. He even got so crazy. He’s like, your favorite play might be Hamilton.

And I’m like, yes. Anybody else? Hamilton? Uh, you need to get saved. We’ll have the altar open, uh, later today. I love that musical. And then also, it says your favorite show might be West Wing. That’s an incredible show. Anybody with me? Like the real, no? You know what? Ah, you know, so, okay. I have nothing else to say.

West Wing’s a good show. Go watch it. Now, it was a front because, again, those are the two unique things to me that I thought more people would be unique with. But his whole point was saying, you and I are weirder than we think. And in other words, we are influenced and shaped by our world more than we’d like to admit.

The fact that we are weirder. Changes how we perceive the scriptures, changes how we perceive society, what is right and what is wrong, all of those things. That’s why at Passion Creek, we talk a lot about formation, because every day you’re being formed. We are not neutral. We’re always going towards something.

So we’re becoming more like Christ or more like the world. And James spends a lot of his time in this letter pointing to Christians who are being persecuted and scattered throughout the world. He is writing a letter telling them, hey. You are influenced by the world more than you would like to admit. So he calls it out.

For example, in chapter 2, we went through this message already. He says, Hey, guys, hey, Christian brothers and sisters, like the world, you were discriminating. You love rich people more than poor people. That’s not the way of Jesus. That’s the way of the world. And you’re allowing the world to influence your values.

He also says, like the world in chapter 3, you’re using your words to tear people down. You are using your words like a forest fire. You’re gossiping, slandering. Don’t do that. That’s not the way of Jesus. That is the way of the world. Later in chapter 3, we talked about this a few weeks ago. Like the world, you and I find ourselves, without even being intentional about it, we are wrapped up with selfish ambition.

And we like to think it looks like wisdom, but it always leads to folly and chaos and envy and bitterness. That is like the world. Chapter 4. We looked at last week. He’s saying like the world You guys are pursuing your own destructive desires at any cost and the Bible calls that the flesh and the Bible says to refrain Restrain walk away from those desires so you can actually live the life you were called to live They likely had no idea how much the world influenced their values their ideas and their practices and yet It did for you and me We like to watch the news, we like to think, man, the world out there is so bad, good thing we’re Christians.

But to be a faithful reader of the text, it’s always to recognize there is a temptation, there is a real danger of you and I becoming just like the world. Jesus warns against this, and he says there’s this subconscious sway that leads to destruction. John 15 will be on your screen, we’re going to read it quickly.

Verse 18, this is, uh, a beautiful discourse Jesus is having right before leaving his disciples to go get crucified. Verse 18 and 19 says, If the world hates you, understand that it hated me before it hated you. If you were of the world, the world would love you as its own. However, because you are not of the world, but I have chosen you out of it, the world Hates you if you’re there flip over one page for my Bible It is chapter 17 verse 14.

Jesus is still communicating these important words to his disciples: verse 14: I have given them your word. He’s praying to God the Father about his disciples the world Hated them because they are not of the world Just as I am NOT of the world The world. Anybody remember the not of the world brand? Not of this world brand?

Anybody wear that? Now we finally find commonality, okay? Watch Hamilton, and then we’ll have more in common. But, verse 15. I’m not praying that you take them out of the world, but that you protect them from the evil one. They are not of this world, just as I am not of the world. Sanctify them by the truth, which we believe is the scriptures.

Your word is truth. As you sent me into the world. I also have sent them into the world. I had a professor in college. I walked in the first day of college, had that knot of this world jacket on and he ripped me. He was like, knot of this world, huh? It needs to be sent into the world. You’re good. And I was like, I’m so sorry.

I like immediately took off the jacket. It was like, I don’t even know that somebody gave that to me. I don’t know what it meant. You know, I’ll never forget that. That was just for free. First, John chapter two, one more section here about the world. Verse 15, John, who wrote Jesus’s words in the book of John, is now here in 1 John saying, Do not love the world, or the things in the world.

If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For everything in the world, the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride in one’s possessions, is not from the Father, but is from the world. And the world, with its lusts, is passing away, but the one who does the will of God remains forever.

Now, the word world has many different contexts by which it can be applied. Uh, this word is called cosmos. Can you say that to me? Cosmos, where we get the word cosmo, right? And, uh, it can mean just planet, planet earth in the Greek text. Sometimes it can just mean humankind, like for God so loved the world.

Isn’t that interesting? So he’s saying do not love the world. But then God loved the world? That’s because the world has a different meaning. Think of the word ball, right? You can have a ball, or you can have a ball, right? Right? Dance. Or, I think, well, there’s another ball out there somewhere I’m not thinking of, right?

You can use the word ball in different ways, same with this word world. But that’s not how cosmos is used in these passages we’ve read so far this morning in James and all those references in John. Instead, Dr. Breshears, he actually gives a really helpful definition of the world according to what we’ve been reading so far, it should be on the screen.

He says, The world is Satan’s domain, where his authority and values reign, though his deception makes that hard to realize. Remember that. If you are of the world, then it all seems right. Is this not the moment we’re in today? I’ll give you another, uh, another word for world can simply mean culture. This is also should be on your screen.

Culture is a set of ideas, values, and practices that are assumed to be good and right. What’s interesting about our culture, a lot of historians say we’re actually built on assumption now, we’re, we’re more about what we’re against than what we are for, and so like our culture doesn’t have a Ten Commandments, doesn’t have a Bible, just has culture.

It’s just what the leading celebrities say is right and wrong, what movies are now propagating, and we just kind of get shaped and formed. What’s hard about culture today is you can’t really critique it as much because you can’t point to their Ten Commandments. It’s parse it out line by line why it’s not logical.

Now a lot of great thinkers are taking these thoughts of the culture, putting them onto paper and then critiquing it, which I find very helpful. But a lot of people believe things. They don’t know why they believe it. Just the world has taught them to believe it. And so they just believe it. It’s a feeling.

It’s a vibe, you know, like, you know it when you see it and you know it when you don’t see it. And so therefore it takes the word of God and the spirit of God to discern first of all, what are the world’s values? And how does the word of God contradict those values? And why should I follow the word of God instead of the world?

In short, this is what the world is always seeking to do. On the screen one more time. The world normalizes rebellion against God and incentivizes retaliation against man. This is the world. This process of normalization is a slow but steady drip. This is why we talk a lot about formation here at this church, talk about practices, because we’re fully convinced you coming an hour, one time a week.

does not win against the other 167 hours of the week that you’re being formed by the media, by friendships, by the world, right? So we’re trying to empower you to put on Christ throughout the week, not just on Sundays. Now, this process of normalization, I mentioned this in the Revelation series, but it’s called the Overton window.

Anybody remember me talking about the Overton window. I’m not even going to look and see if you say yes or not, because then I’ll just be so discouraged. I’m past depreciation month, whatever. Now, here’s what the Overton window does. It redefines good as evil and evil is good. It flips it, but it takes a long process to do that.

A brief explanation that I use in the Revelation series. I’m borrowing from myself, so I need to quote myself, or else I’m going to plagiarize myself and sue myself. Okay. So I use this already. Let me do this again. Every society has a spectrum of ideas, morals, values that go from crazy talk. To unthinkable, right?

And then accepted facts, right? So there’s a big range. There’s a spectrum. Yes, that’s crazy. Our culture all agrees that’s crazy. Uh, you know, maybe there’s some reality to this. Yes, we all know this is true. You with me? So, for example, the easiest thing is to say bears are real. You can go out and see one.

Okay. Bears are real. Okay. Now the middle ground over 10 window, let’s go over here first. Unicorns are real. Okay, now my daughter is convinced they are and she dreams every night about unicorns like it’s the cutest thing, right? So unicorns are real now. If we all agree bears are real, if we just keep yelling over and over unicorns are real, Eventually, you’ll accept this middle fact, and the middle fact is that Bigfoot is real And I know some of you believe that, okay Overton window, right?

So it’s this idea you say something so outlandish all the time. You’ll eventually budge and at least agree on something that’s not as crazy as unicorn. That’s the Overton window. Culture is doing this. I use that because, hopefully, that’s not a hot button for you. Like, not freaking out, like I’m leaving here because he doesn’t think Bigfoot’s real.

I don’t care if he is. Whatever. Now, so, but we’ve done this with a lot of more serious things. Topics of sexuality, things like abortion, or greed, or gender identity, or violence, or many other vices that we try to now paint as virtues. It’s a slow rebellion where we say crazy things and keep giving up ground of what morality really is.

And what the Overton window does, or what the world does, is slowly but surely convince you, God is not here, God is not good, and God is not able. The enemy, the world, wants to slowly make you unravel those truths. He doesn’t want you to know that God is here, that God is good, and God is able. On top of that, what our world does gives incentives towards retaliation.

Hatred. Tribalism. I think we’ve seen this on pure display the last 10 days with everything happening in the Middle East. And what I have learned in this digital world, what gets the most clicks and most attention is to be hateful, to bring somebody down. So as a result, things are getting more and more shaky in the Western world because we’re hearing less and less of the truth.

And more and more of these cultural assumptions. The world is that feeling maybe many of us had. Where, can I make a post about in favor of Israel, because I know some of my non believing friends might get mad at me for saying what happened to the Israel, Israelis, was evil. That’s the world. If you even thought about that, hesitated a little bit, that shows the world has just this peer pressure.

These ideas that aren’t written down anywhere, but we all kind of feel them. You’ll notice, by the way, what does the world do? Rebellion against God or retaliation against man? It’s the exact opposite of God’s greatest command, which is to love God and to love your neighbor. The world wants to do the exact opposite of what the world says to do.

Not love God, rebel against him. Not love your neighbor, retaliate against him. And so James, going back to James now, he is warning us not to be friends with the world because when you want to be favored and loved by the world, it will lead you down this scary road of rebelling against God and retaliating against man.

Verse four again, he says, you adulterous people, don’t you know that friendship with the world is hostility towards God. So, whoever wants to be the friend of the world becomes the enemy. There are some texts in scripture where you have to slow down and really feel the weight. I want you to feel the weight of being considered an enemy of God.

James here is equating friendship as adultery. Notice he says, you adulterous people. And then he talks about friendship. So this is more than platonic. This is our deepest values, our, our deepest love. So he is saying you can love God, or you can love the world, but you cannot do both at the same time. And so if you, if you take the name Christ, if you are a Christian and yet you’re seeking to be friends and, and, and loved by the world, you are committing adultery.

And the consequence, not just being labeled an adulterer, he is saying you become an enemy of God himself. It doesn’t get more serious than this. It doesn’t get more terrifying than this. Most of us don’t have a theological category of God being our enemy, but he can be according to this text. Now, in Christ Jesus, we are, we’re more than conquerors.

We are, we are actually his beloved. We are his bride. But if you do not follow the way of Jesus and you follow the world, you become his enemy. And for me, I love to preach positively, but I want to match the tone of every text I preach. And this one, especially verse four, is somber and it’s serious. Being a friend of the world is more and more opposed to being a follower of the way.

And you and I are in a cultural moment where we have to decide which one we’re going with. John Tyson, he’s a pastor in New York City. I want to go visit one day. Actually, a guy graduated with at CBU. He was there when he saw me get yelled for my Nautilus world jacket. He now works for him, which is super cool.

But he explains there’s three levels of hostility towards Christians in America. And I want to explain those to you briefly. Number one, he talks about a green-light culture. This is no hostility towards Christians at all. And so this is some places in the South. Still, where it’s like a positive contribution to society.

Not everyone may participate, but they like to go on Easter and Christmas, and they’re thankful for churches. They want more churches. And in that culture, you tell people like, yeah, I’m a pastor. They’re like, oh, that’s cool. Here, here’s a free dinner, right? That’s a cool place, right? Green light culture. We are not in a green-light culture anymore.

You also have a yellow light culture. Yellow light church is weird, but not harmful. Right, like, I don’t know how you can believe those things, but you do you, boo, and we’ll do me, and everything is fine. And so, they think it’s great that some people find hope in religion, and so they’re pumped about it. Uh, churches in general, yeah sure, have them, it’s not a big deal, if you invite me to Easter I may go one year, but for them, they’re kind of like, okay, it’s, Christians are good, but don’t get too public about your faith, it gets a little weird, don’t let it influence your politics, don’t let it do all those things, just kinda, you do you, I’ll do me, and we’ll try to get along.

Then you have the red light culture, where church is just harmful. The Christian stance on sexuality and morality are destructive. Private faith is no longer enough, right? And the yellow light, hey, you believe in Jesus, don’t proselytize to me and we’ll be fine. Now the fact that you just believe Jesus, even if you’re not sharing the gospel, you are, you are, you are destructive to society.

You can’t just not share the gospel. You need to stop believing in God in order for this society to get better. You need to be completely eradicated. And pastors, they’re, they’re bad people. They’re, they’re the ones who just pervert power, and if you’re a pastor, we’ll never be friends, I will never trust you, that sort of thing.

Now, for years in America, we’ve experienced peace of being a Christian and not being hated by the world. Like, we were in a green light culture for a long time. My grandfather, being a pastor since he was 16, was in a pretty good green light culture, but those days are dwindling, aren’t they? I would say in Queen Creek, at least in my neighborhood, the people I talk to were in a yellow light culture.

Hey, that’s cool that you’re a pastor. Don’t talk about it too much to me. It’s kind of strange. You do you, and I’ll do me. But we are trending more and more towards the red. There are places in America, especially our urban cities, where it is full on red. You are harmful. You must be eradicated. And so as we drift from yellow to red, we have a decision to make.

Is it worth being friends with the world and enemies of God? Or friends with God and enemies with the world? That’s what we have to figure out. Now, we have a responsibility to love our neighbor, to love the created world, to steward our lives to make it better, to love the people in it. But… It’s getting more and more clear.

The cultural air that we’re breathing in is more and more hostile to the way of Jesus. This hostility is leading to this tipping point where we have to make a decision. Are we for the Word of God, or are we for the world? I have enough time quickly. I thought this was pretty, pretty, uh, incredible study.

Jonathan Haidt. He wrote this, uh, book about, um, man, I’m forgetting the name of it. Something about righteousness, but he is actually, he’s not a Christian. He’s a, he’s a Jewish man, but he, he actually studied all of cultures like in modern day. How do cultures decide what is morality? And so he wound up finding six moral taste buds, he calls it.

And so, throughout the world, there’s different places, and we don’t, a lot of places don’t have a Bible, but they just kind of know, there’s, some of the best cultures have all six, some of the worst cultures only have one taste bud, where they decide if something is good to do or not. And, um, he actually argues, we, in the Western world, us weirder folks, we have actually stripped down our moral values to just two of the six.

We only have two moral taste buds left. He says usually the way we determine if something’s right or wrong is we ask the question, one, does this action harm somebody? And two, is this action fair to everybody? Leaving the other four… So, questions like submission to authority, those sorts of things, is this best for the community?

If you leave out those other four taste buds, it leads to a lot of very immoral conclusions. It is, in other words, in America today, if the wrong is being done by somebody in power, then it’s still entirely permissible. Um, it, it, does that make sense? If the wrong is being done to someone in power, you can still do it because they’re in power, and we don’t like power, so we’re just going to destroy them.

I think it would lead to our moral taste buds where we’re kind of like, some people today, even very high elite institutions, are saying, well, you know, is Hamas that evil? It’s like, yes! Like, it’s full-on terrorism, right? We’re in this moment. Why do I bring that up? But more and more, our culture is losing its moral taste buds.

And we have to, at some point, stand up and say, we follow the way of Jesus. We believe in truth. I want to love you, but I also have to stick to truth. It’s such a very, very hard balance. And it’s getting more and more difficult. And what I have found, we can find ourselves in a place where we do everything right, say everything with the right tone, with a great amount of patience, speak the truth, but yet in love, and you can still be labeled a bigot.

You can still be misunderstood. What I think that means is we still do what’s right. We still do what’s loving and patient, but we have to remember, I think this text encourages us. At some point, we cannot be friends with the world. At some point, we have to be okay being labeled something else. Uh, whenever ministry feels really heavy for me, I spend some time reflecting on my calling.

So I’ve kind of shared this story a lot. It was actually here in this room, kind of, I began to, as a junior high student, I began to fall in love with the scriptures. And my father told me right before planting a church to start to pray, asking God for my spiritual gifts. So every morning, every night.

Never missed it. Prayed, God, reveal to me my spiritual gift. Reveal to me my spiritual gift. About a year later, I was at a Discipleship Now conference. Not in this room. That’d be so poetic. I was sitting right there! You know, it wasn’t here. Um, but I, I went to this conference and the pastor preached on 1 Kings 18.

It was this wonderful story about Elijah and how he stood up against the prophets of Baal. Even though… It seemed like nobody else followed him. He was, he was, he was facing hundreds of other prophets of these other gods. And he stood up and said, no, my God is real. He’s going to bring down the fire, put water on it.

He’s still going to light up the sacrifice. And so he did this. It was an incredible moment. He stood up for God, and the fire came down from heaven. And he was told we still have saints that are just hiding in caves. And so he helped kind of shift the momentum back to the people of God. And so it was in that sermon, I really felt the Holy Spirit calling me to ministry.

And it’s that I’ve, as I’ve talked to mentors more and more, they say, like the passage that was used to bring you to your calling in life, you need to keep revisiting. And so, at first, I interpreted it as, yeah, I’m just called to ministry. But more and more, as the world continues to get as it’s getting, I think, oh, the Lord maybe has put on me the spirit of Elijah.

I’m not saying I’m the only Elijah of our generation by any means. But I think part of my calling, and I would argue part of yours. It’s to be willing to stand up against the 450 prophets of Baal when it looks like nobody else is standing and still standing for the truth. And it’s scary. I don’t like that calling.

Right? It overwhelms me. I’d rather be, I’d rather live in my grandparents generation. I think of Frodo when he goes to Gandalf. Why me? Why this moment? He’s like, we just have to deal with whatever moment we’re given. We need to meet the occasion. Because I like to be liked. I don’t like to rattle the cage.

But there are moments. Where you and I still have to call sin, sin. Evil is evil. Righteousness is righteousness. God is God, and you are not. We still have to do this. And what that takes is a, such courage that you and I do not possess in our own power. But that’s the promise we have in this text. Let’s look at that one more time.

It says, verse four, you adulterous people, don’t you know that friendship with the world is hostility towards God? So, whoever wants to be a friend of the world becomes the enemy of God. Or do you think it’s without reason that the scriptures say the spirit he made to dwell in us envies intensely, but he gives greater grace.

Therefore he says, God resists the proud, but gives grace to the humble. Therefore submit to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you. Notice this, therefore, so when you receive his grace and his love and go back into this loving loyalty fellowship with God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit, when you then from that submit to him You can resist the devil and he will flee from you.

Verse 8: You will draw near to God, and he will draw near to you. Cleanse your hands, sinners, purify your hearts, you double minded. James is using an Old Testament metaphor of marriage. He’s saying you and I, the people of God, we are the bride of Christ as Paul says in Ephesians 5. He is jealous of us. He wants to be present with us and we long to be present with him and he will not tolerate idolatry and what he is saying, the only way to persevere To say no to the world is to fall in love with Jesus.

This week we were up at the cabin and, uh, for fall break and I asked my girls, I do this randomly, Hey girls, who am I in love with? You know, and they’re all like blushing and then they like point to my wife. You know, you’re in love with her. I’m like, that’s right. I’m also in love with somebody else. And my wife went, what?

You know, like she was like, hmm, and they couldn’t answer, and I was like, I’m in love with Jesus, you know, that’s, and Trinity goes, you can’t do that, he’s a boy. It was, it was amazing, and so we had to sit down and talk about that, because I’m like, well, you’re kind of right, but you know, with Christ being God and the divinity, it was really fun.

Um, it’s the love relationship, and that’s the only way we can get that kind of courage. My last point of the day, I think. We can endure the world’s hatred towards us. When we are assured of Christ’s love for us. Like a husband, Christ loves, protects, and cherishes you. He gives you the strength you need to persevere.

He gives you the love you need to keep holding on. He gives you the hope to face another day. He gives you the righteousness so that you don’t have to be burdened by the shackles of guilt. He gives you patience so you can keep loving your neighbor even when they slander you back. The world is anti grace and the only way we can defeat the world or not be friends of it is to cling to grace.

It’s all about grace. The most anti world message is grace. And this is what Jesus has called us to hold on to Andrew Wilson, who wrote that book, the weirder thing, right? He ends his whole long book saying there’s one way for us to bring the culture maybe back to fight against the world and bring them into union with Christ.

And his answer, like this text, is grace. Look at what it says. He says grace has always been one of Christianity’s most striking features. The claim that God in Christ. He takes the sin and death of the world upon himself in order that he might freely and incongruously give his righteousness and life to those who do not deserve it without parallel in any other system of belief, religious or otherwise, in a world powered by works and measured by achievement.

There is something deeply refreshing about the unmerited, transforming favor of God, given without regard to the worth. Friends, the world has been lying to you. You don’t have to earn God’s favor. It’s not about being good enough, being righteous enough. Jesus was good enough in your place. Jesus is all the righteousness you need.

On the cross, what happens is we give Christ our sin, and Christ gives us his righteousness. We, he paid the debt that you and I could never pay. And that’s grace. You didn’t earn it. You didn’t deserve it. There’s nothing about you. It’s all about him, and that’s the beauty. And the world cannot fathom grace.

And that’s how we’re saved from the world. And it’s in that point of grace, it’s why we can’t be friends of the world. Because the world is missing out on the greatest gift of all time. And so we’re called to rescue people from the world. Bring them into righteousness. So, what I want us to do is just to have a few moments to allow the Holy Spirit to reflect on this message.

I have two questions. These are really quick. Church, throughout history, has pondered these things, and I would love for us to give room to the Holy Spirit. And so if you’re willing and able, maybe even close your eyes in this moment, open your hands in a posture of reception and let us just kind of be silent with the Father as we ask these two questions.

And I hope, you know, you can be as honest with God as possible. God will meet you in your vulnerability. The first point of reflection, number one, do you renounce the world and all its empty promises?

The world promises greed is the way to go. Christ calls us far from that

the world promises. If we just indulge in the flesh, we will be satisfied. But that promise is empty. Do you renounce that promise?

The world tells you that you don’t need God, that you don’t need the scriptures, that you don’t need saving, that you can be strong enough. Do you renounce those lies? Cause that promise is empty.

And the world says sin is exactly what we need,

but sin is bad for you. It’s bad for your neighbor. It destroys us from the inside out. Leads to death and destruction. Will you in this moment, maybe even recommit to the father and say, God, I renounce the world and all of its empty promises,

which leads me to my second question. I want you to spend time with the Holy Spirit here. Do you receive Christ and the fullness of his grace for you?

The world wants to lie to you and say, yes, God will have grace for you, but you got to do X, Y, and Z.

The world wants to convince you that yes, my neighbor deserves grace, but not me.

Lay that lie at the feet of Jesus and say, God, I need the fullness of your grace.

I know we’re in a room full of people who feel unlovable. Man, God in Christ Jesus wants to pour His love fully on you. Will you open and receive it?