Ashe Alliance Church
Sunday Service 11.17.24
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    Main Idea

    Drawing near God in humble submission will guard against a destructive, sinful life.
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    I’ve referenced Solomon’s wisdom many times during this study and plan to do so again today. However, instead of looking at the Proverbs, I want to reflect on a bit of wisdom in Ecclesiastes. Many commentators have suggested that Proverbs was written in the early and middle parts of King Solomon’s life… almost as if he were recording the wisdom God was revealing to him in real-time. Ecclesiastes, however, was written from the vantage point of an older man reflecting on what he has learned over the course of his entire life and providing his deeper contemplations. That seems to fit what he writes in chapter three:
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    Ecclesiastes 3:1–8 ESV
    For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven: a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted; a time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up; a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance; a time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing; a time to seek, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away; a time to tear, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak; a time to love, and a time to hate; a time for war, and a time for peace.
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    The time that we now find ourselves investigating is a time of humble repentance since James has just admonished us as being adulterous spouses who have sought out the world as our companion and significant other. Though the infant church was growing quickly, she had a lot of lessons to learn as she learned to stand and walk on her own. James has addressed many of these issues over the past few weeks. Now, he will tell them (and us) how to avoid them in the future.
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    As we begin, let me ask you a question: Do you want to know how to live so that you don’t constantly stumble? Do you want to maintain a faithful and loving relationship with God with minimal fallout? If your answer is yes, then take some paper and take notes.
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    Passage

    James 4:7–12 CSB
    Therefore, submit 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, 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. 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?
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    I - Therefore (v.7)

    Remember always to ask: “What’s the therefore there for?” The author is connecting what comes next with what he just unpacked. In this case, James is saying that in light of and to avoid all the sinful actions you are demonstrating, such as…
    infighting
    bitter envy
    selfish ambition
    untamed tongue
    spiritual murder
    hedonistic pursuits
    spiritual adultery
    pride
    worldly pursuits
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    … you must do the following. What follows are ten imperative commands. TEN! What is unique about how James delivers these ten commands is how he uses them within an Action-Reaction framework. So, in essence, these are James’ 10 commandments of fidelity to God.
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    II - Action | Reaction (vv. 7-9)

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    Submit & Resist
    First, we are encouraged to submit ourselves to God and to resist the devil.
    Submit- ὑποτάσσω hypotassō - to willingly relinquish authority and control of your life and give it to God, subordinating yourself to your Superior.
    Action: Submit to God. James has just finished demonstrating that the church is, in fact, not submitting to God. They are doing the opposite and actively pursuing what the world has to offer so they can exhaust the hedonistic passions of their hearts. If they are submitting to anything, it is these desires, which include envy and selfishness, that lead to infighting. The exhortation is that in your state of rebellion and sinful pursuits, stop submitting to your immoral desires, turn back, and submit to your Lord, King, and first love. It’s not a matter of IF you submit, but WHO you submit to.
    Your Reaction: Resist the devil. If you are genuine in your submission, your desires will shift to pleasing God rather than yourself. This means you will start rejecting the sinful things you once enjoyed. This will require an active resistance against those temptations, amplified by the Tempter, which, of course, is the devil. But remember the order. Your resistance only comes after your submission to God. The reaction should not come before the action, just like an effect doesn’t come before its cause. If you resist before you submit, you are doing so under your own power, which will almost always result in failure. Your resistance is driven by God’s power, not your own power.
    Satan’s Reaction: Flee. It’s vital to recognize that the devil does not flee because of you. He isn’t sacred of your carnal strength or human willpower. He flees when you stand firm and resist him because you are in Christ. As a part of His body on earth, the devil flees Him because He is the head of the body that you were adopted into.
    Takeaway #1: As you submit, God’s strength crushes the devil’s grip.
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    Draw Near
    This command is similar to what we find in John 15 about the nature of abiding. There is a parallel truth found in both passages. In John 15, we are told that if we abide in Him, He abides in us. There is a condition and an ordered sequence. Similarly, if we draw near to God, He will draw near to us. It's the same conditional statement and the same sequence. Why is that? Is this always the case?
    Action: Draw near to God. Your job is to make the first move. Why? Because you were the one to walk away. God hasn’t moved. The scenario James addresses is one where the believer has moved away from God in an adulterous pursuit of the world. You are the one who walked away from the relationship, so you should be the one to come back. And this isn’t just for the individual, either. To be precise, James is calling for the entire believing community to follow these 10 commandments. While we must pursue this in our individual lives, we mustn’t lose sight of how to do this collectively.
    Reaction: God draws near to you. If you are drawing near, it is a sign of a repentant heart (which is an unstated undercurrent to all of this), and as James already said, God’s mercy is greater than our transgression. As you move back toward Him, He will draw even closer to you, even after your sinful, adulterous acts. King David understood this principle. We know this because he wrote about it after his act of adultery with Bathsheba:
    Psalm 51:17 ESV
    The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise.
    Remember the context of His jealousy from the previous verses. God is jealous for His bride, not so He can get her back and punish her for her evils, but to make her pure and holy once more. God’s righteous jealousy for His bride is linked to His inexhaustible love.
    Takeaway #2: You are responsible for making the first move, knowing God will draw even closer to you than He was before.
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    Cleanse, Purify, Be Miserable, Convert Laughter, Mourn, and Weep
    Action: A time to weep. A lot was happening in the early church to celebrate. People were coming to saving faith by the thousands. Jews were recognizing their promised Messiah. The door of the Kingdom was opening to the Gentiles. Saul - the great Persecutor of the church - had a complete re-direct from Christ himself to become the great Preacher of the church. Though this was all exciting and praiseworthy, this wasn’t a time for laughter and celebration. As Solomon said, there is a time for everything under the sun. There is a time to weep and a time to laugh. Right now, the church needed a wake-up call concerning the sin they were allowing in their lives. They had let their passions get out of hand to the point that they were breaking their commitment to God. When you have offended your first love, that is not a time for laughter. That is a time to weep over what you have done to the person you cherish. This is a call to lament, knowing something powerful is happening amid the lamentation. Have you ever wept bitterly before? Maybe it was over something egregious you had done, or perhaps it was over the loss of a loved one. No one wants to experience these heart-wrenching situations, but there is a design to sorrow and mourning. Times of heartbreak or loss have a cleansing effect.
    This happened to me when my dad died very suddenly with a heart attack. At first, I was numb and in shock. I really couldn’t think clearly or feel anything. But soon after, as my heart and mind began to come to grips with reality, I felt as though I had been stripped completely bare, emotionally. My whole being felt like an exposed nerve, but there was an upside to that feeling. It gave me perspective. I had so many things going on that really didn’t matter in the grand scheme of things. Only a few precious things mattered: faith and family were the top two. I wanted to honor Christ in my sorrow. I wanted to care for my family as we mourned. I wanted to carry on the legacy that my dad had built in the community. I wanted to honor the good name my parents and grandparents had built. I wanted to ensure everyone knew that Jesus is Lord and time is short. Extreme loss brings clarity to the trajectory of your life.
    Brokenness leads to clarity. But, for the sake of context, let’s focus on mending a broken relationship. If you are genuinely mourning over the damage you have caused, it clarifies what really matters. All other less important things tend to fade away. When you realize what you have done… I mean, really grasp it with your heart and mind; that realization impacts the rest of your life. Treating God like an insignificant spouse should make you miserable. It should cause you to weep and mourn over your egregious decisions. But, as Christians, we don’t weep and mourn as one with no hope. Even in our unfaithfulness, God is faithful. He will never leave or forsake us. We know that if we draw near to our Heavenly Father in true repentance, He will forgive us and cleanse us from all of our unrighteousness (1 John 1:9). God's unwavering faithfulness always offers hope and redemption.
    Reaction: To cleanse and purify ourselves, we must first mourn and weep over our sins. The command to Cleanse and Purify are priestly terms. The Old Testament Priests had to be ritually clean and purified before presenting sacrifices for Israel’s sins to God. Now, in the New Covenant, every believer is part of the Royal Priesthood. We don’t make sacrifices for sins, but we do point to Christ, who was the once-for-all sacrifice, and we are called to be pure and blameless in His sight and the sight of unbelievers. How can we do that effectively if we are consistently wallowing in filth and constantly chasing carnal desires? Didn’t James tell us clearly in 1:21 to put away all moral filth and humbly receive the implanted word?
    So, we must let God purify our hearts as David prayed in Psalm 51, and as Peter mentions in his first letter:
    1 Peter 1:22–23 CSB
    Since you have purified yourselves by your obedience to the truth, so that you show sincere brotherly love for each other, from a pure heart love one another constantly, because you have been born again—not of perishable seed but of imperishable—through the living and enduring word of God.
    Takeaway #3: True spiritual cleansing begins with the honest tears of repentance.
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    Humble & Exalt
    Action: Humble is a repeated word in James, so we would be wise to pay attention. This almost seems to be a bottom-line type of quote. If you are distracted by the allures of this world, you aren’t going to submit, draw near, mourn, weep, cleanse, or purify yourself. The common denominator to all of these commands is to humble yourself. In fact, it is the key to this entire passage! Humility is the key that unlocks the way back to God.
    Moreover, the combination of humility and exaltation (to raise in rank, status, character, position, or dignity) has been mentioned before. Remember James 1:9-10?
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    James 1:9–10 CSB
    Let the brother of humble circumstances boast in his exaltation, but let the rich boast in his humiliation because he will pass away like a flower of the field.
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    Reaction: God wants us to understand the powerful connection between humility and restoration and between humility and exaltation. Though you may think you are spiritually rich, you are spiritually poor and bankrupt. You believe that pride will lead to ambition, which results in your exaltation, but that is foolish thinking. The biblical pathway to exaltation begins with humility, which produces sorrowful repentance, which results in exaltation. The power of change comes when you realize this truth and approach God accordingly. When you approach God lowly and humbly, he will lift you and exalt your lowly position to a high position of dignity and status in His kingdom.
    We see this exact exhortation from Paul, followed by Christ's perfect embodiment of this principle in His incarnation, death, and resurrection.
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    Philippians 2:3–11 CSB
    Do nothing out of selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility consider others as more important than yourselves. Everyone should look not to his own interests, but rather to the interests of others. Adopt the same attitude as that of Christ Jesus, who, existing in the form of God, did not consider equality with God as something to be exploited. Instead he emptied himself by assuming the form of a servant, taking on the likeness of humanity. And when he had come as a man, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death— even to death on a cross. For this reason God highly exalted him and gave him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee will bow— in heaven and on earth and under the earth— and every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.
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    Humbleness is the key to living a victorious Christian life. And yet, humility is a dirty word in our culture. Instead of humbling ourselves, we are told to be proud, self-made people who pick ourselves up by the bootstraps and live how we want without regard for anyone else’s feelings. But as God often does, He turns modern wisdom on its head.
    We don’t follow the wisdom of this world. We follow and emulate Christ. And guess what…. He never wandered from the Father. Wouldn’t you want to live like that? Though you will never be sinless this side of heaven if you follow James’ 10 commandments of fidelity, you will fall away far less often.
    Now that James has given his Ten Commandments of Fidelity to the infant church, he has one more to add before moving on to the next subject.
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    III - There Can Be Only One (vv. 10-12)

    Just like a baker’s dozen gives you one extra roll, James wants to give you one more bonus command: Don’t Criticize.
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    Don’t Criticize fellow believers
    James brings it back full circle to how the war within a person manifests outwardly in the Body of Christ. Criticizing breaks the Royal Law and fuels everything James has addressed. Please don’t be that foolish.
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    Judging others equates to judging the law
    When you criticize and judge one another, you are also judging the law. The law was given by God, which makes it God’s law. Do you think so much of yourself that you are able to preside as judge over God’s law?
    There are times when we are called to hold one another accountable and judge believers inside the church to maintain godly behavior and purge evil (1 Cor. 5), but this is to be done in righteousness according to God’s standard. James is speaking against unrighteous judging based on bitter envy and selfish ambition that produces evil actions. That cannot be because you set your own standard and reject God’s.
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    There can be only one Judge and Lawgiver
    That person is not you. It is the God you have submitted yourself to. It is His responsibility to save or destroy. Giving the law and judging are part of His job description. You have enough to do. You have ten things you need to work on. Let God handle His part.
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    So, I’ll end with the same question I started with. Do you want to know how to live so that you don’t constantly stumble? Do you want to maintain a faithful and loving relationship with God with minimal fallout?
    Final Takeaway: Heed these ten commandments of fidelity, especially the call to maintain a humble heart.
    If you have fallen away, return to the God you have sinned against, knowing His grace is greater than your transgression. Weep and mourn over offenses. Let that deep sorrow cleanse and purify your heart. In your lowly state, draw near and submit to God, who will empower you to resist the temptations of your heart. If you haven’t fallen away, Maintain a humble heart and continue to submit to God instead of your heart’s tainted passions. Draw near Him daily and watch how your life transforms in light of His love and grace.
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    Questions to Consider

    What is the significance of humility in the context of submission to God?
    How does the passage from Philippians 2:3–11 illustrate the relationship between humility and exaltation?
    How can we actively submit to God in our daily lives amidst temptations and worldly pursuits?
    How can mourning over our sins lead to spiritual clarity and growth?

      • Ecclesiastes 3:1–8CSB

      • James 4:7–12CSB

      • Psalm 51:17CSB

      • 1 Peter 1:22–23CSB

      • James 1:9–10CSB

      • Philippians 2:3–11CSB

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Ashe Alliance Church
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