Drinking Deeply

James 4:1-10

September 6, 2015 • Mount Pleasant UMC

Why do wars start? It’s a question that often preoccupies historians. Sometimes they argue, and other times they agree over the real reasons for conflict in the world. Most agree, for instance, that World War I began with the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand in July 1914, though there were certainly underlying political, social and economic factors that played into the decisions that were made following that attack. The same is true for World War II, which may have officially begun with Germany’s invasion of Poland in September 1939 but informally began as fascism rose in Italy and Germany and an aggressive foreign policy came from the Nazi party. That all began back in 1933. The first Gulf War began with Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait and the second Gulf War began with an invasion of Iraq in the wake of the 2001 attacks on the United States. We could go on and on; somewhere in the midst of every conflict, someone identifies an event that, we believe, caused the war. And we should know about war. Since World War II, which was the “war to end all wars,” there has rarely if ever been a day when there hasn’t been some sort of armed conflict going on somewhere in the world. The twentieth century was one of the bloodiest in recorded history, and the twenty-first has not gotten off to such a great start in that regard either.

But even if we can pin down historical events, can we really say that such event is what caused the war, what made one nation or group go fight another? Historians would say “yes,” but James would say no. Wars and fighting and arguments and conflict, James says, come from somewhere deeper, something more profound. Wars happen, he says, because of us.

We’ve been spending these weeks looking into the book of James in this series we’re calling “Practical Faith.” The reason we have these boots up here is to remind us that we’re called to walk out our faith, not just keep it bottled up inside. James has been reminding us—in difficult fashion sometimes—that faith is not just something we practice on Sunday morning. It’s something we live out in very practical ways each and every day. Practical ways like taming our tongue, loving even those who hurt us and caring for the vulnerable in our culture. So this morning, as we turn to James 4, we turn our attention to conflict, something we all know too well. Conflict happens not just on the world stage, but in our daily lives—in our homes, our workplaces, among friends and family, between spouses and people on the street. Conflict is a way of life, and James says if we’re going to confront it, and deal with it, we first have to understand where it comes from. What’s the root of the conflict we see and experience?

James, as we’ve become accustomed to, puts it quite bluntly: “What causes fights and quarrels among you? Don’t they come from your desires that battle within you?” (4:1). Deep down, at the root, conflicts and wars come, James says, from unsatisfied desire, from appetites that go unmet, unfulfilled. The word translated “desires” there is the root for our word “hedonism,” or the idea that pleasure in life is the highest good. Another word for it is “sensualism.” We want something because we think it will bring us pleasure and when we don’t get it, or when someone else gets it instead of us, conflict happens. Unmet desire. Unsatisfied appetites. Think of it this way: every evening, I’ll sit down and you eat dinner. The food is good, maybe I eat too much, but when I feel full, or maybe just a little past that, I’ll stop. My appetite for food has been satisfied. For the moment. But somewhere around 9:30 or so, my tummy starts telling me, “Hey, what about some food down here? No, forget healthy food. Let’s get some ice cream, or chips, or cookies, or something that’s just not good for you.” And so I wander over into the kitchen, even without thinking about it much, and I rummage around in the cabinet until I find something that will satisfy my appetite. For a while. I have a craving, a need that must be met, so I try meet it. But I don’t always meet it in the best way.

Our son, Christopher, has been on his own now for about two months, and he posted this on Facebook a couple of weeks ago: “Buying food for yourself means for the first month you get nothing but garbage because you can and no one can stop you, getting acid reflux, then buying proper food.” Satisfying our appetites for so-called “pleasure food” does not always result in a positive end, as Christopher learned! We have to satisfy our desires in ways that are healthful and helpful. James says we have other appetites that are not so easy to satisfy. We long for things. We desire, but do not have, so we get jealous. You desire, but do not have, so you blame someone else. You desire, but do not have, so you blame God. James says you desire, but do not have, so you might even kill. I don’t know if he meant that word literally or not, but how many relationships have been killed because of jealousy, because of unsatisfied desires, because of our failure to be fully satisfied by the right things, the helpful things? You see, James says, most often, we’re asking for the wrong things and, even more, we’re asking the wrong person. Conflicts begin because we’re expecting someone here to satisfy our longings when the only one who can do that is God. James puts it this way (again, bluntly): “You do not have because you do not ask God” (4:2).

James pushes it even further and calls his audience “adulterous people” (4:4). That’s not something I would tend to say to a group of believers, but that age was deeply embedded in the Scriptures of the the Old Testament. Especially in the prophets, that image was used to describe God’s people any time they wandered away from God and started worshipping idols, false gods. There was a guy named Hosea, for instance, who was even told to marry a prostitute, to live out a parable of what Israel had done to God. The people of God had often been pictured as living lives of adultery toward God—cheating on God. So James here isn’t necessarily talking about actual adultery so much as he’s talking about spiritual adultery. William Barclay translates it as being “renegades to your vows,” reminding us that we often break all sorts of vows. That subject has been much in the news lately, hasn’t it, with the release of the hacked data from the Ashley Madison. That sounds like a nice name; it doesn’t sound like a website that would traffic in extramarital affairs, and yet that’s exactly what it does. And when the names began to come out, people you wouldn’t expect found their names on the list. Ed Stetzer wrote that he expected there would be 400 church leaders and pastors who would resign last weekend over the scandal, and one this week that was widely reported had only visited the site but had not actually registered. The website had captured his email, and now his brief visit has been made public, causing him to lose his ministry position. It’s sort of interesting that, in a world where vows and promises seem to be taken so lightly, this sort of thing is still a scandal, but that’s a good thing and a reason for hope yet for our culture. Some of you know the heartbreak that adultery brings, whether it happened online or through a chance meeting or in the office. That’s the heartbreak James is trying to describe here, the heartbreak God feels when we seek other gods, when we worship other things, when we are “renegades to our vow” to serve and love him. You want something but you cannot have it, so you either take it or you start trouble because you have unfulfilled desires, James says. You are spiritual adulterers, and that’s something God takes seriously. It’s something that will put quick distance between us and God.

You likely know what it feels like to have distance between you and someone else. Something has gone wrong, and you may or may not know what it is. Something changes and suddenly you don’t hear from that person like you used to. Then, you run into them at a restaurant or a coffee shop and the conversation is obviously forced. You feel as if you don’t know each other anymore, and so you exchange pleasantries but not much more. Distance has grown, and sometimes it doesn’t even have to be something that went wrong but just the fact that you don’t see each other very often. That can happen in our relationships with others, and it can happen in our relationship with God. Often we don’t even notice when distance develops between us and God. We move away slowly, imperceptibly. We justify the decisions we make, even spiritualize them. We have other things to do rather than read the Bible or go to small group. We can’t make it to worship this week, and we don’t have time for prayer. Or we’ll do those things later. Always later. We become “friends with the world” rather than “friends of God” (4:4). James says we can’t have it both ways; if you want to dive fully into the world, if you want to be the world’s friend, you will be an enemy of God. You can’t do both. So distance between us and God happens slowly, over time, and even the symptoms James describes seem to us to be just the normal way of things. How often have you heard someone say that conflict in the church is “just the way it is”? And in our world today we’ve even figured out the way to deal with it: we just go somewhere else. Then we discover, what do you know, they have conflict, too! James says all of that is caused by a distance between us and God that we might not have even noticed is there. The solution, then,` is not more activity, more stuff or even going somewhere else. The solution, James says, is submit ourselves once again to God.

The first piece to that, according to James, is to “resist the devil” (4:9). Some folks today want to deny the existence of the devil, or Satan, and even try to deny the existence of evil. We relabel those things as “bad choices” or “mistakes.” Just watch the media go crazy when someone labels something as “evil.” And while I don’t think the devil runs around in red spandex with a pitchfork and horns on his head—those images come more from Dante than they do from the Bible—I do believe the devil is alive and well and working to oppose the purposes of God. Jesus himself talked about the works of the evil one, and he fought temptations offered by Satan in the wilderness. So I’m reluctant to discount anyone Jesus talked about. But you know what else I know? I’ve read the end of the book and I know that, even though he seems to prevail so often today, the devil does not win in the end. He may be the “prince of this world” (John 12:31) but he is not the Lord of eternity. When we resist him, we’re getting on the right side for the long haul.

There are plenty of places in our world today where is seems evil has the upper hand, and it is up to God’s people (and often no one else) to stand up to it, to resist the work of the devil—both in our own lives and in the broader world. First, by making sure our own conduct is what it ought to be. “Wash your hands,” James says (4:8). Our hands represent what we do; we’re to make sure our actions are “clean,” in line with what God calls us to do. Then, we also have to make sure our motives are pure; “purify your hearts” (4:8). Earlier in this book, James has warned us against being double-minded—saying one thing and doing another or telling two people different things, or believing you can be a friend of God and a friend of the world. One of the things that’s emphasized in so many recovery movements, including Celebrate Recovery, is that you can’t have your old life and your new one at the same time. You can’t be double-minded. I knew someone once like that, who would say whatever you wanted to hear to make you like them. They had the ability to believe two contradictory statements, and their motives were always self-centered rather than God-centered. I can’t think of a better word to describe that person than the one James uses: “unstable” (1:8). Wash your hands; purify your hearts.

Then, repent. James puts it this way: “Grieve, mourn and wail. Change your laughter to mourning and your joy to gloom” (4:9). James isn’t advocating that all Christians go around with long faces looking like they swallowed too many sour lemons. But he is telling us we must take sin seriously. If we laugh off the presence of evil, and especially if we justify the ways we give into it, we will continue to feel that distance between us and God. So when that person you’re out to dinner with makes a racist joke—do you laugh and just go on, or do you find some way to gently confront the evil of racism and hatred? That kid on your bus or in your neighborhood who is being bullied—do you join in or do you find a way to stand up for the vulnerable? I remember a kid in our school when I was growing up who was just a bit different, so a lot of the “cool” kids picked on him. I was not one of the cool kids (I know that’s hard for you to believe), but I also just stood by and watched while they harassed him. It wasn’t until years later I began to feel a bit of what James talks about with regards to that time in my life. I wish I knew where Charles is today so that I could make things right. We have to take sin and evil seriously and repent of it when we find it in our lives; that’s a huge part of resisting the devil. But did you also see the promise there? “Resist the devil,” James says, “and he will flee from you” (4:8). Not “he might.” Not “maybe.” He will flee from you. He has to. So if he’s still hanging around, if we’re still finding ways to participate in evil and injustice, it’s because we haven’t been diligent in resisting him. The choice is ours.

But it’s a choice we must make if we want to do the next thing James tells us to: “Come near to God” (4:8). This may sound like a command, but it’s really an invitation—an invitation to a relationship of love, trust, grace, mercy and forgiveness (cf. Cedar, Communicator’s Commentary: James, 1, 2 Peter, Jude, pg. 84). Isn’t it great to get an invitation? When Rachel was in kindergarten, we had just moved to Portage and didn’t know very many people yet, and one day she came running home with an invitation to a birthday party. One of the little boys in her class had handed her an invitation with her name on it, and he wanted her to come to his party. She was so excited. So she picked out a gift and we made room on the calendar to make sure she could go, which she did, and she had the time of her life. To be invited meant she was welcome, included, wanted. Now, we found out later that the family was rather wealthy and the invitation had actually been extended to everyone in the class, but you know what? For Rachel, that didn’t make it any less special. It meant she was a part. All she knew is she had been invited to something outside of class where she could get to know other kids her age. It made me realize that an invitation is not any less “special” just because all are invited—and if that’s true with a birthday party, how much more true is it with God’s invitation. All are, in fact, invited and welcomed and wanted. All are invited to come near.

And so we do that through things like reading Scripture, practicing prayer, worship, serving others—those things we talked about a couple of weeks ago. We come near by drinking deeply of the spiritual well God offers us—the life-giving water found in these practices. We read God’s word, revealed to us in the Bible. We pray, which is just talking to him. We hang out with his people in fellowship and worship. We serve those whom he loves and become passionate about the things God is passionate about. And, as we do that, an amazing thing happens. As we allow Jesus more and more into our lives, we become increasingly like him. That life-giving water shapes us. His character grows within us (cf. Cedar 85). If we want to satisfy our appetites in ways that are ultimately fulfilling, we resist the devil and then drink deeply of the water God offers when we draw near to him.

And we humble ourselves. Humility is a tricky thing. We’ve often misunderstood or even misinterpreted humility. We think of it often as tearing yourself down, making yourself small somehow. Or, even worse, it’s thinking you’re not worth anything. Now, how do we square that with a Scripture that tells us we are made in the image of God, that we are worth dying for, that we are worth more to God, the creator of the universe, than we can even imagine? Humility is not tearing ourselves down. True humility is seeing ourselves rightly, seeing ourselves as who we really are in relation to God. The psalmist puts it this way: “What is mankind that you are mindful of them, human beings that you care for them? You have made them a little lower than the angels and crowned them with glory and honor. You made them rulers over the works of your hands…” (8:4-6). Humility is seeing ourselves in right relationship with God. He is God and we are not. He knows what is best and we most often do not. Humility is an aspect of trust. Do we trust God to work things out for the very best, even when it’s hard to see?

Generally speaking, those who think they are the most humble are not. That’s what I mean by humility being tricky—once you think you have it, you’ve lost it. Let me illustrate with a diagram that I’ve adapted from Adam Hamilton. All of us are aiming at growing in grace, becoming more like Jesus. That’s the top of this diagram; the Bible talks about it as “sanctification,” but it means becoming like Jesus. Adam Hamilton says about 40% of those who call themselves Christian believe that they just have to be a “good person,” and generally “good” is defined in whatever way they are currently living. Just stay within in the lines, go to church occasionally, don’t hurt anyone and you’ll be okay. 30% of Christians want to grow; that’s the next level. They are trying but often things distract them or pull them away. These are folks who are passionate for a while, fall away for a while, then come back and so on. About 20%, Hamilton says, are those who attend every week, who give faithfully to the church and Christian causes (in fact, they tend to be tithers) and they generally form the core of the leadership in the church. And then there is the top 10%, Christians who are deeply committed, who are very much like Jesus and very humble. Those who are in this area generally don’t think of themselves as anything special, but their long walk with Jesus has brought them to a place of profound faith. However, Hamilton says, if anyone tells you they’re in this category, they immediately get bumped down two levels. The folks who are truly humble are a rare breed; I can think of only about two people I’ve known who struck me as models of true faithfulness and humility (and no, one of them wasn’t me!). But I can think of a whole lot of people who are striving for this, who are working on trusting God more, seeing themselves better in relation to God. I know of a whole lot of people, myself included, who are seeking to better know, love and serve God with our heart, hands and head.

What causes conflicts and disagreements among you? James says it’s because we don’t get what we want, and like toddlers we throw a fit. But when we resist the devil, come near to God and humble ourselves, it’s amazing how the things we thought were so important just aren’t anymore. His plan becomes greater; our becomes lesser. The call for us is to drink deeply at the well of God’s grace and mercy, because we can’t do this on our own. On our own, we just end up in conflict and trouble. But in God’s grace, we find ourselves moving toward peace. Maybe that’s why Jesus said, “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God” (Matthew 5:9)—children of God who increasingly look, act and live like him.

As we continue to drink deeply of his grace, we demonstrate that in one way by coming to his table—the table of communion. Jesus gave us this act so that we could remember what he had done for us. But more than that, he gave us this meal to remind us that we’re called to be like him. These two tokens—bread and juice—remind us of his body and his blood, his whole being. As we take them inside of us, we take him into our lives and allow him to change us, shape us, remake us from the inside out. This morning, as we come to receive small symbols of communion, may they be a reminder of our need to drink deeply of God’s grace. Let’s prepare our hearts for holy communion.