James 4:4-10 – “A Little Bird”

As always, here’s my fairly literal translation of these verses:

⁴Adulteresses! Do you not know the friendship of the world is enmity with God? Therefore, whoever chooses to be a friend of the world has become an enemy of God. ⁵Or do you suppose that the Scripture says emptily the spirit dwelling in us lusts toward envy? ⁶But He gives more grace, therefore it says, “God opposes proud ones but gives grace to humble ones.” ⁷Therefore, submit yourselves to God and resist the devil and he will flee from you. ⁸Draw near to God and He will draw near to you. Cleanse [your] hands, sinners, and purify [your] hearts, double-minded. ⁹Be miserable and be sad and cry tears. Let the laughter of yours be turned into sadness and the joy into dejection. ¹⁰Humble yourselves before the Lord and He will lift you up.

While I’m thinking about it all, there is one more thought I’d like to record on the subject of v7 – “Submit yourselves therefore to God…”

I still feel I barely understand what it really means to submit to God. However, I liked something John Gill said: “It is right and best for the people of God to leave themselves with Him, … since by all their anxious cares, their striving and struggling, their impatient desires, wars and fightings, … they cannot add one cubit to their stature, … and it becomes them to submit to God … and be still and know that He is God.”

What Gill is addressing is our submission to the Lord’s providence. It doesn’t take much Bible reading to realize that the Lord completely orders our human existence. “In Him we live and move and have our being.” “He works all things together for our good.” “All of my days were written in Your book before one of them came to be.”

But while it doesn’t take much to realize that, it has seemed to me to be a life-long endeavor to learn to embrace it.

But is that not, in a very immediate sense, one of the ways we all must submit to God?

The Israelites in the desert pretty much illustrated us all. They were very openly and obviously dependent on the Lord’s providence. He provided their food as manna from heaven, provided them water even if it had to come from a rock, shaded them with His cloud in the day and warmed them with His fire by night. He gave them one of the greatest leaders in human history, delivered them from slavery and gave them a beautiful land to call their own. And yet what was their response? “How often they rebelled against Him in the desert and grieved Him in the wasteland. Again and again they vexed the Holy One of Israel …” (Ps 78:40,41). The two words “grumbling” and “Israelites” are almost synonymous!

But are we really any better? I am quite a well-practiced grumbler. I could peel off right now a seemingly endless list of things I “don’t like.” In every case, you would probably say, “I see what you mean. Can’t blame you for that!” But I have said I believe the Lord orders the very minutes of my days. So who am I grumbling against?

So this is a very real issue and one of all-day-every-day importance – to submit myself to God in the sense of accepting His providence for me, no matter what.

As Gill said, “It becomes [us] to submit to God … and be still and know that He is God.”

What probably catches my heart is the “Be still and know that He is God.” Be still. Settle down. Chill.

My natural bent seems to be to live my life in a nervous, frantic stew. “So much needs to get done!” “So much could go wrong!” “I don’t know if we’ll make it!” I can literally live my life in a terrored frenzy.

Be still.

And know that I am God.

This is an issue of submission to God – to learn to “be still.”

I hate winter. No, not hate – I loathe winter. Miserable. Evil. Unfit for human habitation. I absolutely loathe the feeling of cold air on my skin.

The problem with all of this, first of all, is that it means I am pretty much guaranteed to be a grumbling, grousing, unhappy camper six months out of every year! And ultimately, am I not grumbling against the Lord’s providence? Who made winter? And Who ordained that I should live in it? “He appoints the times of our lives and the bounds of our habitation” (Acts 17:26). I don’t doubt at all that winter is part of the Curse, but, on the other hand, I can see clearly that “even in judgment He has remembered mercy” – that if there has to be snow, He made it a beautiful white; that if there has to be bitter cold, He made it sparkle like millions and millions of diamonds. He’s given me a warm house to live in, a nice warm coat, a warm car to drive in. And He put me here. In winter. Somehow I need to submit to Him in it. I need to be still and know that He is God.

Interesting.

Another huge one for me is my job. I love my job, but it is very, very hard. The pace is a mad frenzy and much of the time I feel totally overwhelmed. I often have to pray even to go to work. I have to remind myself the Lord knows the workload I’ve been given – and in reality He’s the One whose given it to me (… for I serve the Lord Christ” Col 3:23). I have to remind myself that He will help me, He always has helped me, His strength is made perfect in my weakness (of which I have plenty to offer!). But I really believe this is all an issue of submission to God. “Be still, Don, and know that I am God. Fear not, for I am with thee. I will strengthen you, I will help you, I will uphold you with the right hand of My righteousness. For I know the plans I have for you, plans to do you good and not to harm you, plans to give you a future and a hope.” I really believe this is a submission issue in my life. “Be still – even at work.”

And then there is this body I live in. It hurts. All over. All the time. I’m still trying to exercise and keep moving, but my legs are pretty much shot and even my shoulders have gone weird on me. Nothing works. I can’t hear, can’t see, can’t remember. I don’t like it. At all. But I have prayed the Lord would take it away and up to this point at least, He has allowed it all to go on. In fact it only gets worse. So what should I do? “Be still and know that I am God.” Another submission issue.

Are these not all submission issues? I think so. I’m sure they probably all sound petty and mundane – but, even as I type, I wonder if that isn’t why I have a hard time grasping what James really means by “Submit yourselves therefore to God.” Maybe it’s hard to see because I’m wanting to make it into something big and “out there” instead of seeing that it’s really all about the simple fabric of my everyday life, embracing His providence in the seemingly unimportant details of my everyday life? “He that is faithful in that which is least, is faithful also in much.” “Despise not the day of small beginnings.”

Isn’t this exactly where Jesus meets us? Think about it – when He wants to teach eternal truth, how does He begin? “A man went out to sow his seed …” Pretty mundane, no? But isn’t that where we all live? Isn’t that where our faith had better show up – in the seemingly mundane of our everyday lives? And doesn’t it make sense that, if we’re going to truly submit to God, it needs to happen in the minutes and seconds of our everyday lives?

I think so. Even in the evil cold winter, even overwhelmed at work, even in this hurting body – submit yourself to God. Submit to His wise providence.

Somewhere in my life I heard the little poem Madame Jeanne Guyon wrote from prison:

“A little bird I am,

Shut from the fields of air,

And in my cage I sit and sing

To Him who placed me there.”

I think that’s a lot of what it really means to “Submit yourselves, therefore, to God …”

… a little bird.

“It is right and best for the people of God to leave themselves with Him, … since by all their anxious cares, their striving and struggling, their impatient desires, wars and fightings, … they cannot add one cubit to their stature, … and it becomes them to submit to God … and be still and know that He is God.”

James 4:4-10 – “Religiously Comfortable”

As always, here’s my fairly literal translation of these verses:

⁴Adulteresses! Do you not know the friendship of the world is enmity with God? Therefore, whoever chooses to be a friend of the world has become an enemy of God. ⁵Or do you suppose that the Scripture says emptily the spirit dwelling in us lusts toward envy? ⁶But He gives more grace, therefore it says, “God opposes proud ones but gives grace to humble ones.” ⁷Therefore, submit yourselves to God and resist the devil and he will flee from you. ⁸Draw near to God and He will draw near to you. Cleanse [your] hands, sinners, and purify [your] hearts, double-minded. ⁹Be miserable and be sad and cry tears. Let the laughter of yours be turned into sadness and the joy into dejection. ¹⁰Humble yourselves before the Lord and He will lift you up.

Verse 7 begins, “Therefore, submit yourselves to God …” I’m pondering what these simple words mean. What does it really mean to “submit to God?” As always, if we just throw Christian clichés at it, the answers are easy. They just don’t mean anything. I’m battling that and also the realization that we’re going for the jugular here and the devil and my pride are no doubt working overtime to get me to think I “know” what it means and am doing it, when in fact I’m not.

I want to say I think this is exactly the battle into which James is laboring hard to engage us. At least as far back as 3:13, he has been urging us to give our lives a very hard examination. And his whole point I think is not to ask us what we believe, or what we think is the state of our relationship with God – he is charging us to take a very hard look at our actual lives, what we actually do, what is really true about who we are and what is really going on in our hearts and how we really treat other people – and to consider that again based not on what we think but rather on the evidence.

Back in 3:13 he asked, “Who is wise and understanding among you?” Then he proceeded to tell us to get the answer to that question from our lives – not from what we think. It is quite clear, he says, that God’s wisdom produces peace. The fruit of righteousness is sown in peace. But in 4:1 he asks, “What about all these fightings and wars? You want me to believe you’re good Christians, you think you are, and yet here you are being irritable and angry with each other. What’s going on?”

That is the very question he wants us to ask ourselves. What’s going on?

I would like to suggest we are not very good at answering that question – and I’d like to record some thoughts why I think that is true (and all of which lead me back – I hope – to my current pondering of what it really means to submit ourselves to God).

James is actually writing to Jewish believers (1:1), not to the Gentiles, like Paul usually was. James is writing to people who grew up in religious homes, people who’ve “always gone to church,” whose religion has always been based on the Bible itself. Religiously speaking, they’ve grown up in a world where there’s them (the good people) and everyone else (all those people who aren’t religious like us). In this context, I hope a red flag immediately goes up, an alarm is going off – what we’re talking about here is a sure recipe for the sin of pride. From the very second we become “religious” or start attending church, we are mortally in danger of this sin. Even the decision to follow Christ, to be born again, to know God – is heinously accompanied by the sin of pride. As Manton said, “Christians are not so much in danger of intemperance and sensual lust as pride; it groweth by the decrease of other sins.” The very fact we “don’t do those things” is a set up to see ourselves as better, to feel we’ve achieved. And in many ways it may be true – I don’t cheat on my wife. I get up in the morning and go to work. I try to be nice to people. I study the Bible. And all those things are good – but what is going on in the darkness of my heart? Am I getting “religiously comfortable?”

Is that not a real danger? I’ve come so far. I truly am different. So … I will say to myself, “Soul, thou art fat and increased with goods. You have plenty of good things laid up for many years …” Religiously comfortable … but blind to my pride, blind to who I really am, minimizing my sins of anger and irritability and envy – the sins that are actually destroying everything good I try to be and do.

This problem was glaringly obvious in the Pharisees (particularly since Jesus very specifically exposed it). I would suggest it was underneath it all the sin that destroyed the Israelite people. And I’d like to suggest it is perhaps the most destructive sin for us today who call ourselves Christians. … to be “religiously comfortable.”

This is why James is hitting his readers so hard – they don’t really believe they have a problem. Twice he has warned them not to be deceived. He’s challenged them about hearing the Word, but then not doing what it says. He’s warned them a person may “seem religious” and yet “his religion is worthless.” He’s warned us against a faith that claims to exist but doesn’t change our lives. He’s warned us our mouths are set on fire by hell and that our “wisdom” may be demonic. He’s called us “adulteresses.” And finally he’s warned us against the sin of pride and called us to submit to God.

 I’ve mentioned earlier that it amazes me how many writers comment on these verses, write polemically against those “worldly” believers out there, and then move on. Does anyone else see what’s happening here? They don’t get it. They are the religiously comfortable. They can’t even see that James is talking to them. And so they miss the point.

I believe this is exactly what has been true of me over the years. I’ve read these verses at least a thousand times, even taught through them. But I’ve always kind of wondered at the negativity. Especially when he goes on to say, “Cleanse your hands you sinners and purify your hearts, you double minded. Be afflicted and mourn and weep …” It’s always been hard to wrap my brain around the ferocity with which he seems to be speaking.

But now I think I get it. He’s talking to me. He’s trying to break through my pride, trying to break through this being “religiously comfortable,” and help me to take stock of who I really am. He has to do this, this has to happen, if I’m really going to “humble myself in the sight of the Lord,” if I’m really going to “submit myself to God and resist the devil.” I have to see the battle. I have to know it’s true. And I’ve got to stop letting the sin of pride leave me “comfortable.”

Pride is my most mortal enemy. The devil feeds on it. But it blinds me to itself. It hides in my heart. Like the most vile of all leeches, even as I try to grow in my relationship with God, as I sincerely want to “do better,” it sinks its evil teeth into my heart and sucks out the very life I ought to be enjoying. “What a wretched man I am!!! Who shall deliver me from this body of death???”

I know what I’ll do. I’ll run to God. I’ll fall at Jesus’ feet and wet them with my tears. I’ll fall into the arms of the only One who can actually fix me, make me better, and at the same time, protect me from me. I think I’ll submit myself to God and resist the devil!

I think I actually do see what it means now. I desperately need God. Hard to see the dark side is, and I won’t see it. Only in His arms, vigilant against my evil pride (and the devil who feeds on it), will I actually be able to enjoy the fruit of the Spirit and not get “religiously comfortable.”

Wow. Heavy stuff. But right where I am. And right where I think we all are today as Christians. The sin of pride has conquered us all. And we don’t even see it.

God help us.

James 4:4-10 – “Slippery”

As always, here’s my fairly literal translation of these verses:

⁴Adulteresses! Do you not know the friendship of the world is enmity with God? Therefore, whoever chooses to be a friend of the world has become an enemy of God. ⁵Or do you suppose that the Scripture says emptily the spirit dwelling in us lusts toward envy? ⁶But He gives more grace, therefore it says, “God opposes proud ones but gives grace to humble ones.” ⁷Therefore, submit yourselves to God and resist the devil and he will flee from you. ⁸Draw near to God and He will draw near to you. Cleanse [your] hands, sinners, and purify [your] hearts, double-minded. ⁹Be miserable and be sad and cry tears. Let the laughter of yours be turned into sadness and the joy into dejection. ¹⁰Humble yourselves before the Lord and He will lift you up.

If it is true that friendship with the world is enmity with God, if it is really true that our hearts are incorrigibly rotten, if it is true that God marshals His forces against the proud, and if it is true He gives His grace to the humble, then what would be the logical thing to do?

Submit yourselves to God!

Resist the devil, so he goes away.

Draw near to God, so He will draw near to us!

That would all seem logical, no? So what’s the problem? How do I actually apply all of this to my heart and life?

I am amazed as I ponder these questions how elusive is the answer. When I read, “Submit yourself to God,” it should be immediately obvious in my mind what I need to do. But I feel like I’m trying to squeeze a bar of soap.

Oh, you can throw Christian clichés at it, but that isn’t what I’m talking about. What does it mean to submit to God – really?

First of all – why is this so hard? I suspect we haven’t left this issue of pride. Remember it was born in a cloaking device. “Hard to see the dark side is.” Even the passage itself comes down to resisting the devil – but he is the master deceiver, a liar and the father of lies, blinding minds and masquerading as an angel of light. I fear this passage simply gets too close to the jugular. Satan and the sin of pride will let you see sins of immorality, of unkindness, of various intemperances, as long as they as pride can remain hidden in our hearts. Pride carries on its kingdom “covertly in the darkness” and utterly resists being exposed. Manton said, “Christians are not so much in danger of intemperance and sensual lust as pride; it groweth by the decrease of other sins.” In other words, even as I overcome more obvious sins, pride can actually be growing in my heart. I don’t look at pornography (which is good) and way down deep underneath it all, I congratulate myself that I’m actually better than all those guys who do (which is very bad).

In practice, we may be admirably “religious” yet in our hearts we’re saying, “I thank thee, Lord, I am not as other men, like this sinner.” That’s what Manton is referring to and it illustrates my point. If I’m sincere and prayerful, there is a sense in which it is “easy” to see some of my more obvious faults so I can repent of them and change. Perhaps I even advance admirably as a Christian in putting off various sinful habits. But when we go for the jugular, when we go for the root, when we actually want to weed out this insidious sin of pride and its dark lord, I’m not surprised I have this feeling all I’m catching is fleeting glances.

“Hard to see the dark side is.”

Even in submitting to God, I have to be begging Him to open my eyes. “Listen to my cry, O Lord, for I am in desperate need; rescue me from those who pursue me, for they are too strong for me.” They are too strong for me.

It’s no coincidence that when Jesus was here, He gave sight to the blind. There was a much bigger issue at hand. As He told the Laodiceans, “I counsel you to buy from Me … salve to put on your eyes so you can see.”

Lord, my name is Bartimaeus.

I believe this is the first step to submitting to God – realizing this is real spiritual warfare and my enemy is an elusive deceiver. I can’t do this. “I need You, to soften my heart and break me apart; I need You to open my eyes …”

Lord, don’t let me study this passage and walk away with superficial changes. Help me to be genuinely submitted to You. Hard to see the dark side is, but with God, nothing shall be impossible. Satan and my pride are powerful enemies but they are puffs of air compared to the Lamb who was slain. I can’t seem to get a grip on this slippery bar of soap long enough to even give it a serious look. But You can.

James 4:4-7 – “Help Us! 2”

As always, here’s my fairly literal translation of these verses:

⁴Adulteresses! Do you not know the friendship of the world is enmity with God? Therefore, whoever chooses to be a friend of the world has become an enemy of God. ⁵Or do you suppose that the Scripture says emptily the spirit dwelling in us lusts toward envy? ⁶But He gives more grace, therefore it says, “God opposes proud ones but gives grace to humble ones.” ⁷Therefore, submit yourselves to God and resist the devil and he will flee from you. ⁸Draw near to God and He will draw near to you.

I think before I move on, I want to record some more thoughts regarding the sin of pride.

I seriously do believe the church today has totally lost all sense of this sin. I don’t believe it is even on the radar screen, pretty much anywhere that I’ve ever had any association or knowledge.

From church history, one thing has always puzzled me – how the old writers seemed to be so godly, how they seemed to have such a depth in their relationships with God, with their knowledge of Him. And somewhere around 1800, it’s like it just fizzled away. There is almost a watershed where, after that, even the most eminent of theologians still have a shallowness that is routinely disappointing. Then I see amazing men like Charles Spurgeon and J.C. Ryle who even into those 1800’s still seemed to possess that very deep sense of God’s greatness and yet who marveled in His love and grace. And yet, even while those two men preached to them – and Spurgeon’s sermons were transcribed and published in the London times every Monday – spiritually speaking the nation of England “went to hell in a hand basket.” Read anything either of those men wrote and ask yourself, “How could a nation go to hell with men like this preaching to them?”

I suspect the answer is in the very passage before us. Pride. The devil’s sin. The sin born in a cloaking device … and yet the particular sin against which we are warned God marshals His armies to fight against. Those old writers come to a passage like James 4 and they can write for pages exposing and thrashing the sin of pride. Since 1800, writers give it passing notice and very often leave whatever it says condemning all those “sinners” out there – never even considering that James is writing to us!

I recall one rare sermon against the sin of pride after which a woman retorted, “But shouldn’t we be proud of our children, of our schools …?” Here was a woman who had claimed to be a believer for probably 60 years and she still doesn’t even know the difference between the sin of pride and the pleasure we rightly get from things accomplished. This is my case-in-point. Really? Sixty years of church-going and pride isn’t even on the radar? Sixty years of supposedly knowing God and still not knowing His enemy?

It explains a lot. It certainly explains my own life, how I could have tried so much and accomplished so little, how I could have made such bad decisions even while I thought I was sincerely trying to “do things God’s way.”

Unless pride is exposed and deliberately crushed, it utterly, insidiously destroys even the best of our intentions. But, once again, it is a self-concealing sin. Like the devil himself, it only works in the darkness. Manton said of Satan, “His policy is to blind the mind, and carry on his kingdom covertly in the darkness …” II Cor 4:4 tells us, “The god of this world hath blinded the minds of them which believe not,” and in 11:14,15, “Satan himself masquerades as an angel of light. It is not surprising, then, if his servants also masquerade as servants of righteousness.”

As Yoda said, “Hard to see the dark side is.” And may I add, “and even harder when we aren’t even looking for it.” And I guess that is the point I’m trying to make.

Basically, I fear we live in a generation where the church itself barely even recognizes the sin of pride and certainly makes no effort to expose or renounce it. If that is the case, then we shouldn’t be surprised that we labor much and accomplish precious little. We shouldn’t be surprised that our “great” leaders go down in adultery and financial improprieties. We shouldn’t be surprised that churches all over America are so busy and yet have very little effect on the country. We aren’t even looking for the very devil’s sin that lurks within us.

God resists the proud.

So what should we do about it? What if it’s true that for some reason, ever since about 1800, the church has allowed the devil and his sin to masquerade within us with little or no effort to even acknowledge it? What if that explains why we have so little impact in this world?

I don’t know. Pray. Pray that the Lord would help me to see it in my own heart. Pray He’d help me to take my enemy very seriously and pray He’d help me be genuinely humble before Him. Pray that somehow His church would wake up and see what James is saying – that we all need to take a hard (and honest) look at the evidence of our lives and see what the fruit really tells us.

Maybe we need to submit to God and resist the devil, to draw near to God so He will draw near to us, to see ourselves as sinners and cleanse our hands, to see ourselves as double-minded and purify our hearts, to be afflicted and mourn and weep and let our laughter be turned to mourning and our joy to heaviness, to humble ourselves in the sight of the Lord, so He can lift us up.

Maybe we need to take James 4 seriously.

God help me. God help us.

James 4:5,6 – “Help Us!”

As always, here’s my fairly literal translation of these verses:

⁵Or do you suppose that the Scripture says emptily the spirit dwelling in us lusts toward envy? ⁶But He gives more grace, therefore it says, “God opposes proud ones but gives grace to humble ones.”

As I said in my last post, verses 1 thru 5 are a very ugly catalog of who we are: fighting, warring, killing, coveting, discontent, adulteresses, enemies of God, and then having the audacity to think we’re “wise and understanding” (3:13), to consider ourselves “religious” (1:26). Verse 6 finally pins down the real problem: we’re proud.

Pride. The devil’s sin. The root of it all. “I deserve better,” says my heart and from there on it’s all downhill.

As I considered in that last post, God is a Giver. If we’ll let Him, He gives more grace. But horror of horrors, there is something in us that will utterly clog the funnel of that grace. Our pride.

The Bible is full of examples of pride and its destruction: Satan, Pharoah, Nebuchadnezzar, Haman, Herod, David, Uzziah, Hezekiah, and so many others. The book of Obadiah is entirely given to judgment on the sin of pride: “The pride of your heart has deceived you … though you soar like an eagle, I will bring you down … Oh, what disaster awaits you … you will be covered with shame, you will be destroyed forever …” (vv3-10).

God resists the proud. He opposes them. The Greek verb actually means to “marshal one’s forces against.” What a shame. The God who is a Giver has to be instead the General of His armies taking up their battle lines to destroy us!

Pride. The twisted notion that we’re better, that we deserve more, that I really should be “high and lifted up.” What I personally find most terrifying is that it is a sin which conceals itself in my heart. As the Lord said in Obadiah, “The pride of your heart has deceived you.” It is an insidious sin. I can be consumed by it, my heart can be filled with the sin of pride, and I won’t see it. We may see it in others but they don’t see it in themselves. It lodged itself in the Devil’s heart and we’re not surprised to see it in evil Haman, but what of David and Uzziah and Hezekiah? Some of the most godly men in the Bible suffered horrifically because pride wormed its way into their heart.

How could they not have seen it? Because it is a deceiving sin. It hides itself.  And it hides itself from even the most godly. I shouldn’t be surprised if it doesn’t have too big a challenge to hide itself in me! In fact, I look back and see that most of my life, my heart has been full of the sin of pride. No wonder so many things have gone “wrong.” No wonder so many things didn’t turn out at all like I thought they would. In my heart of hearts, I thought I was destined to succeed famously. And why not? I was exceptional. I was better. What a shame. In so many things I can say I really did have good intentions. I often wanted to see right things happen. But I didn’t see the pride, the arrogance, that was hiding in my heart – and that the Lord could not bless me in those things. Instead He had to marshal His forces against me. But I couldn’t see it. That to me is terrifying.

Then what is also terrifying is to realize that God’s judgment on pride is not just failure. That would be bad enough – to think that even “good” endeavors will fail when pride hides in my heart. That would be bad enough, but it’s worse. God’s judgment on the sin of pride is shame. Not just failure, but shame. As He warned them in Obadiah, “Oh, what disaster awaits you … you will be covered with shame …” Here I am thinking I’m “high and lifted up” and instead I find myself wishing I could go back and right-click-delete the whole ugly business.

Insidious. Shameful. Utterly frightening. What I have determined is that I cannot resolve to be watching for the sin of pride. When it is there, I will not see it. It is born in a cloaking device. I have to watch for its symptoms. When someone says something and I find it galls me, I may be convinced what they said was just completely wrong. But what of this “galls?” Why does it gall me? Saul was galled when he heard them singing, “Saul has killed his thousands, but David his tens of thousands.” Why? He was proud. It basically goes without saying that when I’m angry about anything – it’s probably a sure symptom of the sin of pride. And that is what I must look for – its symptoms.

It’s the same way hunting deer. A novice goes out looking for a deer – looking for a big, brown, four-legged creature with ears twitching and a big white tail. The problem is, by the time you see anything that obvious, he’s already seen you! A deer’s deliberate intention is to hide, to disappear. Even his color is intended to camouflage him in the woods. Hunters often walk right by deer and never know it. You simply can’t hunt deer looking for deer. That may work for a man sitting high up in a blind, but it will not work for a stalker. One has to learn where to look and how to look first for the signs that a deer might be there. Only then – when you learn to look, in a sense, for the symptoms of their presence, will you have a chance to actually “see” him – that is before he has long since seen you and bounded away.

That’s how pride is. And that is probably why we so seldom do see it. You can’t look for it; you have to look for its symptoms. In case it hasn’t occurred to anyone, that is precisely what James has been doing since 3:13. He’s calling us to consider the evidence – to look at our lives, to look at our hearts, to do any honest evaluation and ask not what I imagine is going on, but what does the evidence prove? I think I’m “religious” but what about all this anger and envy? Finally he pins it down. What are we really looking for? Pride. The devil’s sin, hiding its ugly evil, shameful destruction in our hearts.

The other reason why I suspect we don’t see it is because other sins are more obviously odious to us. I can see the sin of adultery and how it destroys families. I can see the cruelty of murder and the injustice of stealing. But, as long as another person’s arrogance doesn’t particularly hurt me, I don’t really see the harm. In fact, I can survey my own life and as long as I’m not cheating on my wife, haven’t murdered anyone (lately), haven’t burglarized my neighbor’s house, I seem to have a pretty clean bill of health. That my heart might be full of the sin of pride or that that is even a bad thing doesn’t even occur to me.

Pride can center itself on any or all of what we think to be beauty, strength, accomplishments, family, country, possessions, potential, and even religion itself – any way we attach any undue importance to ourselves.

Even having said all of the above, I find something in my heart wanting to ask, “What’s the harm? So I’m a little arrogant. As long as I don’t hurt anyone, what’s so terribly bad about that?” But wait a minute. It is the devil’s sin! When it is present, though I cannot see it, it makes me compete with God Himself, not to mention all the people around me. And in the end, God has already warned me, I will not succeed, in fact I will fail, in fact, it’s even far worse, some way or another I will go down hard in shame.  Why is my heart so determined to play down pride, to minimize its evil, to not see its devilish face? Why? Because it was born in a cloaking device. It hides itself. It deceives the deceived.

God alone can deliver us. He wants to. He gives more grace.

But there is a condition. He gives His grace to the humble.

He who exalts himself will be humbled, but he who humbles himself will be exalted.

We must assume our rightful place. We are created beings, not God. We are created beings among created beings. We are no better than any other created being. We may have more ability in some particular area. We may be bigger, stronger, richer, more accomplished than someone else in some specific ways but we all also have our weaknesses. Albert Einstein could figure out that time is curved but couldn’t find his way home at night. Herod was rich and powerful but died eaten by worms. It is one thing to recognize our strengths – it is another to imagine somehow they make us “high and lifted up.”

We must assume our rightful place. We are here to love God and others. That is our calling for this short journey in time. We take the life He has given us, the particular array of abilities or gifts and give them as a very small part of our God’s great eternal plan. We give of our strengths and let our weaknesses remind us how much we need God … and others. We’re only part of a great eternal whole.

Guess I’ll close by saying I fear we live in a generation that has completely forgotten that God hates the sin of pride. It’s no wonder we attempt so much and accomplish so little.

God help us.

God help me.

As Princess Leia said (sort of): “Help us, O great One, Jesus; You’re our only hope!”

James 4:5,6 – “Giver”

As always, here’s my fairly literal translation of these verses:

⁵Or do you suppose that the Scripture says emptily the spirit dwelling in us lusts toward envy? ⁶But He gives more grace, therefore it says, “God opposes proud ones but gives grace to humble ones.”

Verses 1 thru 5 are a very ugly catalog of who we are: fighting, warring, killing, coveting, discontent, adulteresses, enemies of God, and then having the audacity to think we’re “wise and understanding” (3:13), to consider ourselves “religious” (1:26). Verse 6 finally pins down the real problem: we’re proud.

Pride. The devil’s sin. The root of it all. “I deserve better,” says my heart and from there on it’s all downhill.

I want to take a closer look at all of this, but first I want to note the beginning of verse 6: “But He gives more grace.”

If I am willing to honestly see myself in my evil pride, if I’m willing to admit that my behavior exposes a childish, godless, selfish, evil black heart, then here’s God’s message to me: “But He gives more grace!”

“But He” is always a sure recipe for hope in the Bible, and this time is no exception!

Clear back into chapter 3, I’ve been having to face the fact that my mouth is set on fire by hell and I cannot tame it. I’ve had to face the fact that my “wisdom” is not from Heaven but demonic, of the devil, straight out of hell itself. I am, in fact, the catalog of sin we’ve read in the first 5 verses of chapter 4. The spirit dwelling in me is rotten.

Can I pause to say anyone who denies all of this only proves they’re still blind in their sin? It is the truth. But for those who will admit it, for those who will sit honestly under the hot white light of God’s Word, the result is not despair – because even as the Lord shows us our black hearts, He also whispers hope in our ears: “But He giveth more grace!”

Miracle of miracles! The One who finds me grasping and selfish and lusting after my wants is a Giver! The only One who deserves to get is a Giver! Into my black world steps One who should strike me dead, who should grab me by the collar and throw me into hell, who should wash His hands in disgust and squash me like a bug. But what does He do? “He gives more grace!” Yes, my heart is black. Yes, I am hopeless. But His grace is more. His grace is greater. Greater than my sin. Envious and lustful is what I am by nature, but grace is greater. His Spirit in me conquers the spirit in me!

Here is the cure for lust and pride, the cure for envy and our contentious fighting demanding spirit that always wants more: Grace. The grace that is more. True freedom is to be convinced that grace is the richest possession of all! God’s gift of grace and the love, joy, and peace it gives is a far better gift than anything this world can offer. “Not as the world giveth give I unto you,” (John 14:27).

Here is hope. The Healer of our souls is a mighty Physician! Satan’s power to deceive us and conquer us and damn us is nothing compared to Jesus’ power to save us!

We’re full of envy but God is full of grace!

It’s no mere coincidence that God “gives” two times in verse 6. He is the Giver. He is the One who ought to punish sin and kill us, yet Himself goes to a Cross and instead dies in our place!

Wonder of wonders. Love divine, all loves excelling.

Let me wrap this up by saying that way back at the very beginning, not long after He stepped into my life, He showed me John 17:3: “For this is eternal life, that they might know Thee, the only true God …” I realized then that all that mattered in life was to know God, to truly know Him, to know Him better and better. I’ve been down too many rabbit trails since then, each of which I deeply regret, but always, always, always I find myself back here again … knowing Him, finding again that knowing Him is the cure for everything. Knowing Him is what gives me hope. Knowing Him is what cures me. Knowing Him is what changes me. Me in my sin. Him the Giver.

Jesus. Healer. Giver. Lover.

He gives more grace!