The commands of God are given for us to obey. When we fail to do what God commands we sin. This is known as a sin of omission: failing to do what God commands. The Bible is full of positive commands: love God with all your heart, love your neighbor as yourself, do not forsake assembling with believers, raise you children to fear and know God, and stir up other Christians to love and good works. When we fail to obey these commands we sin. The answer to our sin problem is found only in Jesus Christ. Though we sin in what we fail to do, peace with God is achieved through repentance and faith in the atoning work of Jesus. To listen to this sermon, please click on the following link: James 4:17.
God made us as dependent creatures. He is the sovereign Lord of the universe, upon whom we depend for all things. When we live as if we are self-sufficient, we lie about our dependency. We act as if we are able to accomplish the plans we make for our life irrespective of God’s will. Yet, God rules and reigns over all things and our plans will only come to pass by His grace. To listen to this sermon, please click on the following link: James 4:13-16.
The Bible gives guidelines for judging and not judging. As a rule Christians are not to judge others, though there are occasions where they must judge. James 4 is an instance encouraging Christians to not judge others. His reasoning is that judging others distracts us from identifying our own sin, confessing it, and turning from it while trusting Jesus for forgiveness. This is the same message we give to the sinners around us that are just like us in that we all sin. So, let us not spend out time judging the sins of others, God will one day judge everyone perfectly. To listen to this sermon, please click on the following link: James 4:11-12.
God promises to bless those who live humbly before Him. James teaches what that humble life looks like. The humble know they are sinners, they have sinful desires, and they are not perfectly faithful in their allegiance to Christ. The humble understand that they must abstain from sin and pursue faithfulness to Christ. Yet, they must do this by grace. It is by grace that a man is saved. It is also by grace that he puts away sin and pursues holiness. To listen to this sermon, please click on the following link: James 4:10.
It is true that Christians sin. They sin all the time and every day. Every day they prove that they need a Savior. This is the result of the fallen human flesh that desires things contrary to God’s will. Yet, another desire also resides with the Christian: a love for God. This love for God is a result of seeing his glory (2 Cor 4:4-6) and results in the desire to obey God (1 John 5:1-3). The desire to obey God, though not always followed – leading to sin, leads the true Christian to repent over sin because that is what he wants to do. The Christian wants to be like his Savior, therefore he repents of his sin. To listen to this sermon, please click on the following link: James 4:9, part 3.
Many look at repentance in the Christian life as saying you are sorry for doing what you want to do (sin) or delighting in what you like (the world). In a sense, this view believes that we are repenting against our desires. Since we desire the wrong thing, we repent because we know it is wrong, but be don’t really mean it (or we mean it little) because really we are doing what we want when we sin. This understanding misses a major part of the Bible’s teaching on the new birth. When we are born again, we are given spiritual appetites, so that we want to delight in God and we desire to do God’s will. In this view, repenting of sin is not forced or coerced, but is exactly what we want to do, because we want to love and obey God. To listen to this sermon, please click on the following link: James 4:9, part 2.
James calls his readers to admit that they sin, trust Christ for forgiveness, turn from sin, and obey God. True repentance has God in view: all our sin is against God. It also involves repenting of sin, not just the consequences of sin. Lastly, repentance does not involve blame shifting, but acknowledges that no sin against God is acceptable. To listen to this sermon, please click on the following link: James 4:9.
James called on his readers to live according to the wisdom from above rather than the wisdom of the world. He understood that to the extent that we are friends with the world we are separate from God. Since we are to be faithful to God and God alone, such an alliance with the world is spiritual adultery. James urges his readers to rely on the grace of God for our sin – to trust in Christ to make us right with God. At the same time, he urges them to repent of their sin. We must understand what it means to repent, then do it for the glory of God. To listen to this sermon, please click on the following link: James 4:7-9.
God’s standards are too high for our ability. This is because God is perfectly holy and righteous while we are sinful. God calls us to be more than we can be in our strength. This is to humble us and cause us to see that we are in need of him. All that he calls us to be has been fulfilled in our place by Jesus. In Christ, God shows us grace that makes up for our inability to achieve God’s high standards. To listen to this sermon, please click on the following link: James 4:6-8.
James addresses his readers as adulterous people. What he had in mind was spiritual adultery. In Christ, Christians are the bride of Christ and must be faithful to him — as a wife must be to her husband. When we allow our affections to be drawn away from Christ, we are committing spiritual adultery. We must pray that God would cause our affections to be fixed on Christ and kept away from pursuing the pleasures of this world. To listen to this sermon, please click on the following link: James 4:4-5.