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.
James exposes the connection between our worldly passions and our fighting and coveting. Even as those saved by Jesus, we still sin. This is a product of our worldly thinking and our worldly desires. In contrast, Christians are to be informed by biblical wisdom to produce heavenly desires. Our worldly passions lead us to pray for the wrong things: to spend it on our passions. Our worldly passions also cause us to be prayerless. Since we do not want what God gives (love to God, holiness, joy in Christ) we fail to pray much at all. To listen to this sermon, please click on the following link: James 4:1-3
James argues that those who are wise will live in wise ways. A person demonstrates whether he is wise by how he lives. The wisdom James speaks of is from above and is characterized by living that is free from selfish ambition and bitter jealousy. A wise man will live a life of peace. To listen to this sermon, please click on the following link: James 3:13-18.