James 4:7-10
MAny believers are overwhelmed by the great gulf between how they should live and how they actually live. They begin to doubt their salvation because they feel that they have fallen far short of that which is expected of Christians.
Every Christian, I believe, feels that way at one time or another. But we mustn’t acquiesce in our failures. If you are a born-again Christian, you are a supernatural person in Christ. You are a partaker of the divine nature, and have the unfailing access to the indwelling Lord. You are able to overcome the world. These aren’t mere words. This is the reality of Christian experience.
In James 4:7-10, God uses a series of exhortations that tell us how to shake off discouragement, and really overcome the trials and temptations that surround us. That passage reads:
Submit yourselves therefore to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you. Draw nigh to God, and he will draw nigh to you. Cleanse your hands, ye sinners; and purify your hearts, ye double- minded. Be afflicted, and mourn, and weep: let your laughter be turned to mourning, and your joy to heaviness. Humble yourselves in the sight of the Lord, and he shall lift you up.
There are six guidelines here. Let’s look at them one at a time.
1. Submit yourselves to God.
We are God’s servants. Although our Lord is gracious enough to regard us as His friends, His brothers, His sheep and so on, our attitude should always be that which God Himself tells us to have in Luke 17:10: “We are unprofitable servants: we have done that which was our duty to do.” Remember, we were hell-bound sinners whom Jesus graciously redeemed by going to the cross. He puchased us with His own blood. We belong to Him totally.
Since Christ is the Lord of our life, we do not have our own agendas. We just submit to whatever He wants for us. A servant strives to discover what his master wants and then does it. We may not understand why, but with a childlike trust, we simply obey.
Under construction. We know that we have been given a new life in Christ and God is in the process of transforming us into the image of His Son, bringing every part of our lives under His sway. We are being changed, and change is often painful.
As a means to strengthen our faith, God sends a host of trials into our lives to chasten us. Instead of being resentful or discouraged by such chastening, we need to surrender to God totally. We can trust Him to take full charge of our life because the Bible assures us that God works all things together for good to them that love Him.
2. Resist the Devil.
There are so-called Christians who live a worldly life and blame it on Satan, saying, “The Devil makes me do it.” Indeed, all unbelievers are ruled by Satan. Not so, however, for the child of God. The Bible assures us in I John 4:4 that “greater is he that is in you, than he that is in the world.” With God the Holy Spirit indwelling us, Satan can never make us do anything. When a believer rebels against God, he merely succumbs to his own sinful nature.
To be sure, Satan does try to attack Christians. He walks about like a roaring lion, seeking someone he may devour. He blinds the unsaved, so he can turn his vicious attention upon believers. Hence, God tells us in Ephesians 6:11: “Put on the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil.” The armour of God comprises every aspect of our salvation. Only when we are so fitted are we equipped to resist the devil.
Divine example. We should resist the devil the way our Lord did when He was tempted by the devil at the beginning of His earthly ministry. Satan challenged Him in the three main areas of human weaknesses—the desire for physical things, for fame, and for power. And in all cases, Jesus rebuked the devil by applying the word of God to the situation.
Our text says, “Resist the devil, and he will flee from you,” and that was precisely what Satan did after the Lord had resisted him. We can count on his fleeing from us too when we stand firm in the word of God.
3. Draw nigh to God.
How does one on earth draw near to God who is in heaven?
For one thing, Jesus says, “For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them” (Matt. 18:20). So, go to the fellowship of His true people, and there you will find Him.
In these end-time days, particularly notable is Hebrews 10:25: “Not forsaking the assembling of ourselves together, as the manner of some is; but exhorting one another: and so much the more, as ye see the day approaching.”
Second, Jesus Himself is the word of God. He speaks to us through the Bible. Another way to draw near to God, therefore, is to spend time to read and study the scriptures and meditate on them. Better yet, learn from those teachers and preachers who are gifted to search out spiritual truths hidden from the surface.
Again, there is a promise attached to this command, “…and he will draw nigh to you.” As we get to know God more and more, our personal relationship with Him will become increasingly intimate.
Finally, of course, we draw nigh to God by praying to Him. God knows what we are going to say even before we open our mouth. Nevertheless, God commands us to pray without ceasing, because our prayers express in action our enormous love and praises for Him, our heartfelt desire to communicate with Him, and our continuing need to seek His strength and guidance.
4. Get Clean
The second half of verse 8 says, “Cleanse your hands, ye sinners; and purify your hearts, ye double minded.” A Christian is a cleansed man. His sins have been forgiven and he has been adopted into the family of God. Why then is this verse telling us to wash our hands and purify our hearts?
For the answer, let’s look at a remark Jesus made on the eve of His crucifixion. The Lord started to wash the feet of the disciples, saying, “If I wash thee not, thou hast no part with me” (John 13:8). Peter then said, “Lord, not my feet only, but also my hands and my head.” Jesus answered in verse 10: “He that is washed needeth not save to wash his feet, but is clean every whit: and ye are clean, but not all.”
You see, when we become saved, we are given a new, resurrected soul that does not sin. But we still live in a body that has a sinful nature. And just as our feet are made dirty by contacting the earth, our body is contaminated by interacting with the world. So, although we have become saved, we still need to be repeatedly cleansed. Elsewhere in the Bible, we are told to mortify the deeds of the body.
Incidentally, a double-minded person is one who thinks that he can live a Christian life and still love the world. If you have such an attitude, your heart needs to be purified.
5. Be afflicted, mourn and weep.
The command of verse 9—“Be afflicted, and mourn, and weep: let your laughter be turned to mourning, and your joy to heaviness”—seems to be at odds with those passages in the Bible that repeatedly tell us to rejoice. But they are talking about different stages of our conversion.
Before we become saved, we lived a worldly life that gave us temporary joy and laughter as we indulged in all kinds of ungodly behavior.
But Jesus says, “Repent: for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.” (Matt. 4:17). To repent is to acknowledge that we have been living a wicked and unholy life, but now want to do things God’s way. We don’t want the kind of worldly joy and laughter anymore.
Nowadays, we sing in the hymn “Beneath the cross of Jesus” of the wonder of “my own worthlessness.” It was when we first thought of our worthlessness that we became afflicted (that is, we endured deep sorrow); we mourned and we wept. Thankfully, as Christ promises in the Beatitudes, “Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted” (Matt. 5:4), we were comforted when God saved us and gave us a new life in Christ.
With that new life and new hope, we rejoice now and for evermore.
6. Humble yourselves.
Christ, being found in the fashion as a man, humbled himself and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross. For us to be Christ-like, God wants us to humble ourselves in His sight. Even as our Lord thought it not robbery to be equal with God, we should all the more be willing to part with all the things and pleasures that the world entices us with. God wants us to come to Him with empty hands.
We are God’s servants and every servant humbles himself. Every day we ask the Lord as Paul did on the road to Damascus, “What shall I do, Lord?” (Acts 22:10). That is where humility begins. The Christian pours contempt on all his pride; he becomes increasingly willing to be where God wants him to be, and do what God wants him to do, for as long as God wills. And for all such men who humble themselves the promise is that “he shall lift you up.”
Illustration. I trod on some blue twine as I was briskly walking to the Post Office the other day and down I crashed, the mail in my hand flying everywhere. Immediately a young man approached me and asked whether I was all right. I told him I had apparently twisted my ankle and he helped lift me up and gathered back my mail. Though embarrassed, I was thankful to him because I couldn’t have stood up on my own at that moment.
God always knows when we are down, and God knows how to lift us up. Did he not do it that first great definitive time in salvation? He will go on lifting us up throughout our lives.