There is something called a
“worldview”. All of us have one. It is our personal view of reality; everything
that happens, all that people do, all that people say, need to fit into our
worldview. For instance, people with a secular, materialist worldview explain
everything that happens has to be explainable by regular phenomena. They don’t
believe in miracles, because they can’t happen. There are no angels, no demons,
no God, no power or principalities. They would say Jesus existed, we have good
evidence for that, but He was just a good guy. He didn’t perform miracles; that
isn’t possible. So Jesus didn’t walk on water; that can’t happen, he must have
walked on stones just under the water that no one saw but Him. That’s how some
people have tried to explain away that particular miracle. For a secular
materialist, the only things that exist is the material world. There are no
angels, no God, no miracles, no ghosts, only what we can see exists.
Other people groups have
worldviews as well. The Maasai have their own worldview; that God has specially
blessed them. Part of their worldview involves cows, of all things. The Maasai
believe that God gave every cow on the planet to them. Therefore, if someone
else owns a cow, it is okay to take it back because they are just correcting
for a cosmic error. So the Maasai regularly steal cows from other tribes and
people. It’s part of their world view. Its part of who they understand
themselves to be. They have views about the land they live on that differ from
ours, like they have no land ownership. The land was here before you, it will
be here after you are gone, how can you say you own the land? It doesn’t make
sense. It’s all a part of their worldview. It’s how they explain the world and
all that happens in it.
Whether you know it or not,
you have a worldview too. We all do, and as Christians, our worldview should
begin and end with God; His Word and His Son. This is what James is trying to
impress on his readers, because of Christ, you now have a new worldview. Your
old worldview, with how you thought the world ran, with what you thought was
important, with who you thought was in charge, all that is wrong. You need a
new worldview, James tells us. You need Christ’s worldview, the proper
worldview. Let’s take a look at James chapter 4.
What causes fights and quarrels among you? Don’t they come from your
desires that battle within you? 2 You
want something but don’t get it. You kill and covet, but you cannot have what
you want. You quarrel and fight. You do not have, because you do not ask God. 3 When you ask, you do not receive,
because you ask with wrong motives, that you may spend what you get on your
pleasures.
4 You
adulterous people, don’t you know that friendship with the world is hatred
toward God? Anyone who chooses to be a friend of the world becomes an enemy of
God. 5 Or do you think
Scripture says without reason that the spirit he caused to live in us envies
intensely? 6 But he gives us
more grace. That is why Scripture says:
“God opposes the proud
but gives grace to the humble.”
7 Submit
yourselves, then, to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you. 8 Come near to God and he will come
near to you. Wash your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you
double-minded. 9 Grieve, mourn
and wail. Change your laughter to mourning and your joy to gloom. 10 Humble yourselves before the Lord,
and he will lift you up. [1]
Let’s pray.
We’ve been going through James for a bit now. James is a
short letter, with just 5 chapters. And we’ve made it through 3 chapters, 3
down, 2 to go. James is a very practical letter written to Christians in a
tough place. James himself was a Christian in a tough place. Scholars think
James the letter writer, is the same James that is mentioned other places as Jesus
half brother. James, we know from Acts, was one of the leaders of the early
church in Jerusalem, obviously a very tough place to be a Christian. Since it
was an offshoot, a reinterpretation of Judaism, as you can imagine there was
persecution on both systemic and personal levels. Christians were shunned by
their families, they were under threat of physical harm and arrest as well. So
this letter is from one persecuted believer to another, some one who is also
readjusting his worldview to accommodate the new revelation of Jesus Christ;
the Messiah, the one who was sacrificed but was resurrected and lives. That
takes a huge worldview shift, one that people weren’t raised in as we were. We
were born into a world that takes Christianity seriously, at least. But they
weren’t. They were learning to accommodate new thoughts about Heaven, Hell,
right and wrong, the Messiah, God, all sorts of paradigm shifts. So James is
trying to help them make the shift from a worldly world view, where the Emperor
was the supreme ruler, to a Christian worldview where God reigns supreme. The
shift from worshipping a God that was far away, and demanded dead animals, to a
present God, who demands our attention.
As you might have guessed, it was not an easy shift. Nor
is it now. We are in constant need of aligning our lives to fit Christ’s
values, His desires for our lives, and not our own. We are immersed in a
culture that is mostly secular, with a haunting memory of Christianity. We
collectively remember that we should be living for something different than
ourselves all the time, but usually that doesn’t intrude on our consciousness
or our decisions. Instead, our worldview, James explains, now that we are
Christians, is all about Christ. It is about finding God in Scripture, and in
the process finding ourselves. It is about conforming our lives to new and
different standards. So James is about the business of helping the new,
persecuted Christians discover themselves in their new faith. Let’s take a
closer look at today’s scripture.
What
causes fights and quarrels among you? Don’t they come from your desires that
battle within you? 2 You
want something but don’t get it. You kill and covet, but you cannot have what
you want. You quarrel and fight. You do not have, because you do not ask God. 3 When you ask, you do not receive,
because you ask with wrong motives, that you may spend what you get on your
pleasures.
James still seems to me to be very engaged with the actual happenings in the early church. James must have known about fights and quarrels in the early churches; fights over who is in charge, fights over theology, fights because the people in the church were human, were under stress. James says, you need a worldview shift. You need to be focused on God. And you aren’t. Here is the proof; you fight, you covet, you have wrong motives. These are immature Christians; they are beginning to follow Christ, but they are interested in their positions of power within the community, they are interested in the slights one person can accidentally or purposefully give another person. You need to shift says James. Your fights mark you as immature, mark you as someone who doesn’t get it just yet. You ask for gifts from God, but you don’t know what you are asking for, and you ask for selfish reasons. People were thinking this following Christ was a pipeline to God, a pipeline to all sorts of riches and wealth that they just had to ask for.
Of course, Christianity is not the golden ticket to an easy life. The worldview of the early Christians was changing, but it hadn’t arrived at where it needed to be. You see, they were suddenly adrift, moving away from what they had known life to be about before. And sometimes when that happens, great damage can be done before everything is sorted out. Look at our society and you will see all the post-modern worldviews; that all truth is relative, everyone can and should do basically whatever they feel like. Many people in our society have cut their ties with Christianity, to find themselves suddenly adrift in a sea of religious weirdness; from crystals and chanting, to people bouncing in a seated position calling it flying, to a serious return to paganism. Christianity is not a golden ticket to avoiding pain, to living the good life, but it is truth, while everything else is less. James is scolding the early Christians to get their lives in line; get their thoughts and their worldview in line with God’s, in line with God’s revelation of Himself in His Son, Jesus Christ.
You adulterous people, don’t you know that friendship with the world is
hatred toward God? Anyone who chooses to be a friend of the world becomes an
enemy of God. 5 Or do you
think Scripture says without reason that the spirit he caused to live in us
envies intensely? 6 But he
gives us more grace. That is why Scripture says:
“God opposes the proud
but gives grace to the humble.”
7 Submit yourselves, then, to God. Resist the
devil, and he will flee from you.
The early Christians were embarrassing themselves by asking for material wealth; they were still stuck in the clutches of this world. They wanted everything the world told them was valuable; wealth, power, influence. And they seemed to think Christianity was a shortcut to achieving worldly goals. But Christ did not come so that we could be wealthy and happy, contrary to many popular Christian books and lecturers. Jesus came to get us in right relationship with God. But many people want both things. They want the benefits of being close to God, they want Heaven everlasting, but want everything the world has to offer as well. They want the wealth, the power, the prestige, all that stuff. They want the world, and they want God, who is not of this world, who is actively opposed to this world, and the powers of this world.
The Spirit of God is jealous. There can be no sharing of
someone with God. It says multiple places in Scripture that a person can’t love
God and money, that loving God is exclusive. God wants to give us His Spirit,
the Holy Spirit, but if we are focused on the spirit of this world, on all that
this world has to offer, and it certainly can be enticing. But God gives us
grace through Jesus Christ, and there is something humbling about coming to
God, knowing that we aren’t good enough for God, but also holding onto His love
that makes Him come close to us. I think people struggle to change their
worldviews in several ways. One way is thinking that we aren’t really that bad.
We didn’t really need or want Jesus to die for us; we’re cool. We occasionally
sin, but it’s really no big deal. Then others get consumed by grief over their
sins, and that is an improper worldview as well. This twisting of Christianity
can tell us that we are so lost that we no good whatsoever, so why try? Some
folks think Jesus death was not enough, there must be a continual flogging of
ourselves in order to appease God. Both worldviews are mistaken in critical
ways—we all sin, and fall short of God’s glory, but Jesus came and died to take
away the consequences of our sins, and that is enough. We live with the
knowledge that Jesus had to die for each of us, but it was enough. There is
nothing more we can do to effect our salvation. But we can still live to praise
God, live to share about Him, live to help someone else change their worldview.
Part of that is active; part of worshipping God, and
living for Him, is fleeing from sin. You know the sins that tempt you; and you
need to flee from them. Sometimes the fleeing is mental, having the discipline
to stop what we’re doing and read Scripture until the desire goes away, but
sometimes fleeing from sin is physical. For example, if we hang out with
friends that swear all the time, and that tempts us to swear, then we ought to
think about why we are hanging out with them. If it is to swear, then that’s
not okay, but if we are working to help them meet Jesus, then we won’t be,
hopefully, tempted to swear. But fleeing from sin is both mental and physical.
It’s good advice, we take sin seriously because it is what separates us from
God. The way we flee from sin is to run toward God. I had a coach in college
that told us to break certain bad habits and temptations he would stop,
whenever he was tempted or had a bad thought, and read Scripture for half an
hour. That is a great example of fleeing toward God, and using the impetus of
temptation to drive someone to God. We should not just endure temptation, but
use it as something that drives us further into God’s arms, further into His
wisdom, further into His view of the world.
Come
near to God and he will come near to you. Wash your hands, you sinners, and
purify your hearts, you double-minded. 9 Grieve, mourn and wail. Change your laughter to mourning
and your joy to gloom. 10 Humble
yourselves before the Lord, and he will lift you up.
Here is a promise of God made simple to understand. Come
near to God. When you do, He is already near you. What a revelation for the
early Christians, that God was already with them, rather than just in one
place, the Temple in Jerusalem. What a shift in mindset, in worldview. What a shift
also, that they could wash their hands of sin, that they themselves could
purify their hearts before the Lord. They didn’t need the help of priests at
the Temple anymore, but because of Christ, God was near to them. You can see
how this changed their worldview. God had always been holy other; He created
the universe, and was angry all the time so they tried hard not to anger Him,
but He was at the Temple, and they weren’t, so life kinda just went on without
too much intrusion. When it was time, people were penitent and sorry for their
sins, but that certainly wasn’t every day or even every week.
The hardest thing to shift, as I’ve talked a little
about before, is our understanding of grace. We tend to either think grace is
for someone else; like those filthy sinners over there, or we think God’s grace
is not enough for us. Those are the shifts in worldview that need to take place
in our lives, or we will be paralyzed with fear, or alternately, never come to
a place of full gratitude for what Jesus has done for us. We do need, as James
says, to grieve, mourn and wail that our hearts are not pure, that our hands
are not clean, but rather we come before God stained in our souls from the sins
we have committed. And if you think you aren’t that bad, you are. Every single
sin ever committed will be held against us when we are judged. All the little
white lies we ever told, all the times we stole from someone else, maybe their
ideas, maybe the money we grabbed from mom’s purse when we were younger, all
that will be held against us. All the times we wished someone were dead will be
held against us as though we committed murder, all the times we took advantage
of the gullibility or trust of others, all that stuff that we’ve said to hurt
others, the grudges we’ve held onto, all that is what we need to ask
forgiveness for, it is what Jesus came to wipe away. When we are finally
judged, those of us who have accepted Christ will not have to answer for those
crimes against God, but instead we will be covered by Jesus’ perfection. We
will be found innocent not for what we have done or not done, but because of
Christ alone. That is the worldview of grace.
On the other hand, we need to live into the confidence that Jesus’ death dealt with the consequences of our sins. There is no need to live in fear or in paralyzing guilt. Jesus death on the cross was enough for us. There is no need to live in the fear that God is waiting for us to step out of line so that He can punish us. God wants a relationship with us; not a relationship of fear, but rather one based on love; His love for us, and our love for Him.
A worldview is a hard thing to
change. The hardest thing, beyond grace, is that our thoughts and our opinions
become subjected to Scripture. Just because we want something to be true,
doesn't make it so. I have no desire to see anyone go to Hell. I wish there was
no Hell, and that nice people went to Heaven. But that’s not what Scripture
says; it isn’t what Jesus said about Hell, it isn’t what Jesus said about
salvation. He was very clear that He Himself is the way to life eternal, the
way to God forever. So I take what I wish was true and leave it as a wish and
take seriously what Scripture says. There are some of us that need to reorient
ourselves in Scripture. And there may be some of us who need a complete new
worldview, one that has Jesus exalted at the center of our lives. There are
some of us who need to humble ourselves before God, and wait for Him to lift us
up, rather than we ourselves. At that point, when God lifts us up, our mourning
turns to laughter, and we have a new lease on life, a new worldview that has
Christ in Scripture at the very middle.
Let’s pray.