Two weeks ago, I heard about this newest school shooting rampage in the United States… in Oregon, the place that Canadians like to visit because there’s no sales tax. A twenty-six year old community college student shot and killed nine people and injuring seven others. Most of those who were killed are students. Imagine the families of those who died… maybe in the morning, it was just an ordinary day for most of them. They probably just said bye just like the usual way…or maybe some of them didn’t even say “bye” … Imagine if you are a family of one of those students… then you receive news late in the morning that your son or daughter is no longer coming home because they were killed. Just like that. One of the students was even asked by the shooter if he was religious. The student said he was Christian and he was shot point blank, just like that.
Getting old or even dying is a reality that we all have to face. As Christians we know that Jesus has conquered death and death no longer has its sting but still, a lot of people fear death, even if it’s a certainty. Either you die young or you get older and still die. So the challenge is not whether we can live forever or not … or to die or not to die. The challenge is how we live our lives while we are here on earth. Our life is a gift from God. The Bible says He breathed His spirit into our nostrils, otherwise, we are just dust from the ground. So God gave us life, or maybe the more correct way of saying it is that “God lent us life” and while we have this life that God has allowed us to use… how are we living our life? James posed a very important question here in Chapter 4: What is Your Life? And I think there is no way we can live our lives to the fullest if we don’t really know the answer to that question right?
This will be our question to ponder and its very logical. How can we know how to be good in something if we don’t understand fully what that something is all about? It is also amazing to find out the implications of not knowing what life is all about because it is manifested in the things that we do.
Let us understand what James had to say about our lives. Please read James Chapter 4.
In Chapter 4, James presented to us different life issues – one after the other. He is like a machine gun here. Listing down the things that we do, the sins that we commit, situations that we get caught up into -- one after another --- and based on his own analysis these things are caused by a wrong understanding of life, a false concept of reality. If we don’t know what our life truly is, here are the things or sins that we are likely to commit. I just summarized it to seven of these sins or issues that we get to commit or get caught up because of our wrong view of life.
First, James asked a hypothetical question: What causes fights and quarrels among you? It’s hypothetical because he answered it himself. He said “Don’t they come from your desires that battle within you? So the cause of most fights and quarrels that we experience… comes from within. It comes from inside of us. In verse 2, he said you DESIRE but do not have so you kill. You covet but you cannot get what you want, so you quarrel and fight. So the first sin is:
COVETOUSNESS
Covetousness is greediness. It’s when we desire things that we don’t have or we don’t have capability of getting. Then James said, well, you don’t have it because you don’t ask God. Maybe when you ask Him – He would either give it to you or He would enlighten your minds that you don’t need it after all. In verse 3, he said “When you ask, you do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives, that you may spend what you get on your pleasures.”
ASKING WITH WRONG MOTIVES
Asking with wrong motives is another sin that we commit. These two are connected with each other. When we pray we have to check our hearts. Why do we ask these things in the first place? Do we really need these things? Or we want to have these things because we just want to impress other people. We pray God for provision but we can’t wait for His answer so we just swipe it. We use our credit card. I heard one preacher saying “Credit Card” is used to buy things we don’t need, to impress people we don’t know using money we don’t own (repeat).
Then James is getting more intense, he used a really heavy word here, he said “You adulterous people, don’t you know that friendship with the world means enmity against God?
FRIENDSHIP WITH THE WORLD
What’s wrong with being a friend? He calls us “adulterous” because we are having an affair with the world and we are not faithful to God.
The Bible says in Romans 12 “ Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.” The use of the word “friendship” is a sarcastic tone. By being too worldly makes us less and less Godly because simply stating, we cannot serve two masters. James said, that friendship with the world is simply an enmity with God.
The 4th sin is very famous and we can probably have a separate sermon about this by itself. In verse 6, he quoted the book of Proverbs by saying “God opposes the proud but shows favor to the humble.”
PRIDE
Pride is another sin that we commit when we have the wrong concept of our life. He’s basically saying, a lot of times, we are proud. We all want to be on the side of God, right? Because we know He is all-powerful, almighty, all-knowing. But there is one way to be cheering for the opposite team, there is one way to oppose God and that is PRIDE.
In verse 11, He said “do not slander one another.:
SLANDER
To slander means “to insult” or defamation or libel. It comes from the Greek word “katalaleó” which means “to speak evil of.” Sometimes it’s easy for us to judge another person. Without knowing the whole story, we can easily form an opinion or judgement based only on what we hear from other people. James said “there is only one Lawgiver and Judge” and that’s our God.
BOASTING
Boasting about tomorrow is another sin. I like his illustration here. He said: “you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go to this or that city, spend a year there, carry on business and make money.” Why, you do not even know what will happen tomorrow” Of course his point here is not whether or not we should plan for our future. His point here is sometimes we plan for our future to the point that we are boasting already. Having insurance coverage is not bad. However, getting all these kinds of insurance that obviously have all these expensive premiums that lead us to work 2 or 3 jobs, that takes away our time with God and with our family… because we want to leave millions and millions of dollar… e no wonder you will die early. Jesus said, do not worry about tomorrow for tomorrow shall worry about itself. He also said, when we pray and ask God, we say Give Us Today our Daily Bread. For some of us, we stock our Bread for 10 years. We accumulate wealth now, for the things that we need for 20 years. If you die tomorrow, what will happen? What happened to those times wasted accumulating all those riches?
The last point he made is also very important. He said “If anyone, then, knows the good they ought to do and doesn’t do it, it is sin for them.”
SIN OF OMMISSION (v. 17)
It’s not enough that we are not doing bad things. It is also a SIN if we don’t do good things. Last night in the prayer meeting we talked about this. God supplies us with provisions more than we need, He supplies us in abundance, NOT JUST FOR OURSELVES but He does that so we can be a channel of blessing to others.
Mist is what in Filipino? “Hamog” Lately it’s been too foggy right? But it only appears for a while and then disappear. Our life here on earth is like that. Until we are able to grasp that reality, then we are obviously going to commit the sins that we mentioned earlier. Our life here on earth is very short especially when we compare it to eternity. But you know what, our life here on earth maybe very short… like a mist… but the implication of the things that we do in this short life here earth has tremendous impact on how and where we are going to spend for in eternity.
Knowing what our life really is, what should we do? James said…
1. Check your motives whenever you ask God for anything in prayer (v.2)
If we know that our life here on earth is very short, and we know that the things that we do here will impact our life thereafter, then probably when we pray, we can ask God for the right things. Ask yourself first when you pray. Do you really need these things? Will it make you closer to God? Will it allow you to help others? Will it bring you closer to the ones you love?
2. Recognize God’s grace and walk in humility (v.6)
We also need to recognize God’s grace and walk in humility. I don’t know why but this is very hard to do. Being humble, right? We are all guilty of this because there is a very thin line that divides true humility from false humility.
If we are talking about our needs, God is supplying us more than that. A lot of times, we fail to recognize His grace and we are not humble enough to admit that we have what we need and we have to stop acting like the whole world turned us down because that is false humility.
The third point, James said in verse 7
3. Submit yourselves to God and resist the devil
If we realize the fact that our life is like a MIST that can anytime vanish, don’t we want to submit to God who is our Maker and has full control of everything? We obviously cannot hang on to anything here on earth, not even to our families because they, too, can disappear on an instant. But we can hang on to God. If we submit ourselves to Him alone, even if we die tomorrow we know that our life has not gone to waste.
Resist the devil – this is something we need to do as well. Just to segue a little bit… remember one time I posted a question in email for discussion? “should Christians rebuke the devil?” The Bible says “Greater is he that is in us, than he who is in the world.” However, the Bible does not clearly tell us to rebuke the devil. “To rebuke” means to correct, to chasten, to punish, to convict” First of all, the devil, if we talk about Satan, is not omnipresent. If we rebuke Satan today, he may not even hear us. So we may be talking of the evil spirits. What the Bible teaches is that we ask the Lord to rebuke the devil for us. If you read Zechariah 3:2 and Jude 1:9 it is the Lord Himself who is rebuking the devil. What the Bible commands us to do, which is here in verse 7 is to RESIST the DEVIL and he will flee from you. How do we resist the devil? Well, God has given us the full armor of God for our spiritual battles. The most effective weapons we have against the devil are our faith, wisdom, and knowledge about God and His Word. It’s the way we live our lives in accordance to God’s commands and the fruit of the Holy Spirit – these are the most effective weapons against the devil.
Let me conclude in saying that:
Generally speaking, when a person is on his deathbed and is about to die, you won’t hear him talking about his wealth or his resources, he calls his family and he talks about relationships and God, right?
We are just visiting here. We don’t belong here. This is not our permanent home. This is the reason why James said “do not become friends with this world” because we are not supposed to be comfortable here. If we become too attached here, the Lord may just leave us here. But this is nothing compared to what’s waiting for us in heaven. The Bible says “no eye has seen, what no ear has heard, and what no human mind has conceived" -- the things God has prepared for those who love him—“ isn’t that wonderful?
Paul has a very good explanation about this to the faithful church in Philippi:
We don’t belong here. We belong in heaven. Our citizenship is there. We are not even permanent residents here. We’re just tourist. We can’t even acquire properties here. Our houses – these are just “lent” to us by God … we may have a humble two bedroom apartment here but Jesus said “in my Father’s house, there are mansions and I will go there ahead of you and prepare a place for you.” That’s why Paul said… we eagerly await a Savior from there, the Lord Jesus. Our ultimate hope in life is the coming of Jesus Christ when He will transform our lowly bodies to be like His glorious body.
That is what our life is. It is certainly not limited to the things that we experience here on Earth. It is much much much more than that.
Prayer
Wherever you are, whatever you situation you may be -- you need the love of Jesus in your life. Please say this prayer sincerely from your heart:
Father God, I confess all my sins to you today. Please forgive me. Today, I open my heart to your Son Jesus Christ. I accept Him in my life as my Savior and as my Lord. May the Holy Spirit come to my life and make me the kind of person you want me to be. In Jesus Name, I pray. Amen.
The above article is an excerpt from a sermon delivered at WCCC Richmond during its service on
Sunday, October 18, 2015.
I apologize if there are grammatical and spelling errors. I also apologize if I have missed acknowledging or making proper references to my sources, if any. as it is purely unintentional.
If you are looking for a church in British Columbia, Canada please visit our website at:
www.wordchristiancommunity.com
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