James had been discussing how the worldview and the Godview are polar opposites. This daily devotion looks at how the good is at war with our sinful nature and gives us pointers on how to be godly.
Nuggets
- God’s love for us is shown through His grace.
- Disciples escape punishment for being proud by being humble.
- We cannot submit to God if we are prideful.
- We must turn away from sin.
- We are promised that God will draw near to us when we draw near to Him.
- Approaching God involves our becoming a new creation.
- We need to understand our unworthiness on our own and how we become worthy only when we are covered with the blood of Jesus.
- God is calling us to be sorrowful for our sin.
- Only after we submit ourselves to God and humble ourselves before Him will He save us.
Devotions in Living Out Our Faith series
James 4: 6-10 give us what God expects from us in a nutshell. He told us in short, concise phrases.
When we unpack them, it gets a little longer.
Let's Put It into Context
Here is a running list of nuggets for the series.
God’s Abundant Grace
“But he gives more grace. Therefore it says, ‘God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble.’ Submit yourselves therefore to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you” (Jas. 4: 6-7 ESV)
“But he gives more grace …” (Jas. 4: 6 ESV)
God’s love for us is shown through His grace.
God loves us so much that He wants our relationships restored to Him. He does that through His gift of grace.
Grace is a free and unmerited gift of love from the Heavenly Father, given through His Son, Jesus Christ, that enables salvation and spiritual healing to believers by the work of the Holy Spirit. Salvation is the gift of life through the deliverance from condemnation and sin to acceptance and holiness and changes us from being spiritually dead to spiritually alive.
Glossary
The ABCDs of Salvation
If you have not become a believer in Christ, please read through the
Plan of Salvation and prayerfully consider what God is asking you to do.
A – admit our sins
B – believe His Son Jesus is our Redeemer
C – confess God as Sovereign Lord
D – demonstrate that commitment by making any changes needed in our lives to live the way in which God has called us
The Disciple’s Job Description
Did you see what James said? “But he gives more grace …” (Jas. 4: 6 ESV).
When we are children of God, He gives us an endless supply of grace. Yes, it is the gift that keeps on giving!
Glossary
It is a gift of favor. It floods our hearts.
If we know our Scripture, we know that is amazing. “The human heart is the most deceitful of all things, and desperately wicked. Who really knows how bad it is?” (Jer. 17: 9 NLT).
We know wicked means that the person purposefully does not follow God’s laws and commandments. We definitely are not submitting to God when we don’t follow Him.
It doesn’t matter that we don’t deserve God’s grace. God gives it to us because He loves us.
Think about what James had just said. “Or do you suppose it is to no purpose that the Scripture says, ‘He yearns jealously over the spirit that he has made to dwell in us’?” (Jas. 4: 5 ESV).
God loves us so much that He is jealous when we focus on something other than Him.
Raleigh felt that – sometimes – God gives us more grace than we desire. Since we are working on getting our character to be His character, we then have to be more gracious to others.
It is a good thing that we desire to be more gracious. Raleigh reminded us, “If we have no spiritual desires[,] we have no spiritual life.”
Resource
We desire to be like God, so we work out our salvation. It is only through His grace that we that we can ask Jesus to be our Savior. His blood is the only thing that can make us worthy of salvation.
“… Therefore it says, ‘God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble’” (Jas. 4: 6 ESV)
Disciples escape punishment for being proud by being humble.
Pride is harmful to us because it means we are not giving God priority in our lives. Instead, we feel that we don’t need Him because we can do it ourselves.
We gain nothing by being proud. Oh, we may think we do when we use the worldview definition of success.
However, that success is temporary. If we do not receive judgment while here on earth, we will receive it at Judgment Day. “The LORD detests the proud; they will surely be punished” (Prov. 16: 5 ESV).
That makes sense when we think about it. Satan’s fall from Heaven was predicated with pride.
God rewards those who are humble. Christian humility is our yielding our dependence to Christ to serve Him and others.
When we are humble, we show our contentment with God and with ourselves. Zollikofer said that make us more content with our position and others. We are content regardless of our circumstances.
Resource
“Submit yourselves therefore to God …” (Jas. 4: 7 ESV)
We cannot submit to God if we are prideful.
I know. The first word turns a lot of people off. They don’t want to submit to anything.
Look at it this way. Submitting to God is actions by humans that obey God and keep His reasonable, holy, and righteous laws and commandments, follow His purpose for us, and do not follow Satan’s promptings.
That is the opposite of sin. That is what God wants us to do.
Submitting is our conscious decision to put God as a priority in everything. It is about receiving Jesus as our Savior.
- We agree to do things His way.
- We agree not to talk back.
- We agree to become more like Him.
God doesn’t call us to some prison where He binds us and throws us in some dark hole. He doesn’t control our every move.
We talked once about what we are called to be.
- Children of God
- Elect of God
- Doers of the law
- Heirs
Resource
Glossary
To read a related devotion, click on the button below.
I know. Submission has so many connotations associated with it that we shy away. We shouldn’t.
God gives us free will to accept His gift of salvation. Free will is the ability within us to make decisions, which determine actions that produce character. It is our choice.
Think about this. What is stopping us from submitting is our pride. We think we have to be the ones calling the shots.
Even if we don’t submit to God, He is the One calling the shots. We are deluding ourselves.
We can’t be talking back about us not believing this or that should be classified as a sin. God is Sovereign God. He gets to decide what is and what isn’t.
Oh, you can kick back and say you aren’t going to accept that. But one day, that is what you will be judged on.
Spurgeon made a good observation. If we feel we are not guilty of God’s laws and commandments for whatever reason, God cannot forgive us and show mercy to us.
Resource
The only way we are going to submit to God is by accepting His Plan of Salvation through His grace. We have to sincerely submit to Him. We have to show Him our faith in Him.
“… Resist the devil, and he will flee from you” (Jas. 4: 7 ESV)
To read devotions in the Armor of God series, click the appropriate button below.
We have to flat out resist Satan. If we try to negotiate with him, we have already lost.
The Prerequisites of Approaching God
“Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you. Cleanse your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded. Be wretched and mourn and weep. Let your laughter be turned to mourning and your joy to gloom” (Jas. 4: 8-9 ESV)
“Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you. …” (Jas. 4: 8 ESV)
We are promised that God will draw near to us when we draw near to Him.
God calls us to salvation, but we have to accept it and come to Him. Any other way would make God into a bad guy who is forcing us into salvation.
Before anything else can happen, God has to reveal Himself to us.
To read devotions in the How Do We See God? series, click the button below.
We are promised that God will draw near to us when we draw near to Him.
God calls us to salvation, but we have to accept it and come to Him. Any other way would make God into a bad guy who is forcing us int
How do we approach God? Adam told us that, too. He wrote, “But coming near to God implies certain feelings and exercises — a state of mind and heart suited to a proceeding so decisive and momentous. There must be preparatory to it, or rather involved in it, the putting away of sin.”
Resource
Yeah, we have to get it to the heart level. That is where we will find God’s peace. We won’t have His peace when we are fighting Him.
If we are really sincere in our relationship with God, we will communicate with Him through prayer. That means spending time with Him. That is how we draw near to Him.
“… Cleanse your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded” (Jas. 4: 8 ESV)
Approaching God involves our becoming a new creation.
We become new creations through sanctification. Sanctification is the transformation of mind, body, and soul, which begins with regeneration; gradually changes our nature and morals through the promptings of the Holy Spirit; and ends with perfected state of spiritual wholeness or completeness.
- Regeneration is being changed from spiritually dead to spiritually alive and the internal new birth and requickening that God brings about through the work of the Holy Spirit to give us new character.
Glossary
As we navigate the Sanctification Road, we have to put off the old fleshly desires and replace them with spiritual desires. We have to change our earthly desires to sin to spiritual desires of submitting to God.
Resource
That is what cleansing our hands and purifying our hearts is all about. Remember, James had called us to not be double-minded (Jas. 1: 6-8).
Turnbull argued that cleansing our hearts and purifying our minds give us an outward profession of faith. He cautions us, though, that this outward profession alone will not save us.
Resource
We can only draw near to God by faith in Jesus through prayer and repentance.
“Be wretched and mourn and weep. …” (Jas. 4: 9 ESV)
We need to understand our unworthiness on our own and how we become worthy only when we are covered with the blood of Jesus.
James told us that we are to be broken up about our sinful condition. We have to genuinely wish to call on Jesus as our Savior and Redeemer.
This has elements of repentance and humility in it. We have to be genuinely sorry that we are separated from God – enough to want to do something about it.
“Let your laughter be turned to mourning and your joy to gloom” (Jas. 4: 9 ESV)
God is calling us to be sorrowful for our sin.
What James was saying here is we need to have godly sorrow. “For the kind of sorrow God wants us to experience leads us away from sin and results in salvation. There’s no regret for that kind of sorrow. But worldly sorrow, which lacks repentance, results in spiritual death” (II Cor. 7: 10 NLT).
Are you still afraid that following God is going to take away all your joy in this world? Mouton addressed that. He wrote, “The saddest duties are sweeter than the greatest triumphs, and the worst and most afflicted part of godliness is better than all the joys and comforts of the world. It is better to have your good things to come, than here (Luke 16:21).
Resource
Whatever God has in store for us is better than anything we can get from this world.
Our Attitude
“Humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will exalt you” (Jas. 4: 10 ESV)
Only after we submit ourselves to God and humble ourselves before Him will He save us.
James went back to discussing that we need to diminish our pride and reverently and honestly humble ourselves before God.
God will only accept our praise and worship and save us after we have a conversion experience. We have to humble ourselves before our Sovereign God.
Crosby reminded us that James wasn’t talking about our relationship with others. He wasn’t talking about humbling ourselves before our friends, family, and coworkers.
James was talking about our relationship with God. We have to be humble before Him and submit to Him.
Resource
To truly humble ourselves before God, we have to make sure it is an inward humility instead of an outward humility. We have to be a new creation and have a holy life.
Glossary
We have to keep our focus on God. It must be a genuine surrender of our will and desires to His.
Making the Connections
God bestows His grace on us because of His love. Coghlan something I really liked. He wrote, “Now if the love of God — a looking to the things not seen — if holiness be our character, we must expect the Holy Spirit to exert such an influence over us as we know other powers to exert over those upon whose characters we decide by our knowledge of their ruling disposition.”
Resource
God doesn’t give us this gift and expect a lackadaisical response. He expects our relationships with Him to change us.
That is one reason why He sends the Holy Spirit to dwell within us. Satan works so hard to get us to deny God and go back to the worldview.
God wants to give us every opportunity to remain obedient to Him. That is one reason it is imperative that our character change. We want to be pure as God is so that we can withstand temptation better.
Sometimes, though, we don’t feel like we have gotten a dose of grace recently. That is our fault. God gives grace abundantly.
God does give grace to us undeservedly and abundantly. That is how He get glory out of it.
How Do We Apply This?
- Utilize prayer as what it is – direct communication with God, so that we may have a continuous supply of grace given to us from above.
- Utilize prayer as training for our lifetime in eternity.
- Utilize His grace more to be more like Him.
Submit to God through faith in Him. - Repent and turn from our sinful ways.
- Follow God’s laws and commandments and not try to rewrite them to fit our opinions.
- Face our testing and punishments without losing faith in God.
- Yield to God completely.
- Use God’s Word and prayer to resist Satan.
Use past experience to stand firm during trials and testing. - Seek God to gain knowledge about Him.
- Commit to spending a lifetime of being devoted to God
- Experience joy and weeping.
Searching for and Seeking God
Hearing His Word (Rom. 10: 17).
Reading His Word (Rev. 1: 3).
Praying to Him (Heb. 4: 16).
Studying His Word (Ac. 17: 11).
Meditating on His Word (Ps. 1: 1-2).
Memorizing His Word (Ps. 119: 11).
Resources
Father God. Thank You for calling us to salvation. Thank You for making a way for us to be saved. Help us to resist Satan. It is difficult while we are still in these earthly bodies, and we cannot do it without You. Give us an attitude of repulsion of sin. May we humbly approach You as Sovereign God. Amen.
What do you think?
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