James chapter four and reading from verse seven. And we'll read down to verse 12. James chapter four and verse seven. This is the word of God. 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.

Speak not evil one of another, brethren. He that speaketh evil of his brother, and judgeth his brother, speaketh evil of the law, and judgeth the law. But if thou judge the law, thou art not a doer of the law, but a judge. There is one lawgiver who is able to save and to destroy, Who art thou that judges another? Amen. May the Lord bless to us this reading from his word as well.

I want to begin today thinking about a paradox of faith. A puzzle known only to believers and yet one that perplexes every believer. It is the contradictions we find in ourselves. This fact that God's people simultaneously are glad and sad, blessed and oppressed, joyful and mourning. And that's an enigma to us. That we are at once kings and priests in the royal household of heaven and strangers and pilgrims in a foreign land. That we are heirs of a kingdom but poor in this world, that we possess eternal life, and yet we die daily, that we are dead to sin, but sin dwells in our members, that we are complete in Christ, justified in God's sight, but yet constantly hunger and thirst after righteousness, that we're poor in spirit and rich in faith, that we're constantly in a battle and yet we possess peace that passes understanding. And these apparent contradictions, and doubtless many more like them, are a puzzle to us. It seems odd that we should be at once heirs and joint heirs of all things with Christ, while at the same time, the filth of the world, the offscouring of all things unto this day.

Apostle Paul tells us that. The off-scouring, the off-scouring, what does that mean? The off-scouring is the waste that gets washed down the sink. The world says to the church, the world says to believers, the world says, you and your faith is trash. While Christ says, you are my friends and precious in my sight.

And these contradictions go to the very heart of our being. And they reflect the vast difference between the flesh and the spirit that James has been speaking about. The war between the old man and the new. James referred to that in verse one of chapter four. We read that last week.

They go to the heart of a believer's life, but they don't stay at the heart of our being. They rise up in our thoughts and in our thinking and experience. They spill out. They affect our life so that we often feel ourselves to be an enigma, separate and conflicted in all aspects of our life in this world.

And when that happens, the temptation for us is to try to find a quiet spot away from the battle, the battle between the old man and the new man, to try and placate that situation, to call a truce. with our foe and make terms to render those conflicts, those contradictions that we feel less stark, less noticeable, less offensive. And to accomplish this, we begin to accommodate the world. We might take on its values or adopt its fashions or speak its language, blend in. Paul calls that worldly lusts or worldliness. And he contrasts it with living soberly and righteously and godly in this present world. So that when we feel like that, instead of rejoicing that we are different, we endeavor to make friends with the world.

And we laugh when the world laughs. And we rejoice when the world rejoices. And we keep our faith for Sunday. And we get on with living in the world every other day. We quietly conform to the world so that the constant abrasion isn't quite so rough. We devise schemes to fit in. We give a little to get by. Until in many ways, it's hard to tell us apart. Hard to distinguish the church from the world and its practices. And we pride ourselves in maintaining a line to get along without too much conflict.

Brothers and sisters, this isn't someone else. This is us. This is me. I dare say we are all guilty of this. We pride ourselves in living at peace as best we can. And that pride is the problem. It's what James is speaking about here in this passage. It's the opposite of the humility that he has been calling for from these believers. When we encounter these conflicts in our life as believers, when we meet with the troubles and the challenges of our everyday life, Humility asks the Lord for help. Pride finds a less confrontational path and an easier way to get things done. Humility confesses our inadequacy and our struggle and our weariness and it leans upon the Lord for help.

Pride says, I can handle this. I've got options. Humility acknowledges sin. Pride says, it doesn't matter. Our sin is already forgiven. It's the price of still being in this world. And I'm not speaking here about legalism or making difference for difference's sake. Oh, I don't know, what we eat or drink or wear. Legalism is just another form of pride.

It's another way of getting by in the world under our own steam. When James says, submit yourselves therefore to God, he is speaking about ceasing from our own effort. and resting in Christ to manage our way in the world. He's speaking about humbly acknowledging our need of God's grace every single day.

Brothers and sisters, We rightly rejoice that the old man has been deposed in our lives. We rejoice that we have been freed from thralldom to Satan. That we are no longer dominated by the old passions that used to drive and motivate us. This is good, this is good.

But there's more to submitting to God than being freed from the power of sin. It is positively submitting to the Lord's will. It is being content with what the Lord has given to us. It is waiting on the Lord rather than running ahead in our own strength. It's being satisfied with such things as he has given and at peace about such things as he takes away. This is true submission and we all find it hard to do that.

When James tells us to resist the devil. He's not speaking about devising techniques that allow us to make our way in the world without causing too much disruption. He's speaking about looking to Christ, drawing upon Christ, and fulfilling our needs by Christ's help. trusting in the enabling grace that fends the devil off. Paul has spoken about this when he tells us about the whole armour of God. It's the great doctrines of the gospel that we turn to in order to resist the devil. It's the blood of Christ that we turn to in order to resist the devil.

It's the power of the Holy Spirit, it's prayer, it's faith. This is the core of the great paradox at the heart of every believer. Paul tells the Corinthians, when I am weak, then am I strong. It's when we are nothing that we are most submissive to God. And it's when we are most full of Christ that we are most offensive to the devil. John the Baptist told the Pharisees in John chapter three, verse 30, he, he was speaking of the Lord Jesus Christ, he must increase, but I must decrease.

And that is the essence of true humility. It's that we are always seeking opportunity, that the Lord should get bigger in our understanding, in our experience, in our life, and that we are getting smaller and smaller in him. Last week, we dwelt a little upon the Apostle's words, he giveth more grace in verse six. And we're reminded by that, that James knows where the believer's hope and confidence must always be found. Not in our own ingenuity, not in our own strength, but in humble submission to God. As we make our way through this world, we daily need more grace. and only in Jesus Christ can we find what we need.

We need to be thoughtfully and purposefully returning often for refills of grace, because the fight is fierce, more fierce than we realise, and doing battle drains our resources. weakens our arm, it exposes our souls to danger. And the essence of Christian growth and maturity is knowing our weakness and sorrowing for our own sin, lamenting our innate self-confidence. We're fools to imagine that we can serve God, honour the Lord, and do right by His people in our own strength. Christian service demands humility, because self-reliant, self-important men and women, despite a profession of faith, are of no earthly use to the Lord our God.

Under grace, believers live by faith. By grace, we have been joined to Christ in eternal union. By grace, we are sanctified in Him. By grace, we are made righteous and pardoned from sin by the merit of His blood. When the Lord Jesus Christ died on the cross, He made us righteous in Him. By grace we have been created anew, made wise unto salvation, brought into new life experiences through conversion of the Holy Ghost. Without doubt, all for whom Christ died are righteous and holy and complete in the sight of God, because we are viewed by God as being in His Son. and all this makes us fit for heaven. If you and I were to die right now, we believe that we lack nothing to make us more ready for that glorious destination of heaven. beyond laying down this body of flesh in death. That's all we need to do. We only need to die to be in heaven.

But until we do lay this body down, we must continue to contend with the weaknesses and sinfulness it carries with it. And it's for that reason that we need more grace every day. It is for this reason that we must be daily submitting to the Lord, battling the self-promoting subtleties of the old man and resisting the devil. We are not free from sin in our bodies. We are pure in the new man, but in the old man, in the flesh, sin remains and a fight rages. And the old man attacks whenever he feels that he can make trouble and cause mischief.

This is why the apostles regularly admonish the Lord's people to stay strong in the Lord, to put on Christ, to submit to God, to resist the devil with the armor of God and not be conformed to the world. They're showing us where our help lies in this fight.

Faith enables us to draw near to God. for the troubles, the varied, broad, extensive troubles that we meet. Faith teaches us to think wisely about the dangers that we face, the traps of temptation, the pitfalls of fleshy pleasure, and to seek God's way of escape.

Paul tells the Corinthians in 1 Corinthians 10, verse 12, he says, There hath no temptation taken you, but such as is common to man. But God is faithful, who will not suffer you to be tempted above that ye are able, but will with the temptation also make a way of escape that ye may be able to bear it. So be sure of this. Our best efforts, our firmest resolve will never successfully safeguard us from Satan's attacks.

Resisting the devil is drawing strength from the blood of Christ by faith in those moments of temptation. It is enjoying the presence of Christ by faith when the world offers the pleasures of sin for a season. These are practical matters of daily living. It has to do with honouring the Lord, preserving our testimony, supporting our brethren and witnessing to the world. But it is faith that is the vehicle by which we draw down God's help in these circumstances.

James says in verse 8, draw nigh to God, and he will draw nigh to you. Cleanse your hands, ye sinners, and purify your hearts, ye double-minded. I think probably the apostle is drawing upon Psalm 24. Verses three and four, when he writes this, that little passage says in the Old Testament says, who shall ascend to the hill of the Lord, or who shall stand in his holy place? He that hath clean hands and a pure heart, who hath not lifted up his soul unto vanity, nor sworn deceitfully. I once heard a sermon which paralleled the clean hands to sanctification by obedience to the law and the pure heart to justification by grace.

The implication being that heart purifying is God's job and hand purifying is our job. But it is far better, far better to think of Christ as being the one who ascends into the holy hill of the Lord with all his people in him. Turning or we should say returning to the law for sanctification is a fool's errand. That condemning law has nothing to offer and nothing more to say to Christ's redeemed people because the substitutionary death of the Lord Jesus has satisfied all its demands.

We do not live by the law, we live by faith. We get our clean heart, we get our clean hands by faith. We're not ruled or governed by the law. We're not motivated by the law. Men and women who live by faith are dead to the law. So that neither hand cleansing nor heart purifying can be done in our own strength, but both work by faith as we submit to God and resist the devil. True humility isn't beating ourself with sticks, physical or metaphorical. It's not self-denial. It's not wearing hair vests under our shirt.

The Pharisees were very good at that. And the Lord told his disciples in Matthew chapter six, when ye fast, be not as the hypocrites of a sad countenance. They disfigure their faces, that they may appear unto men to fast. Verily I say unto you, they have their reward. But thou, when thou fastest, anoint thine head and wash thy face, that thou appear not unto men to fast, but unto thy father which is in secret, and thy father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly. What is the Lord speaking about here? He's speaking about humility, the same as James is speaking. It is being honest with God.

It is knowing our weaknesses and humbly acknowledging our constant need of Christ. That is what true spiritual mourning consists of. We mourn for the sin that continues to dwell in our nature and continues to disrupt our fellowship with the Lord Jesus. And when James tells us, be afflicted and mourn and weep, let your laughter be turned to mourning and your joy to heaviness, it isn't saying that we're to be miseries. Rather, we are to resist the superficial pleasures of this world that lead to conformity with it.

And we are to be honest and humble before God about our ongoing need for God's grace. And now James gives us a practical application. which again may have been drawn from his personal experience of the church in his day and doubtless persists openly or secretly in all our minds. James says, speak not evil one of another brethren.

He that speaketh evil of his brother and judgeth his brother speaketh evil of the law and judgeth the law. But if thou judge the law, thou art not a doer of the law, but a judge. There is one lawgiver who is able to save and to destroy. Who art thou that judgest another? How often the Lord and his disciples cautioned against evil speaking and improperly judging one another out of self-righteous pride.

We might think of the moat and the beam or the speck and the plank, the idea of there being a splinter in somebody's eye and the person that has got a log buried in their eye comes along and says, let me take the splinter out of your eye. Do you dare to take a speck of dust from your brother's eye when you've got a plank of wood in your own?

I think there's some graphic humor in there. Someone else pointed out that whenever we point a finger we have three pointing back at us. And the real point is this. Criticising one another is a proud self-promoting vanity. Because it presumes that we know all the facts, that we have the power to discern another person's motives, that we know what is right and that we can judge correctly. It is all about me and how clever and how great I am. And all of those things are properly only in the power of God. Dare we be so presumptuous as to take such a role to ourselves? The truly humble have no remaining capacity for judging others.

James's admonition against judging one another is similar to Paul's words. And that's a beautiful attitude to have towards a brother or a sister in the Lord. Judging a brother is pride. Of course, we did read in 1 Corinthians chapter 5 there is a place for judgment and discipline in the church where there is an open and flagrant sin which brings the gospel into disrepute. But here, in this context, judging a brother is just pride, speaking evil of someone when you don't have all the information. Being critical of one another, it intrudes into God's own role and impinges on a believer's Christian liberty. And again Paul says, who art thou that judgest another man's servant?

To his own master he standeth or falleth, yea, he shall be holding up, for God is able to make him stand. And the Lord Jesus tells us, whosoever shall exalt himself shall be abased, and he that shall humble himself shall be exalted. And that's James's lesson for us today.

The proud exalt themselves and will be brought down. The humble poor come to Christ with empty pots and empty vessels and they will be lifted up. God who gives the grace of true humility will give more grace. And he is able to lift up those who come to him for help.

God will lift us up in this world as trophies of his mercy and grace, and the Son will lift us up in the next world as his beautiful bride and heirs together with him. In coming into the world, our Lord Jesus Christ fulfilled the words of the prophets. and He provided every reason, every justification for us to trust Him, both for salvation and for continuing daily grace. Christ said, The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me, because the Lord hath anointed me to preach good tidings unto the meek. He hath sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives and the opening of the prison to them that are bound, to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord and the day of vengeance of our God, to comfort all that mourn, to appoint unto them that mourn in Zion, to give unto them beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning, the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness, that they might be called trees of righteousness, the planting of the Lord, that he might be glorified. Our Lord God will lift up his people when we humbly come to him seeking the grace that only he can give. May the Lord give us faith to be such a people. For Jesus' sake, amen.