James 4:1-10
Before I really get started I want to share a little story that kind of illustrates the problem I want to talk about today. A man was driving down the road one day and saw another car pulled over, lights blinking. So he stopped to see if he could help. But first he wanted to know something. He asked, "What's your name? And are you religious?" The man said, "I'm Bob, and yes I am religious." The helper said, "Me too. What sort of religion? You're not Buddhist are you?" Bob said, "No. I'm a Christian." The guy said, "Me too. Are you Catholic or Protestant?"
"Protestant." "Me too. Are you Episcopalian or Baptist?" "Baptist." "Wow. Me too. Are you Baptist Church of God or Baptist Church of the Lord?" "Baptist Church of God." "Me too! Are you original Baptist Church of God, or are you Reformed Baptist Church of God?" "Reformed Baptist Church of God." "Me too. Are you Reformed Baptist Church of God, Reformation of 1879, or Reformed Baptist Church of God, Reformation of 1915?" Bob said: "Reformed Baptist Church of God, Reformation of 1915."
At that, the potential Good Samaritan said, "I can't have anything to do with you, you heretic!" And he got back in his car and drove away."
Is it surprising sometimes what kinds of things can divide us, even though Jesus very strongly prayed for our unity? Can you see why the world of unbelievers today doesn’t know that Jesus was sent to show his love to the world? If Christians can’t be inspired by God to love each other, why would anyone looking at the situation we are in think they should give it a try?
What really does cause quarrels and fights? James says it is the desires that battle within. We tend to want things to go our way and when they don’t, we’re not very good at taking it lying down. In fact, some people are proud of their stand up and fight for their rights attitude. They’re not the problem. The people who disagree with them are.
When James warns them that “You desire but do not have, so you kill. You covet but you cannot get what you want, so you quarrel and fight.” Does it sound like James is talking to Christians? But he is! And he talks about them killing people? Seriously? Well, listen, James was talking to people who had recently become Christians in a young church. The James who wrote this was Jesus’ biological half-brother, another son of Mary.
He was martyred for his faith in about AD 62, a mere thirty years or so after the death and resurrection of Jesus and the birth of the Church with the coming of the Holy Spirit on the day of Pentecost. So, his letter was written before that, perhaps several years earlier, potentially even a decade or two earlier. His audience then was a very young church with virtually no Christian traditions. Out of the whole lot of them, probably very few of them were “raised in church.” If any were raised in that church they would have been babies, or not even born yet, when Jesus walked the earth. Most of them were brand new believers who had no idea how to “do” churchy stuff.
Most of them were probably born again Jews. So, their worship services looked a whole lot more Jewish than ours would. Maybe they even met on Saturday instead of Sunday! Likely they spent a lot of time together and ate together frequently. They wouldn’t have sung many hymns, but would have recited or sung a lot of the psalms we have in the book of Psalms.
Also, some of them would have been Gentile believers, whose parents had raised them in pagan idolatry and a Roman culture of power and forcefulness as the paths to success. But even the Jews among them were not untouched by the human tendency to rely on power and influence rather than on God.
Pharisees, in particular, had actually learned how to use God and his law as a way to secure their own prosperity by controlling the people and benefitting from the sacrificial system, while making themselves look good as supposedly strict adherents of the purity laws. They made the rules hard to keep, partly because the easier it was to break the commandments, the more frequently the guilty parties would have to come to the temple with appropriate sacrifices.
I am trying to give you an idea of how different from us were the people to whom James wrote the book. These new believers had come mostly from having different kinds of unspiritual religious culture that stressed purity laws, or religious rituals, that were more externally imposed than eagerly embraced. It was the Holy Spirit who was teaching them things that we have become accustomed to hearing, that God wants a deep personal relationship with you, that loving one’s neighbor is to be not just an outward affectation or appearance but an actually heartfelt desire.
Also, think of Middle Eastern culture today, with all its passion for religious things, it’s harsh blasphemy laws and even the death penalty for religious opponents. That’s the kind of people James was talking to when he wrote this. So, it may be that his words about killing people they disagreed with or when they didn’t get what they wanted, could be taken literally. It was part of the background culture in which they all lived and grew up. And it isn’t always easy to change.
But then, our own Christian history, especially in what we call the Dark Ages, also came with a lot of violence and harsh punishment in religious disputes. Think of the Crusades and the Spanish Inquisition as episodes in which the church tried to defend itself against attacks from the outside. It wasn’t always done in a very Christ like manner. But there was plenty of internal strife too. Do you know how many people were burned at the stake for trying to translate the Words of the Bible from the venerated Latin into languages that ordinary people could read and understand for themselves?
And yet, even in our more enlightened, more civilized culture, we may still have a lot in common with the people to whom James spoke. It is why the book remains in the Bible. The inspired words here can be applied to our lives also. Or would we try to claim that there are no more fights and quarrels in churches today?
There are fights and quarrels in some churches, aren’t there? Some of the worst kind too, with the gossip and back biting meant to hurt and harm the enemy in a more secretive manner. Church people like to avoid the appearance of conflict. So, they fight dirty instead of openly discussing their differences. And yet the tendency and desire of each of us is to turn a blind eye to our own human natures and say things like, “not me” and “not in my church.”
James used this strong language in his letter to get past the façade of social decorum. Christians are only human, just like everyone else. But since we tend to be more religious and we try to be better behaved, we get better at hiding what’s really going on inside. But we’re still fighting and quarreling. So, James is telling it like it really is, no matter how much we try to hide it or deceive ourselves.
But again, James does so much more than just hand down the judgement. He is all about mercy and grace that are ours if we repent and turn to the Lord. The next thing he says, in verses 2-3 is, “You do not have because you do not ask God. When you ask, you do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives, that you may spend what you get on your pleasures.”
James understands that what all people really want is peace and harmony, or shalom. But he is pointing out that we tend to try anything and everything to get what we want without asking God and we usually go about getting what we want through selfish means. So that even when we do ask God, we are not asking for His Kingdom to come, but for our own Kingdom to come! People who desire to be in control of everything really think their ideas are best and if everybody would just agree with them and live by their rules everything would be fine.
This is so ingrained in us, children don’t have to be taught it. I was playing with my granddaughter Maddie in the snow yesterday. She had a bottle of colored water to “paint” the snow. But she was just using it to melt the snow. Then since I was playing with her, she graciously let me have a turn. But she was immediately upset with me for doing something a little different from what she had been doing. Instead of honoring my creativity she laid down the rule, “You have to do it the way I do it.” I said, “Really, who made that a rule?” She didn’t even think about it before she said, “Me.”
Maddie’s little sense of peace and tranquility depends upon her having everything her way. So, what do you suppose happens when two such children try to play together? In a world of many Maddies, each with different ideas about what they want, usually centered in their own desires, there will be quarrels and fights.
But James is reasoning with his people saying God wants you to have what you want, only according to his will. And since God is God, his will counts the most for one thing. But also, by knowing Christ on the cross we can trust and believe that God’s will is determined to bless us. His will is not just what’s best for Him. It really, truly is what is best for all of us!
One way of picturing that is in a neat poem called Hug O' War, by the late Shel Silverstein. He wrote:
“I will not play at tug o' war. I'd rather play at hug o' war, Where everyone hugs Instead of tugs. Where everyone giggles And rolls on the rug, Where everyone kisses And everyone grins And everyone cuddles. And everyone wins.”
That’s what we really all want, to just get along well together. But our unity and harmony can never be based on the will of any one human being. None of us is smart enough to know what will hold all of us all together. It is better to be centered on the will of God so that we all want what he wants.
But the natural state of man is to be focused on the worldly way of doing things. It is a very serious problem. That is why James uses more strong language and says, “You adulterous people, don’t you know that friendship with the world means enmity against God? Therefore, anyone who chooses to be a friend of the world becomes an enemy of God. Or do you think Scripture says without reason that he jealously longs for the spirit he has caused to dwell in us?
James is using language here that speaks the same way the prophets of old spoke to the nation of Israel. So, his Jewish brothers and sisters would hear alarm bells going off to remind them that the Jews in the Old Testament were called adulterous when they followed after other Gods as idol worshipers. The Christians would say to themselves, “But we don’t follow idols we follow Jesus!” James is sounding this warning to teach his followers that idolatry, spiritual adultery is not just found in pagan rituals, but is found in any form of friendship with the world that takes the place of friendship with God.
This is not about being afraid to interact with people of the world. If that were the case Jesus would never have come down to be with us. But this is about the ways we live in this world. Paul, in 2 Timothy 3:4 warned Christians against being lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God. And John was addressing the same problem also in 1 John 2:15. “Do not love the world or anything in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him.” We must live in this world in the same way that Jesus lived in the world, as sent by God and knowing who we are in him, as humble and sacrificing much to give ourselves to the mission, as a servant of God and loving him, a seeker of the lost and loving them, as an ambassador for Christ and faithful to the task, as a messenger of the gospel and joyful as we bear the good news to this sad and broken world.
God has put his spirit in us and James says he jealously desires to maintain the relationship he has begun with us. Can God be jealous? We usually think of jealousy as a bad thing. But in the Bible jealousy just means eagerly desiring with emotional passion. That only gets you into trouble when you are coveting the wrong thing, or using sinful means to get what you want. Eagerly desiring is not bad. Humans sin, but not God.
So now straining out the negatives feelings we may have about the word jealousy. Think about this. What does it mean to you to ponder the idea that God loves you so much that his passionate desire is to be with you? I was recently remembering my own conversion experience in these terms. I come from a family that wasn’t very good at loving each other, and that was true long before it ended in my parent’s divorce when I was 15. And after the divorce it was more true than ever that I felt alone in the world. Besides the family difficulties, I was not popular in school, socially awkward, fending for myself. Even the friends I had never called me. I called in them and there were times I felt they were only tolerating me.
Then when I had gone my own way, taking care of myself and ended up failing at that, I was in utter despair. I was so desperate, I decided to even give God a try, even though I had decided years ago that he was probably a myth. But when I opened the door to that possibility, God rushed in! He showed up! And he demonstrated his love for me! Imagine what a change I felt from having no one to love me, on the day that I discovered that of all people, God himself loves me with a great, great love! And he hadn’t waited for me to call on him. God demonstrated his love for us in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us! To me, in a moment, in the second I realized this, the difference he made was like stepping out of pitch blackness into broad daylight.
And God loves you just the same, with an intense, but righteous, jealousy that longs for you to be with him. That’s why James goes on to speak of God’s grace. “But he gives us more grace. That is why Scripture says: “God opposes the proud but shows favor to the humble.”
Submit yourselves, then, to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you. Come near to God and he will come near to you. Wash your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded. Grieve, mourn and wail. Change your laughter to mourning and your joy to gloom. Humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will lift you up.
In these words James again is using language his Jewish friends will remember as belonging to the God given religion of the old Testament, the means by which the people could demonstrate their own repentance and desire to be with God. It is important to realize that they would wash their hands IN the religious ceremonies and not before them. This was God’s way of teaching them that they come to him to get pure, not after they already are pure. The offerings they brought had to be clean and pure because they were going to be used to cleanse and purify the people who brought them. God wanted all to understand that they were welcome to come to him to get clean, not because they already are clean. That’s grace!
To submit yourself to God is to acknowledge that you are dirty and you can only get clean by doing things his way. The world’s way is to say, “God will give me what I want because I am a worthy person and I bring this worthy offering to impress God.” That’s totally the opposite of what God wants. And it doesn’t impress him one bit. He laughs at such foolishness.
It is far better when we are impressed by what God has done for us in Christ. When James says, “Grieve, mourn and wail. Change your laughter to mourning and your joy to gloom.” He is not saying that we must live the rest of our lives in that condition of mournful self- pity. He is only saying, “Humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will lift you up.” He is bringing his audience to the point of the conversion experience. It is when we stop being proud of ourselves for how often we go to church or anything else that we can point at as good. It is when we see ourselves as sinners, it is when we agree with God that we need the salvation he offers, that is when we are humbling ourselves and presenting ourselves to him as needy people, that is when we are seeing things God’s way, in the truth, and accepting his help, that is when we will be greatly impressed by the value of Christ on the cross.
And so, my friends it is at this point that we can come to the table of grace and enjoy the deep meaning of the Lord’s Supper. Here is a constant and regular reminder of God’s grace to us. It is good to come to this table with thanksgiving, for God’s grace has lifted us up into the very presence of God where we find that he loves us with his love that makes us happy, much more happy than we deserve to be. And in that love, any and all compromise with the world’s ways ought to just slough off of us and drift away forgotten. We don’t remove it. God’s love does. We are cleansed of it by his grace. His amazing love changes everything about us.
Let us pray.
Before I really get started I want to share a little story that kind of illustrates the problem I want to talk about today. A man was driving down the road one day and saw another car pulled over, lights blinking. So he stopped to see if he could help. But first he wanted to know something. He asked, "What's your name? And are you religious?" The man said, "I'm Bob, and yes I am religious." The helper said, "Me too. What sort of religion? You're not Buddhist are you?" Bob said, "No. I'm a Christian." The guy said, "Me too. Are you Catholic or Protestant?"
"Protestant." "Me too. Are you Episcopalian or Baptist?" "Baptist." "Wow. Me too. Are you Baptist Church of God or Baptist Church of the Lord?" "Baptist Church of God." "Me too! Are you original Baptist Church of God, or are you Reformed Baptist Church of God?" "Reformed Baptist Church of God." "Me too. Are you Reformed Baptist Church of God, Reformation of 1879, or Reformed Baptist Church of God, Reformation of 1915?" Bob said: "Reformed Baptist Church of God, Reformation of 1915."
At that, the potential Good Samaritan said, "I can't have anything to do with you, you heretic!" And he got back in his car and drove away."
Is it surprising sometimes what kinds of things can divide us, even though Jesus very strongly prayed for our unity? Can you see why the world of unbelievers today doesn’t know that Jesus was sent to show his love to the world? If Christians can’t be inspired by God to love each other, why would anyone looking at the situation we are in think they should give it a try?
What really does cause quarrels and fights? James says it is the desires that battle within. We tend to want things to go our way and when they don’t, we’re not very good at taking it lying down. In fact, some people are proud of their stand up and fight for their rights attitude. They’re not the problem. The people who disagree with them are.
When James warns them that “You desire but do not have, so you kill. You covet but you cannot get what you want, so you quarrel and fight.” Does it sound like James is talking to Christians? But he is! And he talks about them killing people? Seriously? Well, listen, James was talking to people who had recently become Christians in a young church. The James who wrote this was Jesus’ biological half-brother, another son of Mary.
He was martyred for his faith in about AD 62, a mere thirty years or so after the death and resurrection of Jesus and the birth of the Church with the coming of the Holy Spirit on the day of Pentecost. So, his letter was written before that, perhaps several years earlier, potentially even a decade or two earlier. His audience then was a very young church with virtually no Christian traditions. Out of the whole lot of them, probably very few of them were “raised in church.” If any were raised in that church they would have been babies, or not even born yet, when Jesus walked the earth. Most of them were brand new believers who had no idea how to “do” churchy stuff.
Most of them were probably born again Jews. So, their worship services looked a whole lot more Jewish than ours would. Maybe they even met on Saturday instead of Sunday! Likely they spent a lot of time together and ate together frequently. They wouldn’t have sung many hymns, but would have recited or sung a lot of the psalms we have in the book of Psalms.
Also, some of them would have been Gentile believers, whose parents had raised them in pagan idolatry and a Roman culture of power and forcefulness as the paths to success. But even the Jews among them were not untouched by the human tendency to rely on power and influence rather than on God.
Pharisees, in particular, had actually learned how to use God and his law as a way to secure their own prosperity by controlling the people and benefitting from the sacrificial system, while making themselves look good as supposedly strict adherents of the purity laws. They made the rules hard to keep, partly because the easier it was to break the commandments, the more frequently the guilty parties would have to come to the temple with appropriate sacrifices.
I am trying to give you an idea of how different from us were the people to whom James wrote the book. These new believers had come mostly from having different kinds of unspiritual religious culture that stressed purity laws, or religious rituals, that were more externally imposed than eagerly embraced. It was the Holy Spirit who was teaching them things that we have become accustomed to hearing, that God wants a deep personal relationship with you, that loving one’s neighbor is to be not just an outward affectation or appearance but an actually heartfelt desire.
Also, think of Middle Eastern culture today, with all its passion for religious things, it’s harsh blasphemy laws and even the death penalty for religious opponents. That’s the kind of people James was talking to when he wrote this. So, it may be that his words about killing people they disagreed with or when they didn’t get what they wanted, could be taken literally. It was part of the background culture in which they all lived and grew up. And it isn’t always easy to change.
But then, our own Christian history, especially in what we call the Dark Ages, also came with a lot of violence and harsh punishment in religious disputes. Think of the Crusades and the Spanish Inquisition as episodes in which the church tried to defend itself against attacks from the outside. It wasn’t always done in a very Christ like manner. But there was plenty of internal strife too. Do you know how many people were burned at the stake for trying to translate the Words of the Bible from the venerated Latin into languages that ordinary people could read and understand for themselves?
And yet, even in our more enlightened, more civilized culture, we may still have a lot in common with the people to whom James spoke. It is why the book remains in the Bible. The inspired words here can be applied to our lives also. Or would we try to claim that there are no more fights and quarrels in churches today?
There are fights and quarrels in some churches, aren’t there? Some of the worst kind too, with the gossip and back biting meant to hurt and harm the enemy in a more secretive manner. Church people like to avoid the appearance of conflict. So, they fight dirty instead of openly discussing their differences. And yet the tendency and desire of each of us is to turn a blind eye to our own human natures and say things like, “not me” and “not in my church.”
James used this strong language in his letter to get past the façade of social decorum. Christians are only human, just like everyone else. But since we tend to be more religious and we try to be better behaved, we get better at hiding what’s really going on inside. But we’re still fighting and quarreling. So, James is telling it like it really is, no matter how much we try to hide it or deceive ourselves.
But again, James does so much more than just hand down the judgement. He is all about mercy and grace that are ours if we repent and turn to the Lord. The next thing he says, in verses 2-3 is, “You do not have because you do not ask God. When you ask, you do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives, that you may spend what you get on your pleasures.”
James understands that what all people really want is peace and harmony, or shalom. But he is pointing out that we tend to try anything and everything to get what we want without asking God and we usually go about getting what we want through selfish means. So that even when we do ask God, we are not asking for His Kingdom to come, but for our own Kingdom to come! People who desire to be in control of everything really think their ideas are best and if everybody would just agree with them and live by their rules everything would be fine.
This is so ingrained in us, children don’t have to be taught it. I was playing with my granddaughter Maddie in the snow yesterday. She had a bottle of colored water to “paint” the snow. But she was just using it to melt the snow. Then since I was playing with her, she graciously let me have a turn. But she was immediately upset with me for doing something a little different from what she had been doing. Instead of honoring my creativity she laid down the rule, “You have to do it the way I do it.” I said, “Really, who made that a rule?” She didn’t even think about it before she said, “Me.”
Maddie’s little sense of peace and tranquility depends upon her having everything her way. So, what do you suppose happens when two such children try to play together? In a world of many Maddies, each with different ideas about what they want, usually centered in their own desires, there will be quarrels and fights.
But James is reasoning with his people saying God wants you to have what you want, only according to his will. And since God is God, his will counts the most for one thing. But also, by knowing Christ on the cross we can trust and believe that God’s will is determined to bless us. His will is not just what’s best for Him. It really, truly is what is best for all of us!
One way of picturing that is in a neat poem called Hug O' War, by the late Shel Silverstein. He wrote:
“I will not play at tug o' war. I'd rather play at hug o' war, Where everyone hugs Instead of tugs. Where everyone giggles And rolls on the rug, Where everyone kisses And everyone grins And everyone cuddles. And everyone wins.”
That’s what we really all want, to just get along well together. But our unity and harmony can never be based on the will of any one human being. None of us is smart enough to know what will hold all of us all together. It is better to be centered on the will of God so that we all want what he wants.
But the natural state of man is to be focused on the worldly way of doing things. It is a very serious problem. That is why James uses more strong language and says, “You adulterous people, don’t you know that friendship with the world means enmity against God? Therefore, anyone who chooses to be a friend of the world becomes an enemy of God. Or do you think Scripture says without reason that he jealously longs for the spirit he has caused to dwell in us?
James is using language here that speaks the same way the prophets of old spoke to the nation of Israel. So, his Jewish brothers and sisters would hear alarm bells going off to remind them that the Jews in the Old Testament were called adulterous when they followed after other Gods as idol worshipers. The Christians would say to themselves, “But we don’t follow idols we follow Jesus!” James is sounding this warning to teach his followers that idolatry, spiritual adultery is not just found in pagan rituals, but is found in any form of friendship with the world that takes the place of friendship with God.
This is not about being afraid to interact with people of the world. If that were the case Jesus would never have come down to be with us. But this is about the ways we live in this world. Paul, in 2 Timothy 3:4 warned Christians against being lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God. And John was addressing the same problem also in 1 John 2:15. “Do not love the world or anything in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him.” We must live in this world in the same way that Jesus lived in the world, as sent by God and knowing who we are in him, as humble and sacrificing much to give ourselves to the mission, as a servant of God and loving him, a seeker of the lost and loving them, as an ambassador for Christ and faithful to the task, as a messenger of the gospel and joyful as we bear the good news to this sad and broken world.
God has put his spirit in us and James says he jealously desires to maintain the relationship he has begun with us. Can God be jealous? We usually think of jealousy as a bad thing. But in the Bible jealousy just means eagerly desiring with emotional passion. That only gets you into trouble when you are coveting the wrong thing, or using sinful means to get what you want. Eagerly desiring is not bad. Humans sin, but not God.
So now straining out the negatives feelings we may have about the word jealousy. Think about this. What does it mean to you to ponder the idea that God loves you so much that his passionate desire is to be with you? I was recently remembering my own conversion experience in these terms. I come from a family that wasn’t very good at loving each other, and that was true long before it ended in my parent’s divorce when I was 15. And after the divorce it was more true than ever that I felt alone in the world. Besides the family difficulties, I was not popular in school, socially awkward, fending for myself. Even the friends I had never called me. I called in them and there were times I felt they were only tolerating me.
Then when I had gone my own way, taking care of myself and ended up failing at that, I was in utter despair. I was so desperate, I decided to even give God a try, even though I had decided years ago that he was probably a myth. But when I opened the door to that possibility, God rushed in! He showed up! And he demonstrated his love for me! Imagine what a change I felt from having no one to love me, on the day that I discovered that of all people, God himself loves me with a great, great love! And he hadn’t waited for me to call on him. God demonstrated his love for us in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us! To me, in a moment, in the second I realized this, the difference he made was like stepping out of pitch blackness into broad daylight.
And God loves you just the same, with an intense, but righteous, jealousy that longs for you to be with him. That’s why James goes on to speak of God’s grace. “But he gives us more grace. That is why Scripture says: “God opposes the proud but shows favor to the humble.”
Submit yourselves, then, to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you. Come near to God and he will come near to you. Wash your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded. Grieve, mourn and wail. Change your laughter to mourning and your joy to gloom. Humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will lift you up.
In these words James again is using language his Jewish friends will remember as belonging to the God given religion of the old Testament, the means by which the people could demonstrate their own repentance and desire to be with God. It is important to realize that they would wash their hands IN the religious ceremonies and not before them. This was God’s way of teaching them that they come to him to get pure, not after they already are pure. The offerings they brought had to be clean and pure because they were going to be used to cleanse and purify the people who brought them. God wanted all to understand that they were welcome to come to him to get clean, not because they already are clean. That’s grace!
To submit yourself to God is to acknowledge that you are dirty and you can only get clean by doing things his way. The world’s way is to say, “God will give me what I want because I am a worthy person and I bring this worthy offering to impress God.” That’s totally the opposite of what God wants. And it doesn’t impress him one bit. He laughs at such foolishness.
It is far better when we are impressed by what God has done for us in Christ. When James says, “Grieve, mourn and wail. Change your laughter to mourning and your joy to gloom.” He is not saying that we must live the rest of our lives in that condition of mournful self- pity. He is only saying, “Humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will lift you up.” He is bringing his audience to the point of the conversion experience. It is when we stop being proud of ourselves for how often we go to church or anything else that we can point at as good. It is when we see ourselves as sinners, it is when we agree with God that we need the salvation he offers, that is when we are humbling ourselves and presenting ourselves to him as needy people, that is when we are seeing things God’s way, in the truth, and accepting his help, that is when we will be greatly impressed by the value of Christ on the cross.
And so, my friends it is at this point that we can come to the table of grace and enjoy the deep meaning of the Lord’s Supper. Here is a constant and regular reminder of God’s grace to us. It is good to come to this table with thanksgiving, for God’s grace has lifted us up into the very presence of God where we find that he loves us with his love that makes us happy, much more happy than we deserve to be. And in that love, any and all compromise with the world’s ways ought to just slough off of us and drift away forgotten. We don’t remove it. God’s love does. We are cleansed of it by his grace. His amazing love changes everything about us.
Let us pray.
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