True Religion: The Way To Change

James 4: 1 - 10 

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SPEAKER_03 0:19

Would you now stand for the reading of God's Word? Our passage is James chapter 4, beginning of verse 1. Turn to page 1077 again. James chapter 4, beginning of verse 1. We'd like for everyone to be able to see the passage as it's being preached.

SPEAKER_00 0:37

What causes fights and quarrels among you? Don't they come from your desires that battle within you? You desire, but do not have, so you kill. You covet, but you cannot get what you want, so you quarrel and fight. 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. 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? 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. The word of the Lord.

SPEAKER_03 1:47

Thanks be to God. May be seated. Thank you, Lydia. Would you pray with me once more as we come to God's Word? Let's pray together. Father, we come now, having this morning sung praises to you and brought our offerings and our tithes to you. Lord, we have offered up our hearts in prayer. Lord, we have heard you speak through the reading of your word. And Lord, we would ask now that you would come and be near through the preaching of your word. That Holy Spirit, you would come and you would take your word that you say is living and active, sharper than a double-edged sword, that you would pierce down to the very core of our spirits and our hearts. That we would be changed. Would we see Jesus? In Christ's name we pray. Amen. So here's a question to get us started for our young people, really for all of us, to ponder. Is there an area of your life that you have ever tried to change? Maybe it's a behavior in your life, maybe it's a pattern, maybe it's a relationship, maybe it's a way of responding in your life, maybe it's something in your life that tends to just have its hooks in you. Like you go back to it over and over and over as much as you promise, I'm not going back, I'm not doing that again, and you find yourself right back in that same spot. You ever experienced that in your life? Maybe it's even something that you want to start in your life, something new that you want to uh make a reality in your life. And so you start out with great excitement and determination, and maybe you make a really good go of it, only to see it just peter out over time. What's happened to all of our New Year's resolutions by this point? We don't even remember them, right? It's just an example of this. Change is hard. Change is really, really hard. And that's why it's so rare. But the reality is that Christianity is about change. It's about transformation. That's God's goal for us. His goal for our salvation, his goal for us coming to Jesus is not just that we be a people that are forgiven of our sins, as glorious as that is, but that we be a people who are changed, who are transformed into the image of Jesus. That is, we're looking more and more like Jesus in our life. Change is really what the Christian life is all about. But so often, even as believers, we don't change, particularly in the really deep-seated places of our hearts and of our lives. Change can be so hard. Dallas Willard, the great theologian and writer, once said that the elephant in the church is the lack of change in the pew. Stunning kind of statement, isn't it? That the elephant in the room, so to speak, for the church, the thing that nobody really wants to name and acknowledge is that as much as we talk about new life and talk about transformation, when we actually take an honest look at the church, the American church, our church, our own hearts, we see a tragic lack of change. Maybe we tried really hard. Maybe we gave it all that we got. Maybe we mustered all of our willpower. And we didn't change. Sometimes in those areas of our life that tend to be so deeply entrenched, we we try, we change, we repent, we we fight in that area, and yet we just find nothing changing. And so often what we do is we just give up. We just say, this is just, this is just a reality. This is never going to change in my life. You ever said that about your life? Where others of us, especially in the Bible Belt, we we tend to hear of the concept of grace and we tend to think, you know what? I'm forgiven, I'm I'm saved, I have grace. So does it really matter if I change? You know, my life's in pretty good shape, and so we become stagnant and just kind of stay where we are. As we come to the book of James, James is talking about change. He's actually talking about change and transformation as being one of the clear marks of true, authentic Christianity. That it's the fruit of our life that really indicates that we really have come into a saving relationship with Jesus. So James is going to talk about in our passage today how do we change? That's the question we want to bring to this passage. How do I change? And it would be especially helpful if you have a particular area in your life that you know needs to change. And just kind of have that in the back of your mind as we are hearing James's words here. There's two things that I want us to see here that James is going to show us. One, in order to change, we got to understand and deal with sin at the deeper level. That's what James wants to show us here. He wants to pop the hood. He wants to get up under the hood and say, let's take a look in the core of who you are, what's happening at the motivational level that so often leads to the behavioral sin in our life. So he wants us to understand at a deeper level. And then secondly, he wants us to see the power of change is God's grace unleashed through repentance. So let's jump into our passage here, and we're beginning at verse one here. And James is going to use a particular sin struggle that he just is assuming his readers know all about. And again, he's writing to believers here. These are people in the church, and so he knows that this thing that he's going to address is a reality for them, and it becomes like a model for understanding what's underneath that, what leads to that. And it's conflict and quarreling and fighting, our propensity to find ourselves fighting with each other. Look at what he says in verse 1. What causes fights and quarrels among you? Again, the assumption is that this is a part of our lives. We know this reality, right? Whether we're talking about your family, whether you're talking about maybe the dinner table tonight, you ever have arguments around the dinner table? You know, if you've got children, that's a nightly reality, right? You ever have struggle and conflict and quarrel in your marriage? That's why marriage is so hard. Because so often you always have two sinners together and you're trying to love one another, and your selfishness is in the way, and it creates quarreling. It's hard. But even beyond those things, every area of human life is going to involve quarreling and fighting in this broken world. I mean, think about your workplace where you're going into Mars. Is there any drama in the workplace? Are there any people in there that are kind of, you know, working motives and just kind of can't get along? It's a reality in every area of life, even in the church, right? You know, if we we try to be close to other people, we try to weave our lives together, you're going to find yourself in conflict. Now, we've been called to unity, we've been called to love, we've been called to consider one another better than ourselves, as Paul says. That doesn't often happen. And so the question here is that James wants to raise this why why does that happen? What's behind your quarreling? What's behind all your conflict? Now, the obvious answer that we would immediately give is them, right? That's what it feels like. Ask your kids the next fight that they're having. But I'm I'm just gonna go out on a limb and imagine that this will there will be an opportunity for this today, okay? So you find them in a coral and you say, wait a minute, time out. You look at each one and say, What's the problem here? Okay? And you know what the problem will be? Them. Right? The natural inclination of our hearts is to believe that the problem is outside of us. In a choral, when you find yourself at odds with someone, no matter what it is, no matter what the circumstances is, the deep feeling in our hearts is that they are the problem. It's it's them, it's what they said, how they're acting. And now here's the amazing thing that James wants to say that's not the root problem. The root problem is in you. Look what he says. Again, verse one What causes fights and quarrels among you? Don't they come from your desires that battle within you? You desire but do not have, so you kill. You covet. Remember what coveting is? Tenth commandment. Coveting is this deep desire for something that I don't have. It's a longing, a hunger. You see something that belongs to someone else, and you're like, oh, I gotta have me one of those. That's like the basis of our entire economy, right? That's our culture. We're talking about American culture here. You covet, but you cannot get what you want, so you quarrel and fight. Now notice what James is doing there, and this really works for understanding all sin and all of our behavior. Again, the tendency is to think, it's my circumstances. James says, no, it's your heart. All of our behavior flows from the heart. In the Bible, the heart, when it uses that language, when it talks about the heart, it's talking about the central control system of the person, the very core of who you are, the seat of the motivations. It is the seat of desires. That's what he talks about here. Our heart is the desire center of the human life. And really, you boil it all down, that's what it means to be a human, is that we are created with desires. That's what sets us apart from all the rest of creation. We are motivational beings. We are driven by powerful desires. Now, desire, the original design in that it's good. We are a reflection of God in that we are those who desire passionately. We're created for that because we're we're created to be worshipers. We were made to be those who were driven in life by a prevailing hunger and desire for God and his glory. That's the original design. But the problem with our desires is what James says here. They're at war within us, they're mixed. We got all kinds of desires. You know, if you're a follower of Jesus, you have new desires. You've been made new through the Holy Spirit, and so there is a desire to live for God and to love people and to obey Him. That's a new desire that is flowing from a new nature through the work of the Holy Spirit in you. When you come to Jesus, that becomes true. But the reality is that our flesh, the sinful nature, remains. And it too has powerful desires, longings, particularly to chase after created things. And so the desires in our heart are at war. What are they fighting for? They're fighting for control of your life. They want to rule you. And so the question beneath any of our behaviors, beneath any of our words, as we talked about last week, is what is the controlling desire in my heart? Because the reality is they're at war. Just an example of this. You know, oftentimes I will go home from work and I'm tired. And I'm I'm headed home and I'm headed up that driveway and about to walk into my home where my family is. And I have a deep desire to be present to my family, to love them. I have a desire to come in and see my kids and engage my kids to see my wife and have a conversation with her, to ask her about her day, to love, to offer life, to be present, right? I have a desire for that. I also have a desire for rest and comfort, peace to check out. You know, sometimes I have that desire that's so strong in me, like I just want to be off, right? I don't want to talk. I just want to come and I just want to kind of sink into my chair. I want to, whatever. I want to too often look at my phone. You know, I'm I'm I have a desire for comfort and rest, and oftentimes I'm trying to get that through checking out. Now, what's happening in me? I got two desires that are at war within me. Sometimes it's like hand-to-hand combat. And you know what oftentimes wins out? Not the one I really want. I come in and I check out and I'm not present. Well, how do you see that at work in your life? Maybe there's something in your life that you really hate, that you don't want to keep going back to it. This is like the anatomy of addiction, right? And addiction is not some special category of sin, it is the nature of sin. We're all addicted. That is driven by a compulsion to go to something for life that does not deliver. That's that's the human experience. So, do you do you know that war within in your life? Like, I want to do this, but I keep doing this because ultimately I have a desire to do this that seems to rule out in these times. This is what James wants us to understand about sin. You're not going to change in your life until you begin to see that our behaviors and our sin is flowing from our hearts. And in particular, the war of the desires within our heart. Now, James says something very interesting in verse four. He's been talking about this war of our desires there, that we're divided in our hearts and our desire and allegiance, what is going to rule our hearts in that moment? And then he says this in verse four, you adulterous people. Now that's interesting. Did we change subjects here? You know, we were talking about quarreling and fighting. Are we talking about adultery now? No, he's not talking about physical adultery, he's talking about spiritual adultery. Idolatry. You know, so what the the core human problem as we come to scripture is idolatry. What is idolatry? It's not just the bowing down to a statue. Idolatry is chasing after and putting your hopes in any created thing in place of God. As I said a minute ago, we were created to worship God, that He would be our identity, He would be our passion, our desire, our joy, and that the fundamental human problem is that we chase after created things to give us identity, to give us value, to give us rest, fill in the blank. Right? It's a worship problem that we ultimately have. And that's what James is saying here: this this reality of being driven along and ruled by all of these other desires. You're an adulterous people. Spiritual adultery. You've been called that God would be your greatest treasure. And listen, when God is your treasure, when your heart is delighting in Him, everything else is rightly oriented in your life. Drink, your children, work, rest, stuff, money, all that stuff, it gets rightly oriented if your heart is first and foremost rooted in and controlled and ruled by God. It's just how it works. But look what he says here. You adulterous people, don't you know that friendship with the world means enmity against God? Enmity is war. Therefore, anyone who chooses to be a friend of the world becomes an enemy of God. You see what he's saying here? God and the values of the world, they're sworn enemies. And so if God is going to be ruling your heart, the world will not. But if the the values of the world and the ways of the world and the promises of the world are commanding your heart, the approval of people, the having of stuff in our consumeristic culture, always chasing that next thing, oh, I gotta have that. I gotta have that. If I have that, I'll be okay. I mean, that's that's what we're being sold. Marketers understand this right here a lot better than we do, right? Because we keep falling for the trap. But you see what he's saying here? If you are a friend of the world, in other words, if your heart is captured by the things and the values of the world, it makes you an enemy of God. It puts you at odds with God. Why is that? Because God will not share us. Verse 5, or do you think scripture says without reason that he jealously longs for the Spirit He has caused to dwell in us? We see this in a lot of places in Scripture, that God's love is a jealous love. He will not share us. Our relationship with God in Scripture is described as marriage, an exclusive loyalty, where he demands the first affections of our heart. And so when we take the ultimate allegiance of our heart and take it to created things, God sees that as spiritual adultery. And he is jealous for our hearts, and he will not share us. It's very easy to think I can have God and the world. James says, You can't. They're opposites. So what do we do? James takes us into an understanding of the full reality of our brokenness. If we stop here, it's a rough one, right? But there's hope. James wants to call us to hope. So what do we do? What do we do that our hearts are at war? What do we do that so often my heart is captured by created things? How do we change is the ultimate question. And in verse 6, James takes us to grace. It's grace. The only way to change is by grace. We cannot change ourselves. Can you just sit with that for a minute? It's freeing. You cannot change yourself. It's so easy to think that basically the Bible is saying to us, you've been wrong too long, get right tonight. You know, you've been doing this wrong, start doing this, clean yourself up, try harder, self help, give it the old college try, right? It's just programmed into us. But what Scripture wants us to know, and James wants us to know, is that they can't work. Because it's too deep. We need heart surgery. So he points us to God's grace. Look at what he says in verse 6. But he gives us more grace. That's a wonderful butt there, right? There's grace. He points us to God's grace. God is the heart changer. We do not change ourselves. But that raises another question. Okay, good news. But do we have a part to play? That's an important question. So understand God is the one who changes my heart. He is the one who breaks the power of sin in my life. But what is my role? Do I have a role? What part do I play in change? You ever ask that question? And that's where James takes us next. And what does he take us to? He takes us to repentance. The way to change is through repentance. You know, repentance is it's just absolutely huge in the Christian life. Now, the great reformer Martin Luther, if you know the story about Martin Luther, who was a Catholic monk, and through his leadership, the Protestant Reformation was born. But what sparked the Reformation was that day that he took his 95 theses and nailed them to the door of Windenburg Castle in Germany. And it was 95 points of discussion over theology that he wanted to raise with the church because the church at that time, the Catholic Church at that time, was teaching not repentance, but penance. It's very different. Penance means satisfaction. And so it was the confusing of repentance with penance. That is the attempt to pay for your own sin. Do you ever do that? And what do we do when we blow it big? It's like a reaction in my heart. I go to God, it's like we want Him to see how miserable we are. Maybe we beat ourselves. Anybody beat yourself up over sin? Like me? Right? That's penance. It's this attempt to pay and atone for your own sin. The feeling is like if I feel horrible enough, if I show God how terrible I feel, if I beat myself up enough, then God will say, Oh, okay, that's enough. All right, I'll forgive you now. Right? That's penance. It's the effort to gain God's forgiveness through what we do. But repentance is very different. Now, the very first theses of that 95 theses, you know what it said? When our Lord and Master said repent, he willed that the entire Christian life be one of continual repentance. What? You know, initially that sounds bleak. Are we going to make any progress at all? What are you talking about, Martin Luther? But you see, the point was repentance is how we make progress. Repentance is to be a way of life. Because repentance is just another word for humility before God, for humbling ourselves before God. Look at what he says in the passage. Verse 6. This is why Scripture says, and he quotes Proverbs 3. Do you see that there? A very important verse for understanding who God is. God opposes the proud, but shows favor, actually, the Greek says, but gives grace to the humble. You want to understand God? You want to understand how he interacts with people? That's it in a nutshell. God opposes the proud, but to the humble, to those who lower themselves before him, to those who come to him with an openness of heart, without any merit of their own, God lavishes grace upon them. Repentance is humility, it's humbling ourselves before the Lord. Look what he says in verse 10. This is like a bookend to this little section here. Throughout this section, verses 6 through 10, he's describing all of these facets of repentance. But he begins with that God gives grace to the humble in verse 6, but then he closes in verse 10 with this: humble yourselves therefore before the Lord, and he will lift you up. That's repentance. It is humbling yourself before the Lord. So what is pride? If God opposes pride, what is pride? Pride is the basic, natural, operating default of the human heart. Now, pride, you know, whenever we hear pride, we might think of someone who's like haughty and thinks that they're great. Well, that certainly can be pride. But pride is really self-centeredness, it's independence. It's this feeling that like I can do life on my own, that, that, that I can make life work on my own, that I deserve to have control of my life. This belongs to me. It is entitlement. And it often manifests itself in defensiveness. You know, pride can even be very religious. In fact, that's the most deadly kind. See that in the ministry of Jesus. You know, there is a way to be religious and devoted, to have your life filled with a meticulous attention to doing everything right, to obeying all of God's laws, but but all of that is not for God, but is rather to put God in your debt. It's really a religious pride, a self-righteousness that puts us at odds with God. You see, a proud heart says, I can do it on my own. I'm in control of my own life. So, what does it mean to humble ourselves before God? It means to surrender to Him. Look at what He says in verse 7. Submit yourselves then to the Lord, to God. Submit yourselves to God. That's what that's what it means to humble yourself, to lay down your pride, to come in dependence, to come to God and say, I need you. You know, pride says, I'll clean myself up and then come to you. That's not repentance. Repentance is coming to him as a needy beggar of a sinner hungry for grace. Draw near to God, verse 8. Come near to God and he will come near to you. That is repentance. It's coming home. It's opening ourselves to God, it's putting ourselves under him. Repentance in humility opens ourselves to the joy of the gospel. We experience God's grace through our humbling ourselves before Him. According to James, we change through a continual returning to God in humility and repentance. That's how we change. So a few questions as we seek to apply this to our life. So think of that thing in your life. Think of that area of struggle in your life, something that needs to change. Maybe it's an area of friendship with the world. Maybe it's something you don't want to let go of. Maybe it's a relationship in your life. Maybe it's just a thought pattern in your life. Now, often we try to fight it on our own. We try to clean ourselves up. We try to, through our willpower, change ourselves in this area, which is an act of pride, and it doesn't work. But the power of grace through repentance can change us. Just this past week, I was talking to somebody here in the congregation. We were having lunch and we were talking about struggle, struggle in the Christian life, and he asked this great question. He said, What about those areas in your life that are so stubborn, they don't seem to change, and you see yourself just coming back and repenting over and over and over for the same thing. Can y'all relate to that? Because it almost feels like if I keep coming back to God and saying the same thing, that eventually he's gonna be like I am with my kids and say, Yeah, that's enough, I don't want to hear it anymore. You're not changing, don't come back to me for that. But here's the thing we got to understand repeated repentance is progress. Repeated repentance is progress. If you have an area in your life that so stubbornly refuses to change, the way to change is not to repent less and try to fix it or cover it up or just live in denial of it. The way to change is to repent more and to repent more deeply. So let me stop there for just a minute and give us a few minutes to talk about. Talk about this idea of how we change and the power of repentance in our life. And if you're new here, we do this often where we have a few moments to interact over the truth of the passage. It's a way of not just hearing the word, but doing it and applying it in our life. So, what's happening in you as you think about this, as you think about repentance, as you think about change, transformation? Let's talk about it for a minute.

SPEAKER_02 31:52

I think about how pervasive self-righteousness is in me. Like, and just how this what James says here calls it out. Um the whole grieve, mourn, and well part. I think I do that best when I remember that. You know, I'm not just a liar and a thief, I'm a murderer and an adulterer, and I'm coveted, like all of it, guilty of all. Yeah. And I think when I forget those things or think that, you know, my sin's not as bad, then it's easy to try to justify myself instead of being justified in Christ. So anyway, I felt really called out and wanted to share.

SPEAKER_03 32:32

Yeah. Thank you, Cliff. You know, one of the natural marks of pride in the human heart, and I mentioned this a minute ago, is its defensiveness. It's this refusal to, as scripture says, walk in the light. And it's this reflex in the human heart that wants to hide or to minimize or to blame shift. And what James wants us to understand is that when we're in that posture, when our heart is proud and we are defensive, you cannot change. It's like a whole mindset and posture of your whole soul that is against God and you cannot experience grace when you're in that place. But you you feel that resistance to honesty in your life? Man, I do. And that is what the Bible calls pride. We just can't admit it, we can't look at it. But if you cannot admit something, if you cannot bring it into the open, like our brother just did. I mean, he just shared that with us. It was beautiful. And we relate. I relate, Cliff. You're not alone in that. I'm like me too. That is the place of power in the Christian life. That's the thing to see. Because when we humble ourselves, and a part of that humbling ourselves is opening ourselves to God, is laying down our defenses, laying down our self-justifications, which we are like experts at, right? Like I can put together like a case immediately. When I'm confronted with something about myself, my inner lawyer comes out and goes to work. You know, here's exhibit A, B, C, D, you know, just working, right? Blame shifting, justifying, right? Diverting, deflecting, all of that stuff. That is the posture of pride in the human heart. And the thing is, when we when our hearts are in that place, God's grace cannot penetrate, just bounces off like a force field. And when you're in that place, you're really miserable. There's no real inner peace, but we don't know what else to do. Just fake it till you make it, right? But when we humble ourselves before God, that is when you take the mask off, when you lower the defenses, and you get honest, and you say, No, this is this it hurts. That's the the grieve morning whale, because there's a grieving over the truth of our sin. It's not a beating yourself up, but there's a grieving when we see what we've done in sin. But when we do that, we're moving into the place of power. And when we repent, and that's repentance, it's just coming back to God. When we do that, heaven, like we we wonder, you know, if I'm honest with God, will he really receive me? Jesus says when one sinner repents, like heaven throws a party. Like everybody's celebrating because it's so dear to God's heart. Right? So I just I I just wanted to say that there is a great example of what he's talking about here. And the humbling of our hearts and the power of repentance.

SPEAKER_01 36:06

I'm uh struggling with uh you know, I think what uh a lot of people have always struggled with in terms of James, which that it seems very worksy and horizontal. And then you get a little relief in this passage because he finally spiritualizes it and makes it vertical. I think as reformed folks, we tend to spiritualize the whole thing. And we tend to make all of the James talk about all of the law-keeping, which is virtually all about the second table of the law and how we relate to our neighbor and how we actually treat our neighbor. And we tend to spiritualize it and worry more about our guilt vis-a-vis God than how our motivations are actually in terms of treating and relating to our neighbor and how we, you know, behave towards them. Yeah. Which is sort of the easy, you know, the I feel like the reform default is to to not, you know, is to do that. It is to what I'll call in this tiny little context, spiritualize it. That word has a lot of meanings, but I think you maybe you see what I'm you know talking about. Because it James feels a lot like just a real explication on Exodus 19 and the love your neighbor as yourself, and that passage, how it just kind of ticks through the various commandments and is expanding on the various commandments and how to love your neighbor in that way. And James seems to pick up on that and just go over them again and again and again. And even, you know, in this passage, he kind of walks back through all of the commandments and touches on all of them, you know, from murder to adultery to you know, stealing and conflict and covetousness and in and hatred and all of those things. And I I don't know, maybe you can comment on kind of the tension. What would it be inaccurate or inappropriate to say that that our repentance, what if our repentance in these things was not so vertical, but was uh maybe a little more intentionally horizontal towards our neighbor? And because James seems to continuously be drawing us back to the horizontal and like how we actually treat our neighbor and our motivation, touching into God's motivation of you know, building this kingdom, and the kingdom isn't just a kingdom where people get get out of hell free cards from a vertical, you know, cleansing, but hopefully the kingdom is actually about treating each other decent, you know, and not hating each other. And uh, you know, really thinking about what repentance vis-a-vis our neighbor means. I know that's ironic because this is the one passage where then you know James actually takes us vertical as opposed to horizontal. But it's actually got me thinking a lot more about repentance in a in a horizontal type sense of actually having a motivation of truly loving our neighbor and putting because the humble ourselves, you know, that that can be vis-a-vis our neighbor too. And the the problem with pride vis-a-vis our neighbor and how we treat them, I feel like that's a real root in my heart uh that that is a barrier to you know really taking some of these things to heart in a horizontal sense and loving my neighbor in that way. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 39:54

I think James is like a wonderful book for the Bible Belt. Because in the Bible Belt, I think we very naturally do what you just said. We take the the vertical, our relationship with God, and the horizontal, our relationship with people, and we kind of separate those. We separate them, you know, and we say, the vertical, my relationship with God, that's the one that really matters. And the the relationship with other people, well, if you get to it, but it's not really that important, right? And so in the Bible belt, it's very easy to be deceived and to think, I'm saved, I'm right with God, you know, I prayed a prayer, walked an aisle when I was young, I believed the right things, I had the right theology, I belonged to the right denomination, whatever it is. I got great theology. I'm okay because the vertical's okay. Meanwhile, the way that we treat people can be utterly broken. Like many of us have probably experienced a really devoutly religious person like cutting you, like shot to the kidney, right? And and and we can divorce those two. Our relationship with God and our relationship with people, but scripture won't allow us to do that because it says they are inseparably connected. And I feel like James leans on this so much because he, you I've called the series true religion, because I think James really wants to break in on our deceptions of thinking because I believe the right things or I prayed the right thing, I'm okay. Meanwhile, we're not looking at our lives, how we're actually treating people, you know. So he wants to call out the fact that we'll praise God and then we'll go and gossip about another person. And James says, oh, that's that's way broken, right? That ought not to be. Or how we can be devoted to God and even give to God and yet not pay our workers a fair wage. Like he he keeps wanting to say, if this and this don't match, you ain't got this. That's what he's doing in here. And and that's why it's one, it's so disturbing. I'm disturbed when I read James. Are you disturbed? I'm disturbed because of me, not because I'm like, oh, some people need to hear this. No, I'm like, oh my gosh, I feel so convicted. But you see, also the thing to see him, James, is that whenever you come under conviction, you are under the graceful work and ministry of the Holy Spirit in your life. That's his rescue and work in you. If you hear this and you're like, good talk, let's go to lunch, doesn't hit me, like you should hear danger from James. If if this just you hear this and you're like, I'm good, you know, what are we doing later? What's who's gonna win the World Cup? Like, James wants to say, danger, right? But if you if you hear this and you're like, oh Lord, I need your grace. Help me to see and to admit what I don't want to see, particularly in the horizontal, because that's where it really works out, you know. We might think we've confessed because we've said it in prayer to God, but we'd never say it to another person. I think James would say, have you really confessed? Right? So if you are feeling conviction, that is a great thing. And what I think James would say in this from this passage is so run to him. Like humble yourself before him, open yourself to his grace and the ministry of the Spirit in your life. So that's a really good point. Y'all got like a whole nother sermon there. So let me let me close this in prayer and we'll go, we'll worship. Lord, we are so deceived by our pride to think that the problem is outside of us, Lord, and and not to see that really the problem is deep within each of our hearts. And so we need your grace. Would you help us to be a people who are submitting ourselves to you continually, who are running to you, drawing near to you, Lord, who are opening our hearts and receiving and being changed by your grace. Do this for your glory. In Christ's name we pray. Amen.