James 4:1-4

THE LOWER AND THE HIGHER LIFE

CRITICAL AND EXEGETICAL NOTES

James 4:1. Lusts.—Pleasures, but viewed on their evil side. Desires that are ill regulated. Compare 1 Peter 2:11; Romans 7:23. Evidently James was much distressed by the strife of parties, and the personal quarrellings, in the Jewish communities. Disputing was a besetting sin of the Jewish race. Members.—Organs of sense and action. “The conflict within, in which the evil passion gets the mastery, causes a predisposition to contention, and produces aggression on the well-being and property of others” (Webster).

James 4:2. Desire to have.—Covet. Ask not.—They grasped at things themselves, and did not wait on God for them, or ask His guidance and help in the endeavour to obtain them.

James 4:3. Consume it.—“Spend it in the midst of your [selfish] pleasures.” To pray for that which is but to satisfy our lower, baser nature can never be Christian prayer.

James 4:4.—Omit the word “adulterers.” The term is probably used metaphorically, to describe idolatry and apostasy from the worship of Jehovah. But sins of sensuality in the Christian Church caused much anxiety to the apostles. Compare Matthew 12:39. Plumptre explains the feminine form thus, “In this subserviency to pleasures St. James sees that which, though united with crimes of violence, is yet essentially effeminate.” Will be.—Willeth to be; wisheth to be. Is the enemy.—“Makes himself the.”

MAIN HOMILETICS OF THE PARAGRAPH.— James 4:1

The Secret Causes of Social Contentions.—St. James closes the previous chapter with a description of the characteristic features of practical religious wisdom, the spirit which alone can enable a man to shape his conduct and order his relationships aright. It is “first pure, then peaceable, gentle, easy to be intreated.” And he adds that “the fruit of righteousness is sown in peace for them that make peace.” But when he turns from things as they should be to things as they are, he becomes sadly distressed and anxious. Contentions, heart-burnings, enmities, sectarian rivalries, distinguished the Hebrew Christian communities to whom he wrote. Men were struggling for pre-eminence as teachers, each with his doctrine and interpretation. Thence came wranglings and debates, in which men easily lost their temper and self-control. St. James is very severe on the wranglers, intimating that their spirit was unworthy of regenerate persons. They could be thinking only of gratifying their lower natures. By “wars” here we are not to understand the conflicts of nations, but protracted, violent, widespread, social contentions and disputes; the conflicts caused by sectarian rivalries and disputatious characters. We can form some idea of the condition of the Hebrew Christian Churches by remembering what commotions were made in the Churches St. Paul founded by the visits of the bigoted Jewish teachers. The element of contention is one in which the Christian spirit cannot flourish; and the mischief of it may clearly be seen in the roots out of which it usually springs, and by which it is sustained. According to St. James, the secret causes of failing to gain and keep the spirit of peace in Christian communities are three:

(1) selfish desires;
(2) selfish efforts;
(3) selfish prayers.

I. One secret of contention is our selfish desires.—“Whence come wars and whence come fightings among you? come they not hence, even of your pleasures that war in your members?” The Revised Version makes a useful alteration in putting “pleasures” in place of “lusts,” because the word “lusts” has come to have almost exclusive reference to sensual passions, and St. James intended to include all forms of self-pleasing. St. Peter writes of the “fleshly lusts which war against the soul.” And St. Paul saw “another law” in his members, “warring against the law of his mind, and bringing him into captivity to the law of sin which was in his members.” And our Divine Lord taught that “out of the heart come forth evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witness, railings: these are the things which defile the man.” It is not wrong to have desires. It is wrong not to have them in proper control. Man is a being of desires. In the restlessness of his wantings lies the possibility of his improvements. But we need to distinguish carefully between the natural desires which, when duly met, bring to men healthy, satisfying, and educating pleasures, and those unnatural, morbid, exaggerated desires which follow upon men’s loss of self-restraint through giving way to self-willedness and sin. But St. James only hints at these general considerations. In relation to quarrellings, contentions, and wars, he points out that it is not so much the unrestrainedness of the desires, as the selfishness of the desires, that is the root and cause of evil. The very essence of Christianity is seen in its Founder, who never, in any sense, got, or tried to get, anything for Himself: who “was rich, yet for our sakes became poor”; who “gave His life a ransom for us”; “who thought it not a thing to be held fast, the being equal with God; but emptied Himself, and made Himself of no reputation, that He might serve and save others.” Or to express it in the forms of our text, His desires were wholly unselfish, and so never did cause contentions, and never could. No matter where you may find disputings and conflicts—in families, businesses, society, churches, or nations—you will almost always discover that somebody wants something altogether for himself, and persists in pressing his want against the interests of everybody else. That spirit may be met and rebuked from the merely moral and social standpoints; but we meet and rebuke it from the Christian standpoint. It is essentially un-Christian—altogether unworthy of any one who bears the Christ-name. It is well, however, for us to clearly understand that becoming a Christian never crushes down a man’s desires, unless they are postively wrong. It turns them into a new direction, but keeps, and even augments, their force. This consideration comes in to tone all personal wishes—“Will my gaining these things limit or hinder or injure any one else? It is more important that others should be helped and cheered and blessed than that I should be.” When that unselfish spirit is upon all our longings and desires, it is absolutely certain that we shall not be in any sphere of life the cause of contention and conflict. When even our natural and proper desires, even for personal pleasure, are put into the holy restraints of a Christ-like unselfishness, we become peacemakers wherever we go. Or as St. James puts it, so long as there is a war of desires within us, we shall be a cause of war in the spheres around us. Subdue the warfare within us, bring the desires into the obedience of Christ, tone them with the spirit of Christ, and they may not only shut the doors of the temple of Janus, they may wall them up for ever. The world’s peace will have come.

II. Another secret of contention is our selfish efforts.—Not only the wants are selfish, but there is a wrong and self-trusting character about the ways in which we seek to supply the wants. There is a self-reliant pushing and striving and overriding or driving aside of others which is a most fruitful source of bickerings and disputes. When a man wants something, means to get it by his own efforts, and to master everybody and everything that stands in his way, he is sure to make commotion and heart-burning wherever he goes. St. James expresses this selfish effort of men to force through their inordinate, unrestrained, and self-interested desires in very strong language. “Ye lust, and have not: ye kill, and covet [are jealous], and cannot obtain: ye fight and war; ye have not, because ye ask not.” “When desire becomes the master-passion of a man’s soul, it hurries him on to crimes from which he would at first have shrunk,” as may be illustrated in the cases of David, Judas Iscariot, and Ananias with Sapphira. In saying, “Ye kill,” St. James may mean only, “Ye would even go so far as that to gain your ends.” And we can but be reminded how true it is that in the zeal of the sectarian bigot and the heresy-monger (persons whom St. James has in mind) reputations have often been killed, lives embittered, and worse than death endured. Dean Plumptre says, “There seems, at first, something almost incredible in the thought, that the believers to whom St. James wrote could be guilty of such crimes; but Jewish society was at that time rife with atrocities of like nature, and men, nominally disciples of Christ, might then, as in later times, sink to its level.” According to tradition, St. James himself fell a victim to the passions he thus assails, probably at the hands of a zealot mob. Readers of Josephus are familiar with the bands of zealots and sicarii, who were prominent in the tumults preceding the final siege of Jerusalem. Endeavouring to gain the application of St. James’s teaching to those who live in quieter times, yet are in peril of the same temptations, we may see that he reproves our striving to get what we want in our own self-strength, without any reference of the matter to God, and without dependence for help upon God. He pictures the man of unrestrained desires pushing about, and pushing other people about, but failing to gain what he wants. “Ye have not, because ye ask not.” Striving as earnest endeavour is quite right. We ought to do what we do “with both hands earnestly.” But it must not be self-reliant striving, if we mean it to be Christian. It must be energy, enterprise, perseverance, resoluteness after prayer, and in the spirit of prayer, which keeps us dependent on God, and within His holy restrainings and inspirings.

III. Yet another secret of contention is our selfish prayers.—“Ye ask, and receive not, because ye ask amiss, that ye may spend it in your pleasures.” A self-centred purpose spoils prayer. We may ask for things that we need, but we may not ask for the supply of our mere self-indulgences. The desire must be right, and in right restraint, if we present it in prayer at all. The desire must be right in a wide and not in a narrow, selfish sense, if God is to answer it at all.

SUGGESTIVE NOTES AND SERMON SKETCHES

James 4:1. The Soldiers of the Devil’s Army.—The desires of various sorts of pleasures are, like soldiers of the devil’s army, posted and picketed all over us, in the hope of winning our members, and so ourselves, back to his allegiance, which we have renounced in our baptism.—Bishop Moberly.

The Sources of War.—One great source of war is the love of excitement, of emotion, of strong interests. Illustrate from love of the chase. Another is the passion for superiority, for triumph, for power. There is a predominance of this passion in rulers. Another is admiration of the brilliant qualities displayed in war. This prevents our receiving a due impression of its crimes and miseries. Another is false patriotism. And another is the impressions we receive in early life. The community possesses indisputable right to resort to war of defence, when all other means have failed for securing its continued existence. The earth holds not a more abandoned monster than the sovereign who, entrusted with the dearest interests of a people, commits them to the dreadful hazards of war, that he may extend his prostituted power, and fill the earth with his worthless name. Therefore we should teach true sentiments as to the honour of kings and the glory of nations.—W. E. Charming, D.D.

The Christian View of Public War.—The text does not directly refer to national wars, but to the conflicts and contentions that arise among Christians and in Christian Churches. Yet it expresses a principle which is operating in every sphere—the small spheres of the individual, the family, the Church, and the larger sphere of nations. War can never on both sides be right. In the terrible scenes of war we may see the workings of human lust, and thereby learn to trace aright the evil workings of lust everywhere. War usually is the expression of one man’s sin. It is the truly awful result of some human lust, some self-pleasing, some self-aggrandisement. A fuller discernment of the causes out of which all wars and fightings spring prepares the way for the working of the Christian spirit, which, dethroning lust, and enthroning God, and in Him goodness, moral excellence, and brotherhood, hastens on the time when nations shall learn war no more. It is important that there should be given to men vivid, forcible illustrations of the fearful majesty of power lying in human sin. God writes the evil of sin in famine, earthquake, disease, and death, But it seems as though man would not read God’s writing; so he writes for himself in soldiers’ blood, and widows’ wail, and orphans’ tear, and wasted lands, and rifled treasuries, and ruined commerce, and trodden harvests, and broken hearts, the evil of sin. Let those who watch man writing read correctly, and learn the abominableness of human lust and sin, and hail the coming of Him who kills sin at its root—kills the lust—and kills with it every leaf and flower and fruit of war—social, ecclesiastical, national—and reigns at last as “Prince of peace.”

James 4:1. The Root-cause of War.—St. James wrote his epistle during those years of national decline and social anarchy that immediately preceded the final destruction of the Holy City. There was much sectarian strife, bitter party feeling, and there was even murderous violence, and the spirit of the times seems to have seriously affected the Christian communities. Internal conflicts and sectarian rivalries seriously threatened the integrity of the Jewish nation. Self-seeking and personal strife were imperilling the Christian Churches. The first bishop of Jerusalem puts his hand to the work of staying this strife. He arrests the men that love and seek war, and bids them think—bids them see the essential evil of war—all kinds of war—in the vileness of the root out of which it all springs. He lifts off and puts away at once all the false glamour of war; he does not even stop to impress his readers with details of the shuddering horrors of battle-fields and soldiers’ hospitals; he goes right to the very heart of the matter; compels us to see the root-wrong, the lusting, the coveting, out of which all contention, all war, comes. A great modern writer says: “That man, born of woman, bound by ties of brotherhood to man, and commanded by an inward law and the voice of God to love and to do good, should, through selfishness, pride, revenge, inflict these agonies, shed these torrents of blood—here is an evil which combines with exquisite suffering, fiendish guilt. All other evils fade before it.”

I. The root-principle of war stated.—It is lusting. It is covetousness. It is the desire—the violent, unrestrained desire—to have for self. It is the exclusion of all love for, all thought of, or care concerning, others. It is the determination to get, whoever may have to suffer through our getting; to push roughly aside all who stand in the way of our acquisition. It is the wilful forgetfulness that other people have their rights as well as we. Surely all this spirit is of the earth, earthy. It is the foul blossoming of human corruption. All such lustings are of their father the devil. His stamp is on them all. St. James strikes right home, past all men’s delusions and excuses, to the inmost source of all contentions and bickerings and wars. He is true if his principle be applied to family life. What broke up Isaac’s home, in the olden days, and set brothers at enmity, but Jacob’s desire to have for self? What broke up David’s family life but the envy of his sons? Try all cases of family warfare that have come within your observation. Down at the bottom there is always found to lie somebody’s grasping for self. He is true if his principle be applied to Church life. These bad contentions that distress Churches always follow upon some one’s pressing his own will, his own interests, his own party, before the general well-being. Nobody ever fights in a Christian Church who really wants to obtain the greatest good for the whole. It is always a class, a section, or an individual, seeking its own things. What makes business life so full of struggle in our day? The same thing—the desire to have. Aggravation at the prosperity of another, if in any sense it can be supposed to cross and check our own.

II. The root-principle of war is absolutely opposed to the root-principle of Christianity.—The one principle is—Lusting to possess; the other principle is—Longing to give away. And you can never make these two principles dwell together in peace. The one is—Get for self, no matter who goes down through the getting; the other is—“Look not every man on his own things, but every man also on the things of others.” Which is the corrupt and devilish principle? Which is radiant with the sweet light of God, and Christ, and heaven, and peace? The unselfish, Christ-like care for others carries its healing balm, its peace-preserving virtues, into every family, stilling all tumult, knitting heart to heart, and life to life, until the earth-home bears a suggestion of the many-mansioned home above, where all is peace, because each serves the other. It is the care for the whole that settles the stormy strife of Churches, and ensures that atmosphere of peace in which alone noble Christian work can ever be done.

James 4:3. Our Failures in Prayer.—R.V. “Ye ask, and receive not, because ye ask amiss, that ye may spend it in your pleasures.” St. James gives, sharply and suggestively, the explanation of much that is lacking in Christian life. We fail to obtain so many things that we ask for. We fret over the lack; but we often fail to see the reasons for the lack, and fail to see that the reasons may lie altogether in ourselves. Even when we do not err by failing to ask, we may err, and make such answer as we wish to obtain impossible, by asking amiss. What then may possibly be wrong about even our Christian prayers, which may suffice to explain our failure to receive Divine benedictions?

1. They are wrong if offered in the mere routine of habit. We have prayed morning and night ever since we prayed at our mother’s knee, and we may have come to utter a mere formula; to go through a routine of words which mean nothing in particular, and which there is no particular reason for God to take notice of. The daily prayer habit is not indeed without a value of its own; but it has no precise value as request that calls for Divine attention. All it wants, and all it asks, from God is just a smile as He passes. When daily prayer is at its best, it is little more than a daily committing of ourselves to the Divine keeping and care. But if it ceased to be a mere routine of habit, if it came to be a reality of supplication and intercession, might we not get free of one form of “asking amiss,” and find that, asking aright, we received, and life became altogether fuller of precise daily Divine benedictions?

2. They are wrong if offered insincerely. Prayers are always made worthless and ineffective, when there is self-consciousness in them; when our real aim is to make a show of our piety, or to be seen of men. Our Lord severely reproved all prayer that had in it the characteristic Pharisaic taint. When a man prays in order to show his piety, that is what God hears him pray, and not the things he seems to ask for; and the answer to his prayer is only this—praise and reward for his show of piety; and God never can give that, so the insincere man “asks and receives not, because he asks amiss.” Beware then of all “beautiful prayers”! Beware of your own “beautiful prayers”; for they only mean that you want God to praise you, and it would be no blessing to you if He did. Beware of other people’s beautiful prayers; for they only mean that they want you and God together to praise and admire them. And they who pray them, and you who hear them, are best blessed when, asking in that style, you receive not.

3. They are wrong if offered conventionally. This is very different from insincerely. There is grave danger of our asking for things so often that we cease to put any mind into the asking. They become the proper things to say, so they are said, but have no practical inspiring power in them; they have become no more than pious sentiments conventionally uttered. Mark Guy Pearse, in his Dan’l Quorm, puts this peril of our praying in such a crisp and suggestive way, that the passage may be given by way of illustration. Quaint Dan’l Quorm is represented as saying: “I happened once to be stayin’ with a gentleman—a long way from here—a very religious kind of a man he was, and in the mornin’ he began the day with a long family prayer that we might be kep’ from sin, and might have a Christ-like spirit, and the ‘mind that was also in Christ Jesus,’ and that we might have the love of God shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Ghost given unto us. A beautiful prayer it was, and thinks I, What a good kind of man you must be! But about an hour after I happened to be comin’ along the farm, and I heard him hollerin’, and scoldin’, and goin’ on, findin’ fault with everybody and everythin’. And when I came into the house with ’en he began again. Nothing was right, and he was so impatient and so quick-tempered. ‘’Tis very provokin’ to be annoyed in this way, Dan’l. I don’t know what servants in these days be good for but to worry and vex one, with their idle, slovenly ways.’ I didn’t say nothing for a minute or two. And then I says, ‘You must be very much disappointed, sir.’ ‘How so, Dan’l? Disappointed?’ ‘I thought you were expecting to receive a very valuable present this morning, sir, and I see it hasn’t come.’ ‘Present, Dan’l’; and he scratched his head, as much as to say, ‘Whatever can the man be talkin’ about?’ ‘I certainly heard you speakin’ of it, sir,’ I says, quite coolly. ‘Heard me speak of a valuable present. Why, Dan’l, you must be dreamin’. I’ve never thought of such a thing.’ ‘Perhaps not, sir; but you’ve talked about it; and I hoped it would come whilst I was here, for I should dearly like to see it.’ He was gettin’ angry with me now, so I thought I would explain. ‘You know, sir, this mornin’ you prayed for a Christ-like spirit, and the mind that was in Jesus, and the love of God shed abroad in your heart.’ ‘Oh, that’s what you mean, is it!’ And he spoke as if that weren’t anything at all. ‘Now, sir, wouldn’t you rather be surprised if your prayer was to be answered? If you were to feel a nice, gentle, lovin’ kind of a spirit comin’ down upon you, all patient and forgivin’ and kind? Why, sir, wouldn’t you come to be quite frightened like; and you’d come in, and sit down all in a faint, and reckon you must be a-goin’ to die, because you felt so heavenly-minded?’ He didn’t like it very much,” said Dan’l, “but I delivered my testimony, and learnt a lesson for myself too. We should stare very often if the Lord was to answer our prayers.”

4. Our prayers are also wrong if they are offered with ulterior aims. St. James was evidently thinking of cases in which men asked for what was very necessary in the endeavour to live the Christian life, meet the Christian obligations, and render the Christian service; but they did not intend to use what they might gain in answer in these spheres. They purposed to spend it on their own pleasures. The great Heart-Searcher, to whom our prayers are addressed, is in no way deceived, and makes no mistakes. We cannot have from Him what we intend to use for other things than those we ask them for. The prodigal son asked for his portion, and the father supposed he was going to set up in business for himself. That prodigal had an ulterior aim; he meant to see a bit of life, and enjoy himself in the indulgence of his youthful passions; and his prayer to his father had better not have been answered. God never answers, save in judgment, the prayer of a divided purpose.
5. It is but dealing with a familiar point, which gains full treatment elsewhere, to add that prayer is wrong if offered without attendant watching for the answers. Nothing could be more humiliating to a Christian man than for him to be shown the record of the many petitions that he had offered, of which he had thought no more after they were offered. He does not know whether God answered them or not; he never took the trouble to notice. Very possibly he has had many and many a blessing in his life, which he never thought of as being what it really was, a gracious answer to his prayers. We have not. We wish we had. But why do we lack? Why do we fail to obtain the temporal and spiritual blessings that would be the enrichment of our lives? It is all explained. St. James says that two things will sufficiently explain it all. “We ask not”; or else, “We ask amiss.” If the lack and failure are explained, the remedy is suggested in the explanation. It also is twofold. Pray; and pray aright. “For every one that asketh receiveth; and he that seeketh findeth; and to him that knocketh it shall be opened.”

James 4:4. The Marriage Figure of Unfaithfulness to God.—The prophetical books make constant use of the marriage figure. The nation of Israel is thought of as bound to Jehovah with bonds as close as those with which a wife is bound to her husband. The bond is so suitable to represent the union of the nation with Jehovah, because it rests upon mutual affection; upon the love of the husband for the wife as well as that of the wife for the husband. In the East there is an almost exaggerated jealousy characteristic of husbands, which is illustrated in the case of an Eastern merchant who, on return after a six months’ absence from home, offered public thanksgivings because his wife had never once left the house while he was away.

I. The tie binding the soul to God is like that binding wife to husband.—It implies a gracious selection and calling on the part of God. A loving response on the part of the soul. Mutual pledges taken; a lifelong covenant entered into. A tie which should become closer day by day as each discovers the worth and goodness of the other.

II. The peril of breaking the tie binding the soul to God is like the peril of breaking the tie binding the wife to the husband.—It is the attraction of some other love. In the case of man and woman, either may be drawn aside into heart, or life, unfaithfulness. We can only think of man as possibly unfaithful to God; never of God as unfaithful to man. The world is the comprehensive term that gathers up the things that draw men away from God. And we can think of the various forms in which the world presents its attractions. Friendship, implying the going out of our heart to the world, is enmity with God, just as when a wife takes up with another love her own husband becomes distasteful to her.

III. The consequences of breaking the tie binding us to God are like the consequences of breaking the tie binding the wife to the husband.—The husband is dishonoured. The home is broken up. The wife is ruined. There are natural penalties that fall on the unfaithful; and the just judgments of God are added to the natural penalties.