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A Warning Against Worldliness

This sermon from James 4:1-4 addresses the root causes of quarrels and fights, emphasizing how unfulfilled desires and worldly pursuits lead to enmity with God. The fallen nature of humanity is highlighted, showing how prideful desires within us can lead to conflicts. The outline covers the questions, internal struggles, wrong asking, and the severe rebuke discussed in the verses. The message urges repentance, submission to God's rule, and a focus on God's kingdom and will. References to Matthew and other scriptures reinforce the importance of seeking God's guidance and aligning our desires with His. The takeaway emphasizes the need to submit to God entirely and surrender our agendas to His sanctification.

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A Warning Against Worldliness

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  1. A Warning Against Worldliness James 4:1-4 May 11, 2014

  2. James 4:1-4 4 What causes quarrels and what causes fights among you? Is it not this, that your passions are at war within you? 2 You desire and do not have, so you murder. You covet and cannot obtain, so you fight and quarrel. You do not have, because you do not ask.3 You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, to spend it on your passions. 4 You adulterous people! Do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God? Therefore whoever wishes to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God.

  3. Fallen human nature: Quarrels are the result of unfulfilled, prideful desires warring within us. • verse 4 “…friendship with the world is enmity with God… Therefore whoever wishes to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God.” • If you are a friend of the world, you are an enemy of God!

  4. Outline 4:1 – The Question and Answer 4:2 – The Inside Stuff 4:3 – Asking Wrongly 4:4 – The Severe Rebuke

  5. 1. The Question and Answer (4:1) 4:1 - What causes quarrels and what causes fights among you? Is it not this, that your passions are at war within you? • Fights and quarrels are caused when you and I desire something and cannot get it. • “A desire for even a good thing becomes a bad thing when that desire becomes a ruling thing.” • Their passions, their desires were at war within the local assembly.

  6. 2. The Inside Stuff (4:2) 2 You desire and do not have, so you murder. You covet and cannot obtain, so you fight and quarrel. You do not have, because you do not ask. • Frustrated desire is what is breeding the intense strife that is shaking the church. • The reason you are not the kind of leaders and church you want to be is because of your failure to ask God.

  7. 3. Asking Wrongly (v. 3) 3 You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, to spend it on your passions. • Matthew 7:7-8 - "Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and the one who seeks finds, and to the one who knocks it will be opened. • Matthew 6:9-10 - Pray then like this: "Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. • Jesus is speaking of an asking that has as it’s focus God’s name, God’s kingdom, and God’s will.

  8. 4. The Severe Rebuke (v 4) • 4 You adulterous people! Do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God? Therefore whoever wishes to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God. • Turn, repent, submit to God’s rule and reign in your life!

  9. Is. 54:5-6 - For your Maker is your husband, the Lord of hosts is his name; and the Holy One of Israel is your Redeemer, the God of the whole earth he is called. For the Lord has called you like a wife deserted and grieved in spirit, like a wife of youth when she is cast off, says your God. • Jeremiah 3:20 - Surely, as a treacherous wife leaves her husband, so have you been treacherous to me, O house of Israel, declares the Lord.'"

  10. Hosea 2:5-7 - For their mother has played the whore; she who conceived them has acted shamefully. For she said, 'I will go after my lovers, who give me my bread and my water, my wool and my flax, my oil and my drink.' Therefore I will hedge up her way with thorns, and I will build a wall against her, so that she cannot find her paths. She shall pursue her lovers but not overtake them, and she shall seek them but shall not find them. Then she shall say, 'I will go and return to my first husband, for it was better for me then than now.' Matt. 12:39; 16:4 - But he answered them, "An evil and adulterous generation seeks for a sign, but no sign will be given to it except the sign of the prophet Jonah.

  11. The takeaway… God tolerates no rivals! • Submit to God. Before God, the way up is down (vv. 7-10). • Face the facts about yourself. Your life is not your own, you have been bought with a price, with the precious blood of Jesus Christ. • You humbly submitting your agendas, plans and desires to him in prayer and asking him to purify and sanctify them.

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