James 4:3-6 (ESV)
You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, to spend it on your passions. 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. Or do you suppose it is to no purpose that the Scripture says, “He yearns jealously over the spirit that he has made to dwell in us”? But he gives more grace. Therefore it says, “God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble.”
In this section of James the Apostle is telling us why we have fights and feuds among us. He tells us it is because of the “lust and passion” that “war” within us (vss 1 and 2). As he develops that theme he goes on to say what we read above. He wants us to be able to pray to God (a topic he uses to close this letter to the churches) but realizes that we can’t hope to pray right if our heart is wrong. Our heart is wrong when we don’t realize that the heart is in love with sin, expressed by a desire to live like the world. Throughout the book of James we are being instructed to live unusual non-worldly lives. James gives us some deep theology when he writes about the fact that we have a spirit in us that “years jealously.” The evilness that is in us is at war with the goodness God placed in us. There is a real war going on in our hearts each day. The evil spirit in us yearns for sin. The Holy Spirit in us years for godliness (the fruits of the Spirit). What James is telling us concerns the matter of this on-going war. The more we ware friends with the world’s ways, the more the Spirit is grieved within us and the more the war between our natural flesh and God rages on. For the believer that war is finished as to the victory at the end, but it never-the-less is a constant fight in this present world. What is the answer? James gives it to us at the end of the above section. BUT HE GIVES MORE GRACE! The only answer to this war within us is the grace of God forwarded to us. God gives grace to the humble. We can’t fight this war by working harder in our own flesh. Remember, our flesh is the thing that is at war with God. The only way to conquer the worldly desires in us is through the grace of God, given freely to those who submit in humility to God. When we constantly resist God and think we can do this on our own, we look more and more like the world. That is the very thing James wants us to avoid. The answer for the war in us is the grace of God given freely to us. When we ask in humility we receive grace to conquer the war within us.
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