How to Have a Prayer Life that God Listens To, Pt 3
By Pastor Matt Black
28
November 2007
Midweek Prayer Meeting
James 4:6-10
Scripture and Theme: Open your Bible to the book of James 4:6-10 this evening. The title of our message this evening is the third and final part of a study called: “How to Have a Prayer Life that God Listens To”.
Introduction: Yesterday’s power is not sufficient for this hour! So when you come to chapter 4 and verses 6-10, James is saying: This is what you need to do to become a believer! There are ten imperatives here. This is James’ invitation to repent. This is what humility and repentance looks like. God has no fellowship with people who have divided interests! Humble people are sold out people. They are sold out to the world. Proud people are sold out people. They may talk about God, but they really are sold out to the world.
What category do you fall into? Proud or Humble? God answers prayer! But proud people need not pray—God doesn’t listen. But God doesn’t listen to people who two-time Him with the world. James is a book that slices through all the outward show that we like to adorn in our lives. This message is to unbelievers in James’ church in Jerusalem.
This passage therefore is for lost people to repent. But I believe we as believers can learn a lot about our own repentance from this passage. The Christian life is a constant battle against sin.
So let’s go ahead and stand for God’s Word this evening. Open your hearts to God to speak to you tonight. Let’s read in James 4:1-10, “From whence come wars and fightings among you? come they not hence, even of your lusts that war in your members? 2 Ye lust, and have not: ye kill, and desire to have, and cannot obtain: ye fight and war, yet ye have not, because ye ask not. 3 Ye ask, and receive not, because ye ask amiss, that ye may consume it upon your lusts. 4 Ye adulterers and adulteresses, know ye not that the friendship of the world is enmity with God? whosoever therefore will be a friend of the world is the enemy of God. 5 Do ye think that the scripture saith in vain, The spirit that dwelleth in us lusteth to envy? 6 But he giveth more grace. Wherefore he saith, God resisteth the proud, but giveth grace unto the humble. 7 Submit yourselves therefore to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you. 8 Draw nigh to God, and he will draw nigh to you. Cleanse your hands, ye sinners; and purify your hearts, ye double minded. 9 Be afflicted, and mourn, and weep: let your laughter be turned to mourning, and your joy to heaviness. 10 Humble yourselves in the sight of the Lord, and he shall lift you up”.
[Prayer for guidance]
If you want to know what an unregenerate professing Christian looks like, here it is. They do not have the fruit of true salvation. Sure they pray to God, they go to church, yes. But their heart is corrupt. James uses two words to make his point unmistakable.
Even though these people were secret sinners, he was saying, before God, you might as well be flaunting your immorality.
So James brings ten things to light—Ten imperatives of union with God. God will not listen to a two-timer or a sinner who flaunts his unfaithfulness!
So how do we come to God? Well, as a person who draws near to a city sees signs, there are ten things that show us how to have a prayer life. We’ve already gone over four of them. Let’s review those.
1. "Submit yourselves therefore to God" (verse 7). What does that mean? It is very simple. It means to ‘align yourself under the authority of God.’
“SUBMIT”: The word is used of troops under a general. It means that you have a loyal allegiance to Jesus Christ as sovereign Lord over your life.
· It means pledging your allegiance to God above all others. It is pledging your allegiance to God’s will, no matter what it may mean.
Do you want God’s will no matter what that means?
My heart’s desire is to have that constant unbroken communion with God. You can have that! God loves it when you align yourself under His authority. His way is the way I want!
2. Secondly, we saw that you must “Resist the devil” (verse 7). Literally, ‘take your stand against the devil’ and he will flee from you! Turn your back on Satan and take a stand against his control over you.
Christianity is not mysticism. We don’t let go and let God. The Christian life is a war! Take your stand against the devil. The word is diabolos, the slanderer, the accuser, the devil. Be ready for satanic attack at all times.
The Christian life is a life of constant battle. You never get a break from resisting the devil. Even at this moment the satanic bullets are flying over our heads. Everything we do as Christians ought to be an act of war against the devil and this world!
You must see Satan as a defeated foe! Listen, Satan goes about as “a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour” (1 Peter 5:8), but he’s a toothless lion. He’s conquered. Remember: “Greater is he that is in you, than he that is in the world” (1 John 4:4).
And now we come to a third command to enter into that life with God. If you’ve entered into it, you know this is your constant desire. Listen to this promise. There’s an attitude of heart that pleases God in prayer. Here it is in verse 8:
3. “Draw nigh to God, and he will draw nigh to you” (verse 8). The term "draw nigh" originally referred to the priests who were to “draw near” and offer sacrifices on the Day of Atonement. Wicked and unclean they were, but they had to do it through the blood!! It was the highest privilege for the priests to draw near to God and have that position on the Day of Atonement. It was the highest privilege for the high priest to draw near alone before God Almighty!
Now God has opened the way for you to be restored—He’s granted you access through Jesus’ blood! He invites you to draw close to Him!
He calls us to forsake all others and be joined to Him. I don’t need to tell you what this means! Men, when you saw your wife for the first time, nobody had to tell you to draw near to her!! There’s an abandonment in this word!!
Drawing near to God means my crying heart's desire is for intimacy with the living God.
Then we come to another imperative…
4. Fourthly, “Cleanse your hands, ye sinners” (verse 8). The word is katharizo. It is catharsis in English and it means ‘a purging, a purifying, a cleaning, or a cleansing.’
So James is speaking of a clean and a cleansed life—not in man’s eyes or even in your own eyes, but in God’s eyes.
Why hands? “Cleanse your hands, ye sinners” (verse 8). Why hands? Because hands are the symbols of action, the symbols of behavior. He’s talking about taking action here. There is a forsaking of sin. There is a halt to sinning. So we are talking about a radical repentance. Scrub the filth of sin in every way out of your life! We need to experience a radical amputation from this world!
A. Isaiah’s plea. In the OT book of Isaiah we have a beautiful picture of this. Look at chapter In Isaiah 1:15-16, "when ye spread forth your hands, I will hide mine eyes from you: yea, when ye make many prayers, I will not hear: your hands are full of blood.”
It does you no good to pray if you are not totally right with God and man. Lay your gift at the altar, get right with your brother, and then come to God. Look now at verse 16 in Isaiah 1, “Wash you, make you clean; put away the evil of your doings from before mine eyes; cease to do evil; 17 Learn to do well…" Take some action! Then He says in verse 18, “Come now, and let us reason together, saith the LORD: though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool.” Cleanse yourselves. Stop sinning and start obeying God. Stop sinning in your marriage. Stop sinning in your walk with God. Are you prayerless? Start praying? Are you watching things on TV or listening to things on the radio that God abominates? It does you no use to pray. Cleanse your hands!
B. David’s plea. Remember what David said in Psalm 24. You and I would do well to come to God like this every day. Look at Psalm 24:3-5, “Who shall ascend into the hill of the LORD? or who shall stand in his holy place? 4 He that hath clean hands, and a pure heart; who hath not lifted up his soul unto vanity, nor sworn deceitfully. 5 He shall receive the blessing from the LORD”
C. Dirty Fingernails Illustration. Ladies, you don’t go to your wedding day with dirty fingernails. And you don’t go to the Lord with dirty sin in your heart and in your life!
The heart touched by God hungers for righteousness and for clean hands. You hate what you see about yourself, your sin, the heinousness of it is repulsive.
We come to our fifth key to a genuine walk with God in verse 8…
5. “Purify your hearts, ye double minded” (verse 8). Here we are commanded to repent inwardly. All sin comes from the fountain of the heart. Purifying your heart allows you to see God. Matthew 5:8, “Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God.” And as Isaiah, you see the King “high and lifted up”, then you begin to see your sin.
Look again at Psalm 24. What was the psalmist's cry? Psalm 24:3, “Who shall ascend into the hill of the LORD? or who shall stand in his holy place? 4 He that hath clean hands, and” what else? He must also have “a pure heart”. It's the heart, Jeremiah said, that is “deceitful above all things and desperately wicked”. And the sinner comes not just longing to be delivered from the things he did that are wrong, but from the wrongness that's deep within him.
Jeremiah 4:4, “Circumcise yourselves to the LORD, and take away the foreskins of your heart, ye men of Judah and inhabitants of Jerusalem”.
Joel 2:13, “And rend your heart, and not your garments, and turn unto the LORD your God”.
Double minded has to do with wanting to be mastered by two Lords. What does James 1:8 say about a double minded man? “A double minded man is unstable in all his ways.” And verse 7 gives the verdict, “For let not that man think that he shall receive any thing of the Lord.” You can’t deal with God until you have purified your heart—your motives, your desires. Until all you want is God, you will not serve and follow God. Prayer comes out of this desire.
So as we come to God, let us pray with David in Psalm 139:23-24, “Search me, O God, and know my heart: try me, and know my thoughts: 24 And see if there be any wicked way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.”
Do you see God high and lifted up? If so, you too become undone about your sin. You see God and you see your sin correctly. That leads to our sixth mark of knowing God. It is a command to be afflicted over sin.
6. “Be afflicted” (verse 9). Affliction is the inward sign of repentance. It is the inward brokenness over sin. It is the response to a true estimation of your own sinfulness. It means to feel wretched—to feel absolutely totally miserable. This is an unbearable inward conviction of sin.
Our response to our sin is to have a broken spirit. Do you have a grief over your sin that makes your heart ache? That’s affliction.
Urgency illustration: There’s an urgency to this. It would be like coming home, thinking everything was ok after an evening with friends and family. But you turn on the light to your kitchen, and someone had left some food out, and there are roaches crawling all over it. Are you going to leave it out? Are you going to be able to sleep? No you are afflicted.
James says “be afflicted!” If you want to come to God, be broken! We don’t often say that to people. Listen, you have to feel bad before you can feel good.
This feeling, this emotion, follows the true estimate of one's sinfulness. The Christian life is filled with joy, but it doesn’t start out that way. It is sad, because oftentimes when we give the Gospel, we want to get the bad part out of the way and get to the good part. But the fact is, you are a wretch. And Jesus came to save wretches. But we need to give people sufficient time to feel their own wretchedness.
Transition: James just told us to be afflicted, now he tells us to “mourn”. The affliction is the inward sign of repentance, the mourning is the outward sign.
7. So, the seventh command James gives us is to “mourn” (verse 9). Matthew 5:4 says it well, “Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted.” What are we to be mourning over? Mourning over our sinfulness. Our response to our sin is to have a broken spirit. Do you have a grief over your sin that makes your heart ache? That’s affliction, but your inner pain over sin will result in outward signs of grief.
Repentance is to agree with the justice of God about our sin, and to be shaken to the core by what we have done. It results in a physical, emotional, and spiritual reaction. It is a mourning that comes from the very depth of the soul. It is to agonize. The word, in fact, is used “to lament for the dead, to have a funeral‑like grief”[2]
8. This leads us to our eight command: “and weep” (verse 9). Mourning is how the spirit responds. And weeping is how the body responds, crying, shedding tears. Inner sorrow works its way to the outside.
Do you remember what Peter did when he had just betrayed Christ? He went out and Mark 14:72 says he went out and wept bitterly. Tears are the outward evidence of brokenness over sin. Tears are the way repentance is very often released and evidenced on the outside.
9. Our ninth command is in verse 9 also: “let your laughter be turned to mourning, and your joy to heaviness” (verse 9). “The word ‘laughter’ is used only here in the New Testament, gelos, it's only here. It's a word that isn't used. It indicates the leisurely laughter of men indulging in their desires and pleasures.”[3]
The person who knows God can no longer continue taking this world in a light manner. This “laughter” that is to be turned to “mourning” pictures people who give no serious thought to God, no thought to life, death, sin, judgment, holiness. Stop that, he says, and turn your laughter into mourning. Why? Because you see your sin. And turn your joy into “heaviness”
Heaviness means “gloominess, shame, sorrow, a down‑cast look on the face, hanging the face in shame.” Luke 18 tells us of the publican who wouldn't so much as lift his face toward heaven but having his head bowed looking down beat upon his breast and cried out, “God be merciful to me…a sinner.”
And then James wraps it all up in the tenth of his commandments in verse 10. And this is the summation of everything.
10. “Humble yourselves in the sight of the Lord, and he shall lift you up” (verse 10). The word for humble, tapeinoo, means to make yourself low. Voluntarily put yourself down in the sight of the Lord. Conscious of His presence, conscious that He is watching, conscious of who He is, infinitely holy, sovereign majestic God. He is so great. He is so mighty. He is so pure. He is so perfect. He is so holy. Come to the Lord as Isaiah and say—“I am undone…I am a man of unclean lips”. Come to Him and have your iniquity taken away and your sins purged!
Conclusion: Next week we’ll look at a few more. But let’s pledge our allegiance to God. Let’s align ourselves under His sovereignty no matter what the pain and what the cost. Let’s do the hard thing because He is worthy. Let’s resist the devil. Everything we do as Christians is an act of war against this world!
Hymn no. 418 Trust and Obey