Pastor: Simon Murphy

Book recommended: Instruments in the redeemers hands (People in need of change, helping people in need of change)

Author: David Tripp

Affiliation Link for Book Depository: Book Depository Link

I’ve personally purchased this book as a genuine attempt to understand how can we help one another as people that are also in need of change.

Sermon comes from: Book of James 4

Introduction:

• How our hearts drive a lot of our desires and thus conflict.
• What does God respond to that
• Don’t just think of our relationships from the horizontal plane but also the vertical reality that we often fail to see in our relationships
• If we fail to see God in our relationships, then we are merely looking to life hacks or management techniques to deal with our relationships.
• James 4 is not a chapter about life hacks. But to walk rightly before God will create the create the condition for a flourishing relationship
• We need to think of our interactions with people through our walk with God
• Don’t even entertain to physical abusive relationship, and you need to get out of it. When there are other kind of abuse, the extent can be difficult to navigate, and thus needs to be spoken to someone to make sense of it.

1. Understand our conflict vertically

• Think of conflict through our lens of our walk with God
• What you really want, is at the bottom of much conflict.
  • Double minded, we want to do two competing things (jealousy and pride)
• v2: You covet and cannot obtain, so you fight and quarrel.
  • Some of the desires we have are not filtered in prayer before God. There is a double mindedness that they are not under God’s rule and God’s reign.
  • If we are in for a conflict, is our first response to go before God in prayer? How to reflect God’s grace and mercy to the person we are facing?
  • v3, you do not have, because you do not ask God for them. And even when we ask and don’t receive, we ask in a wrong way. We ask in a way to spend on our passions.
  • Our double mindedness can be seen in our prayers.
  • Is it really for our peace’s sake or for God’s glory sake?
• At the root of our condition is our spiritual condition that we are separated from God and that we need to get back to Him.
• V4: You adulterous people!! When we have conflict with others’ and is double minded, or our godless desires is us being adulterous towards God (thinking from a vertical sense)
  • Fundamentally, it is about our condition with God
  • God is on the receiving end on a v difficult relationship
• In our conflict, God wants us to see first the vertical conflict we are currently having with God first and foremost.
  • Reframe how we think

2. How heavenly wisdom is going to reveal and heal what is going on inside our hearts

• V6: BUT he gives more grace.

• Our desiring wants us to take things for ourselves, but the giving of his grace is through the giving of himself.

• This wisdom is different from how we naturally would think about fixing our relationship with God. We may think of it from a management thinking perspective

  • And this wisdom from God may seem like foolishness & weakness to the world. Because it is from a perspective of vertical reality.

• God’s grace is given that we will turn our hearts back towards Him again.

• His kindness is to lead us back to repentance.

• When we receive Grace, we come to a place where we are at the mercy of God. We cannot receive Grace with Pride still in our hearts.

• Seek to love, understand one another. Not to be defensive of our point.

• Now, when we are healed in our vertical relationship, we can now have that power and strength to draw from God to engage in our horizontal relationships and conflicts.

• Questions to ask myself in self evaluation:

• v8. Understanding what is going on inside our hearts:

  • What do I want? What am I seeking here?
  • What is making me all defensives?
  • How does our desires deviate from God’s will and heart?
  • We need to have God’s grace and presence to be poured out into our hearts, in which we are to access by faith.
  • What exactly am I repenting from? What sin in specific? Explore what is going on in our heart, what do we really want? Do we want to confess this to Jesus? And who else to confess too? Grieve. We need to understand how these desires and sin is making us double minded and thus destroy our relationship with Jesus?
    • Repentance is always linked to faith. Jesus was not passive aggressive.
  • What does it mean to walk by Faith now just as my colleague is pressing our every button.

3. How to walk in heavenly wisdom towards others?

• v 11 -12: watch what we say. What what we think in our hearts (judging one another)
• James spoke in a vertical sense. Everytime we have a conflict and ungodly, we are judging the law by thinking that we are thinking the law isn’t the best and that we have to take things into our own measure.
• Put ourselves to be under the law of Love that bears the heart of righteousness.

How then should we interact with others?

This can be found in verse: James 3:17

• Wisdom of love! 7 criteria into 3 categories
  • Reasonable and peaceable, gentle and open to reason. Considerate (to be slow to speak and quick to listen), submissive (to be flexible and easily persuaded, not always to be right in our own mind. Its more like an attitude. How can I bend my right to love someone better). Do not jump into conclusions, dig under what is their heart driving at? So we can help to love them and help them.
• Don’t find ourselves reacting and triggered by everything.
• Seek to listen.
• These kind of concessions are only possible when we are humbled by the cross and so be able to recognise the grain of goodness in other people.
• The only way we can be merciful to others is when we are standing under the waterfall of mercy given by God. Otherwise it would be too difficult to give to people. We are trying to protect our own rights.
• V17: Be sincere. Impartial and sincere. Be single minded (not to act with someone else). Don’t say one thing but mean another. Speech is honest and also filled with Love.
• When we process our motives before God in the vertical aspects in our walk, thereupon we can be honest without condemning, to give grace. The only way we can be single minded is when our heart seeks to please only one (that is God) and thus we can see things through the lens of God.
• When we think primarily from a horizontal plane, we miss out the vertical reality that is trying happening in our hearts.