James 4:7-8, "Therefore, submit to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you. Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you. Cleanse your hands, sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded."
Two verses, yet they hold so much.
Okay, let's start with the main points of what James writes that we should do....
- Submit to God
- Resist the devil
- Draw near to God
- Cleanse your hands
- Purify your hearts
Let's start with the first one.
Submit to God. Submit basically means to yield to another's authority. When we submit to God and to His authority we're recognizing Him as Who He is - He's the Creator of the universe and everything in it, He's the King of the World, He's the One and Only God.
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So next is James writing to
resist the devil. The devil AKA Satan. Satan tempts us, he makes sin look desirable. Sometimes it's obvious what is sin and sometimes it isn't. But when we pray to God, He can give us the strength to resist the devil and his attempts.
Matthew 26:41, "Stay awake and pray, so that you won’t enter into temptation. The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak."
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Draw near to God. The author of Hebrews actually talks quite a bit about drawing near to God.
Hebrews 10:22, "...let us
draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith, with our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience and our bodies washed in pure water."
Hebrews 11:6, "Now without faith it is impossible to please God, since the one who
draws near to him must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who seek him."
To draw near to God we must first believe He exists. Makes sense right? I mean, you can't really draw near to someone you don't believe exists. Draw near with a true heart as well.
Look, when we draw near to God, we have to leave everything else behind. You can draw near to Him if you're still hauling around all of your idols or sins. You gotta leave it behind. I think sometimes we think we are leaving it behind, until we realize we aren't. There have been so many moments in my life where I've had to take a serious look at my life and see where my devotion was. So often its easy to get swept up in friendships, TV, school, sports, careers, that we forget to truly pursue God and put Him first. I'm not saying those are bad things, I'm just saying God needs to come first if you truly want to draw near to Him.
Do you want to walk with God? Cause if you're being held back by the interests or hobbies or anything that you put before God, you won't be able to keep in step.
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I'm going to combine the next two points:
Cleanse your hands and
purify your hearts. It's kind of like what I just wrote, if you're coming to God you need to surrender completely. We spend so much time being caught up in the things of the world. God is pure, His love is pure, His wisdom is pure - the things of this world are not pure.
I do want to say this though: don't be afraid to talk to God and confess sin to Him or to talk to Him about your struggles. Lay all of it at the feet of Jesus.
When God looks at His children, He sees the blood of Jesus covering our sins. We've been clothed in Jesus' righteousness.
2 Corinthians 5:21, "He made the one who did not know sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God."
I think that that verse right there sums up the gospel beautifully. Jesus, who never sinned, took the sin of the world upon His shoulders and died for us. He rose from the dead, conquering death. Now those of us in Him can become the righteousness of God.
That doesn't mean we have a free pass to sin. Far from it! Paul talks about this in Romans 6:1-11 (
click here to read about it).
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Well, I think that about sums up those two verses! It's amazing how much we can learn about God from just a verse or two. What's your favorite verse in the book of James?
Psalm 116:9, "I will walk before the Lord in the land of the living."
Psalm 119:1, "How happy are those whose way is blameless, who walk according to the Lord’s instruction!"
