Sermon preached at The Bridge Church- August 11, 2024
Intro
As we’ve been journeying through James, one of the things that has been standing out to me most, especially in these recent sections, is humility. A couple of weeks ago, I read some great quotes from C.S. Lewis about humility, about how the epitome of it is when someone can rejoice just as much in someone else’s great work as their own. There’s another famous Lewis one-liner about humility that sums this up well: humility is not thinking less of yourself. It’s thinking about yourself less. It’s simply not spending as much time obsessing over your own status and achievements and so on.
I think that’s true. However, it’s inevitable that we will think about ourselves. It’s unrealistic to believe we’ll just become entirely unselfconscious. That’s why humility is not simply thinking about yourself less, but it’s also thinking realistically when we do think about ourselves. That’s what Paul says in Romans 12:3: “do not think of yourself more highly than you ought, but rather think of yourself with sober judgment, in accordance with the faith God has distributed to each of you.” Think of yourself with sober judgment, not more highly than you ought.
This is a problem for many of us because it turns out that most of us do think about ourselves more highly than we ought. Have you heard of the Dunning-Kruger effect? It’s something a couple of psychologists noticed and documented 25 years ago. They discovered people of low levels of competence vastly overestimate themselves. For example, they had people take a logical reasoning test and asked them how they did afterward. On average, the ones who did poorest thought they had performed better than 62% of test takers. In reality it was 12%. That’s why it’s been said that the first rule of the Dunning-Kruger club is that you don’t know you’re a member of the club. It’s why someone like me who has never played a competitive football game in my life thinks I know better than the coach of my favorite team. Even though I know in my head this is untrue, my heart really believes I’m a much better referee than those professionals on the field. But it’s not just amateurs like me who do this. Here’s another different and completely non-scientific chart showing our willingness to share our opinions about a topic compared to our knowledge of that topic. Notice Mt. Stupid there near the beginning of knowledge (from Adam Grant, Think Again).
We chronically overestimate ourselves. We often give ourselves far more credit than we should. We make a much bigger deal about ourselves than is warranted. As James has indicated in previous passages, there’s nothing wise about this. If you want wisdom, seek humility, which is a right understanding of ourselves and of who God is. In the three sections from James we’re going to look at today, he shows us some key examples of what this looks like.
1. Not judging
11 Brothers and sisters, do not slander one another. Anyone who speaks against a brother or sister or judges them speaks against the law and judges it. When you judge the law, you are not keeping it, but sitting in judgment on it. 12 There is only one Lawgiver and Judge, the one who is able to save and destroy. But you—who are you to judge your neighbor?
James 4:11-12
Do not judge. James isn’t the only one to say this. Jesus said it in his famous Sermon on the Mount, and people know it. Ask people on the street in Vancouver what Jesus’ message was and I’m convinced that a bunch of people will give you this line and nothing more. I read a quote from one religious organization that said that “if Jesus taught us one thing, it is to stop judging others.” On the flip side, judging is what a lot of people think Christians do the most, it’s the characteristic they ascribe to Christians more than anything else. If you actually see a Christian represented on a TV show or movie, the chances are high that character will be depicted as judgmental. I was always a big fan of The Office, but one of the main characters in the show, Angela Martin, referred to herself as a Christian. Judgmentalism was her jam. She was the most joyless, critical person around. She also loved cats and had a lot of them, which perhaps explains the joylessness.
In the old show Seinfeld, Elaine dates a guy named Puddy. In one episode, she discovers that Puddy claims to be a Christian and is surprised he’s not worried about her own irreligion. He replies, “it’s not a problem for me. I’m not the one going to hell.” The next morning, Puddy discovers that there’s not a newspaper at the door, so he asks Elaine to steal the neighbour’s (apparently sleeping together doesn’t present an ethical dilemma for him). She doesn’t understand why he doesn’t take the newspaper himself and he respond, “thou shalt not steal.” “Oh, but it’s ok if I do it?” she shoots back. His retort is “what do you care, you know where you’re going.” Again, a Christian is portrayed as a self-righteous jerk who is quick to condemn others.
One of the problems here is that we don’t understand what it means to judge and not to judge. For example, the Scriptures clearly instruct us to exercise moral discernment. We are to recognize what’s right and wrong, which is a form of judgment. We are not supposed to tolerate anything and everything in the church. The Bible is clear that if there is blatant unrepented sin, the church needs to lovingly call that person to restoration and even exercise discipline if need be. Some people might call that judgment too and yet it is commanded in the Scriptures.
However, what we see being forbidden in James and elsewhere is a prideful superiority where we are blind to our own faults but eager to point out other people’s. The well-known imagery Jesus uses is that one man has a log jammed into his eye but is chomping at the bit to perform eye surgery on his friend who has a bit of dust in his. Judging is also looking to take other people down so that we feel better about ourselves. It’s earthly wisdom again, it’s selfish ambition again. A good example is a little parable Jesus tells about two men at prayer. The one, a tax collector, comes to God and is very real about his own sinfulness. He’s not interested in looking at other people and saying, well, at least I’m not that bad. He doesn’t say, “yeah, I’ve taken advantage of people financially, but at least I don’t litter and refuse to recycle like that evil neighbour of mine.” Instead, he is deeply repentant and honest with God about his own shortcomings. Jesus advocates that kind of prayer. It’s real and it’s humble. The other guy at prayer is a Pharisee, one of the religious leaders in 1st century Israel who carried a lot of social clout. This is how he prays: “God, I thank you that I am not like other people- robbers, evildoers, adulterers- or even like this tax collector.” What a prayer! Jesus thinks that kind of prayer is not so awesome, and it’s the kind of judgment that the Bible forbids. Looking down on others, speaking poorly of them, tearing them down with your words, either to their face or behind their backs, are forms of judgment that mar God’s people. And it’s all rooted in pride.
Here’s what James writes about someone who judges in that manner. He says three things. First, at a basic level, you are breaking God’s law. God’s told us to do something, and we’re not doing it. Later, James refers to “your neighbour,” which seems like an allusion to the command in Leviticus 19:18: “love your neighbour as yourself.” This is the command Jesus proclaimed was the second greatest commandment in all the Scriptures. Love your neighbour. When you’re slandering them, tearing them down, or putting yourself above them in a prideful sense of superiority, I hate to break it to you, but you ain’t lovin’ them.
Second, James asserts that when you judge others, you are sitting in judgment against the law. You’re not just judging a person. It’s not merely between you and this person. You’re also judging God’s law. You are claiming you know better than God, you know better how to live than God does. That’s essentially what we’re doing whenever we sin. We are judging God’s law as inferior to our own desires and wisdom.
Related to that, third, when we judge others we are attempting to steal God’s authority from Him. As James writes, God alone is the judge and lawgiver. Judging is an attempt at divine identity theft. People at The Bridge occasionally receive emails that are supposedly from me. Usually, the email says that I’m in prayer all day- I’m so holy, after all- but I want to do something nice for our staff to show my appreciation- because I’m also so charitable. So could you, as my special favorite person, go and buy $1000 worth of Amazon gift cards and send me the pin numbers so I can assign them to all our wonderful staff. One time, years ago, it worked. I wasn’t mad at the person who fell for it. I was infuriated that someone would usurp my identity, my authority, in such a self-serving way. That’s what we do in our relationship with God when we speak against others.
Now, what’s the antidote to this? We need to recognize that judging words start in the heart. As one commentator on this passage says, “defamation begins and lives on in the mind. It is something we say to ourselves long before we pass it on.” As a result, the antidote starts in the heart as well. It begins with thinking biblically about ourselves and about God. That’s what James does. He reminds us who God is and he asks, “who are you to judge your neighbour?” Who are you? Ridding the sin of judging in our lives begins with understanding that we are not God. We are not lawgivers and judges. We are sinful, we are like that tax collector at prayer, we have logs in our eyes, and we are desperately dependent on God for grace and for salvation as James says in v.12. Sinful judging is born of pride. Repentance springs from genuine humility, from understanding who we are and who God is.
2. Not presuming (4:13-17)
13 Now listen, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go to this or that city, spend a year there, carry on business and make money.” 14 Why, you do not even know what will happen tomorrow. What is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes. 15 Instead, you ought to say, “If it is the Lord’s will, we will live and do this or that.” 16 As it is, you boast in your arrogant schemes. All such boasting is evil. 17 If anyone, then, knows the good they ought to do and doesn’t do it, it is sin for them.
James 4:13-17
Here’s another realm of humility. The picture James paints is pretty clear. Imagine first century business people who are making confident plans well in advance. “Here’s my travel itinerary, here’s how much money I’m going to make, here’s what my 1 year, 5 year, 10 year plans are.” Pretty normal stuff right? Well, James says that this kind of mindset is evil. He doesn’t go, “oh you know, this is moderately unwise.” He says in verse 16 that these are arrogant schemes and that such boasting is evil. It’s pretty strong language, right?
Like we did in the last section, let’s be clear what James isn’t saying as well. He’s not claiming that all planning is evil. Planning is part of human life. James probably had a plan about where this letter was going to go, for example. In books like Acts and his letters, we see Paul making all kinds of plans about where to go and preach the Gospel. How we hold those plans is key but the act of planning itself is not evil. James is also not teaching that certainty is evil. There are things we can be quite clear on: moral issues the Bible teaches about, God’s faithfulness, the resurrection of Jesus, his return- the Bible doesn’t tell us to hold those kinds of things loosely. They’re based on God’s revelation of Himself. And finally, James is not saying that being a business person or making money is evil. As we’ll see in the third section today, how we make money and what we do with it is a moral matter. However, just like planning, making money is a necessity in this world. What James is getting at here is the heart. It’s our mindset about our plans and our business. The mindset James is rebuking is one that assumes that I have full control over what’s going to happen, that I am the captain of my world, that I don’t need God or depend on Him for anything.
This touches on something we all struggle with. We like to make plans and have them happen the way we intend. We like to be in control. I actually preached a sermon on this little section of James back in the spring of 2021. I was reflecting on some of the lessons we could glean from that whole crazy Covid pandemic era. One of the aspects that I believe was especially shaken during that era was certainty about plans. I remember that in the spring, our provincial government had released some guidelines about how churches could have indoor services for Easter again. That was incredibly exciting for a lot of churches. Maybe people would have to don 16 layers of masks and stay a kilometer apart from each other, but at least we’ll be together for this celebration! So churches began making arrangements, sending out information to their congregants. A few days later, those dastardly case numbers that some of us watched obsessively started rising again. Suddenly, the province sends out a new missive: “no Easter for you! No indoor services allowed!”
Throughout that pandemic, you’d dream about doing something or traveling somewhere, and then within a week that opportunity had been yanked away by various restrictions. At the same time that I preached that sermon, we as a church were in the midst of all kinds of uncertainty about when we’d be moving into our new building. We were informed that the building would be completed by Christmas of 2020. In line with that, we gave notice to the facility where we had held our services that we’d be out by then. Well, Christmas came and went, and now we had nowhere to do our livestream because this building wasn’t ready. We gave notice to our temporary office space to move out by January because for sure by then the building would be ready. It wasn’t. Our staff ended up working from our homes for five months. We made all kinds of plans for when we’d enter the building and pretty much every one of them failed.
For a lot of us, life has become a bit more predictable again in the last couple of years, so maybe we’ve forgotten those lessons. Remember what James writes here, though: hold your plans loosely. He returns to the theme of humility, reminding us who we are. First, he says, you don’t even know what’s going to happen tomorrow. You are not God, you don’t know the future. You are ignorant about so many things. I don’t mean that as an insult, it’s just a fact. What’s going to happen tomorrow is beyond your comprehension or control. That’s why human attempts at modeling the future- whether it was about Covid, or about climate change, or about economics- is all ultimately futile. It’s why the stock market fluctuates so much. There are a million variables about the future that we have no knowledge or control over. We make our best guesses and we make some decisions based on those guesses, but as humans we must be honest about our ignorance of the future.
Second, James proclaims that you are frail. You’re fragile. What’s your life, he asks. You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes. That’s a repeated emphasis in the Bible. For example, Psalm 103 teaches that “the life of mortals is like grass, they flourish like a flower of the field; the wind blows over it and it is gone, and its place remembers it no more” (103:15-16). Not only do you not know what will happen tomorrow in a broad sense, you don’t know how many years you have left to live. You might feel strong and full of life today, but a virus could hit you tomorrow and incapacitate you. You could be in a fatal accident. Human life is fragile. Humility means understanding that and responding appropriately.
James reminds us who we are, but he also reminds us of who God is. He commands us to make room for God’s will, because God is King. He is sovereign. He recommends we provide the disclaimer, “if it is the Lord’s will, we will live and do this or that.” By the way, this isn’t some magical formula that you need to repeat superstitiously, like knocking on wood or making the sign of the cross. Like we already said, it’s about the heart. It’s about a mindset. The apostle Paul made plans and he didn’t always preface it with a hasty “if it’s the Lord’s will.” But he had it as a principle fixed in his mind that God could call the shots and change Paul’s plans at any moment. He recognized God’s authority to call an audible.
Do you know what an audible is? It’s from the world of football. A quarterback arrives at the line of scrimmage with a play in mind. He’s announced to his offense what they’re going to do. Then he surveys the opposing team’s defense and notices it’s lined up a certain way. It becomes clear to him that the original play call is not going to work. However, he has the ability to call an audible, to quickly signal to his team that the play has changed and they’re going to run something different. Peyton Manning, one of the greatest quarterbacks of all time, would shout out “Omaha!” as an audible. A few years ago, another NFL quarterback named Jared Goff would yell out words like “Obama” and “Ric Flair” to indicate a play change. I just think that’s kind of funny. The point is, if you’re one of the players on the offense, you don’t get to call the audible. The quarterback does. If you refuse to go along with it and try to run the play that was originally planned, the whole thing falls apart.
When James says you ought to say “if it is the Lord’s will,” the point is to hold your plans humbly and loosely and submit to the Lord’s leading. You need to recognize that He has the right to change those plans and take things in another direction if He wants. Arrogantly boasting of your plans is born of pride but repentance springs from genuine humility.
3. Not indulging (5:1-6)
Now listen, you rich people, weep and wail because of the misery that is coming on you. 2 Your wealth has rotted, and moths have eaten your clothes. 3 Your gold and silver are corroded. Their corrosion will testify against you and eat your flesh like fire. You have hoarded wealth in the last days. 4 Look! The wages you failed to pay the workers who mowed your fields are crying out against you. The cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord Almighty. 5 You have lived on earth in luxury and self-indulgence. You have fattened yourselves in the day of slaughter. 6 You have condemned and murdered the innocent one, who was not opposing you.
James 5:1-6
I’m hoping to come back to this passage in a couple of weeks and link it to the following one, so I won’t cover everything today. However, there a few things to note. For one, it’s helpful to know the cultural context. In 1st century Palestine, there was an increasing concentration of wealth and land ownership in the hands of an economic elite. People who once owned their lands and farms had been forced by circumstances to sell them and were now tenants living at a subsistence level. The modern equivalent would be living paycheque to paycheque- if your wages are withheld for a certain month, it’s going to be really, really hard to make ends meet. It’s not hard to see other modern equivalents here in terms of the income gap between wealthy and poor. This is why God’s word is so potent and relevant 2000 years later. Many dynamics of the human heart and interpersonal relationships don’t actually change that much no matter how much time passes.
Having said that, James isn’t addressing those who are experiencing economic injustice. He’s focused on those who are inflicting it. There are a few behaviors he targets especially. One is hoarding wealth. It’s stockpiling possessions. It seems that these people thought their possessions would last forever, but James says in the end, it’s all going to rot and corrode. That’s what Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount too. He told us not to store up treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and thieves break in and steal. This is the irony, isn’t it? We can become so anxious about our things, we can put so much pride in what we own, we can depend on it for status, when in reality it’s all so fleeting.
Computers, for example, are a modern miracle. If you showed my MacBook to anyone a generation or two ago, they wouldn’t believe their eyes. It would seem like the most valuable physical thing they had ever seen. A few days ago, I was showing Carolyn and Zachary some Olympics-related videos at the dinner table on my MacBook. As I reached out to switch to another video, I knocked over a glass of apple juice onto the keyboard. I brought it to a Mac repair place the next day and learned that corrosion had already begun to set in from the juice spill and that the keyboard needed replacing- $400! These supposedly valuable things are so fleeting, but we put so much stock in them. We greedily hold on to them, and in the process we often deprive the poor of what they need. We have closets full of clothes that we never wear while people die of cold in the streets. We throw away perfectly good food while people die of starvation. We pay significant amounts of money to store things in storage lockers that we never use. That’s uncomfortable for us to talk about, myself included, because most of us can relate. We fit that description of hoarding wealth better than we’d care to admit.
James also says these rich people have withheld wages from their workers. Who knows why they did it. Maybe it was blatant. Maybe it was some technicality, some loophole they exploited. The point is those who have worked hard haven’t received their fair wages because of the selfishness of these rich people. As James notes, they have lived in luxury and self-indulgence. Some of you know what this is like from either side. You’ve been financially taken advantage of by bosses, you’ve had work agreements not honored, you’ve struggled to make ends meet while others did the same work and prospered. Others of you might realize you’ve taken advantage of others and withheld what should have belonged to others because you wanted more for yourself. If you feel conviction about that, you should. Listen to the Lord’s word on this.
While James doesn’t use language about pride, it’s not hard to see that sin at work here too. Hoarding wealth, withholding wages, and living in luxury are behaviors born of a belief that I deserve this. I’m better than others. Again, James isn’t saying that making money is wrong. Wealth is not evil. But how we get it, how we use it, and our attitude when we have it are moral issues. Wealth and pride easily go hand in hand. Wealth can easily become a snare to us and lead us to mistreat others. If that’s the case, you’ll never guess what the antidote is. It’s humility.
We’ve been saying that humility comes from understanding who God is and who we are. So what would a right understanding of ourselves look like in this realm? I’m convinced it looks like understanding our common humanity with others, regardless of socio-economic status. It’s knowing that before the Lord, our wealth doesn’t do a thing to elevate our status. Here’s how God sees us, according to 1 Samuel 16:7: “the Lord does not look at the things people look at. People look at the outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart.” God shows no favoritism towards the rich. James has spoken about that. God gives them no greater status just because they’ve got a bunch of stuff. If we understand ourselves rightly, we’ll see things the same way.
And what does a right understanding of God look like? James writes that the cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord Almighty. You might remember the story of Cain and Abel in Genesis. Cain was jealous because the Lord accepted his brother Abel’s offering, but not his own. He was so overcome with anger that he killed his brother Abel. God later confronts Cain and tells him that the blood of Abel has cried out to Him from the ground. Again and again in the Scriptures, from beginning to end, we see how God’s heart is moved by injustice. His heart is for freedom for the oppressed. He desires to lift up the humble and bowed down. That’s why care for the poor is such an emphasis in the Bible and in the history of the church whenever it’s been faithful to the Lord. This is what God is like. In the end, He will bring about the consequences of injustice perpetrated by the unrighteous wealthy. James is exhorting his readers not to share their fate. In the realm of wealth, beware the trap of prideful indulgence and embrace humility so you can walk rightly with the Lord.
Conclusion
In all of these realms of life, humility is what we want to pursue. Understanding yourself and God rightly so you can live wisely. If you want wisdom, pursue humility. However, I’d say even more important is that pursuing humility is necessary for salvation. James talks about God’s ability to save or destroy in 4:12. Which side of that you’re on will depend to a significant extent on acknowledging your sinfulness and your inability to save yourself. It will depend on acknowledging your need for the grace of God. It will depend on your willingness to embrace the Gospel, a message that cuts to the heart of our pride. The Christian Gospel says that salvation comes through Jesus, who was crucified as a common criminal. It says that this death is what we deserved, but that God through His Son paid the price for us. It says that we receive this forgiveness and the status of an adopted child of God not by accomplishing some great feat, not by popularity, not by our wealth, not even by our good deeds, but by faith in the death and resurrection of Jesus. I encourage you towards humility, beginning right there: trust in Jesus and acknowledge your need for him.