1. Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Heavenly Father and our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen. The message from God’s Word today is taken from James 3.13-4:10, it’s entitled, “God Gives More Grace,” dear brothers and sisters in Christ.
2. It won’t be too many Sundays from now that we will be singing the great hymn of the Reformation. We love to sing, “A Mighty Fortress,” and rightly so. But how about these lines from Luther’s last stanza? “And take they our life, Goods, fame, child, and wife, Let these all be gone” (TLH 262:4). What if all those good things of this world were taken from you? What then? We look to the things of this world, as life itself. Without them, we think, there is no real living. Is that how you think? Repent! Or, rather, sing the rest of that last stanza: “Let these all be gone, They yet have nothing won; The Kingdom ours remaineth.” You should know that if the world and all that’s a part of it were taken from you, by faith in Jesus, the kingdom is still yours. Life consists not in the world and its things, but in faith that clings to Jesus alone. Let the things of the world all be gone; God gives us more grace.
3. The Christians that St. James was addressing needed to hear that, and so do we. James asks them, and us, “What causes quarrels and what causes fights among you? Is it not this, that your passions are at war within you?” (James 4:1 ESV). What causes you to fight? How many times have pastors counseled marriage partners, families, and congregations because of fighting that has as its source the things of this world, the passions such as hatred, jealousy, and anger that war within us? You know what I mean by the things of this world? It’s the things that you own and even the things that you don’t own, but want to. At the source of all of the things of this world is money, that which gets you the world’s things. Little wonder St. Paul reminds us, “the love of money is a root of all kinds of evils. It is through this craving that some have wandered away from the faith and pierced themselves with many pangs” (1 Tim 6:10 ESV). These pangs are what have afflicted the congregation, the Christians to whom James is writing.
4. James continues to lay out the picture of unbelief among the believers when he writes, “You desire and do not have, so you murder. You covet and cannot obtain, so you fight and quarrel. You do not have, because you do not ask. 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” (James 4:2–4 ESV).
5. Are the Christians in James’s time literally killing one another? The answer may be yes. James writes at a time of a great persecution against Christians. Some of that persecution may fuel a betrayal of Christians by other Christians. James is writing to Jewish Christians, many of whom still have contacts with the temple in Jerusalem, the synagogue, and their unconverted relatives and friends. Realize that to be a Christian at this time was not, in the estimation of the world, a beneficial thing. To be a Christian, especially a Jewish Christian living among other unbelieving Jews, was to be cut off religiously. To be a Christian was potentially to be cut off socially from friends and relatives and financially. With all that happening in the daily lives of Christians, selling out the brethren to death could be a temptation, a way to save one’s own skin from persecution. In order to maintain a status or way of life in this world, a Christian might be tempted to such a drastic step as murder. Even if it didn’t involve the taking of physical life, these Christians certainly were guilty of the murder of hatred, all to maintain an adulterous relationship with the world and the things of the world.
6. We, too, are capable of that. Christians, sinners, are prone to taking into our own hands our own lives. We would become makers of our own destiny. We would provide our own security, peace, and well-being into the future. And so we would put ourselves in the place of God.
7. Such was the temptation of our first parents in the garden. The Devil came to turn them away from God and his Word. The tempter came to tell them that if they no longer listened to God, if they acted against God, they would be “like God” (Gen 3:5). They would then have control over their own lives in knowing good and evil. They would give up the knowledge of only good, only God, and become gods, makers of their own destiny, and so know evil. They would live, not by the Word of God alone, but by the things of the world. They could take pride in that they would be their own providers, independent of God, that they would find their worth in their own accomplishments, and that they would find their joy in the world and its pleasures.
8. Such was the temptation acted upon by our first parents. Such is sin of the Christians in James’s day. They had joined themselves with the evil one and with the false gods of their own desires and covetousness, the world, and their own flesh. So we are tempted in the same way, and we all too often fall, as did our first parents, as do Christians of all times. We must be warned, even as Jeremiah attempted to warn with words of judgment the people of Jerusalem who had adulterated themselves with the gods of this world, as we heard in the Old Testament Reading: “But, O Lord of hosts, who judges righteously, who tests the heart and the mind, let me see your vengeance upon them, for to you have I committed my cause” (Jer 11:20 ESV). Repent!
9. But we also have been given a different Spirit. We have been given the Holy Spirit and faith that returns to the one true God, in all humility. We have been given, by the same Spirit, faith to renounce the world, the devil, and our flesh. That Spirit and faith were first given to us in our Baptism. It’s in our Baptism that we now live, not as our own gods, but by faith in God, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, in whom we are named. It is always to that name that we return in repentance, to receive more grace, because we know that in that name there is forgiveness for our sin, there is a sure and certain future, and there is divorce from the world and its gods. James tells us, “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’ ” (James 4:5–6 ESV). More grace is what God gives to the humble, and that’s what we need.
10. Humility in God’s sight is the kind that Jesus showed. When Jesus came into our flesh to bring us more grace, he came down from heaven and “did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross” (Phil 2:6–8 ESV). Jesus humbled himself to be like us, to do away with our sin and death by his suffering and death and his rising to life. Jesus became a servant for our sake. He is truly God, but also became truly man for us and for our salvation. He took our place in death, and now he gives us a place in life. So we should be humbled.
11. When I was in the seminary, one of my professors loved to say, “There is nothing so humbling as to be nothing but given to.” And that is what we are, nothing but given to. And what we are given is more and more grace. This grace is from Jesus, from the cross, given to us in his Word and Sacraments because of his Word. It is a grace that is received by those who are last and lost, who have no other gods in the world, and who look to the only true God for nothing but mercy. Such a mercy, such grace, such a Jesus then leads us from this world to eternal life. Humility leads us to confess that we are not gods, nor can we find pride in such, but rather we are “poor, miserable sinners” living in this world by more grace, in Jesus alone!
12. So “take they our life, Goods, fame, child, and wife, Let these all be gone, They yet have nothing won; The kingdom ours remaineth” (TLH 262:4). We return to our God every day in our Baptism, denouncing the gods that are in this world, so that we might receive more grace, forgiveness, and life through Jesus Christ, our Savior. That is our only true joy and hope, and in such the kingdom of God is ours forever. Now the peace of God that passes all understanding, guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus, until life everlasting. Amen.
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