JAMES CHAPTER 4

[Kevin Young]

Greetings to all our Bible Study friends! Thank you for joining with us. This week we are reading Chapter 4 of the book of James. After reading the chapter, please post about your favorite verses, the verses that challenged you, questions, and any thoughts or insights you might have on the chapter. God bless you guys.

[Iamnotw]

Verses 10 12 and 14 really hit me....

[sassy1506]

Chapter 4's a bit easier to focus on than chapter 3 . . .

3 When you ask, you do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives, that you may spend what you get on your pleasures.

This reminds me of so many scenarios at camp last week. I was in a camp called Leaps of Faith, where we do the challenge course every day. The challenge course facilitators kept telling us to ask for what we need. When we were on the low ropes, some of the kids kept asking them to do the challenge for us, but they wouldn't 'cause we needed to do the challenge ourselves. When we were on the high ropes and asked for advice on how to get onto an element, they did all they could to help us, because we needed their help to make it through the element.

9 Grieve, mourn and wail. Change your laughter to mourning and your joy to gloom. 10 Humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will lift you up.

How come we're told to become miserable here, when in other verses, we're told to always be joyful? I'm confused.

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.”

This is so true. My parents are trying to get me to make decisions of what I'll do when I finish school, but who knows if I'm even gonna live that long? I want to be a professional musician, but that's not something you can get with a college degree. So the only way I'm going to get there is if God decides he wants me there.

[huskerthom]

The verse that caught my attention was 17.

So whoever knows the right thing to do and fails to do it, for him it is sin.

It is amazing how God works. I was debating whether or not to watch the series finale of "The Closer" with my wife because I have been God has been convicting me of some of the television that I watch. I had decided that since it was the final episode I would go ahead and watch it. I was thinking "Is it really a big deal?" Apparently so because I was reading James Chapter 4 before the show started and just as the show was starting I read this verse. Message received and I decided to do some other reading because I want to remain faithful to God.

[Ric]

9 Grieve, mourn and wail. Change your laughter to mourning and your joy to gloom. 10 Humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will lift you up.

How come we're told to become miserable here, when in other verses, we're told to always be joyful? I'm confused.

Here's why:

“God opposes the proud
but gives grace to the humble.”

Anyone who is mourning has pretty much left pride out back. God sees our heartfelt hurts and passions, and He responds to us when we're for real with Him about ourselves.

What causes fights and quarrels among you? Don’t they come from your desires that battle within you? 2 You want something but don’t get it. You kill and covet, but you cannot have what you want. You quarrel and fight.

Ever stop and realize that this was aimed at BELIEVERS??? I still know "church" people who act like this. Heck, I still act like this sometimes!

4 You adulterous people, don’t you know that friendship with the world is hatred toward God? Anyone who chooses to be a friend of the world becomes an enemy of God.

And yet we still try to work hard, build on that extra room to the house, take the kids to Disney World, and get that 73" LED TV to hang on the wall in the living room so we can get a better experience when we watch whatever big movie's out at the time. After all, God wants us to prosper, right?(Did yall pick up the sarcasm???)

Truth is, if we're Christian, then we're Christ-like. Or better put, we're like Christ. With that in mind, did Jesus set out to pad the church benches and put in a top-quality sound system and A/C? Did He go door to door inviting people to come to church on Sunday morning and to Pepe's Mexican Restaurant right after? If I recall right, I think He went from place to place, getting ran off at times because He offended the people with what He had to say. He likely spent lots of time sleeping on the ground under the stars - homeless. And when He said to go to the highways and hedges and compel them to come into the house of the LORD, He meant as in, go find them, and plead with them to turn not just away from their sin, but to turn TOWARD Jesus, and become one of His.

I think Radical may be influencing some of this, in case nobody picked it up yet.

11 Brothers, do not slander one another. Anyone who speaks against his brother or judges him speaks against the law and judges it. When you judge the law, you are not keeping it, but sitting in judgment on it.

Think about when somebody falls to sin. Do you "restore him gently", as we are told to do? Or do you get on the hellephone and call up all your "prayer warriors" and tell'em to "pray for poor Jimmy, I just saw him staggering out of the bar drunk as could be again," and proceed to run him into the dirt till everyone he knows is shunning him for the mistake he made? We're not above sin, either. I screw up daily. Chances are you do, too.

John goes further to say that anyone who hates his brother is a murderer.

[sassy1506]

Here's why:

“God opposes the proud
but gives grace to the humble.”

Anyone who is mourning has pretty much left pride out back. God sees our heartfelt hurts and passions, and He responds to us when we're for real with Him about ourselves.

I love you. You always manage to answer my questions in a way that I can understand.

[Kevin Young]

3And even when you ask, you don't get it because your motives are all wrong—you want only what will give you pleasure.

I'm going to try to ask for things this week that are not for me; Things that are for the Lord or for someone else instead of myself.

Verse 6 reads so much different in the New Living Translation than in other translations. I wonder what they knew, that made them translate the verse this way. Mary! Calling Mary!!! Wandering Star, where are you?

6But he gives us even more grace to stand against such evil desires. As the Scriptures say, "God opposes the proud but favors the humble."

This verse says that God gives us even more grace TO STAND AGAINST SUCH EVIL DESIRES. The English Standard Version just simply says "But He gives more grace." If the NLT is translated correctly, than this verse reminds me of Hebrews 4:16 which says "16So let us come boldly to the throne of our gracious God. There we will receive his mercy, and we will find GRACE TO HELP US WHEN WE NEED IT MOST." I first picked up on this idea of grace being something that God gives us to overcome sin from the book EXTRAORDINARY by John Bevere. This verse in James seems to say that.... that God would give us GRACE to stand against evil desires. I love it. I think that's so awesome.

7So humble yourselves before God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you. 8Come close to God, and God will come close to you.

One of my favorite passages in all of Scripture. This is a promise from God.... when you come close to Him (or draw near to Hiim) He will come close to you. Promise.

9Let there be tears for what you have done.

Sam, you had asked a question about this. I think James is saying we should take our "sin" seriously. There should be tears for what we have done. When we sin, there should be an appropriate response to our sin. James says that our appropriate response should be tears, mourning, and grief because of what we have done. And if we see sin for what it truly is, and what it does to our relationship with our Heavenly Father (and how it hurts Him), if we love Him, we will respond with sorrow. Godly sorrow leads to repentance. 2 Cor 7:10 "For the kind of sorrow God wants us to experience leads us away from sin and results in salvation. There's no regret for that kind of sorrow. But worldly sorrow, which lacks repentance, results in spiritual death."

10Humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will lift you up in honor.

I love how when I stop trying to lift myself up..... God lifts me up.

17Remember, it is sin to know what you ought to do and then not do it.

I remember the first time I ever read this verse. it opened eyes to the fact that sin is a matter of the heart. If I don't follow my own convictions, I am sinning.

[WanderingStar]

3And even when you ask, you don't get it because your motives are all wrong—you want only what will give you pleasure.

I'm going to try to ask for things this week that are not for me; Things that are for the Lord or for someone else instead of myself.

Verse 6 reads so much different in the New Living Translation than in other translations. I wonder what they knew, that made them translate the verse this way. Mary! Calling Mary!!! Wandering Star, where are you?

Reporting for duty. Sorry it took me a while, I've been out for a couple weeks due to various life events. To clarify, are you asking about verse 3 or verse 6? Either way, I will start looking into the Greek.

[Kevin Young]

Mary,

I am asking about verse 6 where the NLT says, "He gives us even more grace TO STAND AGAINST EVIL DESIRES." The NLT translates the verse to say "to stand against evil desires" where the ESV just says, "But He gives more grace" and nothing else. I'm curious as to what the greek is saying about GRACE. Does it just say God give us "grace" or does it say God gives us "grace that does something" like helps us to stand against evil. Make sense?

Kevin

[WanderingStar]

Thanks for clarifying-- that definitely helps.

Here is the full verse in Greek:

μείζονα δὲ δίδωσιν χάριν· διὸ λέγει· Ὁ θεὸς ὑπερηφάνοις ἀντιτάσσεται ταπεινοῖς δὲ δίδωσιν χάριν.

That first phrase (μείζονα δὲ δίδωσιν χάριν) is the one in question, but I’ll walk through what the whole verse says (this is the Mary Burklin translation, so feel free to take it with a grain of salt):

μείζονα [more, greater] δὲ [but] δίδωσιν [he gives] χάριν [grace]; διὸ [therefore, for this reason] λέγει [it says]· Ὁ θεὸς [God] ὑπερηφάνοις [arrogant, proud] ἀντιτάσσεται [he opposes] ταπεινοῖς [humble] δὲ [but] δίδωσιν [he gives] χάριν [grace].

So smoothed out to account for English sentence structure: “But he gives more grace; therefore it says 'God opposes the arrogant but to the humble he gives grace.' The ESV here is the closest to the Greek.

My guess would be that because the NLT takes more of a paraphrase than a word-for-word approach (as we’ve talked about before), inserting “to stand against evil desires” was an attempt to clarify the purpose of grace here a bit more. I can see where they’re getting it from the broader context of the passage-- James has just been talking about evil desires, so the translation committee seems to have made the decision that the statement about grace was a continuation of that thought (which also makes sense because James is quoting Proverbs 3:34 here, which also talks about grace in the context of avoiding evil). So though that phrase isn’t in the Greek text (and I checked multiple Greek N.T. texts to be sure), it’s justifiable to insert it based on context. Does that help at all?

[Kevin Young]

Wow. Thank you so much for taking the time to do that. You are blessed and highly favored