A sermon preached by Pastor Lewis Polzin on September 19, 2021 at St. Peter–Immanuel Lutheran Church in Milwaukee, WI, on James 3:13-4:10. You may play the audio of the sermon here.
A mostly unedited transcript of the sermon follows the jump:
Grace to you and peace from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Amen.
The text this morning is from the Epistle of James, the third and fourth chapters:
Who is wise and understanding among you? By his good conduct let him show his works in the meekness of wisdom. But if you have bitter jealousy and selfish ambition in your hearts, do not boast and be false to the truth. This is not the wisdom that comes down from above, but is earthly, unspiritual, demonic. For where jealousy and selfish ambition exist, there will be disorder and every vile practice. But the wisdom from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, open to reason, full of mercy and good fruits, impartial and sincere. And a harvest of righteousness is sown in peace by those who make peace. What causes quarrels and what causes fights among you? Is it not this, that your passions are at war within you? 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. 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.” Submit yourselves therefore 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, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded. Be wretched and mourn and weep. Let your laughter be turned to mourning and your joy to gloom. Humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will exalt you.
Thus far the text.
My dear friends in Christ,
Jealousy, quarrels, anger, bitterness, all of these things belong to the spirit of the age and not the Spirit that is Holy. Jesus actually goes even so far to say this in Gospel lesson, where he rebukes the apostles for arguing amongst themselves, Who's the greatest among all of us. We know a little bit of that conversation from the Gospel of Matthew, where James and John get their mom to ask Jesus to elevate them, to let them sit at his right and left hand. Of course, we know who sits at Jesus's right and left hand, because, when he comes into his kingdom, as she asked him, those places were for the two thieves, the robbers, the brigands that the Romans crucified along with Jesus. As Jesus reigned from the cross, those places weren’t for the apostles to have. And Jesus teaches them in such a way that he says it is the least among you who is the greatest. He takes a little child and he uses him as an object lesson. This child, someone that no one would pay attention to, someone, in fact, that can be annoying and underfoot when you have them around you, someone who's always begging you for stuff, this is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven, because that child knows nothing of producing for themselves. They know no self-reliance, no independence. That child knows that it is dependent upon everyone else to fill all of its needs.
James says this, too, wisdom that comes down from above is pure, peaceable, gentle, open to reason, full of mercy and good fruits, impartial and sincere. Now these are all good things and they show us that wisdom is the wisdom that humbles itself. Wisdom is the thing that turns joy into mourning. Wisdom is the thing that tells us that we need clean hands. Wisdom is a thing that cries out that we must draw near to God. Wisdom is the thing that says humble yourself before the Lord.
And we should do this. We should do it more often than we even think. And when we humble ourselves, we’re not looking in our humility to be exalted, but our Lord does exalt us in our humility, not because we have shown God by our works how great and awesome we are, but because we've shown God how wretched we are, how depraved we are, how sinful we are. But our Lord does not leave us in our sin. He does not leave us in our wretchedness or depravity. Instead, he exalts us to the very place where Christ is, to stand by him as he rules and reigns over all things, to stand around his throne as the saints and the angels in heaven cry out, holy holy, holy. You will be exalted in this humility. If you have wisdom to do it, you see there is much in wisdom that we must pursue.
The thing to remember about James, and we haven't preached on him yet this year, but the thing to remember about James is that he is not opposed to Paul. Paul says that grace that comes through faith and that is good. It's a gift. It's a free gift. You've done nothing to earn it. James says, you say that you have faith. I say, I'll show you my faith by my works. These two ideas are not opposed to one another. We know that works will not save us, but we know that if we have faith, which saves us, we will have works. We must, in fact, as Christians have works. These don't mean that these are the super good works that we do, like the missionaries who are called to the foreign fields, all the people who give everything they have and sell it for the poor, like John Mark did. These are not those works that we're talking about. Those are good things for sure, but the Christian has works that we really almost disregard, but our Lord holds them in the highest esteem and calls them good. Things like helping a friend, talking to a parent as they work through issues in their aging, changing the diaper of a baby, changing, well, anything on an adult, picking up after your dog when it goes out in the lawn, taking care of your house, taking care of your yard, these are all good works that the Christian has, because, in them, not only do we show that we are caring for the people that God has put into our path, but we also are caring for the gifts that he's given us to steward creation.
All of these, my friends, are good works. And James says that if you have faith, you have these works. They are accounted to you as good. You might say, ah, it's something I got to do. Well, obligation does not determine whether or not something is good. What is good is what is done and you have done good works. But the greatest work of all, James is indicating is to have wisdom, and wisdom, which comes through faith, wisdom, which puts you in your place, exercises prudence and charity in all things.
We don't want to be quarreling with one another. We don't want fights and divisions among each other. These things are to be avoided like the plague. And we all know what it's like now to avoid the plague. We need to avoid all of the things that would lead us into sin because they will light a fire in our hearts. The desires that arise within my heart, the desires that are in my heart, are horrendous. And if wisdom doesn’t extinguish them, I get into all sorts of trouble. Jesus says that it's not what goes into you that makes you unclean, but what comes out of you. And I can tell you that what comes out of my heart, and I can tell you that what comes out of your heart, is disgusting. And what comes out of your heart, guides your tongue, and it guides your life like the rudder on a ship. It guides your passions and desires. That’s what causes divisions. Think about this for a moment. How do you feel when someone says something bad about you? If you've ever been on the job somewhere and someone blames you for when something goes wrong, it gets kind of upsetting. I can tell you that when someone critiques me, when someone says something bad about how I’ve taught or preached or prepared or worked, it sits on me the entire week. And why is that? Why do these things bug us? When people talk poorly about us or our work, why do these things bother us? It's because deep inside, we have the desire to control everything around us. We desire to be God, and when someone says something, reveals something bad, they’re sinning against who we think the best God is: us.
We have to work to put this down in the Christian life. And maybe we don't talk about this enough. I think we should. The Christian life is about taming ourselves. It's about putting our bodies in submission. That doesn't mean like Luther sitting in his cell, we take our little whip and flagellate our backs until we're bleeding, trying to get our sins out of us, trying to say my I'm in control of my body and not my body in control of me. But instead, to see that the desires of our hearts, which are the wrong things, need to be transformed. And they are being transformed in Jesus Christ. When we look to him, we find that our desires can take a back seat because we are now seeking the things of Christ.
James goes on to say, you want but don’t ask so you don’t receive. You don’t ask for peace and wisdom; you try to make it yourself and it always fails. And those things you do ask for, you ask wrongly, and you don’t receive, because what you ask for is according to your passions. You ask for stuff that isn’t related to this wisdom, you ask for things that are contrary to wisdom, you ask for things that are not given according to the will of God, and you don’t get it. It’s not to say that, in prayer, you shouldn’t ask for your wants or needs, but to understand that your passions cannot drive your heart. Your heart belongs to Christ. So, you should ask, with a heart that is not my own, what should I ask for? What should I seek?
And I can tell you, it's what we ask in the Lord's Prayer: for God's name to be hallowed, for his kingdom to come, for his will to be done, that we might have daily bread to survive that we might bring his message to all people, that our sins might be forgive, and that we would forgive the sins of those who sin against us, that we would be led out of temptation and not given over into evil. These things are what our Lord tells us we should be desiring. These things are what we should be asking for. And I can tell you that, in this prayer, if Jesus has taught you to pray it, and he has, then you know that the answer to this prayer is always yes and amen. By these things, praying these things, looking to these things, we declare that wisdom is running the show. We see that wisdom is giving a wonderful demonstration of exactly what it should be doing, which is to humble ourselves before the Lord and before our neighbor, and to ask for the things that our hearts should be desiring.
Even if our hearts aren't totally there, we know that this is our goal as Christians. We know that this is our goal, but what if we don't reach it? What if we fall short? What if we are, as James says, like the world and at enmity with God? What if we are coming up against God and butting heads all of the time, because we don't like what he says, or we don't like what he tells us we should want, or we don't like any of ways that he shows himself in this world? Then the answer to that, my friends is to humble yourself, to give yourself over to the Crucified One, to say, Lord, my desires are not what they should be, my desires have not been turned to you, my desires have not been to seek the will of my neighbor. Humble yourself and ask for forgiveness, and, my friends, it will always come. Repentance always breeds forgiveness. There is no way that your repentance will not work to bring to you the forgiveness that has been won for you by Christ upon his cross; it's yours.
I know that this is a struggle and you may hear this and you go, All right, so if my desires aren't there, am I truly a Christian? And I would say, if you can go before your Lord calling him Lord and saying, I know that I am not worthy, then my friends, you are indeed of Christ. You belong to him. You belong in his kingdom. He has claimed you as his own. And he has given you the promise that no matter what else happens to you in this life, whether you see the answer to these prayers immediately or not, he will answer them in the day of his resurrection.
He will bring his promises to fruition in your glorified bodies, because he was crucified and raised himself from the dead. He has promised this also to you. And because he is raised from the dead, you know that all of his promises are true. All of them will come to pass in his time, including the gift of wisdom. Our Lord is the only one who is perfectly wise in this world at any time. We are all sinners. We have all fallen short of the glory of God. We all deserve punishment, damnation, hell forever. But our Lord is better than hell. Our Lord has saved you out of his love. Our Lord has put his name on you in your baptism. There is no need to wonder who is the greatest amongst ourselves, because we all will face the very same end. We all will stand with the martyrs and the apostles and all of the saints as our Jesus comes back into this world, remaking it as he desires to see it, remaking it as it was intended to be–dependent on his righteousness, his mercy, his grace, his peace.
Wisdom is pure. It's clean. Wisdom is peaceable. It lives in harmony with all others. It's gentle. It's not harsh. It's not wicked. It's not like a sharp tongue. It's open to reason to see another side of things to see from someone else's perspective. It's impartial, taking no sides. It is sincere. It’s full of mercy and grace. It's full of that idea that we have that mercy, that same forgiveness that's been shown to us on others. And you have been granted and you will be granted wisdom. You show it in your good works. It is not just an act, but it is what our Lord has given you. And you can stand firm then knowing that the wisdom you demonstrate is all a gift from Jesus. It's all a gift because he was wise and he grants it to you.
My friends, do not worry about the works that you do, do not worry about who is greatest, and who's doing the most, just go out and do what our Lord has called you to do and know that, in these things, he's giving you the strength to do them, not because you're earning anything, not because you're pleasing him, but because it pleases him to save you. That is how we respond to our Lord. It's how we respond to our neighbor. And we find that these things come from the true wisdom from on high, our Lord, Jesus Christ. Turn your eyes to him, humble yourselves, and you will find that he has granted you his wisdom that you may live in his righteousness. In Jesus’ name, amen.
Now may the peace of God which passes all human understanding guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus, our Lord! Amen.
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