James series – “The Litmus Test for life”

James 4:1-5

What causes fights and quarrels among you? Don’t they come from your desires that battle within you? ² You desire but do not have, so you kill. You covet but you cannot get what you want, so you quarrel and fight. You do not have because you do not ask God. ³ When you ask, you do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives, that you may spend what you get on your pleasures. ⁴ You adulterous people^] don’t you know that friendship with the world means enmity against God? Therefore, anyone who chooses to be a friend of the world becomes an enemy of God. ⁵ Or do you think Scripture says without reason that he jealously longs for the spirit he has caused to dwell in us?

• The third symptom is friendship with the world. 

When the obsession of your life is you, it can’t be God. When you become obsessed with feeding your all-consuming lusts, you no longer have a desire for the things of God. In fact, you can’t even really think about God. But God will not take second place to anything in your life. Its His first commandment. In Exodus 20:3, God said, “You must not have any other god but me.” God is not just talking about things like Mohammed and Buddha and Krishna, He’s talking about you. Your selfish lusts and consuming desires. Anything in this world that you obsess over is your god. Whether it’s your desires, your home, your health, or your stuff it doesn’t matter. God will not put up with anything in this world that He created being elevated in your heart over Him. Friendship with the world makes us an enemy of God because God will not share His glorious throne with anybody or anything. 

• The fourth symptom is envy. 

Envy is an extreme form of jealousy and is the outcome and result of lust. Think about it, if your heart is full of lust toward an object, it is all you obsess on. No matter how much of it you consume, you still want more and more and more. To the point that it has become the god and sole desire of your life. So how are you going to feel when other people have what you want? If you lust for success, are you going to feel joy in the success of others? No, you will feel jealousy. That’s how lust works. It is an appetite that is never satisfied. It is an all-consuming fire that just grows and grows. It is elevating the object of your desire to the place of God in your life which results in envy and jealousy toward other people. James says that’s why we fight. When you start to feel sick, what do you do? You take your temperature. You look at the back of your throat. You check your symptoms. Do you show any of the symptoms of selfish pride because if you do, you need to get to the source of the problem.