The Grace of Humble Submission

Transcript:

All right, good morning, how are y'all doing today? You good? Y'all recovered from like the humidity and cloudiness and drizzle of yesterday, I hope. Okay, well then, you know, use this time to recover. It'll be great.

I was gonna say you could engage the Word of God with me, but if you just need a little therapy time, that's fine too.

No, I'm thrilled that you're here. I'm really excited for what God is gonna do in our midst. As we get back into the Book of James, maybe with a little bit of renewed vigor, maybe a little bit of renewed clarity after spending the last couple of weeks talking about what we're striving for as a church, right? We wanna come to the text kind of with this assumption of like, okay, this is about us becoming the kind of disciples that live for the restoration of DC and just trying to figure out what would this passage from James contribute to that conversation that really defines us as a church. So I'm excited to jump into what we have here for us today in James chapter 4.

Recently, I was listening to a podcast and I was really excited because it was a leader that I really look up to who was being interviewed. And I was kind of dialing in wanting to get all these different leadership insights.

He's not like somebody I've ever met, but I've read some of his books and I'm kind of familiar with what he's done and what he stands for and kind of how he carries himself. So I was like, man, this is just going to be this great time of learning. And I still hold the guy in really high regard, even though the podcast didn't go the way I thought it was going to go at all.

We kind of didn't get very far into it before I was kind of like, oh, oh dude, you are just coming across as like an arrogant jerk. So much so that I was like, I might bail on this thing, but rubber necking is a thing, whether you're on the Beltway or listening to podcasts that are going awry, that I just kept listening thinking maybe we're going to take a turn and it kind of never did. Like I wanted all these takeaways and my main takeaway was like, yeah, don't be that guy. Like, you know, that just is not a good look. I don't care how successful you are. If you get arrogant, people are going to tell, and it's going to drive them away from you and it's going to drive them away from the God that we represent and the God that we follow. So I was like, all right, well, there's your learning for today, John. Just don't be that guy.

It would be possible, it would be tempting, to come to this passage and be like, yeah, actually, same deal.

Like, that's kind of all that's going on here. This is just one of those expected, regular biblical pep rallies for humility. It's just this great reminder that you've got to keep your ego in check if you really want to serve God.

And let's just go live humble, beautiful lives. And there's obviously something to that.

We're going to hold on to that idea as we move into the text. But what I want you to see right from the beginning is that there's actually a lot happening in this passage, right? Part of the reason I was checking to see how you're doing is this is one of those passages where James packs a whole lot into a couple of verses. And we're going to have to work together to kind of bring it all to the surface.

Basically, James is trying to present to this church what he sees as a problem, a promise, and a response.

That's kind of the basic framework of what we're going to move through. But I'm going to move through it pretty quickly because the response is going to beg a major question, and I want to have plenty of time for us to engage with that at the end. So let's go to work. Let's see if we can get all the different pieces on the table, and then we'll start to put them back together, Lord willing, in a way that's really helpful for us.

So the problem that James is trying to focus this early church on is what we have called spiritual adultery, right?

This is verses 4 and 5, which if you remember earlier this month, we wrapped up a sermon by taking a quick look at these two verses.

But the charge here is pretty serious.

This group of people that by and large James refers to as spiritual brothers and sisters, there's this group of people that he writes to with tremendous pastoral affection.

You get the idea, James really likes this group of people, but man, there's something he wants to call their attention to.

You adulterous people, don't you know that friendship with the world is hostility toward God?

So whoever wants to be the friend of the world becomes the enemy of God.

Or do you think that it's without reason that the Scripture says the Spirit, he may dwell in us, in envies intensely.

Again, if you want a little bit more on this, you can go back and get the podcast from earlier this month.

But what we said a few weeks ago is that James' primary concern with this church was what we are calling spiritual adultery, that they were living in a state of spiritual infidelity.

That they were trying to get from the world what they were designed to get from God.

Now, this is interesting to all of us, or at least it should be, because James is leading us to think about sin in relational terms, not just in judicial terms.

When the Bible thinks about sin, and it doesn't think solely in terms of breaking the rules and facing the consequences.

Sure, sin is a refusal to cooperate with the order and the command and the will of God, but James is like, hey, don't forget, in that rule breaking, there is also a relational component, right?

There is a distancing ourselves from a heavenly father.

There is a spiritual adultery, right?

Because the core of adultery is always getting from another what you should be getting from your spouse.

And he's like, hey, that's what you guys are doing.

Now, in that, there is something beautiful, even as James brings what was designed to be a devastating charge.

I mean, he didn't intend for this to go over easy to say, hey, you guys are living in a state of spiritual infidelity.

Even in that, though, there's this hint of an emerging promise, because there is this belief that God himself wants to be the one who satisfies the longings of our soul, right?

That people are trying to get from the world that which they should be getting from God, that which God longs to offer them, right?

Which starts to open us up to this promise of a greater grace.

This is where we move into newer territory in verse 6.

But he gives greater grace.

Therefore, he says, he's going to back in quote Proverbs 34, God resists the proud, but gives grace to the humble.

Yes, it is true.

God actively resists our attempts to find in the world what we were meant to find in him.

God actively opposes the pride that lives in each and every single one of us, the pride that would believe that we don't need God in order to be fulfilled in life.

That we could do it just fine on our own, that God is sort of this optional accessory for the religious.

Maybe he's an insurance policy against an unpleasant eternity.

But when it comes to satisfying the longings of our soul, when it comes to navigating the world that we live in, man, I'm good, I don't need this divine being.

I don't need the counsel of the word of God.

I'm doing just fine.

This is a warning, God's like, mm, yeah.

So I'm not gonna let you stay in that place because that place is profoundly dangerous.

God loves you enough that he's not going to collude with you in something that's ultimately destructive to your soul.

He loves you enough to be like, hey, I see what you got going on here and in love, I'm actually going to disrupt it a little bit if I need to.

Because I don't want you to live under the illusion that you don't need me.

I want you to stay in a place where you're aware of your need for this greater grace and a place where you're regularly receiving this greater grace.

Now, again, all of these things are meant to be challenging.

Yet, you don't have to look very far before you see the beauty of the whole thing.

He gives a greater grace.

God's response to our spiritual affair is grace, not wrath.

I mean, think about what that means.

Locate that in the context of a marriage.

Yours, or the one you hope to have someday, or the one that you can envision.

One spouse cheats on another.

The pain, the heartache, the hurt, the destruction, the horror of that moment.

And God says, here's what I want you to know.

Here's what I want you to know.

Because you've all caused me that kind of pain, that kind of heartache, that kind of horror.

Here's what I want you to know.

I respond in grace, not in fury.

I respond in forgiveness, not in condemnation.

I respond in love, not in brutality.

That's the God that we worship.

That is the God who created you.

That is the God who makes himself available to us day in and day out.

Not a God of furious condemnation, but a God who lovingly rescues a wayward spouse.

His grace, his love, his mercy, his forgiveness are available to all of us who will humble ourselves enough to admit that we need it.

And for some of us, that's the thing you gotta take away from today.

Because this promise of greater grace is the promise that says, hey, look, it doesn't matter what your week has looked like.

It doesn't matter what your month has looked like.

It doesn't matter what your 20, 25 has looked like.

It doesn't matter what your 20s have looked like.

It doesn't matter how much pain, how much betrayal.

It doesn't matter how much brokenness.

It doesn't matter how lost, how hurt, how confused you are.

God says, I'm gonna move to you with a greater grace.

You have not out sinned the cross of Jesus Christ.

You're not beyond his power.

You're not beyond his grace.

You're not beyond his love.

You haven't gone someplace that he's not willing to come and find you.

And for some of us, it's like, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Church, same old, same old, same old.

And for some of us, that's the kind of thing that will cause your heart to race.

Because the thought of a God of love who would seek you out where you are right now and wrap his arms around you and say, I have come to clean you up.

I have come to claim you as my own.

I have come to call you beloved.

That's the most astonishing thing you could hear this morning.

This promise of a greater grace, the greater grace of the gospel.

Now, for James, and this is the one that is going to beg the question, James envisions a church that inevitably responds to this greater grace by living lives of humble submission to God.

Right?

For James, the promise of greater grace leads to an inevitable response.

We see it in verse 7 and in verse 10.

Therefore submit to God, humble yourselves before the Lord, and He will exalt you.

For James, humble submission is the logical inference of grace.

It's what naturally flows one from the other.

So yeah, back to the podcast.

Don't be that guy.

Don't be that person.

Right?

No matter how much God exalts us, live in humble submission.

But this is why I wanted to move quickly, because it leaves a fairly massive question on the table, doesn't it?

I mean, it's one thing to be like, great guys, go live a life of humble submission.

But if you're like me, you're not going to make it very far out of the auditorium before you would be arrested with a question that is like, well, yeah, that's great.

I mean, I'm on board.

But what in the world does that look like?

Like, what does that mean?

Sure, I'm in.

I'm great.

Yes, let's humble submission.

Sign me up.

Anybody have a thought?

Like, where do we start?

Like, what's the first move?

Like, what do I do when I wake up tomorrow?

By the way, that's a really good question because it's a question that scripture anticipates.

It's almost kind of like, hey, if that question didn't come to your mind, you may not be thinking deeply enough about the text.

So I want to show you something in the text that I think is going to be helpful, and then we're going to spend the rest of our time talking about how it applies for our life.

But the next 45 seconds, this is an invitation to just be a Bible nerd with me for a little bit here.

If you go to verse 7 and verse 10, right, the places where we are told to submit to God and we're told to humble ourselves to God, you would realize two things about those verbs.

Number one, they're both imperatives.

It's a command, right?

This isn't a suggestion.

This isn't a like, pray about it and get back to me.

This is James under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit being like, do this.

Yet they are a passive verb.

It's a passive command, right?

As opposed to an active verb, right?

In an active verb, the person that you are commanding to do something, you're commanding them to take an action, right?

You go shovel the driveway would be an active imperative.

And that's what you almost always encounter, right?

Go do this, right?

Go make that.

Go clean your room.

Go make your bed.

Go and do.

That's not what he's doing here.

These are all passive commands.

In the passive verb, you're commanded to let the thing happen to you, to be the recipient of it.

So it might be something, the equivalent of like commanding somebody to receive a gift.

Like, no, I really want you to take this.

But the goal of the text is not for us to get up tomorrow and do humble submission.

What are we doing?

I'm doing humble submission.

The goal of the text is to say, no, you need to become the kind of person who allows yourself to become humbly submitted to God.

Now, how do you do that?

Every other verb between 7 and 10, those are all active verbs.

So what James is trying to paint is a picture that says, hey, you want to become this humbly submitted person?

You want to respond to the grace of the gospel?

Great, I'm going to show you what to do.

So we're going to pick apart the verbs in between 7 and 10 to paint a picture for ourselves of what a life of humble submission looks like.

But I don't want to just approach these as what one commentator described us as a staccato burst of commands, right?

Because it could be very easy to take this and just be like, all right, here's like rapid fire, six, seven different things.

You better do A and B and C and D and go from there.

We'll get to that.

We're going to talk about all that stuff.

I'm not going to gloss over it, but I want to see the commands.

I want to see this becoming a person of humble submission as directly connected to the greater grace that God offers us in response to the problem of our sin, right?

So that's why we had to get all the different pieces.

The problem is spiritual adultery.

God's response is a greater grace.

And God's promise is a greater grace.

And then our response is humble submission.

I get that all on the table because I'm going to try to bring them together over the next couple of minutes because ultimately what this text is trying to show us is that we experience the grace of God as we live in humble submission to God, right?

And that those two things are meant to just work together sort of the spiritual synergistic effect in our lives, right?

So, a life of humble submission is a life that is built on the grace to fight.

James chapter 4, 7 and 8, Therefore, submit to God, resist the devil, and he will flee from you.

Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you.

Right?

In these two verses, James is using distinctly military language.

So, he is not just trying to call us to something active.

He is trying to conjure up an image, a feel of something that is active nearly to the point of being aggressive.

There's a vigor to this.

There's an intensity to this.

There's a reminder to us that our discipleship to Jesus will often feel like we're in a battle.

Right?

There's this reminder that to follow Jesus well means you live with this sense that you're fighting against the sinful tendencies of your flesh.

You're fighting against the corruption of the world.

You're fighting against evil itself.

Right?

My concern is not Christians who feel like they're in a battle.

My concern is Christians that are so far removed from what God is doing that they can't even imagine the spiritual life in terms of a battle.

That's almost always a sign that we've retreated from the front lines of what God is doing in the world rather than being the tip of the spear of the advance of the kingdom of God.

It's meant to feel like a fight every once in a while.

Right?

James is also trying to be very practical and show us that the primary way we resist the devil is by running to Jesus.

Right?

That's why these are not, you know, disjointed commands like over here, you just go fight Satan.

Good luck with that.

Okay, when you're done, draw near to God.

Right?

We sometimes approach it that way, where it's like, all right, you and the Prince of Darkness, you guys go duke it out.

And then after you win that fight, you run your little self over to Jesus.

And he's like, great job, little warrior.

You did amazing over here.

Let's just kind of come do Sabbath or lay down by still waters or whatever we're gonna do over here.

But you know, you went over there, kicked the crud out of evil.

And now, now we get to have a little Sunday and sing some songs.

Good for you.

No, he's like the primary way that you resist the devil is by running to Jesus.

Sure, you fight off the attack in the moment that it comes.

You're like, no, I'm not looking at that.

No, I'm not going there.

No, I'm not texting him back.

No, I'm not texting her back.

No, I'm not responding to that email until tomorrow.

No, I'm not going down that road.

But you're fighting in a way that's like, get away from me, because I got to get back to Jesus as quickly as I can.

Right, here's why that matters.

This promise that the devil will flee from you.

Look, I don't want to hurt your feelings, but he's not all that intimidated by you.

He's not.

He's not like, oh, well, I mean, she does have a master's.

Okay, well, I just, oh, an MBA.

Oh, okay, well, no trouble here.

I'll just go find somebody else.

He's not intimidated by you.

He's scared to death of the one who's coming to your rescue.

He's like, I know him.

I got one in on his heel, and he's coming from my head.

That's why he's out of there.

And God's saying, hey, in the moment that you run to me, I'm going to come and I'm going to run to you.

I'm going to come to your rescue.

Now I want to make sure that we understand what that battleground actually looks like.

We get the idea of like, I'm going to fend off Satan, and I'm going to run to Jesus and be like, yeah, there he is.

Son of the living God.

I'm on his side.

I just want to make sure we understand that it's, yes, a fight between good and evil, but remember what we talked about earlier, spiritual adultery.

It's a fight for the satisfaction of our souls.

Well, because Satan's primary game is to discourage you, to wear you down, and then to isolate you so that he can tempt you with something that will bring a small measure of temporary relief.

But he just wants to grind you down, wear you out, get you tired, get you hopeless, get you discouraged, feeling like you're never gonna be enough, you're never gonna be able to get it all done, you don't matter, you're this, you're that, you're whatever, he's supposed to tear you down.

And then he wants to get you alone.

1 Peter teaches nearly identical concepts, 1 Peter chapter five, but it describes Satan as a roaring lion who's seeking somebody to devour.

Think willed beast and lion on the Discovery Channel.

The lion always goes after the one that gets separated from the pack.

Satan wants to wear you down and then get you by yourself.

And when you're tired and alone, he's like, gotcha.

Because he's really good at being like, here's what make you feel better.

Different answers for different people.

Here, why don't you watch this online or go shopping here, or maybe you should text him back.

Maybe you should text her back.

You know what he's after, you know what she's after.

He knows exactly what to do.

And he's like, I gotcha.

Jesus is the exact opposite.

Satan is gonna offer you things that might feel good in the moment, but ultimately devour you and the people around you.

Jesus offers life.

In fact, the way Jesus describes it, John chapter 10, verse 10, a thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy.

I have come so that you may have life and have it in abundance.

If Satan wants to tear you down, Jesus wants to build you up.

He wants to strengthen you.

He's placed His Spirit inside of you to do that.

If Satan wants to isolate you, Jesus wants to connect you.

Right?

Sometimes part of the battle is just showing up to community group, even though you don't want to, even though you're tired, even because whatever, because you're like, no, look, I'm vulnerable when I'm alone, and I'm just going to be with my people for a minute.

Because it's just going to create a little more relational death, it's going to create a little more bond, it's going to make me a little more likely to be able to reach out to somebody that I know in this city when I'm hurting, when I'm lonely, when I'm alone.

Right?

Ultimately, Jesus wants to satisfy our souls.

Right?

If Satan's goal is to devour us, or maybe even more accurately, to get us to devour ourselves with that which will never satisfy.

Do you see the contrast?

Jesus offers himself as the bread of life.

He's like, I'll feed your soul.

Right?

So the spiritual life is this rhythm of resisting and running, active.

But the Bible sees that as a greater grace from God who empowers the whole thing.

Right?

It's this greater grace of the one who comes to our rescue.

It's the greater grace of the one who cares about the choices when you make when you're alone and frustrated.

The one who knows you and the one who offers himself to you.

Now that in and of itself is pretty remarkable, but scripture is not done because after God offers us the greater grace to fight, he offers us the greater grace to heal.

Right?

This is where the promise of greater grace starts to take root in our lives through repentance.

Chapter 4 verse 8, cleanse your hands sinners and purify your hearts.

You double minded.

Because this is where we get to just be honest with each other.

I don't care how committed you are to resisting evil, how disciplined you are about running to Jesus.

We live in fallen bodies in a broken world with a real spiritual battle raging around us.

So we're not going to make it through a day without evil, without the world, without despair landing a couple of blows on us.

Even on a Sunday, you don't get through a Sunday unscathed without evil leaving a mark or two on your mind or your heart or your soul.

So this invitation to cleanse our hands and to purify our hearts is an invitation to experience the grace of God that heals the wounds of our souls.

Two weeks ago, I was at my son Jack's baseball game on a Saturday night, and I was sitting on one of the metal bleachers and something happened and I kind of like shot up and somehow put a decent gash on my calf.

And it was starting to bleed and I know the sensible among you are like so clearly you went over to the dugout, opened up the first aid kit and helped yourself, right?

And by sensible among you, I mean women.

Because I'm like, I know that would have made so much sense.

But of course, I didn't do that.

That might have looked weak or vulnerable.

Also not like a great way to strengthen your relationship with your 12-year-old son, who's like, oh my gosh, it's my dad who one is bleeding because he stood up.

That doesn't sound all that athletic.

It wasn't like dad stretched something reaching to save a fly ball from going over the fence.

It's like, oh no, the old guy stood up.

That's great.

And we're hurt.

Oh, and now daddy has a boo-boo and we need to put a bandaid on him.

So I just surveyed the situation and I was like, okay, I don't have a napkin, I don't have anything.

My best move is to just leave it alone.

It was already starting to kind of scab over.

So I was like, I'll just, I'll just pretend that didn't happen.

And I'll do my whole thing.

So we then got on and it did.

It formed a really, really like impressive scab.

I was like, well, there we go.

Problem, problem solved.

Nothing's happening down there.

So we left Jack's game, went over to the field that Aidan was playing a separate baseball game on.

And I come walking in, Laura was over there with Emma.

I come walking in, and you know things aren't going well when she's like, what happened to your leg?

Before we even get to like, hey, hon, how to go?

What happened to your leg?

And I'm like, oh, a little cut.

She's like, did you do anything with that?

I was like, no, no, we're good.

It's scabbed over.

She's like, okay, we'll deal with that at home.

And I'm like, oh, okay, what are we going to do?

And we got home and she's like, I'm like, oh, you're just going to like put a band-aid on it?

And she's like, no, we're going to clean it.

Like you cut it on metal, right?

I was like, well, yeah, I mean, yes, yes, ma'am.

I did.

She's like, yeah, we're going to have to clean that out.

Up until this point, I thought Laura and I were in a good place in our relationship, but clearly girlfriend had some unresolved anger because she cleaned it.

Like she got it all.

She went, I mean, it was not fun, not pleasant.

Now, ultimately, it really helped in the healing process and she did the Neosporin and the Band-Aid and it's like totally fine.

No big deal, right?

Not trying to scare you off, but there is a sense where that same process of like, hey, cleanse your hands, purify your hearts.

It is often experienced as the spiritual equivalent of like, oh, so what's going on with your leg?

Yeah, okay.

We're gonna have to clean that thing for a little bit.

And spiritually, we have a tendency to do what I was trying to get away with physically of like, whoa, I don't know, is that gonna hurt?

Like, I don't know, it's fine.

It's totally, we don't, nothing to see here, we're good.

It's a little scab, it'll fall off, like, it's just a little anger, it's just a little bitterness, it's just a, you know, normal garden variety, nonstop anxiety, it's just a little resentment towards my sibling, it's just a little, nothing to see here.

I'm sure it'll get better, we're good.

And Jesus lovingly gives us the grace to be like, yeah, I don't think you wanna play it that way.

I don't think that's gonna work the way you think it is.

And I think you can get, at the very least, at the very least, you can get a whole lot better, a whole lot faster if you'll let me serve you.

If you'll let me do spiritually for you what Laura was willing to do physically.

So what does that look like spiritually?

Let me give you an illustration from the same confused guy that wouldn't put a bandaid on his leg.

So we'll just keep going using me as the guinea pig of how this whole thing works.

I had the chance to go on a little bit of a personal retreat last February and it kind of picked that time on purpose.

Laura had just gotten back from a trip that she had taken.

So I'd been doing kind of solo dad and working and all that for about 10, 10, 11 days.

And there's just a lot going on.

It's like, man, you should go get a couple nights by yourself.

And it's just kind of like a rhythm that I have.

So I went down, was out at Virginia Beach, got a really good night's sleep.

But I just knew that I was just in a spot, nothing dramatic.

But if you remember back to last February, last February was not awesome in DC.

I mean, there was just like all kinds of stuff happening in everybody's life.

Everything from like, do I have a job to, oh my goodness, there was a plane crash to like sickness and tough winters.

It was just it was hard.

I didn't meet anybody in February that was crushing it.

But I just felt like, man, you're more tired than you should be.

You're just, you're whatever.

So what I would do in situations like this, this is kind of just something I've acquired over my life with Jesus, is I tend to go for a long walk with my phone on airplane mode, but the notes app open.

And I just start to process some things where I'll jot down a question at the top of the notes app, and then really just kind of pray through and be like, all right, Spirit of God, I just want you to kind of give me insight.

And it really is tremendously helpful, even though in this particular case, it started with me opening up a note that just asked the deeply encouraging question, why am I so exhausted?

And what I wanted, going back to verse 8, talking about cleanse your hands and purify your hearts, I wanted a whole bunch of hands things.

Like I wanted a whole bunch of like specific changes I could make, rhythms I could reintroduce, you know, I need to start taking a multivitamin, yeah, like whatever, like all kinds of stuff that I could control, order on Amazon, whatever.

And as I'm wandering around with my notes app, why am I so exhausted?

I started writing down things like, being a perfectionist is exhausting.

And I was like, well, I don't think there's an app for that.

Hmm, that doesn't sound great.

That feels like a heart thing.

I'm after hands things.

Being critical is exhausting.

And then, you know, a mile or two down the road, I wrote down, being angry is exhausting.

And you just have those moments where God's Spirit is like, ooh, that, you need to pay attention to that.

You need to tug on that thread a little bit.

So I'm like, shoot, now we need a new note.

Why am I so angry, right?

Because I didn't think that I was like, yeah, there is something to that, but I was not expecting it.

All right, why am I angry?

And if I was expecting hands stuff on the first one, I was expecting heart stuff on the second.

But actually, the exact opposite happened.

I started writing about certain unresolved conflicts or pain that I had never acknowledged, ways that I'd been hurt, things that I hadn't stood up for what I believe, but had just gone with what other people want.

All these things that actually was more of like, well, you need to make a phone call here.

You need to pray for the grace to forgive somebody over here.

You need to do this over here.

You need to do that over here.

You need to move on.

All right?

The work of repentance is the work of hands and hearts.

It is the work of surfacing the wound and then bringing it to Jesus.

If I brought Laura a scabbed over calf, we need to develop the courage to bring the scabs of our hearts, the wounds of our souls to Jesus, right?

And allow him to clean us.

Ultimately, this grace to heal happens when we explore the why behind our particular fights, right?

The battles that you're facing in life are different than the battles I'm facing in life, but there's a why behind it.

That's what I was trying to do with my little notes app.

I was trying to get to the why behind what felt like a battle with exhaustion and despair.

I was trying to get to the why behind what felt like a battle with anger, right?

And that was how I learned to bring a wounded heart to Jesus.

And finally, in response to a wounded heart, Jesus gives us the grace to feel.

Man, I love that the come on, John, came from a man.

Because that's not how we've trained men in our country to respond.

In fact, what we've done is a pretty good job of like, hey, grace to feel.

This is bonus content for the ladies.

You're leaning in.

It's like, yay, and feelings are grace and woohoo.

We've conditioned a whole generation of men to be like, nah, I'm good.

I don't need that particular grace.

I'll just do the fighting.

She can do the feeling.

I'll go fight.

She feels that that's how this is gonna look like.

So guys, let me just see if I can press on that for a minute in a way that's helpful.

Whoever told you that to be a man meant ignoring your heart lied to you.

And I'm saying that based on what scripture teaches about what it means to be human and what it means to be a person, right?

That's not me trying to interject my opinion into cultural conversations about what it means to be a man.

That's me pointing out that ignoring your heart is a broken and unbiblical understanding of what it means to be a human, right?

Scripture teaches over and over again, no place more clearly than Proverbs 4, that the heart is the control center of our lives, right?

That it is from the heart that all else flows.

And if that is still true today and it is, it helps us understand why so many men in our country are in crisis because we've conditioned an entire generation of men to ignore the very thing that shapes their lives.

And if you raise up a generation of boys that are told, you don't do that, you don't feel that, you don't cry that, you don't need to go there, you just fight, you just go do, you just go battle, you just go do something like that.

You can't be surprised when you end up with a generation of men that feel lonely, adrift, furious, and desperately seeking something that will allow them to feel alive.

Rather than going and fighting the real battles of good and evil in the world, just sit up at night and play Fortnite.

It's like the same, just totally different.

The hard work of asking somebody out and dating and raising family and getting married and all that.

Nah, just watch some stuff online and find sexual satisfaction that way.

By the way, just one more, get it all out of my system.

This is why so many young men are being radicalized online.

Whether it's being radicalized to extreme religious, political or sexual ideologies, they're not being won over by appeals to the head.

They're being won over by appeals to the heart.

We need a generation of men who don't forget that David was a warrior poet.

And who don't just say that as a nice feel-good moment, but are like, no, I want the grace to fight, men and women.

And I want the grace to feel, because James is inviting the church to, if nothing more, to allow themselves to lament and feel the pain of the spiritual wounds that have been inflicted on them, and to acknowledge the pain of the spiritual wounds that they've inflicted on others.

Be miserable and mourn and weep.

Let your laughter be turned into mourning and your joy to gloom.

This is not James just trying to be a killjoy and be like, y'all are having fun in church, you better knock this off.

This is James saying, hey, look, if you go back to the problem of spiritual adultery, if that's really what's going on, have you ever allowed yourself to feel the weight of the wounds you carry because of the ways you've betrayed an eternal spouse?

Have you ever opened up your heart to what it is that God is trying to say to you in the moment?

Have you ever opened up a notes app and processed what's in your soul and why is it there?

Right?

Some of the reason that this feel matters is because we're so enamored and rightly so with the promise of greater grace that we think it gives us license to gloss over the problem of our sin, and that's just not how the gospel works.

It's a grace to feel, it's a grace to heal, it's a grace to fight, and my prayer as we wrap up is that we would see this as a pattern of life, not a three-step process, right, that we would walk into each day just wondering what's the need of the moment?

What's today's fight?

Where do I need to heal today?

What's happening inside of me right now?

And by the way, if we walk down that road together, can I just point out real quick what happens?

Going all the way back to the podcast, going all the way back to Don't Be That Guy, if we pursue this kind of life, the grace to fight, the grace to heal, the grace to feel, we will end up being the furthest thing from that guy.

We'll end up living in humble submission.

God may very well exalt you, but you'll never lose sight of the fact that it was by His grace that you were able to live a very simple pattern of life.

Fight and heal and feel.

So Father in heaven, we want to come and we want to ask that you would empower us to do that.

We want to come and ask that you would empower us to live that way, that you would meet us here in our moment of need, whatever that looks like.

Call us to stand up and fight.

Call us to heal.

Call us to awaken to what you're doing in us.

But Jesus, it was your words.

You're the one that said if we draw near to you, you will draw near to us.

So would you come and do that now?

I pray in Christ's name.