RelationSHIFT | Part 1 | Where Are You Standing?

A gentleman by the name of Kenneth Woodward, he was the religion editor for Newsweek. And in 2016, he began to gather some religious surveys and he was comparing what people responded with in the surveys to how they actually lived their life. And what he discovered was stunning. He discovered that America was one of the most religious countries in the world, that 90% of Americans claimed that they believed in God. But here's where it got interesting, is that he said that when you line those people up and you began to look at the people that believe in God and to look at how they lived their life, what they prioritized in life, what shaped their decisions in life, he said you couldn't tell the difference between the 90% and the 10. That they had intention, but they didn't have action. But it raises, I think, a question that we don't often think about, and the question is what happens in our life when our belief in God is strong but our practice of that belief becomes casual? Like the danger when we find ourselves in that gap, the danger isn't that we stop believing in God, the danger is that our faith becomes something that we intend to live out but we never actually do. And over time, what happens is that gap doesn't just create inconsistencies in our life, but it creates distance from God. And over the next seven weeks, we're going to be looking at some of the shifts that you and I can make in our life, some of the intentional shifts that will allow us to begin to reduce that distance that sometimes we feel between us and God. You know, I believe, God, there are these invitations that God is extending to each one of us, and those invitations aren't to try to earn his love, it's not to try to prove something, but it's to try to position our heart so that you and I can experience more of his presence and his power in our life. And so today what I want to do is I want to lean into this first shift that we can not just have an intention to do in our life, but actually live it out, to act it out in our life. And we're going to look at this shift from casual to intentional, from a casual faith

to an intentional faith, and we're going to be looking at James chapter 4 today. I've given today this title, Where Are You Standing? Where are you standing? James chapter 4 was written by James. He's the half-brother of Jesus, effectively he's the pastor of the Jerusalem church, and he's writing this letter to the believers there, and it's a letter that's not really being addressed to skeptics, it's not being addressed to atheists, it's not even a letter that's being written to new believers. James is writing this letter to people who have developed a casual faith in God. And the importance of the distinction in that is that James isn't trying to convince them to believe, what he's trying to help them understand is why their faith in God seems so powerless in their life. And so in James chapter 4 verse 1, notice what he says here, he says, what's causing the quarrels and the fights among you? I think this is interesting right off the bat. I mean, we're seeing right now church drama, like it's been going on for way longer than lately, right? Like it's been going on, it's nothing new. He's like, what's causing the quarrels and the fights among you? Don't they come from the evil desires that are at war within you? He says you want what you don't have, and so you scheme and kill to get it. You're jealous of what others have. have, but you can't get it, so you fight and you wage war to take it away from them, yet you don't have what you want because you don't ask God for it. I want to stop right here and just point out something, that the language that James is using here is intended to have some shock value to it. He's not literally saying that Christians are going around killing each other because they're not getting what they want. He's trying to help them to understand that when we have these unchecked desires in our life, that they ultimately destroy the relationships in our life.

We may not be killing one another, but we're certainly killing our trust in people, we're killing people's reputation, we may be killing our marriage or unity within our family or within the church. He says here in verse 3, he says, and even when you do ask, he's like, you don't get it because your motives are all wrong. You want only what will give you pleasure. See, according to James here, the real issue isn't what is out there happening around them, it's what's happening on the inside. He's trying to help them see that there is this competition between two different desires that are pulling them in different directions. And what's interesting about what we just read is that he's not looking at the things that they're doing and treating the conflict and the fighting and the frustration and the selfishness, he's not treating those as a problem, he's treating them as a symptom. A symptom of something that's much bigger that carries greater consequence in our life. He says this in verse 4, he's like, you adulterers. I mean, he's like, he's coming right out at them, you adulterers. And this is interesting to me because he's speaking to the believers in the church, right, that have grown casual in their faith, but he's using covenant language, he's using this language that, this is the best way for me to explain it, is that when we come to a saving knowledge of Jesus Christ into our heart, that there is this union that happens between us and the Father, that it's like a marriage relationship. And what James is trying to help them understand is it's, when that happened, when you accepted Jesus Christ into your heart, it's not like, it's not like you're just kind of shacking up with Jesus whenever you want to, like it's a covenant, it's a marriage relationship. And that's why he's using this word, adulterer. You know, it's not that they're rejecting God outright, it's all about them trying to hold on to God and something else at the same time. And he says, listen, don't you realize that friendship with the world, that it makes you an enemy of God. I say it again, if you want to be a friend of the world, you make yourself an enemy of

God. I think when he says that, when he's speaking of friendship with the world, he's, he's not telling us that we can't enjoy the things of the world. What he's, what he's saying is don't allow those things to become first place in your life. And he says in verse 5, he says, do you think the Scriptures have no meaning? They say that God is passionate. He's passionate that the spirit that he has placed within, within us, that it should be faithful to him. And I think of, I think of like, if you're married in the room, you, you probably understand the feeling of, of you're married to your spouse. And if there was ever a time, and I'm not even talking about unfaithfulness, I'm talking about like other things poked up into their life to where you were getting the, the kind of the breadcrumbs of time, the breadcrumbs of attention. And as whatever that was, whether it was work, whether it was recreation, hobbies, kids, like whatever it is that just started dominating their attention, there develops this kind of jealousy on the inside. Because now you're having to compete with something that you shouldn't have to be competing with. And James is helping us see that that is the jealousy that God feels towards us isn't an unhealthy jealousy. It's a jealousy of like he wants that connection, he desires that connection with you and me. And when we allow other things to dominate our attention in our life, it kind of hurts his heart. Because there is that connection that he so deeply craves. Then in verse 6 he shifts and he says, and he gives grace generously, which I think is amazing. Because what do we do when we feel jealous like that? Like we don't give grace generously, like we begin to push away, right? Throw up an attitude, whatever, passive aggressive, whatever it is. But in that situation God is extending grace, says the scripture says. God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble. Which by the way, grace, it's not intended to be permission to stay the same in your life. Just because he gives grace generously doesn't mean that we get to cash that in all the time just so that we can stay the same.

His grace is there to give us power to change. To change directions, to change loyalties. It says in verse 7 that, so humble yourself before God. Resist the devil and he will flee from you. In other words, stop entertaining the things that divide your heart so much. And I think it's interesting that there's an order there. Humble yourselves first before resisting the devil. And how many times do we go into resisting the devil but we never really humble ourselves before the Lord. And we wonder why nothing really changes in our life. That there is this humility, this posture, and the reason why is because humility is a catalyst to change in our life. He says in verse 8, and this is kind of the theme verse for the series, he says come close to God. And God will come close to you. Wash your hands. You sinners, purify your hearts for your loyalty is divided between God and the world. And then James in the last couple verses, he calls for repentance of that casual faith. He says let the tears for what you have done, let there be sorrow and deep grief. Let there be sadness instead of laughter and gloom instead of joy. Humble yourselves before the Lord and he will lift you up in honor. So there's some pretty pointed words that James pens here. But the reason why James is being so straightforward is because he's trying to wake them up to the reality that casual faith doesn't remain casual. It always drifts to something worse. And I want to show you what I mean by that. All of us, well most of us, enjoy fires. We like it when it's cold outside, the light of fire. And what do we do? We come closer to the fire and as we get closer the fire warms us up. There's something about being around a fire, right, that you just kind of warm the hands and it just slows you down a little bit. Relaxes you. You know, you start to think about some things that maybe you wouldn't really slow down long enough to consider and to think about. And us being close to the fire doesn't really impact the fire, doesn't make it bigger or smaller.

The fire stays the same. What's interesting is that when you think about that as we're close to the fire, we're warm. But what happens when we begin to take a step away from the fire? That nothing changes in the fire itself, but the warmth that we experience begins to decline. The colder that we get away from the fire, the colder that we end up getting. And I think when James is speaking about, in verse eight, to come near to God and God will come near to us, that it's not transactional language. And oftentimes we could read that and look at it as transactional, okay, I'm gonna take a step towards God, God's gonna take a step towards me. Oops, I take a step away, God steps away. And it's like this heavenly dance of like, okay, if I do two, he comes too. If I go one, he goes one back. And he only comes to the point that we go to him. And I'm not quite sure that that's what James is intending in this text. I think a better way for us to visualize it is that the fire never changes. And that as we in our life begin to move and take steps towards the fire, what ends up happening? We begin to experience more of God in our life. The more steps that we take back, the less that we experience. He's never changed. Yeah.

The fire of his presence has never changed. It's our proximity to the fire that changes. And I think what James is trying to help us see is that proximity matters. That if we wanna experience a shift in our relationship with God, we're never gonna really experience that with a casual kind of faith that is living at a distance. And here's what you gotta see. Like, this is about how we experience God, not what we believe in God. Because I could be up close to the fire and I still believe it's a fire. I could be a long ways away and still believe it's a fire. I think that's what Woodward was getting at in his article. That 90% of America believes that's a fire. Right? But 90% of America doesn't live their life next to the fire. And that is that intention, action, gap. The intention in our hearts so oftentimes that we want to experience all that God has to offer, but there's a gap between us actually living that out in our life. And so if that's the case, then I think there's a question that all of us have to wrestle with and it's a question we have to wrestle with often in our life. And that is how close are we standing to the fire?

Have we allowed things to get in the way, things to create distance and separation? It doesn't change what I believe about the fire, it changes my experience of the fire. In 25 years of ministry, I've come to know this reality to be true that people don't wake up far from God. They drift there. You don't just wake up one morning and have no relationship with God or feel cold or feel distant. It is something that we drift, that we allow things in our life, the pace of life, right, to create a gap. We allow opinions or differences to create a gap, we allow church hurt to create a gap and what ends up happening over time for most of us, like most of us never turn our back to the fire and walk away. It happens, but most of us don't do that. What most of us do unintentionally is we take steps back from the fire. Busyness of life causes us, prayer then moves to a last resort, not a first response. Church, over time, becomes not a priority in our schedule, but it's a preference. Do I feel like going to church today or not? Like, worship at one point was something that we engaged in, now we just kind of endure through it. Like, we're like, can we sit down already?

And if you really think about just your life and where you're at, chances are there wasn't a whole lot of really bad things that created the distance. Many of those things are good things, but it's good things that often keep us from the great things in our life, because bad things are easy to identify and say no to, but good things are hard. See the challenge is, is none of those things in our life get us to a place where we stop believing in God, we stop believing in the fire. We just take these little steps back over time, until one day we realize, I'm cold. I don't feel the warmth of the fire like I used to feel. A lot of times it's hard for us to identify what that is, and my hope this morning is this helps visualize that. It's not because you did something crazy wrong and egregious, it could just be that you've allowed over time some things to create a separation, and now you're not standing close to the fire anymore. You know the danger of that distance is this, I don't know if you've ever heard of the phenomenon called the paradoxical heat sensation, I actually had to read it because it's so complicated I can't remember it. But it's a condition where prolonged exposure to cold, it ends up dulling our ability to feel it until we go numb. And I just, I wonder if spiritually there's some similarities. That the longer, the longer we go away from the fire and the more distance that's there, the less we end up realizing how cold we really are. We start to grow numb, we start to grow numb to the presence of God, we start to grow numb to His word convicting us in our life, we start to grow numb spiritually in so many areas of our life and we don't even realize it. And I just wondered, I wonder today, I wonder how many might be further away from that fire than we realize. I wonder how many might say if there was a survey that went out and we were like rate your spirituality, right, between one and ten, rate where you are in your relationship with God, if in that survey you would give yourself, you know, six, seven, eight, nine,

but in reality when you really think about it, you're standing quite a ways away from the fire. You've just adapted to the cold. You know, what makes that kind of drift so dangerous in our life is drift doesn't just create distance between us and God, but it starts to numb us of the distance. And friend, if you find yourself in that kind of place, if you'd be like Ryan, like I, it's been a while since I felt the heat of God's presence in my life, then the good news that I have for you today is this, is that intentional steps, they reverse unintentional drift. That over time, the things that we've allowed to separate us and create distance, that the way for us to begin to get back to where God desires us to be and where our heart desires is not massive steps back, but it's... It's one intentional step. I love that about God, because when he invites us back into that kind of relationship, he's not asking us to change everything. He's just inviting us to change something. You know, when somebody is suffering from hypothermia, the last thing that you do in a situation like that is to rush them into intense heat, because if you do that, it could create shock in their body. And what you do is you begin to slowly acclimate them a little bit warmer, a little bit warmer, a little bit warmer. Some of you here today, you've felt this gap, you've felt this distance, and you're looking at your life, and you're like, I don't know if I can stop doing this. I don't know if I can let go of this.

And here's the beautiful thing about it is, God's not asking for that yet. All he's inviting us to do is to take a step. And I don't know what that step is for you. I think one question to ponder is, is what was one or two things that at one point in your life when you felt like you were closer to God, you could feel his presence, what were a few things that were a part of your rhythms in life that because of busyness or distraction, that those have kind of fallen away? And what would it look like for you to pick up one of those or two of those again? What would it look like for you to create a fixed daily moment where God gets your first focus? Like what would it look like for you to take 30 days and instead of grabbing your phone as soon as you get out of bed and jumping on social media, that you grabbed your Bible? You gave God five minutes with no agenda, not a list of stuff that you need God to do in your life, but just five minutes of saying, God, I'm gonna take a step towards the fire. Friend, what if the distance that you feel, what if the coldness that you feel today, what if that's an invitation?