James 4

Three Enemies that Prevent Us to be matured in Christ (v1-12)

v5: This is a very difficult verse to understand, because it is not obvious whether James was referring to the “Holy Spirit” or our own “spirit”, and not obvious whether he was referring “envies” as in good envies, or bad envies. My take is James was referring to the Holy Spirit that live in us grieves (envies) intensely when we became friend with the world.

Self

v1: We fights and quarrels to win. We desire others to agree, to respect and to follow our will. Our own will and desires are controlled by our sinful nature. Christ told us in order to follow Him, we must first deny ourselves (Matt 16).

v3: When we pray, do we pray with our own motives, which are mostly wrong motives. That is why our prayers are not answered. Christ told us that we should pray “may Your will be done on earth as it is on heaven”. We ought to search, study, and meditate on the will of God, and pray that His will be done, not ours.

v6: Our self is always prideful, and God opposes the proud. Do we want more grace from God? Just learn to humble ourselves (v10).

v11: When we are full of ourselves, we think we are better than others and we started to judge others. There is only one Lawgiver and Judge, and He is no any one of us.

Satan

v7: Satan will never flee us, unless we resist him. However we do not have the power to resist Satan ourselves, we need to submit to God, with the power of God, we can resist the devil.

World

v4: What is the world? The world is the all the philosophy, systems and people that denies the authority, the teaching, the salvation and the person of Christ. The example the hollywood entertainment industry. Are you a friend of the world? Then you just made God your enemy, a bad position to be.

v4: When we became friends of the world, we became adulterous people.

Acknowledge The Sovereignty of the Lord in Our Life

We can plan for future, but we need to always be ready that the Lord has a different plan for us. We need to recognize His sovereignty in our life and submit to His will and His plan for us.