To Encourage You

James 4:8-10 “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.”

You’re probably familiar with the term, “in the gutter.” It’s an idiom that is used to refer to a mind that is constantly set on vulgarity. It’s a condition of seeing sexual innuendo in everything. Listen to almost any TV sitcom for more than five minutes and you’ll see an example of it. It’s one of the things that sin does to a life. It degrades it. It pulls it down. It lowers it to a condition that is far below what God would have for us. And all the while, people laugh. They find pleasure in the very things that degrade them. If you don’t think so, notice the laugh tracks on almost any popular TV show. What is it that people are laughing at? Notice what people laugh at on any late-night talk show. Notice what the popular music of the day has as its theme. So much of it is the sin that degrades. So much of it is nothing more than a playing into the hands of the enemy of our souls whose only mission is “to kill, to steal, and to destroy” (John 10:10).

So, is that what the God Who has made us would have for us? Is that what life is all about? Most certainly the answer is “No!” Jesus told us very clearly that the reason He came to this earth was that we might “have life and have it abundantly” (John 10:10). But how does one get there from here? It’s to this that James speaks in the passage above. He’s talking to the “double-minded,” i.e., those that might show an interest in the things of God on the one hand, yet whose minds are “in the gutter” on the other. It’s a person who claims to believe in God on the one hand, yet acts like He doesn’t exist most of the time. It’s a life of instability. It’s a life that’s doomed to fail. The answer? In a word, it’s the process the Bible calls “repentance.” It’s what Jesus continually preached when He walked on this earth, the message of “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand” (Matthew 4:17). To “repent,” means to turn around. It’s a complete about face in the path one is treading. It’s a turning away from sin and towards God. But it’s such a difficult thing.

So, why is this? Because the heart that has never been transformed by the gospel is in love with its sin. Jesus put it this way in John 3:19: “And this is the judgment: the light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the light because their works were evil.” It’s a love for that which degrades us. It’s a trap into which those who don’t know Jesus have all fallen! And the solution? The way up from this? The Bible tells us that it’s the way down. It’s the confession of sin for what it is, and a great sorrow over it. It’s the turning of laughter over sin to mourning, and the turning of taking joy and pleasure in sin to gloom. It’s seeing sin for what it really is in our life and that it’s all a great offense to God. It’s the humility to confess that what we are living is all wrong, and that the only way up is to humble ourselves at the feet of Christ.

The apostle Paul had to do this, as does anyone else who would ever follow Jesus. Paul had to go from a position of seeing himself as a good person to realizing and confessing that “The saying is trustworthy and deserving of full acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am the foremost” (1 Timothy 1:15).

So, have you ever seen yourself in that light? Have you ever seen your sin for what it really is? Has your laughter ever been turned to mourning and your joy to gloom. If not, you’ve never humbled yourself before the holy God Who created you, and it’s not until you do this that He will ever lift you up. Jesus’ message today is the same as it was 2,000 years ago: “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.”