June 26, 2025

James 4:1-3

Submit Yourselves to God:

What causes fights and quarrels among you? Don’t they come from your desires that battle within you? 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. When you ask, you do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives, that you may spend what you get on your pleasures.

Here James is warning us believers in Christ to behave like the heaven-bound disciples of Jesus rather than worldly unbelievers. If unbelievers are unable to distinguish us as something different from them then most likely we aren't.

Before the rooster crowed Peter had to curse and swear with an oath, “I don’t know the man” to make himself indistinguishable from the unbelievers.

We are to live in  the world, but we're not to live as the world. When we ask God with wrong motives for things and we don't receive them it's because He cares for us.

God’s correction for sinning Christians is often us having have to lay in the bed we've made for our self.

It was not Gods fault Samsons eyes were plucked out. His fleshly desire and disobedience was the reason, but ultimately God heard his prayers and returned his strength.

There are often stern warnings in the Bible for rejecting God and harsher lessons for disobedience but they are needed to inherit the Kingdom of God.

"For the LORD disciplines those he loves, and he punishes each one he accepts as his child."