...if your entire life is best characterized by James 4:1-4—no God,
God is not in your thoughts or in your heart.
You go day to day, decision to decision, and somehow God’s not in the
equation, then what this passage is telling you is that you are the enemy of
God. You are resisting His plan and He
is resisting yours. But Jesus Christ—listen—made
peace through the blood of His cross. It’s
called reconciling enemies... I love this
text. This is so important. Here’s what Jesus did. Here’s what Jesus still does. In Colossians 1:19… For in
Him—that’s Jesus—all the fullness of
God was pleased to dwell. And through
Him to reconcile to Himself all things whether on earth or in heaven making
peace by the blood of His cross. And you
who once were alienated and hostile in mind doing evil deeds, He has now reconciled
in His body of flesh by His death in order to present you holy and blameless
and above reproach before Him if indeed you continue in the faith, stable and
steadfast, not shifting from the hope of the gospel that you heard which has
been proclaimed in all creation under heaven and of which I, Paul, became a
minister. The gospel, the good news,
what Jesus came to do in this world is to die for our sins, to die, to make
right what has been made wrong.
Everything bad in the world is a result of sin. Everything.
I mean you talk about tsunamis or floods or tornados, that’s what we
call natural catastrophes--sin. I mean
you talk about cancer, death. You want
to talk about divorce. You want to talk
about wars in homes and in churches.
Listen to me, everything bad in the world is a result of sin. But, listen.
The worst thing that sin caused is alienation of God’s creation from Him
the Creator. Alienated in our minds and
in our hearts because of our evil deeds and Jesus came to make that right by
dying on the cross in our place. So that
if James 4:1-4 is what best kind of characterizes your life, you need to come
to the cross of Jesus Christ and trust what He did and ask Him to make right
what sin has made wrong.
taken from a sermon dated 5/13/2012 by Pastor Jeff Tague at Calvary Baptist Church, Plainfield, IN
