James chapter 4, and we're going to begin
at verse 4.
I want to speak on the subject of
God's recipe for personal revival.
Remember, if you were here last night, I
said that growth, Christian growth really follows revival,
and we took that from Hosea 14 and
verse 7, which says, they that dwell under
his shadow shall return, they shall revive as
the corn and grow as the vine, the
center of shall be as the wine of
Lebanon.
So tonight, because real growth follows genuine revival,
I want to speak on the subject of
God's recipe for personal revival, and I don't
know of any place in scripture where it's
made plainer than it is here.
James 4, 4 to 10.
It doesn't seem as if he begins with
this theme, but he does.
He says, you adulterers and adulteresses, don't you
know that the friendship of the world is
enmity with God?
Whosoever therefore will be a friend of the
world is the enemy of God.
He is obviously not talking about the act
of adultery in the flesh, but adultery in
the spirit, which is dealt with in many
places in the word of God.
The book of Revelation, for example, in the
Old Testament, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Hosea, Hosea 1, verse
2, the land has committed great whoredom, departing
from the Lord.
Jeremiah, God accused the nation of Israel of
committing adultery with stocks and stones, with idols.
And if you love anything, anyone more than
God, that is spiritual harlotry, that is whoredom,
that is adultery.
The friendship of the world, that's adultery.
That's why 1 John 2, it says, love
not the world, neither the things that are
in the world.
If any man loved the world, the love
of the Father is not in him.
For all that is in the world, the
lust of the flesh, and the lust of
the eyes, and the pride of life, is
not of the Father, but is of the
world.
And the world is passing away.
It's on the way out.
And the lust thereof, that he that does
the will of God abides forever.
Jesus Christ said to his disciples, if you
were of the world, the world would love
us all, because you are not of the
world, but I have chosen you out of
the world.
Therefore, the world hates you.
For believers, to love the world, then, is
a form of spiritual harlotry, whoredom.
And that's what he's talking about here, you
adulterers and adulteresses.
Don't you know, don't you understand that the
friendship of the world is enmity with God?
Whosoever therefore be a friend of the world,
is the enemy of God.
Then he says, do you think that the
Scripture says in vain, the spirit that dwells
in us lusts enviously?
One translation says, what kind of spirit do
we have?
You know, in the Old Testament it talks
about the stars not being clean, not being
pure, the heavens not pure.
He charged the angels with folly.
Then it says, how much more abominable and
filthy is man who drinks iniquity like water,
as if God was saying that man is
worse than the fallen angels.
That's strong language.
But then, Jeremiah 17, the heart, your heart,
my heart, is deceitful above all things, and
desperately wicked.
Who can know it?
I the Lord search the heart.
I try the reins.
Only God knows the human heart.
In the Psalms, and Paul quotes from this
in Romans chapter 3, the word none four
times, the word all four times.
There's none that does good, no not one,
not one.
There is none that seeks after God.
They are all gone out of the way.
They are together become unprofitable.
There is none that does good, no not
one.
The wicked are estranged, that is estranged from
God, from the womb.
They go astray as soon as they are
born, speaking lies.
You know that if you're a parent.
You don't have to teach your child how
to lie.
They know how to lie.
You have to teach them to tell the
truth.
You don't have to teach them how to
steal.
They know how to do that.
You have to teach them not to steal.
The evil is so built into us from
the time we're born.
Like one of my daughters, we were at
Pine Falls, Manitoba, where my in-laws lived.
And it was Christmas time, the snow banks
were high.
I just happened to look out the window
to see what the girls were doing.
My two oldest girls, they were then quite
young.
Judy was probably eight and Lois was three
years younger.
And I just happened to see Judy take
Lois and spin her around and push her
head first into a snow bank.
I saw it.
And Lois came running in the house and
Judy came in.
And I said, Judy, why did you do
that?
She said, Daddy, I never did it.
And I stared at her.
And I said, Judith Lynn McLeod, don't you
lie to me.
I saw you do it out the window.
You know what she said?
Daddy, I didn't do it.
This little hand did it.
Where do they learn that?
Where do they learn to throw sand in
the other kid's face when they're sitting in
a sandbox?
Where do they learn?
I've seen them do it.
Drag a kid off a tricycle and knock
them over for no reason at all.
On the larger scale, Lois' feelings erupt into
wars, terrorism, and so on.
Do you need to be persuaded that you
have a sinful heart?
What we usually say is that if the
world has a sinful heart, we're all sinners.
But when it comes down to the individual,
we don't really recognize that.
We think we're pretty good.
The Bible says man in his best state
is altogether vanity.
You know what vanity is?
That's emptiness.
That's nothingness.
The Bible says in Isaiah chapter 40, dear
people, that we are a mathematical impossibility.
We are less than nothing.
I can understand nothing, but what is less
than nothing?
All the nations of the world, if you
put them all together, from Adam to the
last person ever born on earth, put them
all together, they're like one drop in a
bucket, God said.
Surely men of high degree are vanity and
men of low degree are a lie.
To be laid in the balance, they're all
together lighter than the wind, lighter than vanity.
There's nothing there.
Dear people, we need to understand that.
If we don't understand that, then the scripture
is speaking in vain.
Have we forgotten what it says?
Do you remember the man that prayed thus
with himself in the Gospel of Luke?
He was a good moral man, a Pharisee.
Lord, he said, I thank God I'm not
like other men.
I fast twice in the week.
I give tithes of all that I possess.
I'm not an adulterer, an extortioner.
I'm not like this publican.
Is that how you feel?
Maybe in God's eyes you're worse.
Is there anything worse than self-righteous pride?
All our righteousnesses are as filthy rags.
It's much stronger in the Hebrew language.
The translators toned it down for polite ears.
It actually says all our righteousnesses are as
a menstruous cloth.
That's what it says.
That's the kind of heart we have.
That's why we love the world.
That's why we don't get concerned about the
lost.
That's why we don't give to the work
of God.
That's why we take all the benefits of
Christianity and add nothing to it, give nothing
back in return.
Sometimes we think we do God a favor
by attending two services on Sunday.
Do you think that the scripture says in
vain?
Yes, it does speak in vain.
If I don't read it, if I read
it and don't believe it, if I read
it and believe it but don't do it,
it's speaking in vain.
So we have this problem of a nature
that's fallen, it's sinful, born in sin, shaped
in iniquity, like it says in Psalm 51.
That's true for all of us, whoever we
are.
Then it says, but God, he gives more
grace.
And going to Romans 5, Paul said, where
sin abounded, grace did much more abound.
That as sin has reigned unto death, even
so might grace reign through righteousness unto eternal
life through Jesus Christ our Lord.
What then?
Shall we sin that grace may abound?
God forbid.
How shall we that are dead to sin
live any longer therein?
Why, he says, don't you know that as
many of us as were baptized into Jesus
Christ were baptized into his death?
Therefore we are buried with him by baptism
into death that like as Christ was raised
from the dead by the glory of the
Father, even so we also should walk in
newness of life.
Are you?
Will you?
God expects it.
He gives more grace.
Wherefore, he says, God resists the proud and
gives grace to the humble.
Many of us are too proud to ever
experience the grace of God in any appreciable
degree in our life because of our pride.
Surely he scorns the scorners but gives grace
to the lowly.
You and I don't get grace from God
until we're humbled in the dust.
Humble yourselves, therefore, Peter says, under the mighty
hand of God that he may exalt you
in due time.
Dear people, if you once get a glimpse
of your own heart and look at it
and see it from the biblical viewpoint from
the way God sees it, you'll be crushed
in the dust.
You'll weep before God for hours perhaps when
you see the wickedness of your own heart.
You may not commit adultery.
You may give a tithe of your income.
But Jesus Christ said, you pay tithe but
you have omitted the weightier matters of the
law.
Judgment, mercy, faith, the love of God.
These are weightier than tithing.
And among God's people we've created the impression
somehow that if you tithe you're a red
-hot Christian.
You may be as cold as an iceberg
and tithe.
That may be just a gimmick we're using
to kind of keep God off, keep Him
from bothering us in our sin.
Your heart, my heart, deceitful, desperately wicked.
And if it wasn't for the grace of
God we would go as far into sin
as anybody's ever gone.
It's just the grace of God.
A missionary in Africa was visited by a
preacher from England.
And this preacher was preaching to the nationals
there.
And the interpreter, this Christian from England said
he'd never seen a person that seemed to
shine for God the way that interpreter did.
He said you could just see the Lord
Jesus Christ in his face.
And he enjoyed working with him so much.
After the initial meeting he was walking with
his missionary friend through the village and he
was talking about this interpreter.
Oh yes, the missionary said he's a godly
person.
He's filled with the Spirit of God.
And they were walking through the village and
there were three men sitting under a tree.
And just the way they were going they
walked close by and the visitor from England
noticed these three men.
How evil they seemed to be.
And one of them especially.
He said just to look at his face,
he said he seemed to be the incarnation
of Satan.
And his spirit recoiled from what he saw.
And he said to the missionary, those are
evil men.
The missionary said indeed they are.
They're the worst men in the whole area.
And then the speaker said, the man in
the middle, he seems to be worse than
the other two.
He looks like the incarnation of Satan.
And the missionary said he seems to be.
He said your interpreter is his brother.
And your interpreter used to be as evil
as that man.
But the grace of God, he humbled himself
and experienced the grace of God.
If you're having victory over sin, be very
humble.
You're getting it from God.
It does not come from yourself.
You have no interest in taking drugs, you
know, smoking pot, no interest in that, no
interest in drinking liquor.
Don't take any credit for that.
God said I withheld you from sinning against
me.
God withheld you from that by his grace.
So he says, submit yourselves, therefore, which takes
you back into what we've been looking at
already, therefore submit yourselves to God.
Humble yourselves under God's hand.
Submit yourselves to God.
And then he says, resist the devil and
he will flee from you.
Are you struggling with sin?
Satan tempting you?
Are you falling?
In some areas of your life you have
no victory over.
You ask God to nail your tongue to
the cross.
You think that does it.
And then the next time you blow your
cool again and do it all over again.
How do we handle these problems?
Like people tell me, sure, I say, get
me behind me, Satan, when I'm facing temptation
and he gets behind me and pushes me
right into it.
I mean, people have actually told me that.
Just what is wrong here?
Why doesn't it work?
Some people have told me, don't tell me
to resist the devil.
That doesn't work.
And I say, it doesn't work.
Because that's not what the Bible says.
The Bible says, submit yourselves, therefore, to God.
Resist the devil and he will flee from
you.
In Hosea 5, verse 6, it says, they
shall go, that is Israel, they shall go
with their flocks and with their herds to
seek the Lord, but they shall not find
him.
He has withdrawn himself from them.
Now why in the world would God turn
his back on people that were earnestly seeking
him, even going with their flocks and herds
to seek the Lord?
It would be a mystery, but the 15th
verse of the same chapter gives us the
answer.
Here's what he said, I will go and
return to my place until they acknowledge their
offense and seek my face.
They were seeking the face of God, but
they were not admitting their sin.
And that's the basic problem and the reason
why many times we try to seek God,
but we don't find him, because we don't
admit our sin.
I will go and return to my place
until they acknowledge their offense and seek my
face.
And when a person comes saying, God, I
sinned, God be merciful to me, the sinner,
God will be there.
Jeremiah 3.13, only acknowledge your transgressions.
Only acknowledge your iniquities that you've transgressed against
the Lord, your God.
Only acknowledge it, it says.
Oh, it's hard to do that.
In Hosea 5.15, actually the Hebrew there
says, only be guilty.
Be guilty.
Admit it.
God, I did it.
I saw a cartoon at the time of
the Watergate scandal.
And here was all these fellas, Nixon and
Vice President Spiro Agnew and Haldeman and Ehrlichman
and Dean and all these guys standing on
a carpet.
They're all looking in the same direction and
all of them are smiling.
All of them had a halo around their
head.
If you remember at the time, everybody claimed
they were innocent.
You remember that?
They're all smiling with this beautiful look on
their face.
Nobody's guilty.
But you know what?
Everybody had their finger pointed at someone else.
You know, it started in the Garden of
Eden and it still goes on today.
If I'd married a different woman, if I'd
married a different man, I could be a
stronger Christian.
If I had different parents, if I lived
in a different community, if I had a
different job, I could be different.
No, these are not the problems at all.
The problem is, dear people, we will not
humble ourselves under God's mighty hand.
And consequently, God will not give us victory
over sin.
So he says, draw near to God and
He will draw near to you.
Well, people often say, you know, God seems
to be a thousand miles away.
You know something?
That's impossible.
God can never be a foot away, because
in Him we live and move and have
our being.
Just as fish in the ocean, they can't
get out of the ocean.
They can say what they want to say.
The ocean seems far away.
Well, how can the ocean be far away
when they're swimming in it?
How can God be far away when we're
living in an ocean called God?
He fills the Bible, says the heavens and
the earth.
He's present everywhere.
You cannot hide yourself in any secret place
where God will not see you.
He's not far, as Paul said in Acts
17, from every one of us.
So draw near to God.
Seek you the Lord while He may be
found.
Call you upon Him while He is near.
Let the wicked forsake His way and the
unrighteous man his thoughts, and let him return
unto the Lord, and He will have mercy
upon him and to our God, for He
will abundantly pardon.
What does it say?
Seek the Lord while He may be found.
Call upon Him while He's near.
He's not far from every person in this
room tonight.
So it says, draw near to God.
It's written of that great civilization, the city
of Nineveh.
Nineveh drew not near to her God.
But Jeremiah said in Lamentations chapter 3, Oh
God, he said, drew near in the day
that I called upon you.
You said, Fear not, fear not.
God draws near.
When we call upon Him, a song leader
and I once counseled with a man who
was a full-time Christian worker, and he
thought he had demons.
He was so lustful.
When his wife and the kids were not
in the home, he used to flip the
old dial around until he found some dirty
programs, and he'd sit there and soak up
these programs.
He had pornographic literature hidden in the house.
Nobody knew it was there.
He used to devour this stuff sometimes by
the hour.
A Christian worker, he thought he had demons.
He never had demons.
I'll tell you what it was.
It was the demon called self.
That's what it was.
Let no man say when he's tempted, I'm
tempted of God, for God cannot be tempted
with evil.
Neither does he tempt any man, but every
man is tempted when he's drawn away of
his own lust.
And we read those verses to him from
the book of James, and I said, My
brother, are you willing to accept the fact
that it's yourself, it's your own lust, it's
a self problem, it's not a demon problem?
And he humbled himself under God's hand and
said, Yes, I accept that.
It's me.
So we went to prayer.
And oh people, how he prayed.
How he stormed heaven.
How he wept before God.
I thought his body would break in two.
And you know what happened?
In the middle of his prayer, he laughed.
He just laughed out loud.
You know why?
Because the burden was gone, he was free
from the lust, and he knew it.
You could almost hear those chains hit the
floor.
And he was free.
Because he humbled himself.
But as long as you blame it on
something else, on somebody else, you'll never meet
God.
You'll struggle in it the rest of your
life.
It's so easy for God with the power
God has, infinite power, infinite wisdom, infinite grace,
infinite mercy.
Any of the attributes of God are infinite.
A million times, a trillion times, a million
times more than you'll ever need to set
you free.
If the Son therefore shall make you free,
you shall be free indeed.
Free indeed it says.
Submit yourselves therefore to God.
Resist the devil and he will flee from
you.
Draw near to God and he will draw
near to you.
And what's the other half of that verse?
Oh, it says, cleanse your hands, you sinners.
Oh, someone says he's not talking to Christians,
he's talking to sinners.
There's two kinds of sinners, saved ones and
lost ones.
In the context, he's talking to Christians.
Cleanse your hands, you sinners.
Second Corinthians 7.1 says, having therefore these
promises, dearly beloved, let us cleanse ourselves from
all filthiness of the flesh and spirit, perfecting
holiness in the fear of God.
He's talking to Christians.
Having therefore these promises, dearly beloved, let us
cleanse ourselves from all filthiness of the flesh
and spirit, perfecting holiness in the fear of
God.
Unto him that loved us and washed us
from our sins in his own blood, if
we confess our sins, he is faithful and
just to forgive us our sins and to
cleanse us from all unrighteousness.
Cleanse your hands, you sinners.
Purify your hearts, you double-minded.
James 1.8 says a double-minded man
is unstable in all his ways.
James 4.8 gives a remedy for the
double-minded man.
Purify your hearts, you double-minded.
I'm double-minded because I'm impure.
That's what God says.
And God's a lot smarter than any psychiatrist.
By the way, I read something interesting, some
tests they ran in the States a while
ago, fully documented.
They took people with emotional problems and people,
well, they divided them into two groups and
the one group they gave to professional counselors
and they had a 64% recovery rate.
The other group, they didn't give to counselors
at all.
They just left them in their problems and
they had a 74% recovery rate.
Isn't that interesting?
The wonderful counselor is Jesus Christ.
And if I get honest, he'll be honest.
Remember, he shows them their work and their
transgressions that they have exceeded.
He'll put his finger on everything that's wrong,
anything that's wrong and evil in your life,
he'll put his finger on it, he'll show
you.
But I have to be honest and humble
myself under God's mighty hand.
Cleanse your hands, purify your hearts.
You know, in the Hebrides, there was a
great revival there in 1952, I think it
was, about that time.
And there were a number of reasons why
it started.
Of course, the major reason was God himself.
But in one area, there were three men.
They were praying for revival.
They met in a barn on the hillside.
Every Thursday night, they prayed the whole night
through.
They had done this for eight months and
nothing had happened.
One night, about two o'clock, while they
were praying together up in the loft of
the barn, God spoke powerfully to one of
these men from Psalm 24.
And I'm sure Peter had that in mind
when he said what I just quoted a
moment ago about clean hands and a pure
heart.
He said, brethren, listen to this.
God just spoke to my heart.
And he read the verses.
Who shall ascend into the hill of the
Lord?
Who shall stand in his holy place?
He that has clean hands and a pure
heart.
And he stopped and said, brethren, do we
have clean hands?
Do we have pure hearts?
If we don't have, our praying is hypocrisy.
And those men got down on their faces
in the hay and asked God to search
their hearts.
They weren't praying for revival anymore.
They were praying for themselves.
Oh, search me, O God.
And God did.
And God began showing them sin.
They began confessing sin.
And while they were doing this, the revival
began in the valley below.
Up and down the valley as far as
the eye could see.
Lights were flicking on in the houses on
both sides of the valley as far as
the eye could see.
The Spirit of God wakened the whole community
at the same time.
And people were tumbling out of bed, getting
their Bibles, reading their Bibles, praying, calling on
God.
And the revival was on.
Powerful.
There was 80 young people at a dance
one night.
No preacher there.
The band wasn't playing for a few moments.
So the guys were on one side drinking
and the girls on the other side talking
and drinking.
And suddenly one of the men said, he
said, men, we had a bottle in his
hand, a bottle of whiskey.
He said, you know, I think we should
drink all we have because I have the
strangest feeling that after tonight we'll never be
drinking again.
A few moments later his bottle fell out
of his hand and hit the floor and
he fell on his knees and he began
to pray.
And in five minutes there were 80, all
of them were on their knees calling on
God.
That's how powerful the revival was.
Draw near to God and He will draw
near to you.
Cleanse your hands, you sinners, and purify your
hearts, you double-minded.
Be afflicted and mourn and weep.
Some of us would like to go to
the Purim, but we're afraid we might cry.
That's a pride thing.
It says, be afflicted and mourn and weep.
In Isaiah, God was angry with Israel because
He said, I call off in ashes, and
behold, joy and gladness, killing and eating.
God said, this iniquity shall not be cleansed
from you until you die.
He's calling us, dear people, He's calling us
to weep and mourn over our sins.
Let your laughter be turned to mourning and
your joy to heaviness.
Humble yourselves in the sight of the Lord
and He shall lift you up.
So we give God a part of our
heart because we don't want to go to
heaven or to hell, rather, when we die.
We want to make sure we get to
heaven.
So we go through the motions and do
what we can and give God so little
in return.
There was a great revival at Shantung, China
back in 1932.
The cry of the revival was, are you
born again?
And there were tens of thousands of church
members in China who discovered they'd never been
born again.
It was the most remarkable and powerful work
of God.
Evangelists and missionaries and Christian workers and church
members, hundreds of them, and the aggregate total,
thousands of them discovered they'd never been born
again.
They'd been going through the motions.
There was no life, no heart there.
A lot of us sit, you know, like
a frozen frog on a frosty stone.
There's neither motion or movement or life.
We don't croak once a year for God.
We're as silent as a tombstone.
My Jesus, I love Thee, I know Thou
art mine.
For Thee all the follies of sin I
resign.
We sing it, but we don't really mean
it, because we have our pet sins that
we're still involved in.
And we're praying for revival.
Oh, let it begin in me.
Search me, O God.
I'm sure there are many of us need
to go to the prayer room and pray
that very prayer.
God, search my heart.
Show me my sin.
Ask God to be faithful to you.
He will be.
If you ask him to search your heart,
he'll do that gladly.
And he'll give you more grace.
He'll give you victory over sin.
Are you like many Christians waiting for deep
conviction?
You're saying, I'm waiting to be convicted.
What do you think conviction really is?
Conviction is knowledge.
That's really all it is.
The Spirit of God comes and shows me
my sin, shows me some problems.
And it may not be an earth-shaking
experience at all, but if I know that
my life is not holy God's, and I
don't have victory over sin, and I'm not
sharing Jesus Christ, that's conviction, that's knowledge.
That should be enough to move any of
us to the prayer room, to take care
by the grace of God of these problems
while we can, for his glory.
So don't wait for anybody else, and don't
bargain with God.
If my wife goes, I'll go.
Don't bargain with God.
You go if God is speaking to your
heart.
And some of us are saying, I'd like
to go, but I'm afraid.
Sometimes people say, it was just like my
shoes were nailed to the floor.
Well, that's Satan's work and power, of course,
trying to oppose us from seeking the face
of God.
He's always there to throw up the roadblocks.
We read of one case in the Bible,
a certain person was coming to Jesus, and
it says, and as he was coming, the
devil threw him down.
He'll throw you down when you're trying to
come to God, too.
In the balcony, to my right, to my
left, who is God calling?
Will you come as we sing now the
last verse?
But come with the intention of heart, of
meeting the Lord, on his terms.
He'll be honest and faithful, and he'll meet
your need.
The trees of the Lord are full.
The river of God is full of water.
And God wants to siphon some of that
off into your life and mine.