In James 4:13-17, James warns us about the dangers of pride and how it can lead to our spiritual downfall. Therefore we must be very intentional about getting it out of our life. In this passage, James gives two examples about how pride leads us astray and how we can get it out of our life.
Even when times are crazy, God does not give us permission to act pridefully.
Sermon Clip
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MESSAGE Notes
James 4:13-17 – The Danger of Pride
Pastor Kyle Lewis
Colossians 3:12 – Put on then, as God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassionate hearts, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience…
James 4:6 – Therefore it says, “God opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble.”
Pride has a way of taking our eyes off Jesus which leads to WRONG actions.
EXAMPLE 1 – Planning Your Life Apart From God (vv. 13-15)
- James 4:13 Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go into such and such a town and spend a year there and trade and make a profit”—
- The planning is not the issue. It is the planning APART from God that is the issue.
- James 4:14 – yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes.
EXAMPLE 2- Boastfully Avoiding Doing The Right Thing (vv. 16-17)
- James 4:16-17 – 16 As it is, you boast in your arrogance. All such boasting is evil. 17 So whoever knows the right thing to do and fails to do it, for him it is sin.
What can we take away from this passage?
- James 1:1 – “To the twelve tribes in the Dispersion:”
- Even when times are crazy, God does not give us permission to act pridefully.
- Example 1 (Planning apart from God) is an example of doing things you should not do. Example 2 (Boastfully Avoiding the Right Thing) is an example of NOT doing the things you should do.
- James 4:15 – Instead you ought to say, “If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that.”
- “God willing” should be the burning desire of our heart!
- “We have been the recipients of the choicest bounties of heaven; we have been preserved these many years in peace and prosperity; we have grown in numbers, wealth, and power as no other nation has ever grown. But we have forgotten God. We have forgotten the gracious hand which preserved us in peace and multiplied and enriched and strengthened us, and we have vainly imagined, in the deceitfulness of our hearts, that all these blessings were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own. Intoxicated with unbroken success, we have become too self-sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving grace, too proud to pray to the God that made us.” –Abraham Lincoln
Island Pond Baptist Church is an SBC church in Hampstead, NH, just seconds from Derry, NH. We also have many people at our church from surrounding cities such as Chester, Sandown, Danville, Kingston, Fremont, Plaistow, Atkinson, Derry, Londonderry, Salem, and Haverhill. If you live in Southern New Hampshire, we would love for you to come and visit!