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The Love of the Holy Spirit
James 4:4-7 “You adulterous people, don't you know that friendship with the world is hatred to God ? Anyone who chooses to be a friend of the world becomes an enemy of God. Or do you think Scripture says without reason that the spirit he caused to live in us envies intensely. But he gives us more grace. That is why Scripture says: 'God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble.' Submit yourselves, then, to God."
Now this fifth verse of James 4 is the only verse in the letter to contain a reference to the Holy Spirit, although that is disputed. It can be translated in a number of ways. The N.I.V. translators have judged that the best translation is “the spirit he caused to live in us envies intensely.” In other words they think the reference to the spirit is to our own inward spirit. But if you look down at the textual footnotes of this verse you will see that there are two other suggested translations. All are correct possible translations. I believe that the second footnote gives the best translation, “the Spirit he caused to live in us longs jealously.” Let us look at the context of these words.
1. THERE WERE SOME CHRISTIANS IN THE EARLY CHURCH WHOSE LOVE FOR GOD WAS GROWING COLD.
There were people in those congregations, who were leaving their first love and taking lingering glances at the world. James is extraordinarily straight when he speaks to these New Testament Christians. He has said to them two verses earlier, “You kill and covet ... you quarrel and fight . . . you ask with wrong motives,” and here he addresses them as, “You adulterous people” (v.4). They must have loved and respected very much this man who was the half-brother of our Lord to have taken what he said meekly. I have to remember that I, as a preacher, am as much under this apostolic word as anyone. I don’t choose to come to a church and be spoken to like this, “You adulterous person,” but these are some of the issues that God wants to raise with us today in this text. Let us all love and respect the same apostolic word and say to our Lord, “Is it I?”
“Don’t you know that friendship with the world is hatred to God?” he asks them. The ‘world’ in the Bible is a theological and moral word rather than a geographical term. It is first of all the creation of God, owned and ruled by him, the ‘cosmos,’ the world order, to be subdued by man and replenished and filled. But it has now become also a fallen world, disordered, rebellious and aloof through our father Adam’s broken relationship with God. The ‘world’ is organised sinful mankind in the mass, under the power of the god of this world, solidly given over to unrighteousness, hostile to the truth and to the people of God. Bad people organised into a bad system, that is our enemy, ‘the world.’ It is dominated by “the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes and the pride of life” (I John 2:16): its motives are pleasure, profit, power and promotion. So the world in the Scriptures is a subtle organisation of mankind, operating in terms of laws, goals and gods which are other than those of the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. It was the ‘world’ that crucified Christ. In its most important languages the world once declared its cynical enmity towards God by a placard, a crude notice, above Jesus’ head on the cross, “This is the king of the Jews” in the writing of the three leading cultures of the world. The world was a friend of a murderer named Barabbas, and an enemy of the blameless Son of God. It still is. The world will choose a rogue before a righteous man every day. More than 1700 years ago, the great historian Cyprian wrote to Donatus, “It is a bad world, an incredibly bad world, with its philosophy of materialism and force, determination and moral despair.”
What was it that a poet once said? He gave us a rather shocking picture of the world:
Man’s mind reaches past the stars,
Probes the atom,
Measures waves of ether in the infinite spaces ...
But he still lives in an old house,
An old house full of echoes !
Tear down the rotted boards;
Scrap the bat-haunted chambers;
Stop the babbling of simian tongues
Pretending to blabber wisdom !
I am tired of echoes . . . echoes . . . echoes
In the old house.
He can take photographs of the depths of space, but he lives in an old house full of echoes. When we were boys we passed a derelict mansion on our way to Thomastown Park in Merthyr. Occasionally we would climb over the wall and go through a window and stand in the vast hall of this empty house. We were afraid to climb the stairs with their rotten boards or enter any of the rooms. We would smell the damp and look at the fungus. It was all too silent and menacing. Those who live in a world without the living God are like children walking around a very old, condemned house. There are still some features that remind you of its former glory, and occasionally there are bursts of creative energy and flashes of brilliance which excite all the residents, and they cheer up one another at political party conferences and conventions, “It’s going to get wonderful.” The opening ceremony of the Olympic Games in China, or the sight of two athletes running for the line, or a speech, or a piece of writing, or a great song sung well can produce something to lift the spirits temporarily, but then the overwhelmingly destructive spirit of our age can take over again. Another boy is stabbed to death in London; another Bridgend teenager commits suicide.
There were those taking many an itching, lingering look at the world within the New Testament congregations. There was a professing Christian named Demas and he is mentioned three times in the New Testament. The first time is in Paul’s letter to Philemon, verse 24, where the apostle lists those who are his “fellow workers”, they are “Mark, Aristarchus, Demas and Luke” - what a grand brotherhood ! In the second case in Colossians 4:14 we read, “Our dear friend Luke, the doctor, and Demas send greetings.” There is no description of his being ‘a fellow worker’ in that verse, but he is still keeping in good company. The last occasion Demas is mentioned is 2 Timothy 4:10 where Paul writes chillingly, “Demas, because he loved this world, has deserted me.” Demas had fallen in love with the decaying house and has deserted God. Do you feel that as a danger ? Are there people we are thinking of who once worshipped with us, and professed they believed what we believed, and began to live in a Christian way, but today they are not here nor are they in any place of worship ? What did happen to some of the teenagers we baptized ? They fell in love once again with the ideas and values of the world. They got their sense of humour from the world, and their thrills, and their purpose in living, and their boy-friends so that today they are ice-cold towards Jesus Christ. They live as if he never existed. How is it with you? Which way are you heading? How does your mind turn when it is empty? In idle moments what does it naturally think about? What absorbs your interests and affections? Are you falling in love with the world? Or does the love and service of the Lord Jesus mean more and more to you? Friendship with the world is hatred towards God.
2. LOVE FOR THE WORLD IS SPIRITUAL ADULTERY.
James gets even bolder, “You adulterous people” (v.4). Christians are God’s bride, and so longing and loving looks at the world are the beginnings of unfaithfulness. There cannot be two loves in this relationship. As Princess Diana once said that “there were three of us in this marriage so it was a bit crowded.” In the wedding ceremony her husband had vowed “To have her only unto me until death us do part.” To love a world system that scorns the Lord Jesus is a breach of our betrothal to our Husband, God. That is why James addresses them, “You adulterous people.” The lover of the world is God’s unfaithful bride. B.B.Warfield, in his mighty sermon on these verses entitled, “The Love of the Holy Spirit" (The Person and Work of the Holy Spirit, Calvary Press, 1997, p.97ff), says, “We cannot have two husbands; to the one husband to whom our vows are plighted, all our love is due. To dally with the thought of another lover is already unfaithfulness” (p.98). Don’t we sing of Christ,
“From heaven he came and bought her
To be his holy bride.
With his own blood he bought her,
And for her life he died”?
The Son of God was desperately in love with his people. They had been given to him by his Father and he came from heaven for his bride, taking all her liabilities and, going to the cross for her, there discharging every debt she owed. Now, with a sympathy for all her feelings of infirmity, he prays for her without ceasing. He loves her as his own body. And are there those in the professing church who will love the Lamb of God and yet also love a world system that hates him ?
God’s divine affection for his people is being emphasized in this Scripture and James asks in verse five, “Do you think Scripture says without reason . . .” anything ? It’s a rhetorical question. James is asserting as strongly as he can that no saying of Scripture can be empty. He appeals to the extraordinary authority of the Bible to support his ideas of the special relationship between God and his people, and that loving the world is adulterous. There are numerous Old Testament passages in which the Lord has expressed his love for his people in terms of a groom’s love for his chosen bride. He is a jealous God. He announces this in the Ten Commandments. He has the burning jealousy of a loving husband toward the tenderly cherished wife who has wandered from the path of fidelity. The prophets take up this theme, especially in the third chapter of Jeremiah: “‘Return, faithless people,’ declares the Lord, ‘for I am your husband’” (Jer.3:14).
James is challenging us. Do we think the prophets and apostles are speaking of these things without some life-challenging reason? We are the bride of Christ, and he is our loving husband. He has died for us in order for us to live for him, and he is taking us to a place he has prepared for us, because he delights in us. This is the wonder of our relationship today with the Lord. As you walk through life you must remember that the Lord is walking alongside you with his arm around you. Francis Schaeffer, who also picked up this theme in one of his most helpful books, The Church Before the Watching World, where he contrasts Christianity with Eastern religions (which are now so chic in the media and with media people). “Shiva came out of his ice-filled cave in the Himalayas and saw a mortal woman and loved her. When he put his arms around her, she disappeared, and he became neuter. There is nothing like this in the Scriptures. When we accept Christ as our Saviour, we do not lose our personality. For all eternity our personality stands in oneness with Christ” (Works, Volume 4, p.136).
So the Bible takes the sin of adultery and it shows how serious it is, and then it takes the church’s falling in love with the world (and so turning away from God), calling those who are guilty of it an “adulterous people” (v.4). “See how the faithful city has become a harlot !” (Isaiah 1:21) cries the prophet about the city where God's house is set. Jerusalem the golden has become a prostitute. In Ezekiel 6:9 the Lord cries, “I have been grieved by their adulterous hearts.” It is not a matter of indifference to God how we live day by day. “God is not just a theological term; he is not a 'philosophical other.' He is a personal God, and we should glory in the fact that he is a personal God. But we must understand that since he is a personal God, he can be grieved. When his people turn away from him, there is sadness on the part of the omnipotent God” (ibid, p.142). There is also jealousy: in Zechariah 8:2 we read, “This is what the Lord Almighty says, ‘I am very jealous for Zion; I am burning with jealousy for her.’” You are hurting someone who loves you when you are unfaithful to them.
3. THE HOLY SPIRIT JEALOUSLY LONGS FOR GOD’S PEOPLE.
All that I’ve said is the background to the reference to the Spirit in our text, church members loving the world, and that that is spiritual adultery, and that God feels a holy jealousy when this occurs. James says, “The Spirit he caused to live in us longs jealously” (v.5 footnote). The language is of intensity, full of the hungry ache of love. God’s Spirit longs for us, James says. My grandson’s fiancée is in Viet Nam for nine months; she is teaching English as a second language while he is in London and they are longing intensely for one another. This word ‘longs’ is the same verb the Greek translators of the forty-second psalm employed: “As the deer panteth after the water brooks, so panteth my soul after Thee O God.” But what James says turns it right around, so that it is not our panting in longing for the Lord but God panting after his people. It is a term of deep jealousy, in fact it is used by Greek classical writers but only found in this verse in the whole Bible. It applies to the Spirit’s passionate love for us. It describes an envious agony of heart which tears you apart; the Spirit contemplates a rival taking away from himself the affection of someone he loves. She’s turning away from him and she is loving his one who despises him – she loves him! The church is loving the world-system which has nothing but contempt for Christ. The Spirit longs jealously. This is the response in God, how he views us when we are dallying with the world and its fashions, and its fads, and its rewards and glittering prizes. God is jealous when our ardour for him wanes and we begin to love the world. Did the world die for us, rise for us, ever live to intercede for us. Was it the world that forgave us our sins? Then why have we taken our love to the world? Our love should be pledged to him, but now the Spirit looks as we’re abandoning our first love, withdrawing from Jesus and taking our love to town. The Spirit is portrayed by James as deeply unhappy at this and he is panting after us with jealous envy.
Warfield says: “Let us not, however, refuse the blessed assurance that is given us. It is no doubt hard to believe that God loves us. It is doubtless harder to believe that He loves us with so ardent a love as is here described. But He says that He does. He declares that when we wander from Him and our duty towards Him, He yearns after us and earnestly longs for our return; that He envies the world our love and would fain have it turned back to Himself. What can we do but admiringly cry, ‘Oh, the breadth and length and height and depth of the love of God which passes knowledge!’ There is no language in use among men which is strong enough to portray it. Strain the capacity of words to the uttermost and still they fall short of expressing the jealous envy with which He contemplates the love of His people for the world, the yearning desire which possesses Him to turn them back to their duty to Him. It is this inexpressibly precious assurance which the text gives us; let us, without doubting, embrace it with hearty faith” (Warfield, p.101).
4. THE HOLY SPIRIT PASSIONATELY LOVES US.
James is telling us here that the Holy Spirit loves us. Of course, God is love, and Father, Son, and Holy Spirit all share the same substance or being. All are equally powerful, merciful, knowledgeable, long-suffering and so on. All are equally loving; the Spirit loves us just as the Father or Son loves us, but how far have we lived in our Christian lives without being conscious that we are the objects of the love of the Spirit? We are more aware that God the Father so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son. “How great is the love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God !” cries the apostle John (I John 3:1). There are many such references to the Father’s love, and also again to the Son’s love: “The love of Christ which passes knowledge,” “Hereby we know love, because he laid down his life for us,” “Who shall separate us from the love of Christ?” “He loved me and gave himself for me.” What encouragement we find in such truths, so that the youngest Christian child can lisp, “Jesus loves me this I know, for the Bible tells me so.” In the darkest days they are our comfort. When the telephone rings and the news is the worst this is the bedrock of our peace, the immeasurable love of Father and Son for us.
Yet there is this third person who is equally loving, God the Holy Spirit, our blessed Advocate and Counselor.
i] The Spirit’s love is an everlasting love, without a break from eternity to eternity. As it is infinite we cannot get at the beginning of it, and we shall never see the end of it. It is from everlasting to everlasting, like God himself. From the past in eternity it has run on and on without a break in time, and it continues to all eternity. The love of the Spirit cannot be broken. Didn’t the sin of man break it? If anything could break the love of the Spirit sin would do it. We know that the Holy Spirit can be grieved, but sin did not break it. The Spirit still loved the people of God notwithstanding their sin. Sin did not break the love of the Spirit, but it did grieve him and for a short time quenched his flowing forth. Before it could flow again a new way had to be opened up and that was by the way of the blood of Christ, and as soon as that blood flowed the Spirit came flowing down from heaven, and it has flowed abundantly on all he loves ever since Golgotha, and he shall continue to love them for ever and ever.
ii] The Spirit’s love is an unchangeable love. Clearly from the context of this passage with its warnings about not loving the world we learn how changeable is our love to the Spirit. We are like the sea that ebbs and flows, but the love of the Spirit is not like that. The Spirit is the Lord and he changes not and neither does his love. Didn’t he love his people with an unchangeable love when they were unconverted? Yes. It was his love that gripped them in their darkness. It was he who brought Christians into their lives, who led them to come to church, who made them read a booklet. It was his influence in them that caused that booklet to make an impact upon them. He illuminated their minds; he gave them life; he gave them conviction of their sin and need; he gave them life; he sealed them. He did all this to them when they were yet unconverted because he loved them. That love of the Spirit was the reason for their salvation. He could see nothing in them worthy of salvation but he loved them nonetheless.
iii] The Spirit loves freely. In other words, there is nothing we can pay him to love us like that. There is nothing you can do to merit that love. We must always remember that Christ’s death didn’t buy God’s love. No. The death of Christ wasn’t the cause of God’s love. It was the effect of his love. As the Saviour said, “God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son.” So we can say, “God so loved the world that he sent the Holy Spirit to give life and faith and holy desires to all his people. Christ did not buy God’s love; the Spirit did not buy God’s love, and we cannot buy God’s love. But what Christ did opened the way for the Spirit to love us.
iv] The Spirit’s love is sovereign. The Lord Jesus insists on this; “The wind blows wherever it pleases . . . So it is with everyone born of the Spirit” (Jn. 3:8). Why should he love Jacob the cheat and liar? Why should he love Saul of Tarsus the proud persecutor? Why should he have loved you, or me? We were all equally ungodly and he was under no obligation to love any of the human race, and yet what love the Spirit showed to a company of people more than any man could number. He might have left them all to perish, but he breathed in them and gave them life and a new heart.
It is of the Spirit’s love that James is speaking here, that he longs jealously, that he yearns over us. Do you think Scripture says it without reason? Is it utterly inconsequential for us to discover that the Holy Spirit loves us? Is it an irrelevance? Of course there are not as many references to God the Holy Spirit in the New Testament as there are to God the Son. For example in Matthew’s gospel there are only five or six references to the Holy Spirit. The Gospel is full of our blessed Lord. The Father planned our salvation; and the Son accomplished it; and the Spirit applies that accomplished redemption to our souls. Each step was necessary, and each action was the purest expression of divine love. But think again of the wonder of the Spirit of Holiness loving you and coming to indwell you. Imagine someone in London having problems with their drains and phoning Buckingham Palace and asking if some of the members of the Royal Family could come with their rods and clear out the blocked sewer! You’d get other men to do that necessary work wouldn’t you? But think of the Holy Spirit coming into our desperately deceitful hearts and cleaning up our lives, the holiest being that has ever been, or ever will be, coming into intimate contact with such depravity. “The Spirit of all holiness is willing to visit such polluted hearts as ours, and even to dwell in them, to make them His home to work ceaselessly and patiently with them, gradually wooing them - through many groanings and many trials - to slow and tentative efforts toward good; and never leaving them until, through His constant grace, they have been won entirely to put off the old man and put on the new man and to stand new creatures before the face of their Father God and their Redeemer Christ. Surely herein is love !” (Warfield, p.105).
Let me put it like this. Imagine God had once summoned all the spirits into his presence and had said, “Now we’ve got a new Christian in mind. He’ll never be very special. He’ll spend his entire life in the middle of nowhere in central Wales. Who would like to live in him and keep an eye on him for the next 60 years?” Then there might be a long silence as the assembled spirits thought of all the people they would rather be with for the next decades, mighty preachers, heads of Christian organizations, doctors, politicians, revivalists, evangelists or Christian athletes. Finally a very junior spirit, with the greatest reluctance, said, “Go on then . . . I’ll have a go,” and every other spirit was very relieved that it did not have to be one of them. That is not how it was. It was not left to volunteers. James says that “God has caused the Spirit to live in us.” The God who planned redemption, and sent his own Son, now sends God the Holy Spirit to throb with love in our very hearts.
Would you tremble for your salvation if you thought there was some inward, reluctant agent helping you, who constantly wished he was within someone else? We know how cold we are. “Prone to wander, Lord I feel it. Prone to leave the God I love” - we confess that in song. Where would we be without the help of the Holy Spirit? The world is constant in the temptations it brings before us. Our own falls are many. We often cry, “O wretched man that I am, who shall deliver us from the body of this death!” We are so neglectful of God. Hours go by each day in which we never think of the Lord or speak to him. What if you treated your wife like that? How can the Spirit bear us? It is because of his immense love, patient, kind, always protecting, always trusting, always hoping, always persevering, never failing. He longs jealously for us amidst all the incredible stumbling blocks we put in front of him.
He “lives” in us, James says. He doesn't make an occasional school inspection. He doesn’t pop in from time to time as we might call in on our friends. He doesn’t come on approval like a lodger putting the landlord on probation so that if he doesn’t like the surroundings then he’ll move on. This life of ours is now the home of the Holy Spirit, to settle, to stay, to make his permanent dwelling place. We are touched thinking of the brother of the American pilot, shot down over Viet Nam and missing. The brother gave up his job and went to Viet Nam and spent months looking for him following every lead. He was known over a huge area of that country as the ‘pilot's brother.’ His love for him took him into village after village, talking to criminals, and warlords, and corrupt officials, giving his hard earned money away for any information, continuing with unwearied patience, not put off by many a dead end so that he might find and rescue his brother.
So too the love of the Spirit constrains him to keep in step with us throughout our lives. We fall into the gutter - he lies with us there. We visit the brothel - he does not stay outside the door. We end up with a broken marriage, broken life and broken heart he is still there. We go to prison - he enters the cell with us and also spends those years behind bars. We cannot conceive of the foulness of sin as seen by God. Who can imagine the energy of the Spirit in shrinking from the polluting touch of sin? Yet he comes into the desperately wicked human heart, and dwells there - not for himself, or for any good to accrue to himself but that he might cleanse us and fit us to be what he had made us - the Bride, the Lamb's wife. His love for us is so strong, mighty and constant that it can never fail. When he sees us rushing headlong to destruction he does not get off the runaway bus. He still longs jealously over us. When our own hearts despise themselves the Spirit still labours with us in pitying love. His love burns all the stronger because we so deeply need his help.
5. BY THE LOVING SPIRIT WE ARE GIVEN MORE GRACE.
The Spirit loves us passionately, understands the pressures and temptations we are meeting, know our infirmities and helps us. In one of her Newsletters Elisabeth Elliot talks of a husband and wife named Bill and Debbie Rettew of Greer, South Carolina who have adopted nineteen children, ten of whom are seriously handicapped. Three more little boys have joined them this year so that there are now twenty-eight in the family, living in a well-ordered peaceful home “spilling over with sacrificial love, filled with joys and sorrows.” They began with one handicapped child, and then the number grew, as God sent them into their home, and they lavish on them all their touching care, washing and drying, dressing and undressing, helping them to eat and go to the bathroom, and they do it in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and with the strength that the loving Spirit provides. We see there a reflection of the Spirit's care for us - who have been handicapped by sin.
How can such people as Bill and Debbie do what they do ? James tells us here – “God gives us more grace” (v.6). The family increases, and the grace to care for them increases too. The sufferings increase, and the grace of strength increases too. We are afraid of what might happen - an accident, a stroke, some physical calamity that make us helpless pain-torn creatures whose eyes are tortured with fright and desperation. We may not measure our ability to cope by our own limited resources. The Holy Spirit gives us more grace. Annie Johnson Flint has written a beloved hymn on these words:-
“He giveth more grace when the burdens grow greater,
He sendeth more strength when the labours increase;
To added affliction He addeth his mercy,
To multiplied trials, His multiplied peace.
His love has no limit, His grace has no measure,
His power has no boundary known unto men;
For out of his infinite riches in Jesus
He giveth, and giveth, and giveth again !
“When we have exhausted our store of endurance,
When our strength has failed ere the day is half done,
When we reach the end of our hoarded resources,
Our Father's full giving is only begun.
His love has no limit, His grace has no measure,
His power has no boundary known unto men;
For out of his infinite riches in Jesus
He giveth and giveth, and giveth again!”
28th September 2008 GEOFF THOMAS