James 4:1-7:

Resist the devil, and he will flee from you. That’s good advice. In fact, it’s so good that God gave it to us twice. The parallel passage is in I Peter 5:8-9:

It’s not an accident that those two sentences come one right after the other. You can’t ignore the first half of the verse if you want to live the second part. And this is the second critical point I want to make. You cannot resist the devil if you are not submitting yourself to God.

The best example of how to resist the devil is when the devil tempted Jesus in the wilderness, and I’m going to keep coming back to this. You all know the story –- Jesus was hungry, Satan tempted Him to turn stones to bread, Jesus refused because that wasn’t God’s will. Satan told him to prove He was the son of God by jumping off the Temple, and quoted Scripture out of context to try and twist His arm; Jesus refused because we aren’t supposed to put God to the test. Satan offered Jesus the world in exchange for worship; Jesus refused because only God is to be worshipped. It’s all in Matthew 4 and Luke 4, if you need to refresh your memory.

Now think about those temptations. After Jesus had fasted for forty days, don’t you think He wanted something to eat? Of course He did -– the Bible says He was hungry. So why didn’t He turn a rock into bread? Because God didn’t tell Him to do it, and He wanted God’s will more than He wanted His own.

When Satan told him to jump off the Temple to prove He was the son of God, don’t you think it might have felt good for Jesus to shut Satan up by proving His deity? It might have. But Satan already knew whether Jesus was the son of God or not. Jesus had nothing to prove to Satan. And Jesus wanted God’s will more than He wanted His own will.

Did Jesus really want to go to the cross? In the garden of Gethsemane, He cried out to His Father, in so many words, "Father, if this is the only way, I’ll do it, but is there some other way?" He could have been tempted by Satan’s shortcut to becoming king over the earth. But that’s not why Jesus came to earth. He came to pay for our sins and save our souls, and the devil’s bargain couldn’t include that. Again, Jesus wanted God’s will more than He wanted His own will.

That is what it means to submit yourself to God. It means that you will do His will, no matter what He asks of you, no matter what it costs you, no matter how much it hurts, no matter what, period. And it doesn’t get any more unnatural than that. It is not human nature to gladly give up your own well-being. But that’s what it takes to obey this Bible verse. God has promised us a great reward in Heaven if we obey, and He’s also promised a blessing in this world -– if we submit ourselves to Him, then we can resist the devil and he will flee from us.

How does that work? Let’s look at Jude, verse 9:

Strong words. Let’s think about this a little.

Do you remember Joshua 5:13? It was right after the Israelites had crossed the Jordan River into the land of Canaan, and they were trying to figure out how to conquer the city of Jericho.

Joshua asked, "Are you for us or against us?" God said, "No, Joshua, you’re not calling the shots. I’m the team captain. Are you for or against Me?"

We have the same choice to make, and that brings me to my next important point. You cannot resist the devil if you’re trying to fit God into your life, instead of fitting your life into God.

God says, in James 4:4, that we can be friends with the world, or friends with God, but not both. In the past, some have taken this to mean we should renounce all worldly goods and wear rags and live in a hole in the ground. That’s not what God is saying here. When James says "the world," he is talking about the world system. The world’s way of doing things. The world’s way of thinking. These are the opposite of God’s ways.

God says, "Do not take revenge, my friends, but leave room for God’s wrath." But the world says, "Don’t get mad, get even."

God says, "Anyone who looks on a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart." But if you’re watching a pro football game, the world serves up those cheerleaders, and what are they expecting you to do? Admire their nail polish?

God says, "Do not get drunk on wine, which leads to debauchery." But the world makes commercials about the good times you’ll have if you drink the right kind of beer.

And, just to drive my point home, how many of you have read Pilgrim’s Progress? This is just my opinion, but I believe that’s the second-greatest book ever written. And one of the wickedest places in that book, the place that is most opposed to God, is the town of Vanity, and the ongoing fair there, called Vanity Fair. One of the heroes of the book was killed for his faith in that place. And what has the world done? They made a magazine about everything that’s fashionable and trendy and "in" –- you can see it at the checkout counter at any supermarket – and they have proudly named that magazine Vanity Fair.

That is what James meant when he wrote about "the world." And the world wants to be your friend. All you have to do is compromise a little -– nothing big, you don’t have to blaspheme or commit genocide or anything, just soften your standards a little. Don’t be so closed-minded. Go along to get along.

This verse explains why we Christians have such a hard time in this life. It’s a four-letter word that appears three times in these verses. It’s the word "lust." We usually think of lust as being about immorality, but you can lust after anything -– alcohol, money, power, fame. Some people lust after pity; they long for people to feel sorry for them. This word "lust" is the root of my next important point: Satan is not your worst enemy. You are.

I’m going to give you a definition of "lust" that probably isn’t in any dictionary, but it’ll help you get a handle on what I’m trying to say. Lust is any desire that’s contrary to the will of God. Do I need to repeat that? It can be a desire that’s normally natural and good, like the need for food that gets taken too far into gluttony. Or it can be an unnatural desire, like a desire for drugs that no one is born with, but some people acquire it.

Now, let me explain how lust works. Let’s say I’ve got a magnet in my hand, and I want it to stick to the wall. If I just slap it up against wallboard, it won’t stick, will it? There’s nothing in wallboard that a magnet can stick to. But if I put it right above a steel nail in that wall, the magnet will stick to the wall there, because there’s something in the wall at that point that draws it.

That’s how lust works. Satan tries to get us to sin by lobbing temptations at us. Being tempted is not a sin; we know that because the Bible says Jesus Himself was tempted, but never sinned. But when the enemy dangles a temptation in front of us, he’s hoping to find a nail in our wallboard, something in us that will draw that temptation to us. And what happens then? James 1:14 tells us:

It’s our lusts that give temptation its teeth. If we had no lusts, temptation would do nothing to us.

We have three enemies: Satan, the world, and the flesh. Satan is like a fisherman. The world is his tackle box, a bottomless bucket of bait and lures. But no matter how skillful the fisherman is, no matter how yummy that bait looks, the fisherman won’t catch a thing if the fish isn’t hungry. And even though Satan is the master tempter, and even though the world is full of enticing temptations, they won’t have any effect on us unless we’re hungry for them.

I’ll give you a personal example. Let’s say I’m watching a TV show, and a beer commercial comes on. Now, there are people who have made a mess of their lives with alcohol, and they know they can’t go near it if they want to please God, and if they watch this commercial telling them how much fun they’d have if they’d only drink this beer, they would have a problem. They have a lust for alcohol, and the temptation in that commercial would draw them. Me, I don’t have that problem, because I’ve never been able to acquire a taste for alcohol -– the stuff makes me gag. I have no desire for alcohol, none whatsoever. So there wouldn’t be anything in me for that commercial to entice me; that commercial would not be a temptation to me... as long as the women in the commercial are decently dressed. If they aren’t, I’m facing a whole different kind of temptation, because I have a different set of lusts warring in my members. That doesn’t make me any better or worse than the guy who’s fighting a lust for alcohol. But that’s how temptation works.

For proof of this, consider Jesus. He was tempted three times in the wilderness. And these were not minor-league temptations, because they came from the first-rate tempter who had everything to gain by successfully tempting Jesus, and everything to lose by failing. But Jesus did not yield to those temptations. Why not? Because He had no desires in him that were contrary to the will of God. Doing the will of God wasn’t just the most important thing to Jesus, it was the only thing. He had no lusts, no nails in His wallboard, so temptation had no place to stick to him.

But Satan tried to tempt Him anyway, and you can be sure he’ll try to tempt us as well. He knows we have a sin nature, and not only that, but he knows what our weak spots are. None of us were born saved. We’ve all lived as members of Satan’s kingdom. Many of us served Satan longer than we’ve served God. So the devil knows all about our lusts. He knows where our nails are, because he hammered them in himself. And while Satan won’t bother with most of us personally, his demons know everything he knows about us. So it’s no easy struggle we’re up against.

Our old man, our flesh, is capable of nothing good. The verses we just read in James 5 show how hopeless we naturally are. We want something, and we fight each other for it, when all we have to do is ask for it. And if we do ask, we still don’t get what we want, because we ask wrong. What a bunch of losers we are, eh? Naturally, we can’t do anything right. That’s why we are our own worst enemy. Satan is strong, but he can’t make us sin unless we let him. Unfortunately, letting him comes naturally to us.

So what do we do?

Turn to Colossians 3:5, if you would, please.

There’s the answer, at the end of verse 9 and the start of verse 10. Take off the old self, and put on the new self. This became a reality in your life the day you cried out to Jesus to save you from your sins, but you have to keep putting it into practice.

It’s as if your old self, your sin nature with all its lusts, was an old, comfortable, worn-out, dirty T-shirt that came alive somehow. You keep taking it off and throwing in the trash, but it keeps crawling out again, and putting itself on you when you aren’t looking. It has no power over you; it can’t force itself to stay on you; you can take it off at will and cast it aside again. But it’s so comfortable and familiar, and it’s such a struggle to keep fighting it, that sometimes it seems easier to leave it on for a while. And, like most shirts, that shirt has a tag in the collar. Do you know what that tag says? "Made in Hell -– do not wash in the Blood." And do you know what it says on the back of the shirt, where you can’t see it? It doesn’t say, "Kick me," it says, "Tempt me!"

Your old self is just like that old shirt. It’s familiar, it’s comfortable, it’s natural, you grew up that way. But the Bible says that old self has to come off and stay off, and you’ve got to keep taking it off, every single time it pops into your life. But you can’t do it yourself; you’ll be right back to that toy soldier with the crooked base. So how do you do it? Here’s the nitty-gritty.

We, as Christians, have to cultivate the habit of watching out for that old self, because he’ll be back, sooner, not later. And when we see ourselves starting to think and talk and act like we used to think, talk, and act before we knew Jesus, it’s prayer time. There’s no set of magic words that we ought to use; there’s no special prayer we have to pray. Just like a sinner’s prayer, it’s not the words that matter, but the heart attitude behind those words. Just thank Jesus for what He’s done for you, confess that you’re in a temptation situation that you don’t even want to try to handle, and ask God for the Holy Spirit strength to do what His word says is right, and not to do what comes naturally.

And if you find yourself in a flesh situation, and you pray like that, do you know what you just did?
You just resisted the devil, and he will flee from you. You just cut away the lust inside you that could have made his temptation dangerous, and now he’s got nothing to use against you. Victory over sin is a combination of habitually watching out for the old man, and habitually praying for God’s strength every time the old man appears. Putting off the old self, and putting on the new self, is a discipline that has to become a habit. And it’s the discipline that will give you victory in your spiritual life.

I have one more point I need to make, because every Christian who ever lived has found himself in a position like this: you sense your old man trying to make an appearance, you cry out to God, God answers you, and you overcome the temptation that was headed your way. And you rejoice, and thank God for the victory, and you think, "Hey, I could get used to this ‘victory’ stuff!" And a little while later, that same temptation pops up again, and it’s just as hard a struggle as it was before. And it happens again, and it’s still a struggle. Didn’t you just win that battle? Wasn’t it supposed to get easier? What happened?

You have to remember that Satan and his demons are spirits; they’ve been alive a lot longer than we have, and they know about patience and persistence. And my final major point is, < B>if you resist the devil, he will flee from you, but he’ll be back.