James 4 - The Kind of Prayers God Doesn't Answer

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Submit Yourselves to God

4 What causes fights and quarrels among you? Don’t they come from your desires that battle within you? 2 You desire but do not have, so you kill. You covet but you cannot get what you want, so you quarrel and fight. You do not have because you do not ask God. 3 When you ask, you do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives, that you may spend what you get on your pleasures.

Sometimes we ask God why our prayers are not being answered. James describes some of the things going on in the early church such as fighting, quarreling, killing and coveting. The problem? They are living in their own strength, and are slaves to their evil desires. The solution? Sincere prayer not motivated by evil desires. Sometimes we ask God for things and then do nothing to deal with our sinful nature. We ask God to change our lives while we make no effort to do the things God asks us to do . In this way prayer can be crutch to maintain bad behavior. Someone might say, "I prayed about it!" But did they do anything which would give them a fighting chance were God to want to help. An example would be an alcoholic asking God to help him not drink, and then going to bar with all of his drinking buddies. He wants to God to deliver him, while sabotaging God's deliverance plan.  

7 Submit yourselves, then, to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you. 8 Come near to God and he will come near to you. Wash your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded. 9 Grieve, mourn and wail. Change your laughter to mourning and your joy to gloom. 10 Humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will lift you up.

The opposite of willingly allowing sin to take hold of ours live is to submit to God. To submit to God is to give up control of one's life trusting that He will do a better job of running your life.  Rather than blaming the devil for your problems, you need to actively resist him. We don't take a passive approach to the spiritual battle we find ourselves in. We need to actively resist the devil using the spiritual weapons Paul lists in Ephesians 6. 

As part of drawing near to God, we need to be honest with God. Are we sorry for our sin, or do we laugh it off saying things like "boys will be boys".  James says to "grieve, mourn, and wail" over our sin. It is only as we understand the true nature of what Jesus did for us on the cross that we develop a godly sorrow.  

As we draw near to God, we will be convicted of our sin. So we lament and mourn and weep as appropriate under the conviction of sin, and we are compelled to find cleansing at the cross. - Guzik

Boasting About Tomorrow

13 Now listen, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go to this or that city, spend a year there, carry on business and make money.” 14 Why, you do not even know what will happen tomorrow. What is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes. 15 Instead, you ought to say, “If it is the Lord’s will, we will live and do this or that.” 16 As it is, you boast in your arrogant schemes. All such boasting is evil. 

Sometimes our prayers consist of telling God what we are going to do and asking him to bless our plans. We assume we know God's will and even step out and make decisions rashly rather than waiting on confirmation from the Lord. Comic Woody Allen said, 

"If you want to make God laugh tell him your plans!"

This is not to say God is against planning, but he is definitely against planning without Him. 

If anyone, then, knows the good they ought to do and doesn’t do it, it is sin for them.

We often wrangle over what is a sin and what is not a sin. We can take the bible and twist it to what we want it to mean.  We rationalize our sin by saying, "Well I'm under grace so what does it matter?" Or, we get legalistic and point out the sins of others without taking the log out of our eye first.  Jesus taught about the difference between the letter of the Law and the Spirit of the Law. 

"Here James returned to his consistent theme through his letter: the idea that genuine faith is proved by action. “However high and orthodox our view of God’s law might be, a failure actually to do it says to the world that we do not in fact put much store by it.” (Moo)

The bottom line is that God knows what is going on in our hearts. We might do something that nobody thinks is wrong, but we know it is for us. For one person drinking might not be an issue, but for another it might be. The Pharisees thought they kept all of God's laws, but their hearts were as black as coal. But the woman at the well sought out Jesus humbly acknowledging her sin and received the living water Jesus promised!

Where are you asking God to bless your plans without really seeking out what His will is? Is there anything in your life you know is sin, but refuse to do anything about it?