Pleasure Mad Living

 

Pleasure Mad Living
James 4:1-3
 
You’ll remember Sunday night we began a study of Philippians 3:12-21 where Paul uses a sports analogy to teach a spiritual truth. It seems as though modern Americans, by and large, are just the opposite. We take sports and make a religion out of it. 
 
We love our athletics and our sports. And they are a reminder of how much we enjoy pleasure and entertainment. If it’s not sports, it’s the arts or movies or food or fitness. And if we are not those things begin to dominate your life and become the passion of your life.
 
Pleasure has a way of becoming the chief pursuit and end of the existence. After all, it’s just so pleasurable! If it feels good, we ought to do it and enjoy it.  Now scripturally speaking, there are two ways to live your life. You can have a passion for God or you can have a passion for yourself and pleasure.
 
The Westminster catechism says, "The chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy Him forever." This is a passion for God, a fervent desire for God. But people have rewritten that. They have rewritten it to read that the chief end of man is to glorify man and to enjoy himself. 
 
Look at the first four verses of James 4
 
 
 
Notice in the first verse he mentions this “desire for pleasures" KJV says lusts that war in your members?"  The word lust is where we get the word hedonism. That is a passion for pleasure, hedonistic desire for pleasure, an abnormal desire for pleasure.
 
There is nothing wrong with pleasure in and of itself. Pleasure is from God. It is God who gives us the desire for pleasures. In fact, the only way to really enjoy the pleasures of life is to enjoy them the way God designed for them to be enjoyed.  
 
Some of you have read The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis. You’ll remember that one of the demons is talking to a junior demon in dealing with people and tempting people, and he's talking about the matter of pleasure and how pleasure works. 
 
The one demon says to the other demon, "I know we have won many a soul through pleasure. All the same, pleasure is God's invention, not ours. God made the pleasures. All our research so far has not enabled us to produce one. All we can do is encourage the humans to take the pleasures which our enemy God has produced at times or in ways or in degrees which He has forbidden. Hence, we always try to work away from the natural condition of any pleasure to that which is least natural, least pleasurable. An ever increasing craving for an ever diminishing pleasure is the formula. To get the man's soul and to give him nothing in return, that is what really gladdens us."
 
In Psalm 16, verse 11, the Bible says “In your presence is fullness of joy; at your right hand are pleasures forevermore."
 
Ultimately, all the basic pleasures and desires that we have in our heart are fulfilled in our relationship to the Lord. But when we become pleasure mad, when that becomes the objective in the end of our life, that's when the problems come. That's really what these first three verses of James 4 are talking about.
 
In verse 1 it talks to us about
 
I. Disruptive Problems.
 
v. 1
 
Do you notice the language there of battle, the language of warfare? The words are rather interesting. In fact, the language talks about both skirmishes or battles as well as a state of war. 
 
He's talking about God's people, about believers, about Christians. He's talking about spiritual war. He is talking about emotional war. He is talking about inward turmoil and turmoil which erupts from the human heart and causes disruptive problems with other people.
 
And he's asking about the source of the difficulties and the problems that we have. And notice he answers his own question. They come from our inward desires for pleasure. 
 
Into the human heart, because of the fall of sin, there has come an alien. It is this sinful desire for pleasure, the desire for satisfaction. That’s what causes the war inside of you. 
 
 
How does that work? When you have a turmoil inside, what causes it in this setting? The desire for pleasure goes to war in our mind.  We get to thinking “if we just made this much money we could be happy”. Or if we could just buy that car or that toy or that whatever, that would satisfy us. 
 
And once that desire is planted, then we go to work to accomplish it. It doesn’t matter what we have to do or who we have to step on or who we have to offend. The war is on!
 
These desires, these disruptive problems that come into our life, go to war and cause a civil war to go on in our heart. It happens to Christians. Christians aren't immune to this. You don't lose your old nature when you get saved. 
 
When we get saved we've got a brand-new nature. The Holy Spirit has come to live in our heart and in our life, and we have a new nature. But the old nature is very much there, and there is a battle that goes on here. There is a problem that occurs and these desires for pleasure and these desires to have things and to enjoy ourselves, they do battle with our spiritual nature.
 
These are disruptive problems that come from our desires for pleasure that war in your members. 
 
Then in verse 2 he talks about
 
II. Destructive Passions.
 
Verse 2
 
 
There is a different word used for lust there. It is the word passion. It is the word earnestness. It is the word desire. It is the word zeal. 
 
In other words, now, here is this desire that comes from our fallen nature for pleasure, but now it becomes something with intensity. You lust. He is talking here about these destructive passions that go to work in our hearts. They destroy. 
 
He's saying that when you make pleasure the object of your life and when you put pleasure number one in your life, it destroys the personal peace in your own heart and life.
 
"You lust, and do not have."
 
In other words, the more you let pleasure become the desire of your living and the more you set that as the object and the goal of your life, the more searching you do but the less satisfaction you will find.
 
"You lust, and have not." It's kind of like a mirage. It's kind of like someone looking at that mirage and he sees the water and when he gets there, it's only a mirage. It's not there. It's kind of like the carrot on the stick. It's always out there in front of you. You've think you've got it and when you have it, you don't have it. 
 
Notice the language in verse 2. He says, "Ye lust, and do not have." He said, "You desire to have, and cannot obtain." He said, "And have not." You have not, you desire to obtain and have not. 
 
 
What the Bible is trying to make clear to you and to me is that the things of this world don't really bring ultimate joy and satisfaction in the heart. You've got to have something else.
 
Only God can give you ultimate satisfaction. Only God can bring you ultimate joy in your life. You desire to have and you lust and you have not. It destroys your personal peace.
 
Not only does it destroy personal peace, but it destroys your relationships with others
 
Notice the reference in verse 2 to murder.
 
He's not talking here necessarily about literal murder. Killing is cherished hatred in the heart. You can kill people with words as well as with knives. You can kill reputations with the things you say. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus said to hate someone was to murder them. 
 
This “murder” is linked with the desire to have” and the inability to “obtain”. 
 
When you begin to make material things and entertainment and pleasures the ultimate goal of your life, then at that point in time people just become objects to use to get you what you want in life. 
 
That's why so many mess up in their marriages. They get married because of what they want that person to do for them. They get married because they are the most important person in the world. It’s all about them.
 
When instead we should marry with the idea in mind of not what my mate's going to do for me but what I'm going to do for my mate. Marriage is an unselfish relationship if it's according to the scriptures. 
 
I think about Judas. He got involved in material things. The Bible says that he was a thief. Judas got interestred in material things; and when Jesus got in his way of material things, he ultimately betrayed the Lord Jesus Christ. 
 
There are some children of God who have done the very same thing. They lust, they desire to have and they do not obtain and so what do they do? They fight and they war against the Lord Jesus Christ, Himself.
 
In verse 1 he talks about disruptive problems. In verse 2 he talks about destructive passions. Then in the latter part of verse 2 and verse 3 he talks about
 
III. Defective Prayers.
 
This is where we get real close to the people of God. 
 
Verse 2b-3
 
As we discovered Sunday morning, what a precious commodity is prayer. 
 
I love that old hymn about prayer. "What a friend we have Jesus, all our sins and grief's to bear. What a privilege to carry everything to God in prayer." Isn't prayer wonderful?
 
 
But he talks first of all about unoffered prayer. That God’s people don’t pray like that ought to is not a new problem. Notice what he says right off the bat:
 
He says at the end of verse 2, "Yet ye have not, because ye ask not." Now follow the teaching here: He says you have all these desires for stuff that causes you to lose your peace and mistreat people and get your life all out of sync, when all you have to do is ask God and He’ll take care of you, and yet You don’t have because you fail to pray. 
 
Sometimes we don't pray because we're prideful. We decide that we can handle it ourselves. We can make ourselves happy. You can't make yourself happy. If you think you can make yourself happy, then you're going to make yourself miserable. Jesus can make you happy. Jesus can meet the deepest needs of your life. You think you can meet the needs of your life? No. You have not because you ask not.
 
This is unoffered prayer.
 
Then he talks about unworthy prayer
 
verse 3
 
You pray and you don't get what you pray for. He says that it is, "Because ye ask amiss," that is, you ask with wrong motives. You ask with a wrong purpose in mind.
 
The word "consume or spend" means to waste. It's the same word that is used in the parable Jesus told about the prodigal son.
Remember that he came to his father and said, "Give me." He went into the far country and it says that when the prodigal son got into the far country that he wasted his substance with riotous living, and then it says, "And when he had spent all he began to be in want." The statement "spent all" is the same word that means to consume. It means to waste. "When he had wasted it all, when he had blown it all, when he had used it all up." 
 
Sometimes we pray for something because we want to consume it on our own passions, our own pleasures, our own desires.
 
Let me ask you a question? Why do you want to make money? Someone sitting here says, "I want to get a good education so I can make a lot of money." O.K. That's alright. "I want to make a big salary." What do you want with all that money? "I want to buy me a big house." What else do you want? "I want to buy me a big car." What else do you want? 
 
There are only two real purposes for money. One of the purposes for money is to enjoy. The Bible says in Timothy that God has given us richly all things to enjoy. It's not wrong to enjoy money, but then he also goes on down in the next verse and says that we are to use money to employ money to do good to help other people.
 
It you want money in order to be a blessing and to give it away and to use it to win people to Christ and to use it to be a blessing for someone else, then it may not be wrong for you to pray for God to make you rich. If you will just make up your mind that what you want is not to just consume it on your own pleasures but to use it for others.
If you will ask God with right motives, not to consume or waste it on your lusts, but to use whatever you have for the honor and glory of God, then God will bless you.
 
Let me return to the prodigal again. The prodigal son starts off in the story with a passion for pleasure. went to his father and said, "Father, give me." That's pleasure mad living. He went into the far country. He spent everything he had on himself. He blew it. He wasted it. It was all gone. Then he came back to the father and he said, "Father, make me." 
 
Now I would suggest that when you go from saying, "Give me," to saying, "Make me," you have moved from a passion for pleasure to a passion for God.
 
I read about an African tribe. This tribe selected a king every seven years. If you were selected to be the king for this African tribe, you could have unlimited luxury. Anything you desired, any pleasure, any passion, any material thing you desired, you could have it. But at the end of the seven years you were killed and they selected a new king. I read that they were standing in line to be selected king for seven years. You say, "How foolish can you be?" A person would give their whole life for seven years of luxury. But it is no more foolish than for a person to sacrifice an eternity of pleasures with the Lord for the empty pleasures of this life.
 
Jesus said, "What shall it profit if a man shall have the whole world and lose his own soul."
 
Let's bow our heads in prayer.