Sermon Outline 4.26.2026

Title: Who Do You Think You Are? Text: James 4:11-17

I. REVIEW

• Earthly wisdom is marked by bitter jealousy and selfish ambition; it is demonic at its root (3:14-16).
• Heavenly wisdom is pure, peaceable, gentle, open to reason, full of mercy (3:17). 
• 4:1-10 is a devastating diagnosis: your quarrels and fights come from cravings at war inside you.
  • You ask and receive nothing because you ask in order to spend it on your own pleasures (4:3).
  • You are adulterers — spiritual adulterers — who have made friendship with the world your primary loyalty (4:4).
• James closes chapter 4 with mercy: God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble. Submit yourselves therefore to God.... Humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will lift you up (4:6, 10).
• The way up is down. Humility is the cure.

II. INTRODUCTION
James turns to three specific sins, each a variation on the same disease: forgetting who you are and forgetting who God is.

III. THE SIN OF THE CRITICAL TONGUE: Judging as Usurpation (4:11-12)

• The person I feel most qualified to correct is: _____. 
• The fact that a name came to mind immediately tells you something.
• Two forms of evil speech: 
• gossip, true stories taken where they should not go
• slander, false stories constructed and circulated.
• James seems to have slander primarily in view here, since he pairs it with judgment.
• When you speak against your brother, you have placed yourself above the law rather than under it. The law says, Love your neighbor as yourself (2:8).
• When you judge your brother, you are declaring by your action that you are exempt from the law’s claim over you.
• But there is only one Lawgiver and Judge. He is the one who can save and destroy.

IV. THE SIN OF THE ARROGANT PLANNER: Presuming on Tomorrow (4:13-16)

• Four certainties stacked in one sentence: the departure, the destination, the duration, the outcome & identifies our presumptions and outcomes:

A. It forgets our ignorance. (v.14a.)

B. It forgets our frailty. (v.14b.)

C. It forgets our dependence. (v.15)

D. It brags without basis (v.16)

V. THE SIN OF INACTION: Knowing and Not Doing (4:17)

• What is sin? Sin is any transgression of or want of conformity to the Law of God.
• This verse is about the want of conformity, the sin of omission.
• For the Christian, knowing what is right creates an obligation. To know the good & leave it undone is to sin as surely as if you had done the evil.

VI. THE DIAGNOSIS BEHIND ALL THREE SINS

• Each sin forgets something essential:
  • The slanderer forgets that God alone holds the judicial seat. He inflates himself.
  • The arrogant planner forgets that God holds tomorrow. He presumes.
  • The inactive professor forgets that knowledge creates responsibility. He exempts himself.

VII. THE GOSPEL ANSWER

• Humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will lift you up (James 4:10).
• The cure for the slanderer? We have received God's mercy, so we have no standing to withhold mercy from our brother.
• The cure for the arrogant planner? Jesus, facing the cross in Gethsemane, said Not my will, but yours be done.
• The cure for the inactive professor? Jesus, who did what we leave undone. His entire life was the active righteousness we owe and can’t produce. 

VIII. CLOSING
Humble yourselves, therefore, under the mighty hand of God so that at the proper time he may exalt you, casting all your anxieties on him, because he cares for you. — 1 Peter 5:6-7