I remember one time at a Subway restaurant, well, I guess fast food—I don't know, "restaurant" seems like a generous term for Subway. Uh, I was at a Subway, and I was going through the line and had a few moments to talk to the lady as she was making my sandwich. She was kind of agitated and was talking to me about something that had gone on. This was a lady that was 55, 60 years of age, and she said, "If she says that one more time to me, I'm going to go off. I'm going to hit her, and I don't care if I lose my job and end up in jail." And I'm like, this is the lady that's making my sandwich. I'm like, "Can you put some extra anger in that for me, please?" I just remember thinking, you know, that's how so much of the world thinks and acts. It is this way of thinking where if they do this, then man, I'm really going to go off, and I'm going to let them have it. That way of thinking has really kind of infiltrated and become even a part of the church world, sadly.
When we come to James chapter 4, we see that we are simply called, as believers in Jesus Christ, to a different way of living, thinking, and responding to others. So, as you turn your Bibles to James chapter 4, today's sermon is titled, "It begins with me." We're going to see how if we really want our world to change, if we want our families to be different, if we want maybe our church to be different, we have to realize, as James says, and he'll show us that it begins right here in our own hearts.
James chapter 4, as he begins this kind of new discussion—although we'll see it's really flowing from what we looked at last week—he says in verse one, "Where do wars and fights come from among you? Do they not come from your desires for pleasure that war in your members?" Now, this isn't just some random thing that James begins to talk about. This is following his conversation in James chapter 3, towards the end of that chapter, about godly wisdom versus worldly wisdom. If you remember, he was talking about how godly wisdom, the fruit of that, the result of that is peace and righteousness. So, godly wisdom brings peace and righteousness. Then he transitions into this conversation of, "So, therefore, where do the wars and the fights come from among you?" He says, "Well, they come from your own heart. That's where they originate."
Notice Satan isn't mentioned at this point in this passage. In fact, largely James has just been dealing with the issues of our hearts without any reference to Satan or temptation that would come from without. He says, "The desires for pleasure that war in your members." I like the way that ESV translates that. He says, "Is it not this that your passions are at war within you?" This really follows the theme of James. As you've seen, James is a pretty confrontational epistle. This whole idea of what is on the inside will work its way out and bear fruit. We've seen that with faith and works, that what we truly believe we will demonstrate. We've seen that with godly wisdom versus worldly wisdom, that they each bear their own fruit. And so now he's talking about these fights and wars and the strife that are among you. He talks about that fruit that's being born. It comes from an inner war within our hearts.
We live in a world, you know, this is so applicable to today because we live in a world right now where people's hearts are just at war within themselves, and they want to divide and create sides. If I can make that other person the enemy, then somehow it justifies my own poor behavior. But we, as believers in Christ, as those who are bearing the image of Christ to the world, have to understand just how childish that way of thinking actually is, how sinful against God, in fact, that way of thinking is. But does that mean we just kind of roll over and let people have their way and do whatever they want to do? No. What it means is that we must understand that we are always accountable to God for our own actions, no matter what happens or what other people have done on what we would call the other side.
I think even some of that language where we talk about the other side so much, I think some of that is at the heart of the problem in our society as well. We want to create so many other sides that we can be at war with rather than trying to be peacemakers and bridge the gap. So again, in regards to society as a whole, this is just how the world is operating. But as believers in Jesus Christ, we are called to something much higher. We're called to deal with our own hearts first. So then, if an opportunity arises for us maybe to speak truth into someone else's life, we can do so in a godly spirit of grace and humility and love rather than acting out of our flesh and just creating more problems.
So again, it doesn't mean that we don't address issues, but it means we deal with the primary issue, which is the issue of our own hearts. We deal with that first. James is very clear. He's saying, "Where do these wars and where do these battles come from among you? They come from the desires in your own heart." Then he says in verse two, "You lust and do not have. You murder and covet and cannot obtain. You fight and war, yet you do not have because you do not ask."
Now again, there's a danger here because we look at these words. He says, "You lust and murder and covet and fight and war." These are strong words, right? Here's the danger. We read these strong words and we go, "That's for those other people," right? That's what the human nature wants to do. That's what the flesh wants to do. Jesus said, though, "If you look at a woman lustfully, you've committed adultery in your heart." He said, "If you hate your brother or sister, you've committed murder in your heart." We all deal with covetousness, seeing what other people have, wanting it for ourselves. This fighting and these wars that are the fruit of pride in our own hearts. See, we need to beware of the "that's for others" thinking. James is writing to believers who have fled their homes for their faith in Jesus. James is writing to them saying, "Look, you need to beware of these things in your own hearts."
Let's take the last kind of phrase of verse two and how it rolls into verse three. See how this goes together. He says, "You do not have because you don't ask. You ask and do not receive because you ask amiss, that you may spend it on your pleasures." Now look, God wants you to talk to him. Jesus taught on prayer. Jesus told parables about praying and not losing heart and persisting in prayer. God wants you to ask and to seek and to knock. So that's not what this is talking about. But what James is saying is that you have so allowed these other things to creep into your heart and to find a holding place in your heart and really become a stronghold in your heart that they are now so affecting your prayer life that even your prayer life is affected by this covetousness and this lust and these things in your heart to where God hears your prayers in the sense that he knows what you're praying, but he's not inclined to answer them because they're so stained with your own selfish desires.
Now, the thing that's ironic about that is prayer is what we need so much in this country. I would say just about more than anything. We need a people that have a sense of desperation. Do you know this is just my own two cents worth as I read scripture? What I observe is we have largely lost a sense of persisting in prayer in America and the American church. It's not in other countries where they're persecuted. I believe the reason why we have largely lost this is because we've also lost our sense of desperation. We are so blessed in this country; we have become so fat and happy. We have forgotten how desperate we are apart from the grace of God in Jesus Christ. A desperate people don't have a problem persisting in praying. But as a country as a whole, we've kind of lost that. We see that in scripture that over and over again in Israel's life when God blessed them over time, they couldn't handle that blessing, and they became spiritually lazy, and then they shifted into idol worship, and then God had to discipline them.
But God has called us to be a people of prayer and to understand the desperateness of the hour and the desperateness of our own heart and that God is desiring to do more in First Baptist Allen than we could imagine or perceive in this moment. But you know what we must do above anything else? We must pray to seek God's face, to seek his face together, to persist in prayer. The world needs to see the power of a praying church. And so James is telling his readers that their prayers aren't being heard because they're so polluted by the desires of their own hearts. And remember again, this is the half-brother of Jesus writing to believers in Christ who are persecuted for their faith. I mean, they've suffered. Think about that. They have held fast to the faith of Jesus to the extent that they're persecuted and on the run. And you know what that tells me? If people in that situation still have to deal with that kind of stuff in their hearts, then there's probably good odds we have to deal with it as well, right?
But again, the answer is to come back to the Lord, to persist in prayer, to understand that we do desperately need God to do a work in our hearts. And what James is saying is not just for those other people. So he continues in verse four. If you think he's been confrontational so far, it gets hot in verse four. Look at this: "Adulterers and adulteresses!" Whoa. Hello. Did you notice the exclamation mark? He's not just, I mean, he's yelling at them. He's essentially saying, "YOU UNFAITHFUL PEOPLE!" It's like, wow. Okay, James, I thought I just fled my home for my faith in Jesus. But he's not letting them off the hook, is he? He says, "Do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God? Whoever therefore wants to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God." I mean, this is a stout verse. This is extremely confrontational. As we've seen that James can be, to be a friend of the world, he's saying you're being unfaithful. Even though you've been persecuted for Jesus's sake, the world is creeping in.
As you take up the way of the world and the world's thinking and the world's acting, what you're doing is you're actually setting yourself in opposition to God. What I have found is sometimes in our lives, it's like we think that if we obey God in one area, it's like we get a mulligan for other areas. Well, you know, I've taught a BFG for this many years, so I can just treat people like a jerk over here outside of my BFG. No, you know, obedience in one area does not give you a pass in another. God wants all of you. What James is telling these believers who were being persecuted for their faith is don't be friendly with the world. Give your heart wholly to the Lord and realize that to take up the way of the world is to set yourself in opposition to God himself. I mean, this is strong language. He's writing to believers in Jesus Christ. So, we know that this could be possible of us, that we could be found in a place where God is opposing us because of what's going on in our hearts.
We must understand that we are spiritual beings living in physical bodies. We are living in a spiritual battle. We have an enemy that knows our weakness. He knows which buttons to push. Now James, after really for most of the epistle just dealing with our own hearts, now he's going to bring in the enemy. Uh, it's coming in just a few verses. He says in verse five, "Do you think that the scripture says in vain, 'The spirit who dwells in us yearns jealously?'" Now, we're not sure what scripture James is quoting here. People like to conjecture about that, but what he's saying here is that the spirit yearns jealously. Again, there's some discussion on is this a capital S like Holy Spirit or lowercase s? Is he talking about the human spirit? I believe the New King James has this correct with the capital S saying the spirit inside of us, the Holy Spirit, is yearning jealously for us.
We see this theme of God yearning jealously for his people, God being jealous for his people in scripture in Exodus 25 and Deuteronomy 4:24 and Zechariah 8:2 and other places. It's not jealousy as we understand it, which would be sinful, but it is an intense longing for a desire for it is that God is jealous for you, for all of you. Thank God that he is not willing to share you with anybody else. That's what James is talking about. He's saying, "Look, God yearns for you jealously. He's not going to share you with anyone. He is going to do what needs to be done in your life to have all of you." It reminds me of the story of the prodigal son. Remember the prodigal son? He went to his father one day and he said, "Look, I'm done being at home. Give me whatever you've set aside as my inheritance. I'm going to take it. I can do better on my own." It's a great insult to the father. He's basically saying, "I don't care about you. You're useless to me except for this inheritance. Just give me what's been set aside. I'm out of here."
He takes this inheritance and he wasted, the Bible says, on prodigal living, sinful, fleshly living. But then he's in this distant land, and a famine comes. He spent all of his wealth and he has nothing left, and his fair-weather friends have shown themselves to be just that. They're nowhere to be found. The Bible says that now he's working feeding pigs, and he desires to eat some of the food slop. It's not that he's so low he's eating pig food; he's so low the farmer won't even let him eat the pig slop. For a Jewish person, especially with a pig being unclean, this was about as low as you could get. It says that he came to his senses and said, "Look, even my father's servants are treated better than this. I'm going to go home, and at least I can be a servant in my father's house, and at least I know I can eat and have a roof over my head."
As he made his way home, what does it say? The father saw him what? From a distance, from afar. The father ran to meet him and opened his arms, not wagging his finger at him, but opening his arms and embracing him, not as a servant, but as a son. My friends, you have a heavenly father that loves you more than you can fathom or understand the depths of his love this side of heaven. It is his grace that always makes your way back. You have a father that always wants you back. He is calling you back, and he is jealous for you. He wants you.
So what he's saying here in verse five, he's saying God is dwelling—the spirit is dwelling in you and yearning jealously. He wants you, but we've got this sin that needs to be dealt with. So, what do we do? Well, look at verse six. "But he gives more grace." What does more grace mean? We'll get to that in just a minute. He gives more grace. Therefore, he says, "God resists the proud, but gives grace to who? The humble." What does it mean he gives more grace? The Greek is translated more grace in the sense of greater grace. It's mega; it's greater grace. But what does that mean? Well, you have to consider the larger context. Again, it's this context of there's these wars and these fleshly desires in our own heart. Yet, we have a God that desires us with a great jealousy. He wants us. What James is saying in verse six is it's God's grace that always makes the way home possible. It's always his grace. We don't earn it; we don't deserve it. We can never boast about how God has accepted us or loved us. It's always about his grace.
Here James is quoting from Proverbs 3:34, and he's quoting from the Septuagint version, the Greek translation of the Hebrew verse here, that God opposes the proud but gives what? Grace to the humble. Now, I want you to think about that pride. To allow pride to abide in our hearts and to make decisions based on pride is to put ourselves—this is the second time we've seen already in these verses—to put yourself in opposition to God. So James is warning us, "Look, be careful. You may think you're on God's side, but there might be things going on in your heart, and you are actually, by your friendship with the world and in the pride of your heart, you have become someone that God himself is opposing."
That brings us to our first point today, which is this: Pride is self-destructive. Pride is self-destructive. It's not good. But God's grace is transformative. God's grace is what changes us. Not us just trying a little harder, but surrendering to the grace of God in Jesus Christ. Pride is self-destructive. But God's grace is transformative. I mean, look at what pride is behind just in these verses. Pride is behind all sorts of wars and fights and selfishness and spiritual adultery. In the end, it puts us at odds with God himself.
I remember there was a phrase that was going around for years, and I was meeting with this man. The phrase was, "My pride is all I have left." I think maybe it was in a country song or something. It came real popular. I don't know. I was talking to this guy, you know, I mean, it was like a country song, you know? I mean, his family had left him. He lost his job; his truck broke down; his dog died. It was kind of one of those things. I felt bad for him, but most of what was happening in his life was self-imposed. He said to me, "My pride is all I have left." I remember telling him, not to be mean, but just to be straightforward, I was like, "Well, good. Then you don't have much more left to go because what we need to do is let go of our pride in order to actually be free." Realize the life that God has for us. If your pride is all that you have left, you're really close to being free in this life. Just let go. Let go of what is holding you back the most. Let go of what is actually bringing the destruction into your life in the first place. Let go. Humble yourself before the Lord and see what God will do when we humble ourselves before him.
So pride is self-destructive, but God's grace is transformative. The problem is most of our self-destructive ways come again from the things in our own hearts. We like to make excuses for our actions, saying, "But yeah, but you don't know what they did to me first." You know, again, Jesus is always our example. Think about Jesus. His own half-brothers made fun of him. I mean, how many times was he tempted to just be like, "I'll show you what real power is about"? But he didn't. He surrendered to the will of the father and remained our sinless savior. I mean, his own disciples misunderstood him. Peter denied him. Judas betrayed him. The religious leaders of the day, who should have recognized God in their midst, were completely opposed to him, seeking to put him to death. Misunderstood, lied about, made fun of, and yet power restrained, surrendered to the will of the father, never lashing out, remaining our sinless savior.
When we look to Jesus, it kind of removes all of our "But did you know what they did to me?" excuses. We have to go, "Well, if Christ, who has gone before me, can respond that way, then by his grace and through dependence upon his spirit, I can be different as well." Now when we come to our last four verses today, verses seven to ten, there are ten aorist imperatives. There are ten verbs here, and they're strung together really quick, and that is for a point of emphasis. These aorist imperatives are really giving us a sense of urgency and a sense of there needs to be a decisive choice made. The present tense is just a continuous action. While repentance should be a daily part of the believer, James is really saying there is a sense of urgency that you recognize that friendship with the world is to put you as an enemy of God. Whatever is going on in your life that puts you in that place, stop, repent, get before God, and be changed.
There's a great sense of urgency in what he is saying here. The first command is to submit to God. What you could also see in the Greek here is that this first command about submitting to God, the other nine commands possibly could just be explaining further what it means to submit to God. Because when we truly submit to God, it's not just about our relationship with him vertically; it affects our relationships horizontally. So let's look at this beginning, and we'll see how Satan now gets brought into the conversation.
Verse seven: "Therefore submit to God." That's the first aorist imperative. Submit to God. The second is resist. "Resist the devil, and he will flee from you." Submit to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you. Now again, what he's saying is in light of God's grace, be transformed by God's grace. Out of grace, do this. You know, the prodigal son, if he truly received the grace of the father, then he would be changed, right? If we truly receive the love and the grace of God and we're changed by it, we will want to be different because we will not want to do the things that continue to hurt the father who loves us.
This is James's prescription, so to say, for repentance, for being rightly restored to the father. Submit to God. In other words, humble yourself before him. Line up under his authority. Humble yourselves under God's mighty hand. Then resist the devil. Again, up until now, James has really been talking about just our hearts. But we also know that we have an enemy of our souls that knows what buttons to push. We need to be mindful of that.
Now also we need to be mindful that we are to submit to God and resist the devil. But you are to also understand you cannot make Satan flee on your own. You're not powerful enough. But you can surrender yourself under the mighty hand of God. As you keep focused on him and you resist Satan's lies and his schemes and his temptation, then God will cause Satan to flee from you. Because what's happening in this spiritual battle in which we live, it's a truth encounter, excuse me, not a power encounter. It's never a power encounter. Think about this: Can Satan in any way compete with God's power? No. He's doomed. In fact, at some point in the future, God is going to decide that all this is done. He's going to bring this world and everything to his desired end. Satan and hell are going to be cast in the lake of fire and done. They don't have any say in it. God's going to do what he's going to do.
So what Satan does is he attacks us with lies. That's the main way that he attacks the children of God. He's just like what he did with Adam and Eve. He tries to get us to doubt God's goodness. He tries to get us to doubt God's faithfulness. He tries to get us focused on other people and what we think that they've done to us and get our pride stirred up. What James says is resist that. Stay submitted to God, to his word, to the truth, and in the power of God, God will cause him, Satan, to flee from you.
Then he continues on verse eight. "Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you." Isn't that an amazing promise from God's word? Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you. "Cleanse your hands, you sinners. Purify your hearts, you double-minded." I mean, how many people would you like to meet if you could today? Celebrities, politicians, athletes that you will probably never meet, but you can draw near to God and have the promise of his word that says, "And he will draw near to you." He'll draw near to you.
This is also a picture of the Old Testament priesthood. They would draw near to God, but first they had to offer a cleansing for their own sins before they came into the presence of a holy God. But now we're told that we can draw near to God. It's because of the sacrifice of Jesus that we are cleansed and brought into a right relationship with God, and not because of our righteousness, but because of his. But still, we're told, let's look at this verse again, verse eight, because he says, "Draw near to God. He'll draw near to you. Cleanse your hands, you sinners. Purify your hearts, you double-minded."
So, yes, our righteousness is in Christ. The way that we draw near to God is because of Jesus. But we're still commanded. Those are two more of the imperatives: cleansing and purifying. We still have a responsibility to forsake sin, to turn from it, to say, "No more. That is not the way I'm going. By the grace of God in Jesus Christ, by the power of his spirit in me. No more. Through the sacrifice and the blood of Jesus. No more." There is an imperative there. There is a command to move away from that sin.
You know, this reminds me of the Mount Sinai when the children of Israel had left Egypt, and they come to Mount Sinai, and God is going to meet with them on the mountain. God tells Moses, "Look, I'm going to meet with y'all. My presence is going to be in your midst, but you got to be ready for that." He says, "In three days, I'm going to meet with you, and so you need to sanctify yourself." The people went through a bunch of ritualistic cleansing and ceremonies. They washed their clothes, and they did these things not so that their works would make them approved by God, but it was a symbolic act and a way of also internalizing the fact that God is holy, we are not, and we need to be cleansed. We approach him with fear and trembling because he is a holy God.
God has saved us through Jesus Christ. His spirit dwells in us. We have this relationship with him. But God has not lost one ounce of his holiness. He is still the God that makes the mountains shake. There is a sense in the book of James where he's saying we need to remember the holiness of God and draw near to his presence. Yes, but draw near with cleansing and a sense of the holiness of God and being in awe of it.
He continues on verse nine. He says, "Lament," that's another command. "Mourn," that's another command. "Weep," that's another command. "Let your laughter be turned," that's the next one, the ninth one, "to mourning and your joy to gloom." Now, isn't that an uplifting verse? I mean, that's just wonderful, isn't it? He's basically just, it's like James is yelling at you, saying, "Cry. Cry about it." You know, I mean, instead of being like, "Well, are you going to cry about it?" No, James is saying, "Yeah, you should be crying about it." That's not normally the verse that we just flip to first thing in the morning. Like, I love starting out my day with James 4:9. It's just so uplifting.
What he is doing through this is he is painting a picture of genuine repentance. To lament, to mourn, to weep, to let your joy be turned to gloom. This reminds me of the city of Nineveh, the Assyrian capital. They were enemies of the Jews. God's prophet Jonah had been told to go and preach to them. He didn't want to go. He wanted God to destroy them. They were wicked. Eventually, Jonah goes, and he preaches a very half-hearted sermon. But to his amazement, the people respond. The king even makes a decree that from the greatest to the least, and even their animals—I'm not exactly sure how they did this—are to be clothed in sackcloth. I mean, some of you like to dress your pets, and that's weird and that's good and all that stuff, but I mean, they're putting sackcloth on their—I don't know how all that work went down, but they're in the photo shoots. I'll just stop there.
They were to humble themselves before God and to not eat or drink anything as a way of saying, "We have sinned before a holy God, and we recognize the urgency of the moment." What James is basically calling us to do is the same thing: to deal with our own hearts and realize that in our own hearts there are things that are offensive to a holy God and to recognize the urgency of the moment that, "God, I don't want this anymore. I don't want to be found against you. I don't want you resisting me. I want to be purified and cleansed before you. I want to lay this down and to know you and to be known by you in a deeper way."
Again, we have to be careful about this. This is for the other people kind of mentality. We can't put degrees on sin. I think that's our danger with this is we like to put degrees on sin and say, "Well, I haven't done what they done." You know, look, if you spread a rumor or gossip about someone else, then you need to do this. If you act in a way that is impatient and harsh towards someone else, then you need to do this. If you look lustfully at someone, then you need to do this. This is for everyone because we all need grace, and we all sin, and our sin is against a holy God, directly against him. So, beware of again the pride of our hearts that says this is for those other people.
Then the last verse, verse ten, and we'll get to our final point. He says, "Humble yourselves in the sight of the Lord." That's our last command. Humble yourselves in the sight of the Lord, and he will lift you up. But how do you humble yourself? How do you have a heart or an attitude change? I think one way that you do that is by asking God for it. Maybe we just begin to ask God, "God, give me the humility that you desire." How many times do we pray for humility? But then also, I think we just do the things that we know are right. We do the things that we know are humble. We do the things that we know crucify our flesh. We do it when we don't feel like it, but we do it because we know it is right.
Then he says, "Humble yourself in the sight of the Lord, and he'll do what? He'll lift you up." Now, that's great news. But again, here's the danger in verses seven to ten. Submit to God, and then it ends with humble yourself before God. The promise is he will lift you up. That is a great promise, and we can find hope in that. Sometimes you're in a place where maybe you're beat down, and you're just making the right choices because you know they're honoring the Lord, and you're waiting on God to fulfill his word. There's nothing wrong with that. But if you read these verses and you see these other commands as just a means to an end of being exalted, then you're pointing out the problem in your own heart.
If we read all of these things and we say, "Okay, yeah, just what do I need to do to be exalted?" you're showing the pride that is the problem. It's not about us being exalted. It is about humbling ourselves before God and letting him do what he wants to do in his time for his glory. You know, I think why this hits home with so many of us is because we're all human beings with the same nature, right? If we're honest about it, we all struggle with this. It doesn't matter how long you've been walking with Jesus or who you are; this is just human nature. James was writing to believers that love Jesus, and he's dealing with the issues of their heart. That lets me know then I've probably got areas as well.
That brings us to our final point today, and we're going to wrap it up soon, is this: Humility is victorious and God's prescribed way of crucifying the flesh. Don't think about humility as, "Well, somebody else has won," or, "I've just given up." No, humility is actually God's way of walking in victory. It's the way of Jesus. You're not going to make the wrong choice when you choose humility. It's actually the way of victory, and it is God's way of crucifying the flesh, which is what we need. We need to put to death the flesh every day, to make choices where he increases and we decrease, and our flesh hates that. But thank God that greater is he who is in us, his spirit, than he who is in the world or even our own flesh.
You know, years ago, I read a story about—I read a book, excuse me—about Abraham Lincoln. It was really interesting, um, the way that Lincoln led, and I thought he'd be a fitting conclusion to the sermon today. When Abraham Lincoln was elected president in 1860, he was not seen as a real powerful figure as we think of him today. In fact, he was kind of thought of as just this backwards lawyer. Many people were like, "How in the world did he rise to office?" His rivals, in fact, for the Republican nomination, some of his fiercest rivals, William Seward, Salmon Chase, and Edward Bates, were actually more experienced in politics. They were better connected, and in many ways, they were more popular than him.
So many leaders out of pride, once they got the presidency, would have done everything they could to get these people that were his opponents out of the way and put them down and quiet them. But not Lincoln. Doris Goodwin describes in her book, *Team of Rivals*, that Lincoln did something unthinkable. He invited those men and others, but especially those three that were his fiercest rivals. He gave them positions in his cabinet. He invited them onto his leadership team. Seward became the secretary of state. Chase became the secretary of the treasury. Bates became the attorney general. At first, they all doubted him. They thought he was crazy. "What is he doing bringing us on? Doesn't he know how we're going to treat him and oppose him?"
But Lincoln's humility, his ability to listen, his willingness to admit his own limits and to see the strengths in others around him and put them in places to use their strengths eventually won these men over. In fact, Seward, who would just rail against Lincoln as being unqualified, ended up becoming Lincoln's strongest supporter and one of his best friends. Chase, who plotted against him, wrote about respecting his greatness and the greatness of his leadership. That cabinet, forged not in pride but in humility, became a leadership team that was used to preserve the union through one of its greatest trials.
See, Lincoln didn't see humility as being a weakness. It made him strong enough to lead a divided nation to victory. As Goodwin put it, Lincoln's greatness was not in his vision, but in his capacity, listen, to subdue his ego for the sake of a higher cause. My friends, there is no greater higher cause than the great commission and the kingdom of our God. There is nothing that is more worthy of us subduing our ego than the risen Lord Jesus Christ.
Pride is self-destructive, but God's grace is transformative. Humility is victorious, and it is God's prescribed way of crucifying the flesh. Our example in this all is the Lord Jesus Christ.
