Sunday message · James, Unlearning Religion series
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Message Summary
Continuing the series on James and unlearning religion, Pastor Phillip Santillan approaches James 4:4–10 through a simple observation: perspective shapes our actions. After a frustrating online order, he expected a business to make things right, because he was the customer. But if he approached his marriage the same way and threatened to find another wife when dinner wasn’t ready, he would rightly be called an adulterer. James’ whole letter asks what a follower of Christ should look like, and Phil’s answer is in his title: just like your heavenly Father.
That depends on seeing the church rightly. “The church is a family, not a business,” Phil says, and it reflects not our dysfunctional earthly families but God’s perfect one. Ephesians 2 says believers are no longer foreigners and strangers but members of God’s household. A business only wants us to come back and will put up with our pettiness; a family wants its members to grow up. Misread the church, Phil warns, and we will misread much of what the New Testament says about how God’s people should live.
So when James opens with “You adulterers!” and warns that friendship with the world makes us enemies of God, it can sound like shaming. Phil draws on Brené Brown’s research distinguishing shame, the painful belief that we are unworthy of love and belonging, from guilt, the healthy discomfort of measuring our actions against our values. James is aiming for guilt. His readers claimed to belong to God while living by the world’s values, and in a family, hard words are meant to help us grow, not drive us away. Without that perspective, passages like this can seem to confirm the idea that Christians are all about shaming.
James quickly adds that God gives grace generously, opposing the proud but giving grace to the humble. The humility that comes from seeing how far our lives fall short readies us for grace, while making excuses and digging in our heels is the pride God opposes. Humbling ourselves means admitting who we are in the light of God’s truth and refusing Satan’s lies about who we are, the trap Adam and Eve fell into. It is not enough to run from the devil; we must run to God, who promises to come close. Even Peter, who struggled with pride, urged believers to dress themselves in humility (1 Peter 5:5). Washing hands and purifying hearts means humility from the inside out, with actions and words that match the values we proclaim.
Phil admits he has treated churches like businesses, judging them by their small group systems or programs and expecting them to build community for him, and only in recent years has he truly understood the church as a family. He closes by asking where each of us needs to look more like our heavenly Father, and what excuses we make for withholding generous grace from those still learning to follow Christ. He also urges believers to treat people who don’t yet follow Jesus as “soon-to-be family.”