You’re Not God

Thank you for reading this sermon from Christ Fellowship. I hope and pray that this sermon will be a blessing of grace and truth to you. With that said, let me encourage you not to use this sermon as a replacement for your local church. Christ Jesus did not establish his Church simply for us to consume content. Instead, He calls us to be part of a real, covenant family.

Last week was all about humility and that theme continues today. James doesn’t want us lingering in a place of vague feelings about humility. He wants to apply it to our lives very directly using a couple of very practical everyday examples.

We’re going to consider this morning’s passage in two sections.

[11] Do not speak evil against one another, brothers. The one who speaks against a brother or judges his brother, speaks evil against the law and judges the law. But if you judge the law, you are not a doer of the law but a judge.

[12] There is only one lawgiver and judge, he who is able to save and to destroy. But who are you to judge your neighbor?

The simplest way to explain the point here is to say, “You’re not God. So, stop treating other people like you are God.”

God alone is the judge of human character. God wrote the law, subjected us to it, and so He alone has the right to judge. James clearly says, “You don’t.” Neither do I.

It’s best to understand this as a general principle meant to humble us, because there is one very important exception.

Scripture requires church leaders to discipline church members when there is a lack of repentance for public sin. Obviously, that requires a measure of judgment.

There are also repeated commands for church leaders to judge Christian teaching to ensure it is free from error.

But even then, there is the important qualification. None of that should ever be done by one elder.

You’re probably familiar with the verse that says, “Whenever two or more are gathered together, I am there with them.” Jesus says that in Matthew 18. We often misquote that verse thinking it’s about church fellowship, but it’s actually about church discipline.

Jesus is instructing his disciples to judge a person’s guilt or innocence only as a group! And He’s making it OK to do that because He, the judge, promises to be there.

In that context, it is OK to go to someone alone if they have sinned against you. But even then, Jesus doesn’t let us pass judgment on them alone. If we believe there is a lack of repentance, we should take a witness, and then it goes to the court of the church elders.
All of this is to protect us against the kind of judgment James is talking about. If individual Christians start slandering and gossiping about each other without due process, it causes all sorts of problems in the church.

Here are some reasons why, in general, it is a bad idea to pass judgment on someone else and especially to talk about it with others.

First, we should avoid passing judgment because we should probably be attending to our sin. That’s exactly what Jesus says in the sermon on the mount. Before you go looking for the speck in your brother’s eye, deal with the log in your own eye.

Second, we are often guilty of the exact same faults we are finding with other people. I can’t tell you how many times the Spirit has convicted me of this problem. I’m watching someone else sin and then the Spirit reminds me of specific ways I have committed the same sin.

Third, James explicitly says we are breaking the law when we judge other people by it. It violates the law of love. And we also tend to pick and choose the laws that matter to us.

This is the irony of the whole situation. The people who enjoy judging others think they have the highest respect for the law, but they actually have a very low view of the law. They are deciding for themselves which laws should be kept, and which can be ignored. It’s offensive to God’s character and it reveals a serious lack of humility.

All that to say, be careful of your words. One of our former elders was named Brian Dennsteadt. Brian is from Baltimore and he moved back home a few years ago. Brian taught me some lingo from that part of the country. If someone starts talking about you behind your back, you tell them to “Get my name out ya mouth!”

That’s James 4:11-12 – get my name out ya mouth! Now, let’s look at the second section.

[13] Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go into such and such a town and spend a year there and trade and make a profit”—

[14] yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes.

For that, I like to think of the fog we get around here some mornings. You can see the fog, but you can’t grab it and hold onto it. Fog is something but in terms of time and space, it is as close to nothing as you can get. That’s how James describes us and Ecclesiastes uses the same metaphor.

[15] Instead you ought to say, “If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that.”

[16] As it is, you boast in your arrogance. All such boasting is evil.

The first section taught us that should stop treating other people like we are God. This one teaches that we should stop acting like we are God.

Only God knows what the future holds and no one is promised tomorrow.

This is known as the sin of presumption. We live as if we are the gods of our own destiny. In our hearts, we say, “It’s my life and I can do whatever I want.”

That isn’t just a problem for people out there in the world. It’s a problem in the church as well. In fact, we wrongly assume that God is going to bless everything we try to do because we are Christians. That’s not faith, that’s arrogance.

It might be God’s will for 2026 to be your best year ever. It might be God’s will for you to suffer immensely. How can you know?

The answer is, you can’t… until it happens.

I get nervous when Christians start talking about God’s will for their lives as if they already know it. They sound really spiritual, but if you know your Bible, it is actually a sin to presume upon God’s unrevealed will.

In the Old Testament, that was called divination, and it was strictly forbidden. Divination is trying to get secret information from God about the future. It’s in the same category as magic.

Did God sometimes reveal his future plans to people? Yes. When the Bible was being written, God spoke through the prophets. But it was always something relevant to His plan of salvation.

God is not in the business of telling us which job to take, which person to marry, which car to purchase, or what we should eat for breakfast.

He’s given us the law, which sets boundaries for some of our decisions. And He encourages us to seek wise counsel. But be careful of speaking with authority on the future.

Instead of saying, “God told me to take this job” we should be saying, “If God wills it, then I will take this job.” I’m not God, so I probably shouldn’t be speaking for Him.

I think that is exactly the sort of thing James wants us to avoid here. And it’s kind of cringy to me when I hear Christians say things like “God told me.”

Years ago, a pastor friend told me that another pastor met with him. He said to my friend, “God told me that you are supposed to sell your building to our church.” My friend laughed and said, “Well, God didn’t tell me that!”

Do you see the problem? It’s extremely presumptuous to speak that way. It’s arrogant. Am I to assume that you have a better relationship with God, so much that he tells you secrets and not me?

Having said that, James is not discouraging us from making plans. Scripture is full of wisdom encouraging us to make plans. But we should do it with the right perspective and a humble heart.

I’m not God. My plans are subject to His will.

And then James closes this section with one final qualification.

[17] So whoever knows the right thing to do and fails to do it, for him it is sin.

In cases where God’s law does call us to a certain course of action, the path of love and obedience in whatever circumstance, refusing to act on it is sin – even if we did “nothing wrong”.

James keeps widening the net, doesn’t he? No one escapes the net of the law. Even if you did nothing wrong, there are so many right things we still fail to do.

How many times are we guilty of neglect, passivity, delay, or silence?

This final verse reminds me of Micah 6:8 –

He has told you, O man, what is good;
and what does the Lord require of you
but to do justice, and to love kindness,
and to walk humbly with your God?

That’s a great summary of James so far. And how should we respond? Once again, we are back at repentance. This really is the path. Walking humbly with your God requires repentance. If you want to be a better Christian, be a better repenter.

One of my all-time favorite bands is Mumford and Sons and I’m convinced the first song on their newest album is a song of repentance.

The chorus says:

Well, here’s my pride, and here’s my shame
Here’s a trophy that bears my name
Here’s all the mistakes I madе
For too long
Here’s the answеrs I never gave
Here’s the calls I should have made
Here’s the substance that I crave
All along

Take it all to God – the good and the bad, the trophies and the failures. I think that is very near the point in James 4.

He has taken the idea of humility and nailed it to two very practical examples: how we talk about one another and how we talk about tomorrow.

If I spend my week dissecting the hearts of other believers, assuming I see and know what only God can see and know, I am not walking in humility—I am trying to be the lawgiver and the judge.

If I spend my week mapping out my life as if God does not have veto power over my plans, I am not walking in humility—I am pretending to be king.

The good news is that the only true Lawgiver and Judge is also the One who is ‘able to save,’ and He has already come near to us in Christ. He invites us, not to sit on His throne, but to come to His cross in repentance and faith.

As a church, we exercise judgment together only under His authority, in His presence, and according to His Word—not as little gods, but as humbled servants.

May the Spirit help us this week to repent of our arrogance, to submit our plans to Him, and to learn to live each day saying, ‘If the Lord wills,’ not just with our lips, but from the heart.

As always, there will be a daily devotional posted on the church website later today. It’s five days to reflect on the sermon text and prayerfully apply it to our lives. Consider using it for your daily walk with Christ.