“For we all stumble in many ways,” James wrote (3:2).
Amen to that. Most Christians I know are painfully aware of the many ways we fall short. Some failures are obvious; others are tucked away in the corners of the heart where no one else sees. But we know. And God knows.
If you’ve spent any time in James 4, you’ve noticed he doesn’t exactly ease into things. He comes out swinging. He accuses his readers of wanting what they shouldn’t want, of fighting, arguing, and coveting what others have. Then he digs deeper and exposes the heart underneath it all: selfishness. And right when you think he might soften, he calls them adulterers: spiritually unfaithful, betrayers of the God who redeemed them.
James is not passing out smiley-face stickers here. That’s why the next words sound so sweet: “But he gives more grace.” Therefore it says, “God opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble” (James 4:6).
Read that again. Let it sink in. “He gives more grace.”
Not “He gave grace,” as if it were a one-time deposit. Not “He might give grace,” if we check the right boxes. He gives—present tense, ongoing, inexhaustible. And he gives more. More than our failures, our weaknesses, our stubbornness, the mess we made yesterday or the one we’ll make tomorrow.
We stumble in many ways—he gives more grace. We fall short every day—he gives more grace. We fall, get up, and fall again, and he gives more grace. We repeat sins we swore we were done with, but he gives more grace.
Paul said it like this: “Where sin increased, grace abounded all the more” (Romans 5:20). God never looks at your life and thinks, “That’s it. I’m out.” His grace doesn’t run thin, doesn’t need to be rationed, and doesn’t depend on our performance. The well never runs dry.
But James doesn’t let us float away on a cloud. The next line brings us back to what’s at stake: “God opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble.”
This is the razor’s edge that runs through the spiritual life. The one thing that shuts the door on grace is pride. Pride says, “I’ve got this.” Pride believes we don’t really need God. Pride polishes our image while ignoring the rot in our hearts. Pride trusts our goodness instead of God’s mercy, our strength instead of God’s power. Pride is the spiritual equivalent of stiff-arming the Father.
Humility, on the other hand, is simply seeing ourselves accurately: weak but loved, broken but redeemed, sinful but pursued. Humility opens our hands so God can fill them. Pride keeps our fists clenched.
So James’s little verse carries two massive truths. A promise big enough to lift the heaviest heart: God pours out more grace than you could ever need. And a warning serious enough to stop us in our tracks: God himself stands against the proud.
One is the greatest comfort in the world. The other is one of the most terrifying sentences we’ll ever read. —Chuck
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