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“Come near to God and he will come near to you.” (James 4.8)
Recently we lost a beloved member of our church community in Herb Tischer. Some of us may not have known Herb, but you should know he spent a good deal of his life serving a number of people groups through education and Bible translation. Among other spots, he and LaVerne lived in West Africa, and later in Qatar in the Middle East. I first met LaVerne in my grade eight math class, as she and Herb had just returned from Qatar, and she took a teaching job. And, I can assure you, she had her work cut out for her with me. All those years of arduous missionary service were preparing her for that season of trying to teach me algebra.
I didn’t meet Herb until many years later when he and LaVerne joined us here at Living Waters, and by that time I was pastoring. It was a gift to get to know the other half of the power couple, even as Herb’s health was declining. I remember visiting Herb a few years ago and hearing some of his experiences overseas. One story has always stuck with me. When the Tischers first moved to Qatar, Herb’s job fell through, which was problematic in a somewhat closed Muslim country. I remember asking Herb, “Well, what did you do?”, to which he responded, “I prayed”. “Well, yes, of course”, I replied, “but what did you do?” Again, he said, “I prayed.” Worried he wasn’t quite understanding me, I repeated the question at third time, “Yes, Herb, but then what did you do?”. “I prayed”, he said one last time. And it was then I realized that it wasn’t Herb who was missing the point of our conversation, but me. I was sitting with someone who had seen all kinds of adversity and had learned that prayer was best seen not his last resort but his first. I was sitting with someone who had aimed at a life of true dependence and submission. “I prayed. I just prayed.”
Definitions of Prayer
Now, even as I share that story, you might still be thinking, well he must have done something! And though it’s perfectly reasonable to combine prayer with other action, our reaction of bewilderment to an attitude like Herb’s may betray some of our beliefs about prayer. One of the admissions I’ve had to make over the years is that, at times, I trust prayer less than other modes of operating. What, on earth, can prayer offer me in our fast-paced, immediacy-obsessed society? And what are the guarantees that prayer will even deliver? At least we can track the items we order, or ensure our online registrations go through. How reliable is prayer, anyway? In fact, it’s possible that the more we’ve learned to over-curate and chase convenience, the very nature of prayer has become increasingly alien to us today. Prayer is an activity in which we usually slow down, often become quiet, and place our focus on God. Slowing down, getting quiet, focusing on someone other than ourselves – those things may not easily align with many of our social fixations, even if deep down we long for them.
For many people today prayer may not get much thought. Along with this, in wider Christian tradition prayer is also often thought of first as a discipline, something we had better do and work at. Other times prayer is thought of first as devotion, maybe how we show God we’re truly invested. And though neither of these approaches are wrong, we should ask if they’re the best “first position” when it comes to thinking about prayer. Some prayer, no doubt, does take discipline, and prayer is absolutely an indicator of devotion. But prayer is even more so the activity which takes us back to that reality that many have forgotten today. The ultimate reality of dependence on God. As we see all through Scripture, we are, after all, totally dependent creatures, set in God’s world. So prayer, before it’s discipline or devotion, is dependence. Dependency is a theme of prayer and worship which runs through the entire Bible, from Abraham to Paul. We even see a kind of dependency in Jesus’ life of prayer. Dependency may have been something we have forgotten in our face-paced, convenance obsessed society, at least until we face some real hardship, something an Amazon van can’t deliver to our doorstep. So dependence is a foundational posture in prayer.
I think there’s yet another layer to uncover, however, a deeper place which produces a life of prayerful dependence. We can be dependent on a good deal of things. But we become truly reliant on something, we’re truly transformed and shaped by it when our dependency comes from a place of submission.
Prayer as Submission
Let’s put our cards on the table. We probably like the word dependence more than the word submission. It’s great to have a friend on which to depend, who presents themselves in times of need, or even daily. But what if our relationship to that friend shifted where our dependency came under a dynamic of submission? We might feel a little differently. Dependency is fairly palatable idea in our society, where we depend on nutritional supplements, or exercise, or other healthy rhythms. We might even feel comfortable saying we “need” this or that. But if we were told we must submit to an activity or ritual or person, we may get a bit suspicious. We’re told that complete curation of our lives is the goal, a sense of extreme individuality (even if much of that “individuality” is spoon fed us by various commercial trends), so when we’re asked to submit our ourselves, our actions, our thoughts, our will, to something other than our perceived own, we might find that harder to swallow. There’s something about submission, more than dependence, which evokes a giving over of not only our wants or needs, but a giving over of ourselves.
James 4
This takes us to where we began in James 4. At the beginning of our time we read, “Come near to God and he will come near to you.”, and I chose that saying today intentionally because it’s a pithy little verse which has often been cited to encourage people to pray. If you want to know God, take a step and he’ll take a step toward you. But out of its setting this interpretation falls apart pretty quickly. Does God show interest in me, only once I’ve shown interest in him? What about when we’ve tried to get close to God and he feels a million miles away or doesn’t appear to answer our prayers. Out of context this verse falls apart on us, and this is because we’ve yanked out of its wider setting in the book of James. There’s more going on around these words than we might expect. Let’s read some of the setting of those words in a chuck of James 4 now:
1 What causes fights and quarrels among you? Don’t they come from your desires that battle within you? 2 You desire but do not have, so you kill. You covet but you cannot get what you want, so you quarrel and fight. You do not have because you do not ask God. 3 When you ask, you do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives, that you may spend what you get on your pleasures. 4 You adulterous people, don’t you know that friendship with the world means enmity against God? Therefore, anyone who chooses to be a friend of the world becomes an enemy of God. 5 Or do you think Scripture says without reason that he jealously longs for the spirit he has caused to dwell in us? 6 But he gives us more grace. That is why Scripture says:
“God opposes the proud
but shows favor to the humble.”
7 Submit yourselves, then, to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you. 8 Come near to God and he will come near to you. Wash your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded…
The book of James is known for its straight talk, and the writer isn’t pulling any punches in this stretch of the letter as there’s need to address some real community issues. There’s infighting, bad motives, and the audience is described as “adulterous people”. It’s in this stretch of James we hear, “draw near to God and he will draw near to you”. But as we’ve heard this is not a cuddly little verse about God feeling close if you do a little Bible reading and prayer each day. Nor is it an equation, that God’s action and proximity will be more evident if we try a little harder. Instead, we hear these words in context of submission: “Submit yourselves to God…”, which is what James means by “drawing close to God”. It’s telling how James 4.8 gets very readily memorized and quoted, and James 4.7 less so.
What can be drawn from passages like James 4, and a great many other passages in the Bible, is that when people cease submitting to God, things go sideways. A host of other chaotic agents, chiefly our own sinful desires, drive us away from God, and the results are poisonous. Seeing the poison spreading, James calls his listeners to submit, not to themselves, but to God. This is how we should hear that pithy little verse. Drawing near to God is first about submission, and this translates to how we pray. This, I think, is one of the very points which can stand in our way as Christians living now, and that earlier point about our automatic reaction against the very idea of submission.
Now it’s important to stress here that submission is often heard with a negative tone. In fact many people feel they have only lived in a kind of negative submission to someone or something. A submission to an abusive parent or partner, or a submission to an addiction. We buck at the very idea of submission, because surely submission must be all bad, and following our sense of self or feelings is what we are told will bring us freedom. We may be skeptical about authority altogether. So the very idea that submission is necessary to being Christian, and to prayer as an act of submission at all, can be something of a hurdle. But the Scriptures challenge those thoughts. First of all, what if submission itself wasn’t automatically negative? Well, if the act of submission itself wasn’t wrong or automatically harmful to us, surely our experience of submission would depend on the thing or person to which we were submitting. What’s made clear in James is that in order to be the people of God, we must actually submit to God. And in this submission we find the life of God, rather than a life of evil.
It can get lost in the many other messages of the season, but recently this is what we were sharing in song and ritual during Christmas: good news of great joy for all people. Again, this is less a greeting card message, but a heavenly announcement over the world. Jesus’ entire life, from infancy to death, was defined by people either submitting to him and his message or trying to do away with him completely. Submission was also what Jesus’ modeled to his disciples, as we’ll see again in our upcoming stretch in Luke’s gospel. Jesus will submit to the one he calls Father, and for the love of the world submit himself to death on a cross.Following Jesus, then, is submission to him as Lord, and prayer is the action of coming back to that reality again and again, day after day. This is one of the very early themes of the prayer Jesus’ teaches his disciples when they asked him how to pray: Father in heaven, holy is your name, your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. What is that statement if not an expression of submission? There’s no negotiation in that statement, no reservation. It’s all submission, and from that tone of submission we then find theme of dependency and direction.
And this submission, for those who call themselves Christians, is our submission is to God as seen in Jesus. And this is why it’s vital to understand to whom we are praying. Because the picture of Jesus in Scripture is not of one who has come to Lord his power over us, or take from us for his own gain. We submit to the Great Servant, the embodiment of the generosity of God. Our experience of submission, then, to Jesus, is not something negative, but life-giving. We’re not submitting to one who comes dealing out death, but life. And so the good news of the Christian message, as opposed to human philosophies or religions, is that not only that we must submit. In many teachings submission is necessary. The good news is all about to whom we are submitting. We’re not submitting to moralism or a set of rules or a religion. We’re submitting to Jesus, the Lord of Creation, who lived and died and lived again and who gives us life eternal. We are saying, in our submission to Jesus, that our lives are better off in his hands than our own. He has given us life to begin with, and in submitting to Jesus we are simply handing our lives back. Christian prayer, then, is the routine activity in which we are personally and collectively enthroning Jesus, and sitting under his authority and goodness. It’s saying, over and over, we have no king, nor Lord, other than Jesus. Prayer becomes fundamentally frustrating and confusing when we don’t first understand this.
Prayer is sitting down under Jesus and saying: this where I’m going to start today, resting under Jesus’ oversight and authority, over the world and over my life. Prayer as submission is a place where we’re handing over in trust so much of what we naturally grab onto. But what we hear in Scripture is that we’re most at rest, even most ourselves, when we submit ourselves to Jesus through the action of prayer. When a prayer becomes an act of submission, our primary personhood is found very quickly, and we become internally reordered.
Prayer as submission, your will be done prayer, is the decision, even for a moment, to quit trying to be God, and to submit to God as his creature. A prayer like that, is taking our right place in the world. This is where we can hear a bit of Jesus in James that, “God opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble”. That’s one of the things we learn in James, who sounds a lot like Jesus if we listen closely. James is pretty black and white. Why is his first audience dealing with such turmoil and fallout? They’re not submitted to God. But when we choose a life of submission to God, and pray with submission in mind through things like the Lord’s prayer even, we’re living in the reality of God’s place and reality of our place.
Prayer as submission is where we willingly dethrone ourselves, and enthrone Jesus, and from there turn to a life of dependence, devotion and discipline. And in doing that may end up a little like our Herb Tischer in Qatar. Who, when asked what he did in the tight spot, gave us all he had: “I just prayed.”
There’s no better prayer of submission, dependence, devotion than the Lord’s prayer, as give us by Jesus, as people who pray in Jesus’ name. So early on here in 2025, let’s close our time with that prayer. We may be praying this personally, or as a family today. And we’re praying these words collectively as church together at the beginning of a new year. Praying in Jesus’ words, in Jesus’ name, humbly submitted together.
Father in heaven, holy is your name,
your kingdom come,
your will be done,
on earth as it is in heaven.
Give us today our daily bread.
And forgive us our sins,
as we forgive those who sin against us.
And lead us not into temptation,
But deliver us from evil.
For yours is the kingdom, the power and the glory. Forever and ever. Amen.
Luke Knight 