Congregational Worship
Worthy Of Your Name
Welcome & Call to Worship
King Of My Heart
Prayer
He Will Hold Me Fast
James 4:1-6
At Redeemer, we want to be a church that is focused on the deepest parts of us: our hearts. We
want to be more concerned about our affections than our behavior because wrong living always
flows from wrong loving. The Apostle James will help us see if we have left our first love and begun
loving/ worshipping a counterfeit god to try to extract from it what only God can give. This text
will help us identify and repent from idolatry which is best understood as spiritual adultery!
1. The symptoms of wrong loving
-Symptom #1: loving pleasure
-Symptom #2: a demanding heart
-Symptom #3: coveting other people’s stuff
-Symptom #4: seeking to manipulate
2. The diagnosis of wrong loving: spiritual adultery
-The nature of physical adultery
-The nature of spiritual adultery
-The nature of the seductive mistress (the world)
-The nature of our jealous lover (God himself)
3. The cure for wrong loving: grace
-The nature of grace
-How grace becomes real in our experience
For Spiritual Conversation:
What aspect of this message did you find most convicting? Why? When we struggle with idolatry,
we look to counterfeit gods to give us what only God can. We treat someone or something as our
functional savior that gives our lives meaning, purpose, acceptance, a sense that we matter, etc.
Typically our struggles fall into one of these four areas that we might call “deep idols of the heart:”
the worship of power (success, influence, money), the worship of approval (affirmation, love,
relationships), the worship of comfort (privacy, lack of stress, freedom to do what I want), control
(self-discipline, certainty, keeping standards to know I’m okay).