James 1:2-18
One of my acquaintances...I told this woman that I was a pastor. She said, wow, that must be really hard. I wasn’t looking for any sympathy or pity and so I said something like, I don’t think it is any harder than any of your jobs. She said, no, that’s not what I mean. I mean inspiring people
Jokingly I said, yeah, I’ve given up on inspiring people. I'm just aiming for survival. Just keep our heads up and keep going, that will be enough.
She is right. It is incredibly hard to inspire people. The world seems so crazy and upside down. We feel like there is trouble everywhere.
And it really is. In fact, we really connect with the people to whom James wrote.
In verse 1, we hear that this man James was writing to the “12 tribes scattered among the nations” (verse 1). By this point, the 12 tribes of Israel no longer exist. But he is writing to his people. The descendants of the 12 tribes.
They are going through some terrible things. They’ve been
Scattered – sounds like us after 18 months of pandemic; we’re not sure where to go or not to go anymore
Lacks wisdom – sounds like us making decisions in a difficult, shifting economy
Divide between the rich and the poor – growing inequality
We could go on and on because the list of troubles that these people are going through are no different than the troubles you and I experience.
But James wants us to look at a deeper level.
Whatever troubles you and I have gone through, they are really nothing compared to what is going on on a much deeper level.
A lot of our fundamental ways of looking at life as Americans have been tested. re is a clash, a collision of views that we’re experiencing.
This time of testing, that makes it feel like there is intense trouble.
You know what I’m talking about. You know what I’m saying. Even if you wouldn’t talk about it in exactly the same way....
You would say for example, that we’ve been told as Americans, “the customer is always right”. It’s my way. That we the people make the government and all the institutions.
Schools telling parents
We’ve got businesses telling employees who can work there and what they have to do to
I’m not taking a position on either side, but I’m saying that we feel this clash, this collision in our minds saying, I’ve been told my whole life that the customer is always right and what am I supposed to do about this.
“My body, my choice” has always been the position of a certain group of people or a certain party. But now, a different group completely has started saying the same thing.
“You can be anything you want to be.” But now with increasing polarization, especially on social media, all the sudden there are some things we can’t be. You can’t be too masculine. You can’t be too feminine. Some people even feel like they can’t be the person they were born as – their ethnicity, their gender.
You're feeling the testing, you’re feeling the clash, you’re feeling the collision. The basic belief, the basic idea of American life is to be true to myself. That’s the meaning of life. The meaning of life is to be true to myself.
When we think of getting tested, many of us think of feeling encouraged to do bad things. To be naughty. If we know the Bible stories, we might think of someone like Judas who was tempted to betray his friend for money. We might think about a guy who wants to steal someone else’s wife.
James wants to tell us that there can be many kinds of trials. “Consider it pure joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds” (verse 2) We’re going to come back to the joy part in a second.
What you are going through right now, all of these troubles are a huge test. It’s a huge test if you are the person you should be. Are you mature? Are you complete? Will you make it through?
And today he is going to give us the basic thing, the first thing to be mature. To be complete. To really, not in a superficial way, but in a deep way, be true to ourselves.
Development
What is that?
It’s not bad to get that our deepest convictions are getting challenged.
God would say, that’s a good thing. “may be mature and complete, not lacking anything” (verse 4) Because most of your beliefs about the world are wrong. They’re just plain wrong.
It’s easy to laugh at someone who says, “the customer is always right”. We all laugh at that and say, haha yeah right. And yet, if you get into any kind of a position in a business or an organization, you better not tell You realize, its much harder to have correct and true beliefs about life than we thought.
God says, look, most of everything you believe about the world is just plain wrong. Many people believe that the most important thing in life is to be a good person. Just be a good person and everything will be okay. If I'm a good person, then the gods or the universe or whoever is out there will bless me and take care of me and I’ll be accepted and approved. But that’s not true. That’s no more true than saying, “the meaning of my life is to be true to myself.”
“be true to myself” isn’t correct. The only thing that is true is to say we’re poor, wretched, and lost people. We’re more lost and broken and hurt and confused than we could possibly know or imagine. And yet at the same time, at the same time, we are forgiven and loved and accepted and welcomed in Jesus Christ.
That’s the gospel. The gospel is the first thing we need to get through this test. The gospel means that we are are lost and broken and sinful but we are also loved and forgiven in Jesus.
That’s the kind of belief that can stand up. That's the kind of belief that can put the world back right. God is showing you that here in all kinds of little ways in James.
It’s that belief. It’s that conviction that says, I’m forgiven and accepted only because of Jesus. And God wha
He says here. “consider it pure joy when you face trials” (verse 2) How can you have joy when you face trials? Who can do that?
If you believe that I’m a good person, so everything will be okay, what happens the first time your girlfriend breaks up with you, or you lose your first job, or you get cancer? If you believe you are a good person, how can you have joy when you experience those kinds of trials? What will you end up saying to yourself?
You'll say, I thought I was a good person. I thought I was doing the right thing. I shouldn’t have to suffer like this. This doesn’t seem fair. This doesn’t seem right.
But the gospel would say to you and me, Jesus has endured the very worst trial – he was separated from his father – so that he could be joined with us and you and I would never be separated from God.
We can say, yes, my girlfriend broke up with me because I am a messed up person and I probably did something and I betrayed her trust and I hurt her and I messed up the relationship. At the same time I know that my God has endured a test so much worse than this so that he would never leave me. Even if my girlfriend does leave me, my God never will.
Or if you or I get cancer, we can say, I realize that I have this cancer because I am a broken person and I’m falling apart and I’m supposed to be heading into the grave. But my God went through a far worse test, he suffered eternal death so that whatever death I die, it’s only temporary. Even if I die for a time, I won’t die forever. I will rise again.
This is what the gospel does for us. It lets us turn this whole messy world back around.
“Believers in humble circumstances ought to take pride in their high position. But the rich should take pride in their humiliation” (verse 9) Again, we say, how can I take pride in my poverty? If the meaning of life is to be true to myself and my lack of money keeps me from being true to myself, you’ll never have pride when you’re poor. But if you say, God made himself poor in Jesus so that I could be rich, you’ll say, yes, I realize I’m poor. But I’m also rich. Richer than I could imagine.
We could go on and on. Jesus says, you’re going through a time of testing, a time of trial. You feel like the world is turned upside down and is just a mess. Let me tell that the gospel is a thing that will turn the world back right.
What we’re feeling is like an hourglass. You ever watch an hourglass? Sand flows down and there is something mesmerizing about it. The cool thing is, you can just turn it over and it goes around again. Turn it over and it goes down again.
And what God says is, stop trying to turn the hourglass around. Stop trying to put it all back. Do you know what you could do with this hourglass?
God says, I can remake the hourglass. I can do it in a new way.
There is just one way to turn the hourglass around. Change the sand.
Can God do that? “Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of the heavenly lights.” (verse 17)
And you say, can God do that? Does God do that?
Example of this, I was told this week about a conversation a middle aged man, and a 70 year old man had.
He said he asked this man, hey how you doing? He said, I’m good. And then the younger guy said, what you don’t think this is crazy. The older guy said, you know what was crazy. The 60s were crazy.
The younger guy said, oh you mean the summer of love and VW's and the Beach Boys. Crazy like that. He said, no man, that's all stereotyped.
You don't understand the psychological trauma that the 60s were.
He said, you're dealing with racial tensions right now. You're worried about how technology is shaping people. You think politics is a mess right now.
He said, you've got to understand how sort of homogeneous and stable the world was after World War Two. There was this era where for the most part there was pretty shared cultural narratives. There were some people excluded from it, but for the most part it was pretty stable.
And then he said, we had the civil rights movement and he said, you think that you know you're traumatized because people are dying at the hands of the police?
He said I lived at a time were the leaders were assassinated. He said when Martin Luther King Junior was killed, you don't know what that did to the black community and then Malcolm X was killed and then Fred Hampton was executed. He said there was just this sense of racial trauma with the civil rights movement.
He said you think you've got political chaos, so people forget that JFK was incredibly controversial when he was elected. And then JFK was assassinated. And then they wanted his brother Bobby to run. And then Bobby was assassinated. And then Watergate happened and people would completely lost trust in the institution of government.
You think you're dealing with war. We have the Cold War, Vietnam, Vietnam War. We had the draft and draft burnings. Our aversion to violence was horrific.
You think your technology is good because you can do FaceTime calls he's like. We put a man on the moon. We put a man on the moon.
He said there was the rise of mass media, couldn't believe it and he says you you think you're struggling with LGBTQ realities? How do you make sense of sexual confusion and everything happening in our culture? He said you should have understand what the pill did which was sex without consequence.
It's like you don't understand how procreation was separated from sex and what that did in our larger culture you don't understand.
The Stonewall riots and how that came into for the most part, a stable understanding of the family and changed it is that there was so much confusion.
Then there's the hippies and the counterculture. It was just wild.
The middle aged man said, Ok.
And then he said this to me, he said. You know what came next?
I said no, this is the Jesus movement.
Out of all of the confusion, another movement of Jesus came.
And he said, here's the thing about the Jesus movement. The reason it happened is because every structure, every ideology, every vision of life was tested and broken and pushed to the max.
And here's what people found out. They all weren’t enough and a couple of burned out kids read the gospels, read about the Kingdom of Jesus, the way of Jesus, the community of Jesus.
They took it seriously, and that potent fruit that had been hiding under all these other structures came up again and it change the church in the United States. They made it to the cover of the Time magazine.
You think God can’t turn this right? Just you watch.
Action
Friends, this is what God calls you to and I too. And there is one way to get there.
“He chose to give us birth through the word of truth, that we might be a kind of firstfruits of all he created.” (verse 18)
We are on the very edge of a birth of a new movement, but it’s threatened. It’s not threatened by the pandemic, or vaccines, or racial issues, or the government. It’s threatened by us. We need a new birth.
Friends, there is no guarantee or church structures, or great leaders, or our futures. There is the victory of God through Jesus. I don’t know what life is going to look like in a day, a week, a month, or a year, but I know what that word of truth says. And it says if you take hold of his victory, you hold on to his win, you too can be a kind of a firstfruits.
Some of you are on the verge of compromise, you are ready to give in. You want to marry the times and be accepted and fit and conform.
Don’t do it. This is the time to come alive by the word of truth.
I want to encourage you. I want to call you to believe in the gospel. To build a community of love and carry this in our very hands.
What’s the future going to look like in Otsego and Plainwell. It’s going to be what we make it to be. So let’s pray that the Holy Spirit would come and fill us with faith, fill us with hope. Fill us with belief
Belief in the gospel. The gospel will get us past this test.