Introduction

Do you have an appreciation for investing your time in something that brings results? I think we all do. If you do, you're going to love real faith for daily life. Because as we study James, we're going to find real, practical wisdom for everyday, regular life. And what's not to love about that? Go ahead and open your Bibles to James, the first chapter. You can open up your study guides to page four. There's some space there for you to make notes as we go through this. And while you do that, I want to show you this little bag that I picked up this summer that says, count it all joy on it. Which is a cute little bag, great little Bible phrase. But we've become so accustomed to Bible phrasing because of the merchandising we have. That wasn't a thing 100 years ago. But now we have bookmarks and Bible covers and bags and all this sort of thing. And so we're accustomed to Bible phrases. And I wonder sometimes if we know the context of them, if we know what comes before, if we know what comes after. So while we read the first four verses in James this morning, we're going to listen for what comes after count it all joy, okay? Are you ready? James 1 verse 1.

And so fathers, we read those verses. We just bow our hearts to you. And Lord, we ask that you would equip us for this entire study through the whole book. Equip us this morning, Lord, as we sort of get an overview of what we're approaching. And Lord, we ask that you would make our time useful. As we study on our own throughout the weeks, as we come together and gather, as we share our insights, as we learn from one another. Lord, we just pray that you would be in the mix, in Jesus' name, amen. Well, whether your Bible used the word steadfastness or whether it used the word perseverance, the main point is that for a Christian, the pressures of our life, let's say the trials of our life, are the things that are used by God to bring us into maturity. They are useful, because who wants to be immature? None of us wants to go back to middle school, right? We wanna be grown up, we wanna be mature, we wanna be sophisticated. And even in spiritual things, we want to be spiritually mature, and that's the theme of this letter. So we're gonna unpack these four verses this morning to sort of whet your appetite for the study and to help us have an overview of the book of the Bible that we are about to study, which is the book of James. One of the first questions we always ask is, who wrote the book? Fortunately, it's the very first word that we read, James, which is a familiar Bible name, right? Peter, James, and John, that's all familiar to us. We studied 1st and 2nd Peter, we studied 1st, 2nd, and 3rd John. So now we should study James to make it all tidy, but the problem is this James isn't that James, all right? That James was the brother of John, and for one thing he was killed by Herod in Acts chapter 12. So James in our New Testament was not written by the James of Peter, James, and John, so who was it written by? Well, most scholars agree it was written by James, the half-brother of Jesus. And that gives us something to think about, because half-brother means sibling. Well, what do you know about the dynamics of siblings? I know that you know a lot because there are many, many children downstairs registered for childcare. And you in this room know all about the dynamics of siblings. And so I wanna talk about that for just a little bit. What did James think of his older brother, Jesus? While they were growing up, we don't know anything about, but during the public ministry, we certainly do know some things about. So I wanna share with you some of the things that we know from Scripture. The first thing we find out is from Mark chapter 3. This is after Jesus had selected his 12 apostles. They were ministering together. Things were busy. A lot of people were coming for healing. And it says they were so busy they didn't even have time to eat. And when his family heard it, I'll put it on the screen, Mark 3.21, they went out to seize him, saying he's out of his mind. So that's one thing that's how James felt about his brother. Mark chapter 6, now Jesus comes to his hometown. And where they didn't think he was all that awesome because it says he couldn't do very many miracles because of their unbelief. And we find here that they said, they were saying things like, is this not the carpenter, the son of Mary, the brother of James, Judas and Simon, and are not his sisters here with him? And look at the words, and they took offense at him. Okay, one more from John chapter 7, and this is after Jesus had been spending time with his brothers. And his brothers were sort of saying, you ought to go out into Judea and do more things out in public. Nobody does what they do in secret. You need to show yourself to the world and look at what his brothers or what John said about what his brothers thought, for not even his brothers believed in him. Okay, so that gives us a little bit of an insight and understanding about what the sibling dynamics were like. Went out to seize him, said he was out of his mind, took offense at him, didn't believe in him. So it's clear before the resurrection that James was not a member of the Jesus fan club. But here's the thing, God had chosen James. God had chosen James to come to believe in the Messiah. God had chosen James to have a great work to do in the kingdom. And so we come to something that I remember, Paul and I, we had a handwritten sign in our living room in Seattle. Three words, Jesus changes people. Jesus changes people. And James was changed after the resurrection. We don't have a record of James's conversion anywhere in scripture like we do Paul's conversion. But Paul gave us insight that is very interesting in 1 Corinthians chapter 15, Paul wrote this to the Corinthians. He said, I was talking about Jesus being raised on the third day and then he appeared to Cephas, then to the 12, then to more than 500 brothers at one time. Listen to these words, then he appeared to James and then to all the apostles. The kindness of God, Jesus went out of his way to single out his brother and to appear to him. And that had to have changed everything for him to have met the resurrected Lord, which was his brother. And he flipped just like Paul the Apostle made that flip on the Damascus Road. James became a believer in what God was doing through Jesus. Do you wonder what his thoughts were like in that moment? He must have thought, it's all true, it's all true. I think a lot of people feel that way when they are atheist or agnostic and they come to the point then of meeting Jesus. And they're like, it's all true. Jesus, God did send his son to be the Messiah. He picked this time, this place, my family. That's just the way it is. So anyway, James was definitely given a gift. But when he signed this letter here at the beginning, he didn't boast about that. So I'm an elite member of the Jesus Club now. I'm probably vice president, sibling and all. He just simply, look at James, a servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ, humble and simple. And that is a key to a changed life for sure. And in his endeavor to be a servant of God, James then became sort of the, he became the pastor of the church in Jerusalem of other people like him who were first Jews and then had come to believe that Jesus was indeed the Messiah. So they became followers of Jesus, followers of the Christ, the Messiah. They became Christians, and James was the pastor. You could sort of say he was Jerusalem's pastor in a way. And so that is how James ended up serving the Lord in his life. Who was this book written to? We see in verse two that it was written to the 12 tribes in the dispersion. The word dispersion means to disperse, to distribute people or things among a certain place or area. And you might remember when we studied the book of Acts, remember the stoning of Stephen? It's around Acts chapter seven. And when we open up to Acts chapter eight, it starts by saying this. There arose on that day a great persecution against the church in Jerusalem. They were all scattered. dispersed. This is the beginning of the dispersion throughout the regions of Judea and Samaria except the Apostles. So the book was written, we asked the question when was this written? It was written sometime after this dispersion happened, sometime after the stoning of Stephen. Of course there wasn't a date attached to it and so scholars will tell you well between 47 and 54 AD you won't remember those dates, I don't remember dates, but what you might remember is that most people will say James was the very first New Testament book written. Before the Gospels, James wrote this letter first. It is the first of our New Testament books. Well what was the purpose that it was written for? We read that already this morning in verse 4, that you may be perfect and complete lacking nothing. Maturity. Maturity is the purpose that this was written for. James used the word perfect in this letter several times and in the context of this letter, perfect doesn't mean without fault or sinless or whatever, it means complete, it means mature, all grown-up, perfect. These Jewish Christians that had left Jerusalem, they were now going through really hard stuff, a lot of trials, a lot of temptations to sin and there seemed, I think to James, to be a failure on their part to live out what they claimed to believe and these failures had a common cause. It was spiritual immaturity and I think that our failures to match what we say we believe and what we actually believe have a similar cause. It is a lack of maturity in our faith that causes us to not match up and this book is going to be a lot about matching up what you say you believe and what you do and say. So the basic theme I think could be described maturity in the Christian life. So this book can give a brand new Christian, someone who has just gotten saved, real instructions for how to live out their life in the real world. What does it look like now to be a Christian out in the real world? And it can give saints who have been saved for a long time an idea of what real faith looks like. It can remind us about the things that we do and say, where we go, what we use, and how we have the things, how we use the things that we have and lead lives pleasing to God. Now I want to get back to this theme of maturity in just a minute but I want to take just a little rabbit trail first and I want to talk about the style of writing because that's an important foundation when we start a new book of the Bible. We should say what is the style of writing going on here because they're all different. This spring we did Exodus. Exodus was a historical narrative. It told us historically about the movements from the children of Abraham from Egypt to Mount Sinai. That's what we studied and there was a lot of things like, and the next day they did this and that sort of thing. Well this book is very, very different. This New Testament book is, I think you could describe it, half lecture half letter. There's some definite instruction but it comes with that underlying tone of, I'm sending you a letter because I care about you, sort of a thing. There are 108 verses with 54 calls to obedience, clearly stating this is the way, walk in it. Okay and the style really reflects some things that we know about the Bible already. James's style has some very similar elements to the book of Proverbs and to the Sermon on the Mount and I want to share those things with you because I want you to enjoy it when you get to those parts. Now the book of Proverbs has sentences that are short, they are simple, they're to the point, but they are laced with metaphors and with analogies and with imagery from the world around us. James will do the same thing, which I love because who doesn't love an analogy? It helps us understand what it is that they're talking about. So I'll show you one example that we're going to get to when we get to James chapter 3 verse 4. He'll, talking about our words and how we use our words, this is what it says, take ships as an example. Although they are large and they're driven by strong winds, they're steered by a very small rudder wherever the pilot wants to go. Likewise, the tongue is a small part of the body but it makes great boasts. All right, do you see how simple that is to understand because he uses this kind of illustration for us and I love it. We're also going to find a lot of similarity to the Sermon on the Mount. We've studied this together before. James, obviously, now think about this, think about this. James followed Jesus around but he wasn't a follower of Jesus. James, because why did they, you know, say we need to seize him, he's out of his mind. So he followed him around without being a follower. He listened to what Jesus was saying. So think about some of the times that Jesus was saying, for example, on the Sermon on the Mount that Matthew recorded for us and he was saying things. James was not yet a believer but yet those things were getting buried into his heart, waiting for the time that the Holy Spirit would invade him and would not only redeem him and save him but then inspire him to write this letter and then some of those things that he heard Jesus say would come bubbling out. So I want to give you an example of this. When we get to James chapter 5, he says, do not swear either by heaven or by earth or by any other oath but let your yes be yes and your no be no. What does that remind you of? Does that not sound almost identical to the Sermon on the Mount, to what Matthew later wrote in the Sermon on the Mount? In fact, there are so many of these links to the Sermon on the Mount in the book of James that I decided in the study guide to make these little charts that you'll come to and it will draw your attention to the agreement in Scripture. It will draw your attention back to the Sermon on the Mount and give you a chance to say, look what's written here. Let's connect the dots with what we see in the Sermon on the Mount. I always appreciate that opportunity to connect the dots in Scripture because we need to know that the Bible repeats itself in themes over and over and over again. So each of those will start with the phrase real faith and then it will cover the topic. For example, in this one, real faith simply speaks the truth. We don't have to be dramatic. We don't have to put overemphasis. We don't have to, you know, put an oath when we say things. Real faith is just yes and no and it speaks the truth. All right, now before we get to chapters 2 through 5 where we're going to start having all of those bullet point calls to obedience that remind us of the Psalms and the Proverbs, before we get there, what you're going to be studying in this week and the next week is a foundation that James is laying in chapter 1, okay? And that's why it is like a good lecture because he sets down a good foundation for us. So I want to get back to the subject of maturity here as we do this and in your study guide on page 5, it says main themes or key words expressed in chapter 1. And so there's some fill-in-the-blanks there that you can write keywords, but I want to tell you what we're going to do. So I'll use an illustration. I'll use an analogy. If you have a project that you want to get done, you have a starting place and you have a finishing place, right? You start somewhere and when the project is finished, you can stand back and say, that is complete. In the words of James, that is mature, that is all done. Here's my illustration. I drive a late model car. It's a Toyota Camry. It has lots and lots of years and miles on it and so things begin to break. And the other day in the passenger door where you open it up, the little plastic thing just cracked and so now the mechanism wasn't working. It wasn't doing what it was supposed to do to unlatch the car. So there you are trapped in the passenger seat and so that needed to be fixed. Now there's some there was some good and bad things that happened over the course of this time. For one thing, if Paul was driving and I was in the passenger seat, I was trapped and so he would shut off the car, open up his car door, walk around the car, open up my car door and I would step out like a princess and then he would close my door. We did this several times and it made him look really, really good and it was awesome until the day that for some reason, I don't know why, I was driving and he was in the passenger seat and it had not yet occurred to me that I could just roll down his window and he could, you know, reach out and open his car. So I got out and I walked around and it was that day that we said, we need to fix this. This is no good. Okay, so in that project, what was the goal? The goal was usefulness again. The goal was for the car to open the car door to open like the manufacturer intended it to happen. What was the starting place? The starting place was to order a new part. Obviously, the part was broken, we needed a new one. What moved us toward the goal? Me having to walk around and open the car door for my husband. That was a trial in my life. And what did we need along the way? We needed wisdom, we needed YouTube instructions. Because to fix it, you have to take off the door panel and all of that. But God bless YouTube, you can figure out how to fix anything these days. It is fabulous. I hope it's not putting mechanics out of business. I don't think so. But anyway, he did get paid for this project. Because as that door panel came off, out came a quarter and a penny. That somehow had, so there was his tip for doing that. Okay, so now let's get to the point. That is my illustration, just like James does. Now, let's talk about our spiritual lives, okay? What is the goal? The verse I gave you there was verse 12, to receive the crown of life. And key words that we're going to be looking for are these words, perfect, complete, mature, okay? That is our goal. That is the goal of this project, if you will, of our spiritual lives. What is our starting place? Just like we needed to order a part for my car. The starting place for our spiritual lives, it might escape us if we don't pay attention. So look at these two verses, 18, he brought us forth by the word of truth. And verse 21, receive the implanted word, which is able to save your souls. And so the key words that we look for here are word of truth and implanted word. Now, it's very, very important that we draw attention to this, even as we're beginning the study. Because this is the only place in James that we have a reference to being born again. And it is so important that we understand this book is written to Christians. It is written to people who already have the spirit of God, to people who already believe in Jesus. When you have a book with 54 calls to obedience, you need to know that that is speaking to those who are, have already surrendered their hearts, ask for forgiveness from the Lord. And then we obey. We do not work at obeying to catch God's attention so that he will like us, that would be backwards. And so it's very important that we get it the right way. What moves us toward the goal of maturity? What is the catalyst? Well, we read it this morning in verse three, the testing of your faith produces steadfastness. And these key words, trials, testing, temptation, are the things that God tells us move us along in our spiritual life. Wouldn't we prefer if it was other things that moved us along? But look at my car door. It wasn't until it got to be like, this is a problem that you're motivated to do something. And so James reminds us, tells us, trials, testing, temptation is what moves us toward the goal of maturity. And what do we need along the way? In verse five, he says, if any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask God. And a key word in this book is wisdom. We will run into that many times. What is the key to success? In verse six, he tells him, let him ask in faith with no doubting. And so the key is faith. It is a key word and is definitely a key to our spiritual lives. The Bible tells us, without faith, it is impossible to please God. This is a book about pleasing God. Without faith, it is impossible to please God. And so I'm glad that that is right there, right before the very last question that we're asking, what identifies a life that is pleasing to God? James tells us in verse 22 of this outline foundation, be doers of the word and not hearers only. And so the keys are doers and works, okay? The works that God has given us to do are our responsibility and our privilege before the Lord. Let's review what that looked like in James's life. God had planned ahead of time for him to be Jerusalem's pastor, for him to be staying in Jerusalem. He was not scattered, he had a work to do. And the same thing is true for every single one of us in this room. Even before you came to Christ, God had works planned in advance for you to do. And so it is important that we purpose our life and we plan to do those things. All right, I wanna go through just a few minutes here talking about how to study over the next seven weeks here. You all have your study guide. This is a five-day-a-week study, so each week is broken into five parts. And when you open your book, the first thing that it's gonna say on week one is for you to read the week's passage. So all week long, the passage that you're gonna read is going to be James 1, 1 through 15. Every day, you'll read those verses over and over again. And then the next thing it tells you is to write a certain amount of verses. I believe for day one, it will be write verses one through four. Write them in your journal. So I wanna tell you what that means. When we do these short-ish New Testament books, I like to take this approach where grab yourself a 19-cent grocery store notebook or a $50 leather journal. I don't care what you use, but get something that you can write in and begin to write out the verses that it says each day. Now listen, we have seven weeks to write out 108 verses. We can do that. We can do it, right? And so, but what I find is it's such a simple way of slowing down long enough to really read and process each word. So it's a very simple strategy for learning the word of God. And then you'll come out with the book of James in your own handwriting. Now, after you've done that, there will be questions in your study guide. You'll turn to the study guide, and you'll go through the questions. Some of the questions are comprehension questions. It just simply asks you, what does it say? It's like a quiz in a way, okay? It checks how much you understood what you did, what you read. It might ask you to paraphrase something. It might ask you to write a definition. But it's just working on our comprehension. Some of the questions are interpretation questions. And we ask the question, what does it mean? Comprehension is, what does it say? And interpretation is, what does it mean? And in these sorts of questions, we might connect biblical dots, because we always want to let the Bible interpret the Bible. And so we might look back to, well, there's gonna come a time when you'll look back to the Proverbs a lot, because there'll be seven or eight verses pointing you back in that direction. And then some of the questions are application questions, where we ask, what does it mean to me? Particularly, the last page of every week's study has questions for thought and discussion. Many of those questions you'll use in your small groups. But we ask ourselves the question, what does this mean to me? How should this scripture change me right now? How should I be changed from reading this, ingesting this, absorbing it? What adjustments do I need to make in my thoughts and attitudes to match the scripture, rather than justifications of my thoughts and attitudes, and push the scripture aside? We want to make adjustments rather than justifications. And that's not easy. I'm probably the queen of justification. I'm doing this because of that. But we want to eliminate that when we ask these questions, what does it mean to me? And look into the word, well, James will tell us that, about like a man looking into a mirror. And so just buckle up, because there will probably be adjustments that I will need to make and every one of you will need to make as we go through this. But it's good for us. It keeps us out of junior high. It helps us grow up. It helps us mature. It helps us be sophisticated Christians. Father, I just pray for our time in this study. And I pray, Lord God, that you would be the one, through your spirit, Lord, to be the voice behind the words. And to help us, Lord, in that very vein that I just talked about. Help us to make adjustments in the things that we do and say and how we live our lives to be pleasing to you. Rather than holding on to the things and justifying why it is that we do and say the things that we do. So Lord, we invite your presence with us as we're studying at home and as we come together. and we thank you that we're able to right now just go through this book and we pray that you would help us to glean what we need to in Jesus name amen