Jim Styles - Class 1: Learn from Our Trials

Automatically transcribed. Accuracy is good but not perfect, and words are sometimes wrong. Trust the audio over the text.

1. 0:00

   Well, good morning, everyone. Thanks very much for the invitation to come here to Lake Placid. When Ed was reminiscing his times at the Indiana Fraternals, Sue and I have had a lot of fun here at Lake Placid and other places over the years. I sort of remember Trafalgar and some of those other wild Indiana gatherings like Tippecanoe.

2. 0:20

   And there are all kinds of wild things that went on in the past as young people. So it's fun to be back here at Lake Placid again. And I hope the subject that we have right now to look at, the subject of the study of James, it's one of those subjects that if you go away from this weekend without some good exhortational value to take home with you, then I totally failed. You failed too, really, because the letter is so clear.

3. 0:41

   It's like the letter is just a series of exhortational points. And I talked to somebody last night where we're just looking at the fact that this letter could have been written last week, as far as we're concerned, because it's a very common letter. And the exhortational things that are in his are really, they're very common today.

4. 1:00

   So I think you'll find that a lot of the lessons that we run into are going to be very similar as we've seen before. It's also good to know that if something happens today, you see, if I lose my voice and get laryngitis and all that, it's nice to know that Ed's been a backup in the past.

5. 1:14

   But that's really good to know. Although, as he pointed out to me, he's already had his turn, and really, it should be Jerry's turn to take it over this time. I don't know what I would... Did I mess something up here? No, I didn't get it set up. Oh, all right. Well, we forgot to do one of those tests ahead of time.

6. 1:34

   I'm probably talking too low or something, and not loud enough. So if I talk too loud, though, I'll lose all my voice. I don't talk that much during the day. I teach six hours a day, so... And my kids are constantly up like Jerry was right there, and they're wandering around, and they're getting Kleenex, and they're doing stuff.

7. 1:51

   And it's so nice to have an audience that just basically sits down and listens. It's amazing. We just don't get that at school, do we? It just doesn't happen. Anyways, the study of James, I hope you'll find it. It's one I really like myself. I was a little worried that maybe somebody had spoken on James recently, but I guess they haven't.

8. 2:09

   And back in the old days, it used to be that James was used a lot. But I haven't looked at James a whole lot until just recently. And at the same time, I happen to be looking at Galatians, because we're doing something in Galatians as well. And surprised to find the connections between James and Galatians that we'll look at this morning as well.

9. 2:26

   But this is a great mix of good exhortational things with exposition. And hopefully, we'll all find some nice practical things that we can take home with us this weekend and apply those in our ecclesial life when we get back home. So as the letter starts out, when you go back and look at the background, it's James' letter to the scattered 12 tribes.

10. 2:46

    So we're going to find that what ended up happening in the community is that these tribes had been scattered out of Jerusalem. And when you go back and look at the history of what had gone on, you can see that back in Acts chapter 8, of course, that was the death of Stephen.

11. 2:59

    And this is such a classic microcosm of James' whole letter, if you just look at this little event right here. If we had been alive at the time when Stephen was killed, and we had been part of the community at that time, we would have gone home just depressed and upset and frustrated over having lost one of our great brethren, and over the fact that it looks like God was sending persecution upon the believers.

12. 3:22

    And we would have gotten so frustrated because we would have been looking at it from our perspective. And what James is going to try to do is raise everybody's level above all that and get out of the rut of the human perspective and look at it from the perspective of God and the angels.

13. 3:37

    And what they were trying to do with the death of Stephen was to force the believers out of Jerusalem and get them to take the good news of the gospel elsewhere. And when you look back at the event, it's easier to see. It's more difficult to see it as you're going through it, but James chapter 1 is all about this.

14. 3:54

    It's about believing that in our trials and in our troubles and the things that go on in our lives, that God is at work in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure. And that it's happening for our good, that we might one day share his holiness, and that the gospel will go to more people.

15. 4:12

    And you can see that. That was the result of the persecution in Acts chapter 8, that they were scattered throughout all the regions of Judea and Samaria, except the apostles. And then in Acts chapter 11, you find the same thing. And so a few years went by, and those who were scattered after the persecution that arose over Stephen's death, they traveled as far as Phoenicia and Cyprus and Antioch, preaching the word to no one but Jews only.

16. 4:35

    So at this point in time, the gospel is now leaving Jerusalem. It's going out into the world at this point. It's moved up into the Cyprus area, and it's moving further north, and the gospel is spreading. But again, they're going to Jews only. Now, the ironic thing about this, though, brothers and sisters, when you look back at history, is that the Jews who left because of the persecution were looked down on by the Jews who stayed in the land, because they sort of like, they got out when things were tough.

17. 5:02

    They left. They didn't stay, and they weren't committed. And so they left, and they traveled into other areas, and they migrated up to the north and over to other areas. And after a few years went by, they settled in in those areas. They got homes. They had jobs. They were well-established. And they became the rich, you see.

18. 5:19

    They were the established group that had gone out. And then later, when James has to write this letter, because of the persecution that was arising later on, what happened was, as more Jews left the area, and as Jews were leaving Jerusalem later on and were being persecuted in other areas, it was those people that were well-established in the Ecclesias then, who were the rich at times, and the others that were coming up into the area had no establishment.

19. 5:45

    They didn't have any basis, no economic basis, and they came, and they were poor, and now they were being forced into an area where they were going to be the ones on the low end of the totem pole, and it ended up creating a lot of trouble in the Ecclesias at that time.

20. 5:59

    So James has to write his letter to try to convince these people that you've got to learn to get along, that each group has to appreciate what the other has to offer. And those are the kind of practical lessons that we want to take home today, this weekend at least, from this letter of James.

21. 6:14

    A lot of good practical things. So as the gospel expanded, you can see that up there on the green lines, you've got the people that were present on the day of Pentecost, and you can see that out of Jerusalem they spread out into all those different regions as God was trying to take the gospel out of Jerusalem.

22. 6:29

    The word of the Lord was really going forth from Jerusalem. And then we have Stephen's persecution in the orange, and then the Apostle Paul up there in the red, and you can see that the gospel was spreading out. That was God's plan. Now, maybe the people at the time didn't understand it, but that was the plan of God.

23. 6:45

    And James simply writes his letter to try to help people understand that we've got to learn to cooperate with what God's doing in our life. We've got to quit fighting it. We have to quit fighting it, and just cooperate and believe and trust that God knows what he's doing. And it's the same issues back then that we face today.

24. 7:01

    It's no different in our lives today. We've got the same basic problems. So, which James was he? When you go back and look over the history of the different Jameses that existed, if we're going to look at his letter, we might as well take a shot at who he was. And I admit there's no agreement in our community on this, because he could have been the son of Zebedee, who was the brother of John.

25. 7:20

    He was the one that was killed in Acts chapter 12. He could have also been the son of Alphaeus, who may have been the brother of Matthew. And you go back and look at that. It's a possibility. He could have been the son of Cleopas and Mary. He's the one who's called James the Little.

26. 7:32

    He was the brother of Joseph. And it's possible even that that may be the same James as the son of Alphaeus for number two up there. But I really think that what happens with James is that he was probably James the half-brother of Jesus. And you look in our community, at least most of our brethren have settled on this as well, because there's enough evidence there from the Greek scholars that if you go and you look at the word parallels in Acts chapter 15 and the Jerusalem conference letter and the way James handled Acts chapter 15, a lot of the phrases in the Greek, evidently, are similar phrases as to what he uses in this letter.

27. 8:10

    So the people that do the word studies have been convinced that this is the same James. He also definitely had the respect of the ecclesia in Acts chapter 15, because you could see he was running the meeting. And here it was like, this was the most devastating thing that had happened in the community at that time.

28. 8:25

    And here they're having this big conference there in Jerusalem in Acts chapter 15. And of all people, who's the one who stands up and settles everybody and resolves the issue after people like Peter and Paul and all these different people that had their say? It's James. James is the one who brings everything together and had the respect of the people and was able to come up with a compromise solution at that time.

29. 8:47

    And when you look at some of the word connections in this letter, you're going to be amazed that if you just look for echoes as we're going through it today and tomorrow, you'll see a lot of Bible echoes with words that are in the Gospels, which are probably because he grew up with Jesus.

30. 9:01

    And so he got used to hearing the terms that Jesus was using around the house and in their family. And then he incorporated those into his letter as well. And he would have been challenged by Jesus himself. So our suggestion is that it's probably the same James that shows up in the family of Jesus as his half-brother, the reference there in Matthew 13, that he's the one who was the brother of Jesus with Joseph and Simon and Judas.

31. 9:25

    Now, James, when you look back at his own personal experience, then if that's the case, he would have grown up with Jesus as a child, growing up with him as his older brother. And he would have then been able to reflect upon a lot of these teachings of Jesus. And many of the phrases that he uses, you'll see they're very similar to what you find like in the Sermon on the Mount when Jesus went out preaching to the people.

32. 9:46

    You find that this James, you'll see in this letter, he's well-versed in the Law and the Prophets. He knows his Bible really well. You'll find that he challenges us to be a doer of the Word, very similar to what Jesus did when he went out preaching the Gospel, to become a doer, not just a hearer, because Jesus had been frustrated over watching the Pharisaical and the Sadducee approach to the Bible, that you could have a religion that has no power to change your life.

33. 10:12

    And he would have watched Jesus challenge these people over the years, and James himself would have probably talked with him at home. And James comes with this background already understanding the need to become a doer and not just a hearer only. And of course, he had the firsthand experience of the prejudice against Jesus.

34. 10:30

    He saw how the religious leaders of his time treated somebody who was trying to live the truth and the prejudice that they had against him because he was from the wrong city or the wrong family or he didn't come up the right way and all these reasons that they had. And they didn't really value him for what he had to offer at all.

35. 10:49

    And James saw that in the ecclesia, in the first century ecclesia, and he warned us against prejudice that's going to come up in this letter a lot. And of course, he was also personally called by Jesus after the resurrection. So now James definitely was somebody that Jesus had good intentions of using and found as a very useful tool in the first century ecclesia.

36. 11:10

    So that's at least a suggestion as some of the background to this man that writes this letter. But I don't want to spend a lot of time on that this weekend. If you like the history and you want to get into that, you can have a look at it in our writings. There's a lot of stuff written on the background of James.

37. 11:24

    But when he does introduce himself, you'll notice in the very first verse of this book that he writes or in the letter that he writes, you'll notice how he doesn't play on any of those things that he could have. He doesn't say, James, the half-brother of Jesus, to put himself up there as better than the others.

38. 11:40

    He doesn't want to do that. He wants to put everybody down at the same level and just encourage us all to appreciate what everybody has to bring to the table. Appreciate what everybody can do in ecclesial life or in family life instead of ranking people as, well, this person's over this person and so on.

39. 11:58

    And those are great lessons that we're going to walk home with this weekend because as a community, we run into the same problems. We do this in our families. We do this in our ecclesias. We do this in the community at large where we rank people and we put somebody up here and somebody down there.

40. 12:13

    You know, even this whole gathering has tendencies to do that because, you know, somebody comes up and does all the lip service up here and gives the classes and we tend to rank people like that. But we forget about, look at all the work that goes on and all the behind-the-scenes things to organize this gathering so that we could even have it.

41. 12:32

    And somebody to play the piano and all the different things that we have. Imagine what this gathering would be like if we found out all of a sudden there was no food. No food. And then we'd find out that, well, I guess maybe the classes didn't matter so much after all because I think most of us would be more worried about the food at that point.

42. 12:50

    Or those of us as parents, imagine if nobody showed up to take the kids' classes this morning and all of a sudden you find out, you get here that, well, we're all responsible for our own children and that's it for the classes today. See, all those different aspects are really important in ecclesial life.

43. 13:05

    Not just here at this gathering but back home in our ecclesias. We have to learn the value of what everybody brings to ecclesial life. And I think you're going to find James is one of those people. He valued all the different things that people could bring and he was very frustrated at the prejudice that people had, the rankings that were going on in ecclesial life and he just thought, brethren, these things should not be like this.

44. 13:26

    We have to appreciate each other for the love of God, for what we can do in the community and the family. And that's the way James was. You'll see that's the way he introduces himself. When you go back and look at the reasons for why he wrote the letter, there was definitely this problem of persecution going on at this time.

45. 13:43

    That the rich were persecuting the poor. And the suggestion is that these were the established folks that had been there for a while and as believers were leaving the community, leaving Jerusalem and they were going out into these areas where the gospel had preached and the little ecclesias were established, that they were not being accepted.

46. 13:59

    They were being looked down on when they came from Jerusalem and there was a lot of conflict going on in the ecclesial life. Too many of the Jewish believers at this time had a belief system that really wasn't manifested in a good way of life. What had happened is the gospel had gone out, people had left Jerusalem and they'd taken the gospel with them, but they didn't really know how to live it.

47. 14:20

    It was like a religion to have rather than to live. And you see that today. It's very easy to have the right religion and yet not live it. We just become hearers of the word and not doers. And this was the problem James was facing. And all the riches and the covetousness were affecting some of the people and they ended up being prejudiced against the poor.

48. 14:42

    The poor would come in and they'd look at them as, oh, it's a poor person. We'll have them sit way back there so they don't bother the service. And they were doing this kind of thing in ecclesial life. And some of it got so bad that they ended up having verbal wars that were being fought going on in ecclesial life.

49. 14:56

    And some even suggest that the words used in the Greek were actually for fighting. That fistfights would break out amongst the brethren because they were so at each other all the time and there were so many frustrations going on at this time that James felt he had to write the letter. So the letter probably went out somewhere around 8045, 8046.

50. 15:15

    The suggestion is it's probably before Paul's first missionary journey. Before Paul went out and preached the gospel, James put this letter out. The suggestion for that is because it's mainly persecution by rich Jews against poor Jews. In fact, you'll notice as we go through the letter this weekend, there's no reference to the Gentiles.

51. 15:34

    Which in the Apostle Paul's letters, there's constantly, later on, you know, suppose James had actually solved this problem. The next, within a couple of years, Paul goes out and he preaches the gospel to all these Gentiles up in Antioch and over he goes into Cyprus and takes it into Galatia and eventually into Macedonia.

52. 15:51

    And now the next problem is how do the Jews and Gentiles get along? Right now, it's a Jew versus Jew problem in ecclesial life and it just goes to show that no matter what you have in ecclesial life, human nature is such that people, people sometimes want to beat each other's throats. We look for reasons to differ.

53. 16:08

    We look at what's different about each other rather than what's the same and that's where the conflict arises. We don't appreciate what the other people can bring to ecclesial life. So hopefully this weekend we'll get a chance to look at James' suggestions as to how we can overcome those things because he lays them out on the table and then he gives us little measuring tools.

54. 16:28

    Well, here's how you can tell how you're doing on this and here's how you can tell how you're doing on this issue and everybody can measure themselves. We're not here to measure each other. We're here to measure ourselves this weekend and find out how we're doing and what we can do to improve.

55. 16:41

    The suggestion on the letter is that it probably was late enough for James' authority to be established and you find in Acts chapter 12 by that point in time when the other James died that this James was taking over the Jerusalem Ecclesia. He was looked at as the leader of the Ecclesia in Acts chapter 12 and by Acts 15 he definitely was the one that everybody looked to at the Jerusalem conference.

56. 17:03

    But it's early enough that the inclusion of the Gentiles was not a major issue at this point so probably it's before Acts 15 before the Apostle Paul went out in his first missionary journey. There's really no mention of these Gentiles at all. So if you happen to have that little Bible insert right there and you're familiar with that one at all on the Acts of the Apostles probably it's somewhere in that red box in the 8045-8046 region and where we are in this letter is probably between some point where James was killed that's James the brother John when he died in Acts chapter 12 when Herod killed him and Paul's first missionary journey.

57. 17:36

    This is probably before Paul takes the gospel out and turns to the Gentiles. So James is writing this letter probably early on. It's one of the first letters that comes up. Now I happen to be doing a study of Galatians at the same time as I was working on James and I had never I had not caught on to this before but maybe some of you have.

58. 17:55

    I noticed some of our folks that give classes tapes that I was listening to they had caught on to it some of our old books that had picked this up but I didn't realize that the letter to James and the letter to the Galatians are probably both early letters. I'd looked at that before but I hadn't realized what was happening and sometimes it's nice to know the big picture.

59. 18:13

    The suggestion is as to how all this fits together is that what you have on the extreme ends of the Jewish community at this time is that we had the Jewish believers who had come into the truth and who were so happy about grace that they sort of sat back and they liked the idea that oh we've got the right religion we're being saved by grace and so they became the hearers.

60. 18:35

    They're on the one extreme over there but they didn't do anything. They weren't involved in ecclesial life at all they just were hearers and they sort of liked being part of this right religion. It fit in really well with their Jewish philosophy or we are the chosen people anyways. On the other end you see the other side of this would be the Jews who felt from their Pharisee type upbringing that we've got to do it.

61. 18:59

    We've got to do it. We've got to get out there and do and do and do and do because Christ didn't do it all and we've got to save ourselves and so that's on the other side when you look at the extreme positions. One brother or sister sits there and thinking oh it's so nice to be saved by grace and the other ones out there doing, doing, doing, doing, doing in ecclesial life not because they're doing it for you but because they feel like they've got to do it themselves or that they can't earn their way to the kingdom.

62. 19:24

    And see those are like the two extremes when you look at human personalities of what we find in ecclesial life. So there's the two extremes and so what James is going to try to aim at and what the Apostle Paul is going to try to aim at is this whole issue of that isn't what should be motivating us.

63. 19:40

    What the truth was supposed to do brothers and sisters what faith was supposed to do was to motivate us to work for God and work for each other through love. That's what it's all about. It's not so I can earn my way to the kingdom and at the same time I can't sit there and do nothing because I see needs out there.

64. 20:00

    People need us to be involved and you can't sit there in the chair and do nothing because we love those people and we want to help them. So faith working through love which is Paul's phrase in Galatians 5 and verse 6 that is supposed to be the motivating factor in the middle that will drive us to live the life of Christ.

65. 20:19

    And so you're going to see James hitting at this issue and you'll see the Apostle Paul hitting at this. So what James does is James is dealing with the hearers only. He ran into this first before the gospel went out to the Gentiles. And so James in his letter tries to correct this problem of the hearers only.

66. 20:35

    We've got to become doers. Faith has to motivate us. It's got to get us working in our lives. And only a few years later after the Apostle Paul went out and preached to the Gentiles and went through his missionary journeys then the Judaizers came into his ecclesias you see and Paul has to write Galatians and all of his letters to try to counter the impact of the Judaizers who came in on the other end of James.

67. 20:58

    So what some people do is they look at Paul's and James' letters and they think well the two are in conflict with each other. You know James is saying that we need to be a doer of the word and we have to be doing and doing and the Apostle Paul comes along and says it's faith, it's faith and that isn't it at all.

68. 21:13

    What they're doing is they're coming at two different extreme cases trying to battle the extremes and bring everybody back to the center. And it's a great way and it came right early on in the ecclesia. So God set up a situation where these two would write these letters early on in the ecclesial life so that they would try to counter both of these extremes.

69. 21:33

    And that's good because it helps us balance out our own lives. So if we find ourselves leaning one way or leaning the other way now we know which letter we've got to turn to. You see, we tend to be one of those people that's a doer, doer, doer, doer, doer and we're like we've got to earn our salvation.

70. 21:46

    We get out Galatians and Ephesians and Philippians and Colossians and we read Paul's letters and if we're one of those people that's sort of laid back in ecclesial life like I've sort of done my job and let other people take over and I don't need to really be involved anymore then we better come back and read James because you can't have a faith.

71. 22:02

    You can't have a faith that's not balanced with works of faith. We have to be helping in ecclesial life. There is no end to this help and all of us no matter how young or how old we are you can all help. Everybody can help in ecclesial life and so we have to leave here this weekend with a faith that motivates us to become involved and do things for our brothers and sisters at home and to work for God.

72. 22:26

    Work in our families and work in our ecclesias. When you go back and look at this transition period that James was dealing with it really was a transition period. As the gospel was going out to all these different places many of the believing Jews still attended the synagogues. In fact James uses the word synagogues in James chapter 2.

73. 22:44

    We just don't see it in our Bible versions. They cover it up with something else like the New King James just says the assembly. But that's actually the word synagogue and you can see how connected they were at that time still to the synagogue. Many of the believers probably still went back to the synagogues at the time and would go there and they would visit the temple if they were in Jerusalem.

74. 23:04

    You're looking at a Jewish community that was still having a tremendous impact on the believers at this time so that they couldn't just exist in and of themselves. The Jewish community was still having a major impact because of the connection that was there and many of the Jewish believers still kept the law.

75. 23:19

    So you've got this transition period going on right now where the Jewish folks with the law and with their temple and with their synagogue was still having a major impact on the community and because of that some of them at least had developed this philosophy of life that we are the people and all we've got to do is believe the right things as long as you go through the statement of faith and you say yes, yes, yes, yes and you're baptized then you are saved and there's really you don't have to do anything you just have to believe and oh they like this idea of you know have faith this sounds good you see I like what I'm hearing coming out of Jerusalem this idea of having faith because that way oh I have faith I believe I have faith and they didn't do anything they didn't change their own lives and they didn't help out in the ecclesia and so James is going to try to counter that problem and when you look back at some of the problems that this Jewish background would have given because they depended on their Jewish heritage many of the Jews did this some of them now were moving into ecclesial life they thought they were the chosen people they believe now that not only were they the chosen people but now you see they were not only the chosen now they had access to the grace of God this put them in even a better category and so they ended up feeling as a philosophy that God would save them because they're Jews now associated with Christ

76. 24:31

    and it didn't have to have any impact on their behavior I don't have to change my way of life I don't have to help anybody out you just got to have the right religion and you're saved by faith and so James has to counter this problem and say this is not good enough when you watch for some of the illusions that are in this letter you can see that he talks about the waves of the sea in chapter 1 at verse 6 the flower of the field that withers the human life cycles in chapter 1 these are just some of the ones that you would have picked up in the reading this morning the shadow of turning with the planets and also he brought us forth as the first fruits out there and you can see that James is somebody who's in tune with nature you can tell he's somebody who lived like on a farm and he saw all these different aspects in nature that God was trying to use to help us think about higher spiritual things and he brings those into his letter he's a very practical writer that way now getting into the actual letter then hopefully we have a chance to look through chapter 1 we'll see how far we get in this first class the background I don't want to spend a lot of time on it but it's helpful to have a little bit of background to get some ideas to what James is trying to counter so what he does in chapter 1 at the beginning of the letter he sets out right from the beginning that look

77. 25:41

    you folks are going through problems you're having trials in your families and ecclesial life and look God will help you understand your trials if you believe and you trust in him now if you don't follow the if if you're double minded there's not much God can do until you're ready to get on board so what he does is talk about the joys of falling into trials in verse 2 count it all joy when you fall into various trials knowing see if we have confidence and trust in God then when problems come into our life whatever they are problems at work problems with your children problems in the ecclesia whatever those problems are we have that in the back of our minds we have that total trust and confidence that God is at work he's the one behind this he's trying to help us in these trials and these troubles so he can say count it all joy when you fall into these various trials not that we're excited when somebody gets sick not that we're happy when we have ecclesial troubles but we have the joy and the presence and the peace of mind to realize that what God is doing is that he's testing our faith and this is going to produce patience because we're not going to be able to do it all we're going to find out we can't solve all these problems and so we're going to learn to trust in God and not only patience but patience is going to have its perfect work and you're going to become perfect and complete and lacking nothing and without those problems you'll never be

78. 27:10

    at that point it's like an athlete that finds that if you want to become a really fast runner and you want to do your best some of the athletes what they'll do are you want to become a real good jumper they'll wear weights around their ankles and they'll run with weights on them and they'll put heavy things on and they'll endure the troubles and the trials of practicing like that so when it comes time for the race they can take them off and really run and that's what troubles do in our life they help us get through those periods we learn things we develop things that we couldn't have developed without them and we get closer and closer to the character of God and so he says what he encourages us to do then is that you know believe and realize that these things are for our benefit that these trials are going to help us reevaluate what really is important in our life those issues we argued about last week or now just being able to get through a week of being healthy or now dealing with an ecclesial problem or a trouble with our child and we used to think we had problems before and now God brings new ones into our life not because he wants to destroy us because he wants us to look back and realize those things we made big issues of they were just little tiny things and we should have let them go should have let them go and we would have been much better off and we'll learn to do that over time when we really face

79. 28:24

    bigger issues but it only works brothers and sisters and young people this only works the whole premise of James' letter is you really do believe that angels are working in your life that they are involved in these problems in these trials and they didn't happen by chance see if we run into a health issue or we run into a car accident on the way home or we get home and find out something's happened with our job or our boyfriend or our girlfriend has decided they're done with us if we look at all those events in life and we just say well it just sort of happened it was my turn then we miss the point and we don't grow from that what God he's trying to talk to us he's trying to get us to learn and develop and James says this is why you can count it joy because this series of steps is going to bring you to a point where you're going to be one of the children of God and you're going to have things that you'll live with forever and God will be able to entrust you with eternal life and believe that you'll do something good with it this is how you get there and there's really there's no other way to get there you have to believe so what happens when these problems occur is we don't fight God over it we don't argue with each other over it we don't get mad and angry with our spouses and our children or our parents over it we accept the fact that God has brought it into our life

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    to change us to try to help us develop to become a better child of God and it's I guess it's important to look at that verse there when he says at the end of verse 2 that notice it's when it's kind of all joy when you fall in the various trials this isn't a kind of an issue where we like purposely go out and actually create a trial for ourselves it's not like saying leave Lake Placid and you know go home at 150 miles an hour and have a major car accident and then say oh thank you God for the problem that isn't what he's talking about or you know we don't go spend economically with our credit cards and spend spend and buy all this stuff and then say well thank you for the debt that I'm in and I know I'm going to learn something from this these are trials that God brings into your life you know and so it's maybe worth underlining that word fall because you see James put it in there for a reason it's not that you go out and look for these things they're going to come anyway but don't bring them on yourself let God pick the things he'll know much better what to bring into your life than we would ever know what to bring and that's true for ourselves and it's true for others as well that he knows the right trials to bring so it's when you fall into those trials not when we jump into them and the joy does come later you know the apostle Paul when he wrote that letter to the Hebrews

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    and he said at the end of all the exposition in Hebrews and he points out in chapter 12 this issue it's the same issue as James God is treating you as sons he says in Hebrews chapter 12 you're running the race and Jesus has run the race and he finished it and now he's sat down at the right hand of God at the beginning of the chapter and so he can say the same thing you can have an inner peace and a joy because you know that this is what God's after and Paul admits it for the moment in Hebrews 12 and at verse 11 there no chastening seems joyful for the present it's painful right now he's real you know you don't tell people that are going through troubles to just be happy and smile all the time when they're in pain and there's things that have happened in their life but they can have that inner joy and realize that God's doing something good with this he's working in your life it's afterwards that yields the peaceable fruit of righteousness if you see we've been trained by it if we haven't been trained by it the fruit never comes and James is going to say the same thing in this letter Paul and James are on the same wavelength all the way through their letters they're just coming at it from different perspectives one who's trying to earn their way through and the other one who's just sitting back and appreciating the grace of God but they're both coming to that same central point that God is changing your life believe it and accept it

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    but you've got to be involved this isn't something we sit back and watch we're involved we're a part of this he expects us to be a player and he wants us to be involved not just sit back and appreciate the grace of God so that's what we do we appreciate it later on so he says in this letter in chapter 1 that look if troubles come into your life if you're experiencing personal problems right now if there's an illness in your life if there's a family member who's sick if something's happened at your job your ecclesia whatever it is with the young people problems at school things that are going on with your friends your boyfriends your girlfriends your friends at school that you have if you're currently experiencing a problem then look take it to God ask him ask him for wisdom to understand see I've heard this passage quoted for years about you know if we lack wisdom ask God and he'll make us smarter people that isn't what it's about it's about understanding the problems and the troubles that you're going through in your life what does God expect me to learn from this why is this happening and we take it to God and we talk to him and we ask him and sometimes with some of our young couples they find for years they can't have children just like you know with Isaac and they go to God and they pray and they talk to God trying to understand why what's going on in our lives we don't just treat it as well I'm one of those statistics that certain percent

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    of the people don't get pregnant that isn't what it's about God's trying to talk to us he wants us to learn and he's hoping that we're going to develop patience and we're going to develop all these characteristics for which he can entrust eternal life so he says look if you lack the wisdom not just wisdom in general but the wisdom to understand your troubles talk to God and ask him for help who gives to all liberally all liberally you'll notice there not just certain classes of people because you see he's leading into this issue of prejudice without reproach and it will be given to him but the problem is when we go to ask for wisdom you see we've got to ask in faith that's the key we've got to ask in faith fully convinced that God's involved in the problem see if we're not convinced then we're not going to see the answer we're never going to understand what God was trying to get us to think about so what he deals with next in verse 8 is the double-minded man you see if we don't ask in faith believing that God's involved then he uses that natural allusion to the idea we're like a wave of the sea we're like driven and we're tossed one day we sort of think God's involved and the next day the wave comes by and drops us down well I think that's just what I did and the next day we think God's involved and the next day we don't and then we make our decisions that way we're not focused we're not single-minded trying to understand

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    what is God trying to tell me and so he brings up this issue of the double-minded man being unstable in all his ways and that issue is going to be dealt with all the way through this letter really this for these first eight verses the entire rest of the letter is all about these eight verses it's all about these issues over and over again with practical examples of them coming up over and over again and see there's two ways you can look at life you can either see life as what I did and what I caused and all the stuff that I'm trying to get or you can look at it from the perspective of what is God bringing into my life and he's trying to help me learn what am I supposed to learn from this and James is trying to help people understand that if we want the wisdom that comes from God and we want to understand these things we have to believe that God's involved and then God can talk to us you see and what it will do brothers and sisters is that the double-minded man when you look at what ends up happening if we're one of those people who goes and thinks well God's not involved and this is just happening and I've got to find the solutions I've got to work my way out of this it's all about I have to I have to I have to and see that's when the problems develop that's when we start taking advantage of other people that's when our mouth starts to run as he's going to talk in chapter 3

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    this is where it stems from if we really think that God's not involved then we think it's okay to solve the problem my way and I mean that's the issues of life and so we do we find ways to solve it well I'm going to scheme for this and I'm going to do this and I'm going to do that and we justify it all thinking well I had to solve that problem I had to deal with that issue instead of sometimes sitting back and watching well what's God trying to teach me through this what am I supposed to learn from this and try to look at it that way so the fleshly thinking what it does is it ends up taking the responsibility away sometimes and we end up blaming God for our problems which he's going to deal with in chapter 1 I'm going to solve the problem my way and what that leads to in the end is that the ends will justify the means and you know you hear that hurt sometimes well in the end it'll be okay and this applies on all different issues of ecclesial and family life imagine in our ecclesias you see issues come up and brothers and sisters we think that we have to well this issue it's got to be done this way that's the right way to do it and so we scheme through all these different things in the end to make sure it gets done that way because I know that's the right way and here's my Bible to prove it and both sides get out Bibles it's not like one side has a Bible

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    and the other doesn't it's a matter of a perspective that we're coming from and if we can't sit back and watch God sometimes and we want to drive our way through then we're going to live with all the consequences of that in ecclesial life and family life as well but we live with the problems and the consequences because we try to drive something through our way or other times we just we don't even take responsibility for issues for the other person we just blame God for having brought a problem on us and that's sort of like the other extreme so James is going to try to tackle those kind of issues so you'll find that these trials what they do is they reveal the double-minded thinking and so God brings money problems into our lives he brings sickness he brings accidents we have marital problems problems with children ecclesial members that God brings into our family and people move in and people move out or people that are already there and this entire rest of the letter that James writes is going to deal with all those issues and simply show us practical ways that he saw in ecclesial life at that time that these issues were being dealt with and people were not single-minded sometimes they were thinking God was involved and other times they were thinking oh I know it's got to be done this way I'm going to handle it like this and they would force their way on the ecclesia and it ended up to being a case where they would mistreat people so when you look at how practical James is

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    as soon as he lays the issue out and says look the challenge is to be single-minded we have to believe God's involved as soon as we open a door for God's not involved then we either blame God for it or we end up saying well I've got to solve it my way so he says look here's a perfect example right off the bat and he covers in verse 9 and 10 he says look look at the rich and the poor so in verse 9 let the lowly brother the poor brother glory in his exaltation so the brethren that were coming out there that were poor they can rejoice in the fact that look at when we come to meeting every day of our life we're forgiven of our sins and God has exalted us into his family and in verse 10 look at the rich let him glory in his humiliation because it's the flower of the field he's going to pass away and God's going to take the rich and he's going to bring them down to this level and the poor he's going to raise them all up and what he's done is he's put everybody at the same level in the family of God and what James is trying to get folks to see is that no matter which category you were in if you were single minded and you were believing and trusting that God was involved God will develop faith in both categories and both people are worth saving they're both part of the family of God and we have to treat them that way we can't just treat one class

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    and accept them and reject the others and so that's what he's trying to get us to accept and he starts right out with what better than economics because every ecclesia every family situation you're going to look at there's different economics there's some that have money and there's some that don't and so James would say look all you got to do is accept that and believe that God put that there not all these individual people God has made it this way and you've got to if you're down here you've got to rejoice that there's people here that can plan these gatherings and pay for a lot of the things that we don't actually pay our own way on and if you're up here you've got to rejoice that there's folks down there that God is expecting you to help out and he's giving you an opportunity to show his kindness and his love for other people and value what those other people can bring to ecclesial life that you maybe don't understand at all because you're coming from a whole different background up there and if both groups will do that then you can have unity and peace and harmony and ecclesial life and if you ever manage to pull that off I'd like to come to your ecclesia because that is very difficult to do in any family and any ecclesia but we can't just throw that out and say well forget it it's not possible that's what we've got to aim for and the more brothers and sisters that are aiming for that the more peaceful ecclesial life and family life will be so both groups

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    are going to have to learn from their situation so in verses 12 to 18 then what he does is he goes into these trials and shows us that what God's trying to do is develop us as children and he points out as children of God he points out in verse 12 that look it's worth going through the troubles personally for you because you are going to obtain the crown of life and it's the crown of life for all those who are approved through trials so look keep going keep enduring keep going through it because it's going to be worth it for you in the end he's promised eternal life and you'll get the crown it's promised to all those who love him and at the same time it indicates the love for Christ that we have it's the power to endure trials this is one of the ways that you're able to express to God that you are learning to live like his children that we endure through these problems and aim for that crown of life when he deals with the trials versus the temptations it's good to look at the difference there God uses trials to develop our character and what ended what James saw was going to come is that people were going to blame their trials on God and they would say well God brought this into my life and now I've fallen into sin and it's God's fault because he brought the temptation it's not God's fault what he does is he brings the trials to develop our character and then the temptations to go the wrong way they come from in here

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    they're from us what God was hoping is that we would live through the trial learn to endure develop patience and make the right decision when we made the wrong choice that was our fault up here and so right away he realized he was going to have to lay out very clearly the difference between the trial and the temptation that goes on in our head to choose to do sin see God can't be tempted by evil and he doesn't tempt anybody with evil so don't blame your trials and temptations on God when he brings economic trouble into our life when people are losing their jobs and losing their homes and when the health issues come up in our lives and we respond the wrong way that's my fault that's my fault that I did that God brought the trouble and the trial hoping that I would learn patience and kindness and endurance hoping that I would develop a greater aspect of his character and if I choose the wrong way I failed I failed not God he wasn't trying to destroy me he was like a parent who's bringing their children through experiences of life hoping they're going to learn to make the right choice this time and then so many times he has to bail us out when we don't but he's hoping that we'll make the right choice he's doing these things so that we will develop you see the double-minded man doesn't get that the double-minded man inevitably goes back to the thinking of the flesh and thinks oh I've got to work my way out of this blames God for their troubles

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    and what am I going to do to solve this problem not realizing that I brought it on myself because I reacted the wrong way and so James is aiming at single-mindedness single-mindedness will help us get through these problems like that and then he deals with the pathway that's there to death you see and you watch what he does here in this little section that he says look what we all do is we go through this little pathway we see things that we want you see we have this desire and then the desire it conceives and we think of a plan about oh what can we do with that you see and then baby sin gets born because we've gone another step further into this problem and in the end all it does is bring full-grown death and it's all because of back there at step one when the eyes saw we didn't deal with the issue now don't blame God for that maybe God did provide a situation in which we saw something but what he's hoping brothers and sisters is that with single-mindedness we will let the power of the word of God overcome that in our lives and so he gives us that power later on in the chapter of the implanted word of letting this implanted word develop your life so that you won't go down this pathway to death he deals with our God is a loving father you see he's not out to destroy us in verse 17 he says look our father every good and perfect gift comes down from above from the father of lights with whom there's no

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    variableness our shadow of turning and of his own will he brought us forth by the word of truth this father doesn't want to destroy you through these troubles he wants to save you he's trying to save you and your family your children your parents through all of these troubles he wants us to succeed and so he keeps giving us good gifts in addition to these troubles and these trials because he wants us to succeed he does not want to destroy us and so we find that what happens in verse 18 you know it's worth underlining that of his own will he brought us forth this was not by some accident of our mom and dad taught us the truth this wasn't through some experience of where somebody happened to see a gospel message and they got brought to the Christadelphians it's of God's own will see single-mindedness believes that that God brought you to this he's brought you into his family he wants everybody here to make it and so when he brings those troubles and those problems into our families and ecclesial life these are just opportunities for us to develop his character he challenges us like that so that we will make it and become part of the family of God so that's what he's after right there and he leaves him with the idea that he's like the father of lights see he's the father of the lights and what he's hoping brothers and sisters is that when we get single-minded and we believe that he's active in our lives and we trust the thing that he's bringing we will learn to shine like him

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    and all those stars that you're going to see out there tonight if it's not too cloudy out there all those stars that we'll see out here we get away from the city and you can actually see the stars those are to remind us that that's what all of us are like in the kingdom they're going to all shine like the stars and he's the father of it all and everybody has to learn to shine like him and this is what he's after through all these troubles and these problems and there's no variation with him and what he does then is introduce these little topics here at the end of chapter 1 that he's going to deal with now in the rest of the letter you're going to see there's no variation it's not like he shines on the just and he doesn't shine on the unjust doesn't send the rain on them and no rain on them there's no variableness with God there's no shadow due to turning nobody's left in the shade what he does is he gives every one of us the same opportunity he shines on everybody the wheat and the tares of ecclesial life they're all out there together and they're all getting rained on together because he wants everybody to make it that's the kind of God we have no partiality and if that's what our God is like brothers and sisters we're going to find that that's what we've got to aim to be like in ecclesial life too so the goal then that we'll look at we'll maybe finish up a few things in chapter 1 in the next class

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    and then move on to some very practical examples that he covers in chapter 2 about how we can measure how we doing in this how are we doing in our own personal lives when we try to like figure out are we learning to live like the character of God and he brings up this issue of partiality he's going to deal with that and then he's going to look at this issue of are we one of these people that sits back and watches everybody else work in ecclesial life or are we one of those that are out there doing the word because we really believe by faith that God wants us to be an active part of his family and we can't just sit back and watch everybody else do it so hopefully in class 2 we'll get a chance to look at those things too thanks very much