Going Deeper: use the following questions for personal reflection and/or to discuss with family, friends, and small group.

Transcription

1 Don t be Such a Hypocrite Part Two: Rejoicing in Trials? 1. James wrote to believers who were scattered, in exile. 2. The temptation in exile is to justify sin. 3. James wanted people to see that trials can add to your life, not subtract. 4. God uses our trials to show us how far we ve come, not how far we fall short. 5. As God s firstfruit, we show the world what it means to know God. Going Deeper: use the following questions for personal reflection and/or to discuss with family, friends, and small group. 1. Describe a time in your life when you were cut off from a church family, and/or when you felt cut off from God (i.e. dry time, wilderness, exile experience) with no spiritual support. 2. What were the temptations that presented themselves during that time? 3. Were you tempted to feel sorry for yourself and justify sin? How so? 4. Read James 1:1-12. James suggests a different perspective on facing trials. What is it? 5. What is his reasoning behind this perspective? What are some benefits, listed in the text, that support his perspective? 6. Read James 1: It s easy to blame God for our trials and even the sin we commit. What does James have to say about that? 7. In James 1:18, what does James mean by God wanting to make us his firstfruits? What does this have to do with facing our trials in joy? Message This morning, I want to look at one of the most outrageous verses in the entire Bible. It might offend you. It will certainly confuse you. It will definitely challenge you. But if we can read it through God s eyes, it might change you. We ll get to that verse in a few minutes. Today is week two of this new series looking at the letter from James to the church. If you missed last week, I introduced us to a little history on James. We learned that James was the brother of Jesus who eventually came to lead the early church. You can go to our website to listen that message or go to our Facebook page to watch it. Now, as we read this letter, it s important to understand that James wrote to believers who had stopped living out their faith. They called themselves Christian but they weren t living the life that Jesus taught them to live. That s why I called this series: Don t be such a hypocrite. James introduced himself by saying: James, a slave of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ, To the twelve tribes scattered among the nations: Greetings. James 1:1 8

2 This sentence tells us something about where James is headed. By referring to his readers as the twelve tribes who were scattered, James reminded them that God s people have often been scattered in some kind of exile. They were in exile in Egypt. They were in exile in Assyria and they were in exile in Babylon. And now they are scattered in exile throughout the middle east. In other words, the subtle message here is: God s people have been where you are. This exile isn t anything that we haven t seen before. This isn t new territory. So continue to live as I live: as a slave to God and Jesus. Continue to obey Jesus teaching. You see, the temptation in exile is to drift spiritually and morally. Maybe you ve been in that place. There are different kinds of exile. There is geographic exile where you are sent far away from home, cut off from the land that you know. That s what we see here. Maybe there was a time in your life when you moved far away from family and friends: your company transferred you, or you went away to college, or you even left on a business trip. There is relational exile. Maybe you just went through a divorce and the relationships you once had are now gone. There is spiritual exile where you walked away from God and chose a life of sin, reaping the consequences of that life. Or, there was no sin, but for whatever reason you felt disconnected from God. There is financial exile, where you don t have the money you once had to live the way you once lived. And there is physical exile where your body is not living up to your expectations. This might happen with an injury, or disease, cancer, or chronic pain. Sometimes our bad decisions send us into exile. Sometimes we are sent into exile by circumstances beyond our control. But the question isn t so much, how did you wind up in exile? You can obsess about that for years. The real question is: how are you going to handle your exile? How will you let your new circumstances impact your behavior? Will you define your exile? Or will your exile define you? You see, when exile happens, many people feel sorry for themselves. They feel victimized by life...or even by God, like God let them down. They think that God owes them. And so they use their exile as an excuse to sin. They justify their disobedience. It s this disobedience that James wanted to address. But James didn t start by addressing the people s misbehavior. He started by addressing what prompted their misbehavior and that was trials. Their misfortune. Their suffering that came about in exile. 9

3 And so here s the outrageous verse I was referring to earlier: Consider it pure joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you fall into trials of many kinds James 1:2 Consider it pure joy. I wonder how many of you who are facing a daunting trial would welcome those words. They seem a little insensitive to me, like getting slapped in the face with a cold washcloth. Bam! I mean, where s his compassion? Why didn t James start off by telling his readers how bad he felt for them? They were forced to leave their home and country. They were struggling financially. They were cut off from family and friends. And he s telling them to feel good about it. Either James is terribly insensitive or he knows something we don t know. In August I taught on how to handle suffering, and I said: if you can t change your circumstances, you can always change your perspective. And that s what James is doing here, trying to help people change their perspective on suffering. I want to spend a little time on this verse so we can fully appreciate what he means by finding joy in your trials. First, James refers to brothers and sisters. He does this 17 times in his short letter. This might seem like a little thing, but it shows us his attitude. I think it s his way of saying, Come on guys. Brothers and sisters. We are all in this together. We can do this. I m with you. The second thing I want you to see here is that he s not talking about trials they brought upon themselves - although he will in a few verses. Right here he s talking about the trials that we fall into. Like, you were driving down the road and a big sinkhole opened up in front of you and you fell into it. You didn t do anything wrong. Life just threw you a curve and you weren t prepared for it. That s what happened to James readers. They suffered persecution for their faith. They weren t to blame. But they suffered for it anyway. Third, James says, whenever you fall into trials. Whenever tells us that trials are going to happen. He didn t say, if trials happen. He said whenever they happen. This tells us that we have to not only expect trials to come our way, we have to plan for them because it s just a matter of time. If you aren t experiencing any trials right now, that s great. Be thankful, because many people here are. There are all kinds of sinkholes that people have fallen into in our midst. I was at a pastors retreat this past week and the speaker said, if you aren t experiencing any trials today you should be running around this room like your hair was on fire saying, Thank you Jesus! Thank you Jesus! 10

4 The fourth word here is consider. The word has a couple meanings that I think apply here. One, in the Greek, the word literally means to lead or take command. What that means to me is that when bad things happen, don t go passive. Don t shrink back and play the victim. Take charge of the situation by choosing joy. Joy isn t happiness. Happiness is a feeling we experience when our circumstances treat us well. It s conditional. But joy is based on our knowledge of God. It s an awareness. We choose joy because we know that God is in control of our life and no matter how bad our circumstances are, God can use our circumstances to bring about good things in us and through us, if we will let him. The word consider can also be translated as count. Some translations say, count it all joy. I like this translation too because it makes me think of an accounting ledger. Accountants have a ledger with debit and credit columns. James tells us that in the ledger of your life, when a trial happens, don t put the trial in the loss/debit column. put it in the gain/credit column. The trial isn t subtracting something from your life, it s adding something to your life at least if you can look at your life through God s eyes. One Bible translation puts it like this: Don t resent your trials as intruders but welcome them as friends. Phillips That takes a real shift in thinking, doesn t it? We typically ask God to help us avoid trials. We ask God to get us out of trials. And we thank God when a trial is over. But James tells us to embrace our trials. To be joyful in them. T here are some lessons in life that you will only learn by suffering. There are some insights you will only gain through pain. James says that trials are to be embraced, not resisted. So what could a trial possibly add to your life? James says:... you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance. Let perseverance finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything. James 1:3,4 Testing has the idea of putting metal in a fire to burn off impurities. We might think that a test is to show where we are wrong. But God s testing is to make us better. James says it produces perseverance. Some Bibles translate the word for perseverance as endurance, or patience. Maybe patient endurance is the the best description of what James is talking about. When your faith is tested, over and over, and you are able to stand the test, it produces the quality of patient endurance. This is the quality in us that says, I won't back down. I m in it to the end. How many of you could use more patience? How many of you have forfeited a goal you had for yourself by not 11

5 having enough patient endurance? I ve had many people tell me that they wish they hadn t gotten a divorce but stuck with the marriage just a little longer. Patient endurance is what s necessary for anything good to happen. Two examples: Theodore Giesel was rejected by publishers 27 times, calling his writing rubbish. Just when he was about to give up, a friend of his published his first book. Today Theodore Giesel is better known as Dr. Seuss. I have family and friends down in Ft. Meyers, Florida. There is a big museum down there in the winter home of Thomas Edison. It tells his story of creating the lightbulb where Edison made 10,000 attempts before he was successful. There are thousands of examples of the value of having patient endurance. The apostle Paul put it like this; Let us not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up. Galatians 6:9 James said that patient endurance is what s necessary to become mature and complete. Mature and complete are basically the same idea. They both mean fullness...reaching your full potential. James adds, lacking in nothing, meaning that you come to a place where even your blind spots are exposed and addressed. Everyone of us has a certain amount of potential that God has granted us. When we reach our full potential we are able to make the maximum impact for good that God created us for. But sadly, many people don t want to pay the price for reaching their full potential. They head for the exit the minute life gets hard. They usually have a reasonable excuse, even a spiritual one. You know, they prayed about it, and they just didn t feel a peace. And so they quit. That s always hard for me to hear. I m glad they prayed. I have to respect that they think they heard from God. But honestly, I question if they really did in some situations. There are often good reasons to quit. But probably not as often as we like to think. As a result, these people never develop their full potential. They never mature. They never become the person God created them to be. They always lack something. It s like they left half way through surgery. They escaped the pain but they lost out on the healing. I wonder what it is that you are tempted to quit right now? School? A sport? A musical instrument? A relationship? A friendship? A marriage? Your singleness? A relationship with God? Serving here at church? James tells us that if we want to reach our full potential, we need patient endurance and we gain it through trials. Trials force us to endure longer than we would naturally choose to endure. 12

6 And James says...that s a good thing. You should take joy in that, because whether you realize it or not, you will be a better person for it. You will become more like Jesus because of the trial. Let s keep reading here. James addresses a false idea associated with trials. That false idea is that God tempts people, meaning, he brings bad things your way to test your faith. When tempted, no one should say, God is tempting me. For God cannot be tempted by evil, nor does he tempt anyone James 1:13 When we experience hardship, we have to be very careful with our view of God. We can t let our pain influence what we know to be true about God. God isn t out there laying traps for you to get caught in. He doesn t take delight in seeing you fall into sin or suffer. Jesus taught us to pray: Lead me not into temptation. That s why James said: If any of you lacks wisdom, you should ask God, who gives generously to all without finding fault, and it will be given to you. James 1:5 Rather than change your view of God...rather than asume God is tempting you... ask God for wisdom, that is, ask for the eyes to see the good that can come from your pain. Assume that God has not changed. He s still good. Again, that explains what James said in these next verses: Don t be deceived, my dear brothers and sisters. Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of the heavenly lights, who does not change like shifting shadows. God doesn t change. He s not fickle. He doesn t bless you one day and curse you the next. God uses your trials to show you how far you ve come, not how far you fall short. He s not looking to undermine you. In fact, his end game for us is that we are the firstfruits of creation. He chose to give us birth through the word of truth, that we might be a kind of firstfruits of all he created. James 1:18 Being the firstfruits means that when Jesus returns he will restore all things to wholeness. But before that, he wants to restore his followers here and now. We are the firstfruits of his coming restoration. We are meant to be examples to the world of what God can do. But we have to let him finish his work in us. The apostle Paul said: God began doing a good work in you, and I am sure he will continue it until it is finished when Jesus Christ comes again. Philippians 1:6 Let me ask you, are you willing to let God finish the work that he started in you? Are you willing to embrace your present trial so God can make you mature and complete, lacking nothing? I hope so. Don t let your trials rob you of what God wants for you and what he wants to do through you. 13

7 Prayer: Father, there are people here who have forfeited a goal they had for themselves and are probably feeling guilty about that right now. Help them to receive your forgiveness and a fresh start. There are others here who are on the verge of quitting something that they once felt called to. Help them to find the patient endurance to continue on another day, another hour, another minute. There are also people here who have chosen joy in the face of their trial. Thank you for their courage. Might you continue to give them the strength to press on to the other side of their trial. Use us all to show the world how you are a God of restoration. 14