Genuine faith in Jesus leaves no place for partiality in Christian community. Bottom line: if you want to be with Jesus, you lose the right to be picky about who you?re willing to love.

James wants to show us that genuine faith always makes a difference in how we live our lives. In other words, faith always works. In this passage he shows us why faith works, how faith works, and where faith works.

James opens his letter full of commands with perhaps the most surprising command of all. He insists we?re to see the trials we face in life as cause for joy. It is through trial that we grow in maturity, through trial that we?re protected from a faith that?s not genuine. So sort of trial should we expect? And where can we get what we need to persevere?

To make the most of the letter of James, like any other biblical text, we need to know what it?s meant for and how we should use it.

Ecclesiastes is a book about meaninglessness and death, but it?s also a book about joy. Many times through the book, the author follows up sections on the depressing emptiness of life under the sun by telling us to enjoy ourselves as long as we live. How can we live with joy in a world so full of vanity?

In two places Ecclesiastes laments the power of injustice, and in both places the author ties injustice to the problem of death. If death is our end, why do human lives deserve to be protected equally? And if the just and the unjust both end up dying, why worry with justice at all? Our only hope for the justice we crave is a God who sees all things and will judge us?all of us?after death.

When we look to wealth to make us happy or to make us secure, we?re only striving after wind. But when we trust the providence of God we can fully enjoy his gifts, and when we trust the promises of God we can hold his gifts loosely.

Can lots of pleasure make a short life meaningful? That?s the question the author of Ecclesiastes set out to answer with the lavish lifestyle he describes in this passage, a lifestyle where did anything and everything he wanted to do. His experiment reached an awful conclusion, but his wisdom paves the way for a joyful alternative.

Ecclesiastes catalogs the meaningless of life ?under the sun? ?the world as it is if there is nothing and no one that lasts forever. The author takes up his first example with a question: what good is all of our work? The answer? It all depends on our perspective. Under the sun, our work is a dead end. But in the Lord, our work is an opportunity.

Ecclesiastes is probably the darkest book in the Bible. It?s author imagines the meaning of life if all there is to it is what we experience ?under the sun??as if God doesn?t exist. His conclusions sound remarkably modern: everything is meaningless because everything dies. Unless?