It is likely that today’s reading is addressed to a group of well-to-do folks inside of the Christian community who are kind of living their own lives and living kind of a “Sunday Christian” kind of lifestyle.  James is addressing their tendency to assume they control their own destiny, that they live their lives in a way that reflects a sense of sufficiency apart from God.

For most of us, I think that in many ways describes how we live.  I know it is often true of me and of my life.  When things get hard, I definitely turn to God.  When things are great, I am a little more hit-or-miss.  I would definitely say that in my spiritual development over the last few years, I have learned to praise God and to count my blessings and to lean into His Grace in both good and bad times, but there is always that tendency towards autonomy when things are going great.  I think that is a remnant of sin that lives in me that I will always have to battle; similar to yesterday’s tendency to lean into the passions of this world, and away from God’s plan for my life.  I think that’s the linking idea between the first 12 verses in this chapter and the these last 5 - our tendency to drift from God because of the sin living inside of us.

James gives us a hint at a part of the solution though.  As we’ve discussed before, we know James is a believer in salvation by faith, so we know he believes we can’t save ourselves; but we also can clearly see from his text that he is a believer in action as well.  He would tell us that God saves, but we have a job to respond.  Here, the very last verse offers a subtle hint as to how to combat these sinful tendencies.  James says we are to do what is right.  That’s it.  Very scientific.  But, think about it for a second, and we talked about this yesterday, and I think James hit this idea from multiple angles - the more times we do what is right, the more times we step up to the plate and make the good decision over the sinful one, the more we train ourselves to do so.  The more we do this, the more momentum we experience in our lives, and the easier the next right step gets.  We are going to deviate at times, for sure, but 5 steps forward and 2 steps back is still 3 steps forward...and that’s the point.  Today, let’s end the day up a step - that’s the goal.  Let’s focus on both making steps forward, and let’s focus on counting our current blessings, not taking for granted what God has done, is doing, and will certainly do in our lives.  Let’s make today a momentum-builder.