Big Idea: We can become a church that God exalts by abandoning selfishness and pursuing humility.

I’ve been going to church my entire life. As should be obvious by looking at me, that’s a long time. And so I want to give you three scenes in my long church history that stick out to me.

Scene One: A man in church had left the church and fallen into addictions. It was a tragic story. The good news: he was back! He came back before the church, confessed that he had struggled, and told the story of how God had brought him to his senses. It was like a modern-day Prodigal Son story. The best part: he was back in church, back in the community that could love and support him and cheer what God was doing in his life.

But that’s not what happened. The leaders of the church stood and said, “How do we know that he won’t do it again?” They refused to welcome him back in the church. Even as a young child, I knew that I had seen something tragic that broke God’s heart. The prodigal was not welcomed back. The prodigal was shunned.

Scene Two: I was a student pastor still in seminary working in a church for the summer. I was attending the church’s leadership meeting. Things were a little tense in the meeting no big deal. But at one point, the pastor pushed back against a leader. The leader said, “Wipe that smirk off your face.” The pastor said, “You shouldn’t even be here. You should resign.” The leader said, “In that case, I quit.” He pulled a letter of resignation out of his pocket, threw it on the table, and stormed out of the meeting. The pastor waited a few seconds, and then he stormed out of the meeting. The rest of us stood stunned wondering what had happened.

How do you like my scenes I’m painting so far?

Scene Three: A pastor was let go by his church in a very ugly and nasty way. He and his wife were, as you’d expect, deeply hurt. But a small group of people gathered around them and began to dream of God doing something new. They began to dream about a church that would be a safe place for messy people. This pastor thought that his ministry was over. But slowly that church grew and was filled with all kinds of people — hurting people, messy people, normal people. It’s planting other churches. When you go there, there’s a sweet spirit. They recently called a business meeting to call a new pastor, and if you attended you would have thought it was a worship service, not a business meeting. It’s not a perfect church, but it’s a grace-filled church that God is blessing.

That’s it. Scenes one, two, or three. My question: what kind of church do we want to become?

That’s really the question that we have before us today. How can we become the kind of church that God blesses?

James 4 tells us. Let’s look, and let’s pay attention, because this is crucial for our church.

How to Not Be a Church That God Blesses

How do we not become a church that God blesses? How do we become a church that God opposes? It’s easy: do nothing. As one of my friends recently tweeted, “My problem is not that I’m not good at Christianity. My real problem is that I’m really good at anti-Christianity. Why I need Christ.”

We’re really good at becoming a church that doesn’t reflect the beauty and generosity of God. We see this in this passage. Left to our natural devices, we’ll become exactly what James describes in the first few verses of this passage:

What causes quarrels and what causes fights among you? Is it not this, that your passions are at war within you? You desire and do not have, so you murder. You covet and cannot obtain, so you fight and quarrel. You do not have, because you do not ask. You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, to spend it on your passions. You adulterous people! Do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God? T…

Big Idea: Our words reveal the condition of our hearts. To change your words, ask God to change your heart.

A crew from the TV show Mythbusters was staging an “experiment” in the town of Dublin, California. They were trying to fire a cannonball into some large water containers at a bomb disposal range. Unfortunately, the Mythbusters crew seriously underestimated the dangerous power of a stray cannonball.

According to a newspaper report, “The cantaloupe-sized cannonball missed the water, tore through a cinder-block wall, skipped off a hillside and flew some 700 yards east.” But that didn’t end the damage. The cannonball “bounced in front of home on a quiet street, ripped through the front door, raced up the stairs and blasted through a bedroom …. Then it exited the house, leaving a perfectly round hole in the stucco, crossed six-lane Tassajara Road, took out several tiles from the roof of a home on Bellevue Circle and finally slammed into a family’s beige Toyota minivan in a driveway on Springdale Drive.”

Regarding the power of the stray cannonball, the owner of the minivan said, “It’s shocking—anything could have happened.” A spokesmen for the local sheriff’s department also commented, “Crazy, crazy, crazy, crazy. You wouldn’t think it was possible.”

You and I have never experienced the power of a stray cannonball, but we have experienced something else: the power of words. Nelson Mandela once said:

It is never my custom to use words lightly. If 27 years in prison have done anything to us, it was to use the silence of solitude to make us understand how precious words are and how real speech is in its impact on the way people live and die.

James, in the book we’re reading, agrees. Throughout his letter, James keeps returning to the power of the tongue. Today he’s going to show us three things:

that words are powerful

that words reveal our heart, and

how to change our words

The Power of Words

First, words are powerful. In James 3, James spends the bulk of his time talking about the power of our tongues. A tongue, he says, is very small. We know today that the tongue only weighs about 60 to 70 grams. By its size, it’s an inconsequential part of your body. The tongue, however, has an influence on our lives that is out of proportion to its size. There’s probably not a muscle in your body that you use more than your tongue. And there’s probably not another part of your body that has such a direct influence on your life. The tongue is just that powerful.

James makes that exact point in this passage. He compares the tongue to a bit in a horse’s mouth, and to a rudder on a large ship. Both a bit and a rudder are small, but don’t ever think they’re inconsequential. As Sam Allberry writes:

One of the biggest ships in the world is the US aircraft carrier, USS Eisenhower. It weighs over 91,000 tons, is nearly 1,100 feet in length, has a nuclear–powered 280,000-horsepower engine, a complement of 6,100 men and women, and carries nearly 100 aircraft. It is vast. It is like a floating city. And yet all that weight, personnel, and hardware are steered by a rudder that’s just a tenth of one percent of the ship’s size. Something so comparatively small is able to manoeuvre something so huge.

And so it is with our tongues. Your tongue is small, but its influence on your life is going to be disproportionate to its size.

In particular, James says that two things are true of our words that make it so important that we pay attention to them.

Words are Destructive

A lot of people say that words don’t cause lasting damage. “Sticks and stones,” they say. But James doesn’t agree with this at all. “So also the tongue is a small member, yet it boasts of great things. How great a forest is set ablaze by such a small fire!” (James 3:5)

Words are powerful. Fort…

Big Idea: Real faith involves more than just believing. It involves obeying and loving.

I was trying to do a simple thing: to rent a car. I lined up in the cue and waited for my turn. As I waited, I watched the employees in front of me as they served the customers. They looked bored. Disinterested. Unengaged. It felt like we as customers were an inconvenience to them, and that they’d rather be somewhere else.

I don’t mean to be critical. I wouldn’t want their job. Serving the public is very difficult, and I imagine that their job can be very boring at times. But I do want to point out a discrepancy between what I saw before me, and what was hanging on the wall behind them. You see, on the wall was a mission statement. I can’t remember exactly what it said, but it was something like this one:

We aim to exceed our customers’ expectations for service, quality and value, catering to their individual needs, with a spirit of caring, knowledge, and a passion for excellence.

I remember looking at the mission statement, and at the employees, and back at the mission statement, and thinking, “We have a problem here.” It’s easy to hang something on the wall, but it’s another thing altogether to see it practiced in real life.

That’s not just a problem for car rental companies. That’s a problem for all of us. What’s true of car rental companies is also true of churches, and of individuals.

One of my favorite pastors, Ray Ortlund, talks about our need for both gospel doctrine and gospel culture:

If by God’s grace we hold the two together—gospel doctrine and gospel culture—people of all ages will more likely come to our churches with great joy. It is more likely that they will think, “Here is the answer I’ve been looking for all my life.”

But if we have a gospel doctrine without a gospel culture, all we really have is hypocrisy.

The same is true of us individually. If we believe the truths of the gospel, but it hasn’t really changed our lives, then we don’t have something beautiful and practical. We don’t have biblical Christianity. We need the truths of the gospel to really seep into our lives and to change us at the deepest levels.

So today, as we look at the book of James, I want to ask a simple question: What is real faith? What prevents us from thinking we have faith, but just fooling ourselves? According to James, real faith involves more than believing. It involves two things, and here they are:

Faith Involves Obeying

According to James, faith involves listening and hearing. We must hear God’s Word. We must receive it with openness and receptivity. Look at what he says in verses 19 to 21:

Know this, my beloved brothers: let every person be quick to hear, slow to speak, slow to anger; for the anger of man does not produce the righteousness of God. Therefore put away all filthiness and rampant wickedness and receive with meekness the implanted word, which is able to save your souls.

If you’ve been here the previous weeks, you’ll remember that James has been talking about suffering. In this section he tells us not to do what most of us feel like doing when we’re suffering. We’re tempted to mouth off, get angry, and vent. We want to give others a piece of our mind that we couldn’t afford to lose. We can begin to lose a listening posture before God and his Word.

When we suffer, we can stop listening to God. So James reminds us to “receive with meekness the implanted word, which is able to save your souls.” I don’t know if you are aware how important this moment is. What you’re doing right now — listening to God’s Word as it’s preached — is no small matter. James says it’s essential. It has the power to save us. We must approach the task of listening and receiving with all the seriousness that it deserves. It’s one of the most important things…

Big Idea: Don’t blame God when you suffer. Instead, remember who you are in Jesus, and remember his purposes for you.

St. John Ambulance offers a CPR course in Toronto, which you should really take if you haven’t already done so. The ad for their course says, “Ensure you know what to do.” Nobody wants to perform CPR. We all hope that it will be a skill that we learn that we never have to use. Nobody wants to be in that position. But we also know that we may need it one day, and that the time to prepare is now, not when we’re in the middle of the crisis.

In the same way, James offers us a course that we really should take if we haven’t already done so. It’s called “How to Suffer.” We could almost subtitle it, “Ensure you know what to do.” Nobody wants to suffer. We hope that we’ll never need to apply the lessons we learn from the book of James. But we also know that we will need it one day, and the time to prepare is now, now when we’re in the middle of our suffering.

Unlike CPR, it’s guaranteed that we will need this training. Everyone here will suffer. In fact, everyone here has already suffered, and some of you are going through a period of suffering right now. If you’re not, don’t worry, because suffering is coming your way. It’s inevitable. To be human in this broken world means that suffering is simply part of life. Nobody gets off this planet without suffering. It’s inevitable. So we need to learn how to deal with it. The best time to prepare is when we’re not suffering, but it’s never too late to learn.

Last week, if you were here, we began to look at the book of James. Right off the bat, James helps us learn about suffering. He told us that when we suffer, consider how to find joy by remembering the benefits, and remembering God’s help.

But he’s not done yet. In today’s passage, he continues to teach us about suffering. And today he’s going to give us one thing to not to, and three things to do instead.

So let’s learn from James how to suffer. Let’s begin with one thing not to do.

When Suffering, Don’t Blame God

This is one of the greatest temptations we face when we’re suffering. We look for someone to blame, and many times we end up blaming God. We’ve probably all done it. But James tells us to avoid this mistake. Look at what he says in verse 13: “Let no one say when he is tempted, ‘I am being tempted by God,’ for God cannot be tempted with evil, and he himself tempts no one.”

To understand what James is saying, we need to understand two different terms that he uses. One is trials. It’s what James has been talking about so far in this passage. A trial is some hardship that we face, or some form of suffering in our lives.

But there’s another term that James uses is in this passage. He refers to temptation. Trials and temptations are not the same thing, but trials often lead to temptation. Many times when we go through suffering, we see that trail as a temptation: as an occasion to begin to doubt God’s goodness and care for us. Trials aren’t the same thing as temptations, but they can lead to the temptation to begin to blame God.

So James warns us of this danger. And he gives us this rock-solid truth that we need to cling to when we’re tempted: God isn’t the source of our temptation. Sometimes we tend to think that God is throwing obstacles in our way, just waiting for us to fail. What a distorted picture of God. James assures us that it’s never God’s intent to tempt us so that we will fail. God may allow us to go through trials. He may even allow us to be tempted. But he’s not the source of that temptation. God, after all, can’t be tempted, so why would he ever be interested in tempting us? His purpose for us is not that we would fail, but that we would grow through it. We can turn to God when we’re tempted, knowing t…

Big Idea: When you suffer, consider how to find joy by remembering the benefits, and remembering God’s help.

Honestly, the title of today’s sermon isn’t very fun. It’s called “how to suffer.” If I was browsing Amazon and came across a book by that title, I’d probably move on to the next book as soon as possible. Who wants to suffer? And what topic could be less enjoyable than thinking about how to suffer?

I can't make many predictions about 2017, but I can make one: you will suffer. How do I know this? The same way that I know that 2016 involved suffering. Suffering is part of our everyday reality. It's part of the very fabric of life. Although nobody wants to talk about suffering, we all need to learn how to suffer well, because suffering is coming our way whether we like it or not. Troubles are inevitable.

So today I want to look at how to suffer. As we look at the book of James, we discover that we're told to do something that we would never think of doing in a million years. Look at verse 2: "Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds…" (James 1:2).

Here's what James, the half-brother of Jesus, tells us to do when we suffer: count it pure joy. This is, as someone's written, an irrational call. One translation says, "Count yourself supremely happy." You're laid off from work. Hurray! Your landlord says you have to move. Awesome! As Kent Hughes says:

How nice … a letter of encouragement from Pastor Whacko! “Don’t worry … be happy!” Then and now James’ command to “Consider it pure joy … whenever you face trials of many kinds” sounds irrational! Put this verse on a sign next to the expressway and it would appear to be the work of a crazed fanatic. Indeed, to any culture (including ours) determined to insulate itself from trials, even from discomforts, this sounds crazy

Let's look at what he means.

James doesn't mean that we live in denial and that we're in a continual state of fake happiness. The Bible never encourages faking it or denying your emotions. The psalms give us permission to be honest about what we're feeling, and to tell God about it. Faking is never required.

What James says is something more complex and sophisticated. He says "count it" or consider it. This means that we make a deliberate, considered decision when we go through suffering. It means that we honestly feel our emotions, and then begin to make a consideration in our minds about what's going on.

Let me give you an example. Several years ago the Presbyterian pastor Lloyd John Ogilvie underwent the worst year of his life. His wife had undergone five major surgeries, as well as radiation and chemotherapy. Several of his staff members had departed, large problems loomed, and he felt discouraged. Still, he wrote:

The greatest discovery that I have made in the midst of all the difficulties is that I can have joy when I can’t feel like it—artesian joy. When I had every reason to feel beaten, I felt joy. In spite of everything, God gave me the conviction of being loved and the certainty that nothing could separate me from him. It was not happiness, gush, or jolliness but a constant flow of the Spirit through me. At no time did he give me the easy confidence that everything would work out as I wanted it on my timetable, but that he was in charge and would give me and my family enough courage for each day: grace. Joy is always the result of that.

That's what James is talking about. He's not talking about denying or pretending. He's telling us to think about our trials in a specific way. He's not saying we should enjoy the trials themselves. He's saying that we should begin to think about what the troubles bring us. We should consider the purpose of suffering.

2016 wasn't a good year for my running. Last year I had a heel spur, and I d…

Big Idea: Jesus came to speak, conquer, and understand.

Some Christmas sermons look at the predictions of Christmas. Even more Christmas sermons look at the events of Christmas. This year we’re doing something different. We’re looking at the reasons for Christmas. We want to dive in deep and examine why Jesus was born just over two thousand years ago.

Of the facts of Christmas we can say this, in the words of C.S. Lewis:

The Second Person in God, the Son, became human Himself: was born into the world as an actual man — a real man of a particular height, with hair of a particular colour, speaking a particular language, weighing so many stone. The Eternal Being, who knows everything and who created the whole universe, became not only a man but (before that) a baby, and before that a fetus inside a Woman’s body. If you want to get the hang of it, think how you would like to become a slug or a crab. (Mere Christianity)

There you have the facts of Christmas: God became man. But what are the reasons? Why would God stoop so low?

There are many ways to answer. Today’s passage gives us three reasons why Jesus came, and they both change everything. Let me give them to you, and then we’ll unpack them. Jesus came to speak, conquer, and understand.

First: Jesus Came to Speak

Hebrews 1 begins with this amazing sentence:

Long ago, at many times and in many ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed the heir of all things, through whom also he created the world. (Hebrews 1:1-2)

In Greek, the original language, verses 1 to 4 unfold as one long, flowing, beautiful sentence.

The point is this: God communicates. If we were left to our own, we would be able to intuit that there is a God, but we would never be able to figure out what he’s like. Even science would be unable to help us. In his book God's Undertaker, science writer John C. Lennox explains the scope and limits of science with the following story:

Let us imagine that Aunt Matilda has made a beautiful cake, and we take it along to be analyzed by a group of the world's top scientists …. The nutrition scientists will tell us about the number of calories in the cake and its nutritional effect; the biochemists will inform us about the structure of proteins, fats, etc. in the cake … the physicists will be able to analyze the cake in terms of fundamental particles; and the mathematicians will no doubt offer us a set of elegant equations to describe the behavior of those particles.

We have certainly been given a description of how the cake was made and how its various ingredients relate to each other, but suppose I now ask the assembled group of experts a final question: Why was the cake made? The grin on Aunt Matilda's face shows she knows the answer, for she made it for a purpose. But all the scientists in the world will not be able to answer the question—and it is no insult to their disciplines to state their incapacity to answer it. Their disciplines … cannot answer the "why" questions connected with the purpose for which the cake was made. In fact, the only way we shall ever get an answer is if Aunt Matilda reveals it to us. But if she does not disclose the answer to us, the plain fact is that no amount of scientific analysis will enlighten us.

To understand why Aunt Matilda made the cake, Aunt Matilda has to speak. And to understand why God has made all of this, God has to speak. The good news? God has spoken. He has spoken, according to Hebrews, in various ways. Throughout the centuries, God has spoken to us through the prophets. But now, Hebrews says, God has spoken to us most powerfully through Jesus. Jesus is the ultimate communication from God. When Jesus came to earth, he came as God’s clearest, greate…

Big Idea: Jesus draws unlikely people to himself through community.

I’m convinced that there’s something so obvious in the Bible that we usually miss it. It’s like the store that we walk by every day, but one day we ask, “How long has that been there?” and we’re told, “Ummm…five years!”

What is so obvious in the Bible that we usually miss it? Food. More specifically, the role of food in following Jesus. As one person put it, “In Luke’s Gospel Jesus is either going to a meal, at a meal, or coming from a meal” (Robert Karris). Or, “His mission strategy was a long meal, stretching into the evening. He did evangelism and discipleship round a table with some grilled fish, a loaf of bread, and a pitcher of wine” (Tim Chester).

There are three times that the Bible includes the phrase, “The Son of Man came…”

For even the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many. (Mark 10:45)

For the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost. (Luke 19:10)

The Son of Man has come eating and drinking… (Luke 7:34)

The first couple describe why Jesus came: he came to serve, give his life a ransom, and to seek and save the lost. The last verse tells how he did this. It’s about his method. How did Jesus serve and seek and save the lost? By eating and drinking.

Here’s what I’m saying: relationships are essential to sharing the good news about Jesus. And relationships often happen best when food is involved.

We’re in a very short series on our mission as a church. Our mission, in case you don’t know or remember it, is:

Inviting people into community to share in the beauty of relationship with Jesus.

Last week we looked at the first part of this: inviting people into community. We talked about the importance of loving and serving people through hospitality.

Today we’re going to look at the second part of our mission: to share in the beauty of relationship with Jesus. The reason why we invite people into community is because we want people to share in the beauty of relationship with Jesus.

But I have to admit that you and I may have some questions about this. Is hospitality and friendship-building really a good way of people coming to know Jesus? It sounds like it could be a copout: just build relationships with people, and they will start to see the beauty of relationship with Jesus.

So today, I want to look at a story of this happening. I want us to see that when we do this intentionally, we’re not only doing evangelism effectively, but we’re also doing evangelism the way that Jesus did.

The Mission of Jesus

Before we look at the story, I want to look at the end of the story. In the concluding verse of this passage, Jesus says, “For the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost” (Luke 19:10).

This is one of the verses that helps us understand why Jesus came to the earth. It’s crucial to understanding his mission. Jesus was present in this story with two kinds of people:

One group was known for breaking the rules. They were known for being sinners, for being the kind of people who were distant from God. Zacchaeus, the main character in this story, was such a man. He was a tax collector. Tax collectors were viewed as traitors and sell-outs. Not only did he work for Rome, the occupying force, but he was able to levy whatever amount of money he wanted and keep some of it for himself. He and his kind were known for indulging themselves, taking a bit extra at the expense of others, and advancing themselves to get ahead.

Then you have the religious teachers and leaders. They were the ones who followed the rules to a T. They were good, nice, religious, and upright, and they didn’t think very well of the other group of people. They looked down on them, and they looked down on Jesus for spending time with sinners and…

Big Idea: When God reconciled us, he gave us the ministry of reconciliation.

It’s the deepest challenge that any organization faces. It’s one that’s affected schools like Harvard and Yale, the US Army, organizations like the YMCA and YWCA, and pretty much every church that’s ever existed. What is it? Mission drift.

Take Harvard, for instance. Its original mission statement was “To be plainly instructed and consider well that the main end of your life and studies is to know God and Jesus Christ.” Founded in 1636, this university employed exclusively Christian professors, emphasized character formation in its students above all else, and placed a strong emphasis on equipping ministers to share the good news. Every diploma read, “Truth for Christ and the Church.”

Only 80 years after its founding, it had drifted so far from its mission that a group of pastors decided to start a new school that could do better. The new school was called Yale.

Harvard’s and Yale’s founders were unmistakably clear in their goals: academic excellence and Christian formation. Today, they do something very different from their founding purpose. What happened to Harvard and Yale is called “Mission Drift” — and it can happen to us too.

According to Peter Greer and Chris Horst, authors of the book Mission Drift:

Without careful attention, faith-based organizations will inevitably drift from their founding mission. It’s that simple. It will happen. Slowly, silently, and with little fanfare, organizations routinely drift from their original purpose, and most will never return to their original intent…

We’re only three years old as a church, and I can feel the pull of mission drift myself. So today my goal is, as we finish this series on The Heart of God’s Story, to remind us why we exist.

The Reason We Exist

The reason we exist is pretty simple, but absolutely critical. You can sum it up in one word: reconciliation.

In the passage we have before us, the word reconciliation appears five times. It’s the theme of these verses, and it’s the heart and soul of our responsibility. It’s the greatest calling and the greatest privilege we could ever have.

We’re going to see in this passage that there’s a lot to reconciliation, but it’s really at the heart of why we exist as a church. Listen to the passage again and hear how much Paul emphasizes it:

All this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation; that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation. Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ, God making his appeal through us. We implore you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God. For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God. (2 Corinthians 5:18-21)

God is reconciling. He’s also given us the ministry and message of reconciliation.

What exactly does reconciliation mean? It’s to restore someone to favorable or friendly relations after a presumed wrong. It’s the reestablishment of an interrupted or broken relationship.

When Paul talks about reconciliation, he points to the biggest issue that we have. A state of hostility exists between God and humans. It’s the biggest problem that we have to face, and it’s exactly what God has done by reconciling us to himself, and then giving us the ministry of reconciliation.

A few years ago I was involved in a leadership position. For a number of reasons, I ended up ticking a lot of people off. It wasn’t all my fault, but a lot of it was. So there was a period of time that I scheduled appointments with people I’d offended. I met with each one privately and apologized for hurting them.

Every one of these meetings wa…