It’s Brian and Kim Hill here to wrap up this week’s deep dive into James with a little practical application.
A disclaimer before we begin, though: we do not have all this figured out, nor do we perfectly do what we know we should. We mess up—a lot. But, we continue to try and through that, we grow.

The tongue reveals its evil nature by manifesting a hypocritical double nature. The tongue can both praise God and curse people, who are made in God’s image. As James says: “this should not be.”

Words are powerful. In fact they may be the single most powerful medium in the world. They can be instruments of destruction or peace, chaos or calm. We all know this. The original audience of James’ letter knew it, too. And yet they needed to be reminded, just as we do today, of the power and responsibility that comes with speaking.

Faith in Christ will lead to love for, and service of, others, or it simply isn’t faith at all. James 2:14-26 is emphasizing the need for actions to prove a vital, viable, visible faith in God who didn’t just say He loves us, but entered into time and space and gave His Son so that we could know Him and be made righteous.

Today we’ll be focusing on James 2:14-17. I’ll be reading from The Passion Translation, which attempts to translate the essence of the Scripture into modern language.

We have already talked about how you can know your community, how you can understand the theology of your community, how to remember who you are, your proximity to orphans and widows, and avoiding partiality. Today we want to continue with that same topic and we want to talk about how you protect your community.

This week we have talked about knowing your community, understanding the theology of your community, and remembering who you are. Today we are going to look at avoiding partiality and having proximity.

This week we’ve been talking about the book of James. So far we have talked about knowing your community and understanding the theology of your community. For today let’s talk about our value and remembering who we are.

Today we will be diving deeper into the book of James. Yesterday we talked about knowing your community and today we want to talk about understanding the theology of your community.

Today, let’s talk about how do you know your community? James’ letter speaks to various people in different situations and he offers solutions. When we read this letter, do we take for granted that James had an understanding of this community and he had to be listening to what they were going through? This must have taken some time and required him to listen intently and to find out from this community what was going on.