Sermons – Grace Evangelical Free Church // Wyoming, MN

This will be my 10th sermon from the Psalms. Preaching a couple times of year, at this pace I will finish preaching through the whole book in 70 years. I will only be 109 years old. Even if I am still alive at 109, I know the book of Psalms will still be satisfying truth that I will need to cling to, until I take my last breath.

There are many things I’m eager for in heaven. One reality that I am most eager to experience is no longer having the disconnect I too often feel between what I know is true in my mind and what I feel is true in my heart. In heaven, there will be no more disconnect. Our hearts will have continual, growing, fullness of joy as we experience a perfect relationship with our heavenly Father.

This book reminds us of the struggle we have with the disconnect between what we know is true in our minds, and what we feel is true in our hearts. Too often when I’m struggling with trials or sin, my head knows what is true and right, but my emotions are having a hard time syncing up with that. What is true in my head doesn’t feel true in my heart. The psalms deal with emotions.

Emotions can be used for great good or great evil. Proper, God-exalting feelings find their roots in powerful, God-revealed truths. And Psalm 77 is one of the clearest Psalms that addresses a situation that you are either currently in, have been in, or will probably be in at some point in your Christian life. You will most likely go through the low, dark valley of the shadow of death, wondering where God is, feeling like he has turned his back to you. What do you do in those moments? That is what Psalm 77 is about.

The 150 Psalms are split into five different books, each with its own theme. Psalm 77 is in the third book of the Psalms and the theme of this book is very dark and bleak. After finishing on a high note in book 2, the darkness has set in and the light has disappeared. That is our lives. We will experience times of great joy and goodness, and we will experience times of thick darkness and weighty doubts.

Psalm 77 goes back and forth four times between expressing heaviness and doubts, and a reminder of the truth of who God is. This psalm is a lament. It is unclear what specific situation the author of this Psalm was experiencing.

It is a Psalm of Asaph. Asaph was one of three clans of musicians (Jeduthun and Heman were the other two) that David had put in charge of writing songs to be sung by God’s people, some of which have now been added into the Psalms as Scripture.

This song is given to us to illuminate our path when we are faced with the day of trouble. It is a light to our path, that we may cling to truth when our emotions are pulling us to doubt the steadfast love of God.

THE SITUATION (1-4)

Verses 1-4 lay out the situation the psalmist is in. We don’t know the specifics of the situation, but we know there is an intense sorrow for what he’s going through. He is in trouble and it is deep trouble. Where does he turn and direct his cry to? “I cry aloud to God, aloud to God, and he will hear me (v. 1).”

This is an audible, out loud cry directed towards God, and he is reminding himself that God hears it. Yet, he’s struggling with believing that. As we will see in just a few verses, he lays out question after question as to whether the Lord has turned from him. God hears him, but will God do anything to rescue him out of the trouble? Where is God in this situation he is facing?

He is longing and looking for God to show up on his behalf. “In the day of my trouble I seek the Lord; in the night my hand is stretched out without wearying; my soul refuses to be comforted (v. 2).” This trouble is keeping him up at night and he’s on the laid out on the floor, arms outstretched, pleading with God to bring comfort to his soul. But it is not coming. Everything seams bleak to him.

He’s fighting to see God’s promises though.

James 1:19-21 Know this, my beloved brothers: let every person be quick to hear, slow to speak, slow to anger; 20 for the anger of man does not produce the righteousness that God requires. 21 Therefore put away all filthiness and rampant wickedness and receive with meekness the implanted word, which is able to save your souls.

INTRODUCTION

Have you ever needed to tell someone you loved, something for their good, knowing it would be really hard for them to hear it? How do you go about it in such a way that is both winsome and compelling? James’s whole letter is filled with this kind of thing and he seems to have settled in on an approach. Have you noticed his pattern? More or less, five times in 18 verses, James has commanded or shared something he knew would be challenging with the same four-part process.

First, James made sure to get his readers’ attention by issuing a fairly provocative, but substanceless command/statement. “Count it all joy,” “If any of you lacks wisdom,” “Let the lowly [and rich] brother boast…,” Blessed is the man …,” and “Do not be deceived.” To this point in this letter, James introduced every new clause this way. He gave his readers just enough to grab their attention, but not enough to know where he was going.

Next, James frequently used a term of endearment to make sure his readers knew that his primary motivation was love. James referred to them as “My brothers,” “brother,” and “my beloved brothers” so far in this letter. It was important to James for his readers to know that he cares deeply for them.

James then followed up his attention-grabbing intro and love-reiteration with the real substance of his challenging new thought. “Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds,” “If any…lack wisdom, let him ask God…in faith, with no doubting,” “Let the lowly brother boast in his exaltation, and the rich in his humiliation,” “Blessed is the man who remains steadfast under trial,” and “do not be deceived…every god and perfect gift is from above.” Again, James’s knew that he was calling his readers to some very challenging areas of obedience.

Finally, then, James made sure to help his readers see why obedience was both right and good (as it always is). “The testing of your faith produces steadfastness…that you may be perfect and complete, lacking nothing,” “God gives [wisdom] generously to all without reproach,” “the rich man [will] fade away in the midst of his pursuits,” “The man who remains steadfast under trial…will receive the crown of life,” and “do not be deceived…[for those who are not are] a kind of firstfruits of [God’s] creatures.” That’s a lot of incentive to do the hard things he’s called them to. James’s point is that the fruit of obedience is exponentially more valuable than disobedience, so obey!

Our passage for this morning is no exception. He has an attention grabber, a term of endearment, a hard command, and a powerful incentive. That’s James’s familiar formula and that is the structure for this morning’s sermon. The main point of all of it is that God requires righteousness from His people, no matter our circumstances. Hardship is never justification for wickedness. But more importantly still, James helps us see that God always provides for His people what He requires from His people. Obviously, there’s a lot here. Let’s pray and then make our way through it, in order that we might live as God intends.

ATTENTION GRABBER

If you have something important to say and you want to make sure the people you need to say it to are paying attention, what do you do (especially if you’ve already said some important things and have more to say after this)? (More so as a youth pastor) I’ve tried to do so with a dramatic sermon title (“The Ridiculousness of Christmas” was one of my favorites).

16 Do not be deceived, my beloved brothers. 17 Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change. 18 Of his own will he brought us forth by the word of truth, that we should be a kind of firstfruits of his creatures.

INTRODUCTION

Last week I gave a fairly lengthy recap of the beginning of James’s letter (the stuff we’ve already covered). I’m going to give a much shorter one again this morning. It’s important to keep these things fresh in our minds because James continues his argument from the first 17 verses into v.18 (our text for today). But it’s even more important because doing so makes sure we don’t lose sight of the continual mercy, grace, and goodness of God through it all. To those ends, here’s the first seventeen verses of James in ten sentences…

James’s readers were being persecuted for their faith in Jesus. James wrote to help them live in light of the fact that God was using their trials to make them more like Jesus (2-4). James’s readers were struggling to know how to honor God in their persecution. James wrote to help them live in light of the fact that God gives wisdom to all who ask Him for it. (5-8). James’s readers were having a hard time with the low place in society they’d been dragged into. James wrote to help them live in light of the fact that God exalts the lowly (9-11). In the midst of all of this, and on top of all of this, James’s readers were being tempted by their own desires to sin. James wrote to help them live in light of the facts that God never tempts His people to sin, unchecked sin kills, and the crown of life belongs to those who remain steadfast (12-15). And James’s readers were prone to deception (especially with regard to the relationship between their uncomfortable circumstances and God’s goodness). James wrote to help them live in light of the facts that good comes only from God and God only gives good to His people (16-18).

In short, in love, James wrote to share truth with his struggling readers and to help them put that truth into practice.

In our passage for this morning, James continues on in this same mission by describing God’s greatest good: bringing His people out of death and into fellowship with Him! James wanted his readers to recognize the fact that since God did not withhold His greatest good from them, He would certainly not withhold any lesser good. In this short, simple verse, we’re given a surprisingly clear, behind-the-scenes view of God’s saving work in His people. Let’s pray, once again, for ears to hear, a mind to grasp, a heart to love, and a will to act.

GOD’S GREATEST GOOD

One of the questions I like to ask professing Christians is what they understand God’s greatest good to be. It’s very telling to hear someone describe the most significant thing they believe God could do for them. What do you think? What’s the greatest good you can imagine God giving you? Among the people I’ve asked this question to, some have simply confessed ignorance. Some have pointed to physical healing and health (either for them or a loved one). Some have suggested some form of earthly prosperity. And while the majority have spoken of heaven or salvation, almost none have explicitly pointed to God’s bringing about fellowship with Himself as His greatest good; which is what James has in mind here.

Another set of questions that I’ve found to be helpful diagnostic tools relate to how and why God saves. Again, there are a handful of common, mostly-true answers (typically, when we choose Him and because He loves us), but again, it’s not all that often that I meet someone who is able to confidently and biblically drill down very deep into the heart of the matter. James helps us with that as well in this passage....

16 Do not be deceived, my beloved brothers. 17 Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change. 18 Of his own will he brought us forth by the word of truth, that we should be a kind of firstfruits of his creatures.

INTRODUCTION

Welcome back to James. If you’re just joining us, I’ve been preaching through a letter written by Jesus’ brother, James, to a group of Christians who had been driven from their families and homes because of their faith in Jesus.

James’s readers were, as are so many of God’s people around the world today, steeped in trials. They had chosen to follow Jesus and a hard life was made harder because of it. James loved them and wanted to help them navigate the hardships of life in a way that would honor God and be good for them and the world.

To those ends, he’d already helped them to see that rather than counting their hardships as a source of self-pity, they ought to count them as all joy, since God works in every hardship among all of His people for their good. But James knew that rightly counting hardships as joy requires a great deal of heavenly wisdom. For that reason, he again sought to help his readers by telling them where to find that kind of wisdom. It is found, James wrote, in God alone, but God always gives it generously to those who ask Him for it.

Another hardship that was ever before James’s readers was that of being mocked for their lowly condition. Their persecution led to financial and physical hardships. Many derided them for those hardships. James once again wrote to help them frame their lowly condition and the response of others to it properly. He did so by reminding them that in the kingdom of God (unlike the kingdom of this world) it is the lowly who are exalted and the exalted who are made low.

In addition to the trials that come from living in a fallen world and among fallen people, James’s readers’ own sinful desires were constantly ready to give into temptation if they were not careful. This too, James sought to help them to navigate in faith. And he did so by reminding them that their temptations to sin were never from God and that God grants the crown of life for those who resist in faith.

That’s where we’ve been so far in James—the first fifteen verses.

As you can easily see, a great deal of James’s message was counter to that of the world and even that of common sense. For those reasons and more, James felt compelled to warn his readers to be constantly vigilant, constantly on the lookout, for deception. The world, the devil, and even their own flesh were continually whispering lies to them—especially about the trials and temptations that came their way. That’s our passage today.

In vs.16-17 James warned that on one hand, his readers were vulnerable to being deceived that their trials were in vain and that their temptations were from God (that God might do them harm). On the other hand, James warned that they were vulnerable to being deceived that good might be found in anything but God and that God would give them anything other than good.

In all of this is a sweet picture of the love of God, a sweet display of James’s love for these people, and real help for every Christian to guard ourselves against believing lies. Let’s pray for ears to hear and the conviction and strength to turn our hearing into doing.

DO NOT BE DECEIVED (16)

The opening line of our passage serves as a transition between the negative side of James’s argument (vs.12-15) and the positive side (vs.17-18). In it (v.16), James commanded his readers to refuse to allow deception (on either side) to overtake them.

16 Do not be deceived, my beloved brothers.

Why did James feel the need to write this? Why issue this warning to this people?

James 1:12-15 Blessed is the man who remains steadfast under trial, for when he has stood the test he will receive the crown of life, which God has promised to those who love him. 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. 14 But each person is tempted when he is lured and enticed by his own desire. 15 Then desire when it has conceived gives birth to sin, and sin when it is fully grown brings forth death.

INTRODUCTION

Growing up, I went through the Ida Public Schools system. I had Mr. Cunningham, Mr. Weins, and Mr. Dick as principles in elementary, middle, and high school. I also had dozens of teachers. Under their leadership, I went to school for nine months of the year, six hours a day, and five days a week, over the course of thirteen years. If my math is correct, that’s 2,300 days or 14,000 hours or (most appropriately for how it felt) 840,000 minutes of time I spent in a classroom. Aside from gym (on the non-square-dancing days), I have only two distinct memories of looking forward to going to class. For a bit of time each day, over the course of a week in elementary school, we took part in “mini society.” Each student had to create a business and open it up on the last day for our classmates and parents (I printed banners on a dot-matrix printer). That was fun. And for a few days in physics, we worked to create self-propelled cars made of paper, drinking straws, paperclips, and rubber bands. I genuinely looked forward to that as well. There were probably a few other times I’m just not remembering, but being generous that means I made my way through all those years of school, enjoying (maybe) a few hundred of the 840,000 minutes I was there. I had a distant, vague sense that it was right, but I was only there because my parents made me go. As you can imagine, that made learning pretty difficult and my attitude in school pretty bad.

Unfortunately, for many, including myself at times, that is a lot like our approach to dealing with sin. We’re Christians, so we know we should care, and we kind of do, so we make an effort at times to stop sinning, but if we’re honest, all too often our days are marked by doing the things we want and feeling resentment toward anything (parents, friends, conscience, preaching, Bible reading) that gets in our way. Occasionally, we experience some measure of gladness in fighting back sin, but overall, it’s an act of discipline, not delight.

But Grace, for those of you who long to long for the righteousness, for those of you who are tired of trying to muscle your way out of sin, and for those of you who genuinely want to follow Jesus even though your flesh so often pulls so hard in the other direction, this is one of the most significant passages in the NT. In it, James gives Christians two of the most effective weapons available in the fight against sin. The first is one we’ve already seen in a different form—the sanctifying power of a superior affection. The second is new in James—a description of the life-cycle of sin. My aim in the end is to help you cry out “What gifts of grace!” as you make war on your sin.

THE SANCTIFYING POWER OF A SUPERIOR AFFECTION (12)

One of the most significant principles of the Christian’s war on sin and life in Christ is the sanctifying power of a superior affection. As I just mentioned, James has already introduced this principle. In commanding his readers to count their trials as joy (1:2-4), James gave the reason why—because it is through the pain of trial that God often gives His greatest gifts. Trials are hard, James understood, that’s what makes them trials, but the cost they extract doesn’t compare to the reward they bring when we endure them in faith. To believe that is to be able to not merely endure trials, but count them as all joy.

In this passage,

James 1:9-11 Let the lowly brother boast in his exaltation, 10 and the rich in his humiliation, because like a flower of the grass he will pass away. 11 For the sun rises with its scorching heat and withers the grass; its flower falls, and its beauty perishes. So also will the rich man fade away in the midst of his pursuits.

INTRODUCTION

To help you understand the flow of the beginning of James’s letter and to set you up to best understand and apply it, I’d like to begin this sermon by paraphrasing the first eleven verses. That is, I’d like to share with you, what I understand to be, James’s meaning in more familiar terms.

“Dear brothers and sisters in Christ. I know that you have paid a price for following Jesus. I know that on account of your faith in Jesus you have been persecuted. I know you have endured many different trials. But here’s what you need to know. The hardships that are behind and before you are all—every one of them—instruments of God to make you like Jesus. Believe it or not, they are a gift from God to sanctify you. Your holiness is far more valuable than your temporary happiness and so you must rejoice that God is making you entirely holy, even though He is doing it, at times, at the expense of your comfort.

Now I understand that all of this is tricky. It takes a kind of wisdom you know you don’t have to understand and believe and live in light of these things. But take heart in the knowledge that God (and God alone) has the wisdom you need. What’s more, God is eager to give it to everyone who trusts Him enough to seek it from Him. And more still, He will give it generously and glad-heartedly every time we ask Him for it. He will help you know how to live in a manner pleasing to Him even in these tumultuous times.

There’s something else I want you to understand too [from our passage this morning]. Instead of believing and acting on the truths I just shared, some of you have been feeling sorry for yourselves and the rest are proud of your worldly accomplishments. Instead of counting all of your trials as gain, you are envious of those who have much by the world’s standards, and those who have much are bragging about them. Do you not yet know that you are now citizens of God’s kingdom and everything is different in God’s Kingdom? Those whom the world counts as lowly, God exalts, even as those whom the world counts as exalted, God humbles. Listen to me when I tell you about your new citizenship and then trust God to help you think, feel, and live differently in light of it—in all joy, come what may.”

I hope it’s obvious that there’s a lot in all of that. Distilled, however, the heart of our passage for this morning is this: it is a gift from God to recognize the lowliness that sin has produced in all of us, because it is only the lowly who look to God for the mercy and grace we all so desperately need. When we come to God in our desperate need, He will forgive us, free us, and lift us up as His sons and daughters. And in that gracious exaltation we must boast! Let’s pray and ask God for help to see His glory in, and our right response to, all of this.

THE LOWLY ARE EXALTED

In these few verses James addressed his readers who are both lowly (1:9) and lofty (1:10-11). And to both his aim was to correct certain lies they had come to believe about the nature of their respective positions. Let’s first consider his charge to the lowly.

The Lowliness of James’s Readers Came from Following Jesus

Our passage opens with a command to “…the lowly brother…”. We’ll come to the content of the command in just a minute, but the thing to notice here is that this part of his letter was specifically addressed to a group of Christians who were in hard places.

The lowliness James refers to is primarily the product of the persecution his readers were experiencing o...

James 1:5-8 If any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask God, who gives generously to all without reproach, and it will be given him. 6 But let him ask in faith, with no doubting, for the one who doubts is like a wave of the sea that is driven and tossed by the wind. 7 For that person must not suppose that he will receive anything from the Lord; 8 he is a double-minded man, unstable in all his ways.

INTRODUCTION

One of the trickiest parts of rightly interpreting James is in understanding what, if any, connections exist between his pastoral charges. For instance, in 1:2-4, James commanded his readers to count all of their trials as all joy. Did he then mean 1:5-8, our passage for this morning, to build on that? Is 1:5-8 the result of James anticipating his readers wanting to obey 1:2-4, but not knowing how? Or, did James mean 1:5-8 to address another, separate, issue he knew his readers were dealing with?

There are strong textual clues that suggest James did mean our passage for this morning to build on our passage from last week. And yet, we aren’t sure here and are even less sure in other passages. We’ll need to be extra careful to avoid making connections that aren’t there, and equally careful not to miss the ones that are.

The fact of the matter here, however, is that we do need wisdom to know how to count all our trials as all joy, but we also need wisdom for every other aspect of our lives. In other words, whatever connection James had (or didn’t have) in mind between verses 4 and 5, we need wisdom every minute of every day and so this is another passage of great practical help for all who long to be not hearers of God’s Word only, but doers also.

In simplest terms, here’s the heart of this passage and sermon: Knowing how to obey any of God’s commands, and especially the one about counting every trial as all joy, requires wisdom not native to us. Graciously, in our passage for this morning, we find a promise from God to give wisdom to all who seek it from Him in faith. To see all of this, we’ll consider six wisdom principles found in James 1:5-8. Let’s pray that God would help us see our need for wisdom, seek it in the one place it may be found, and then live lives based entirely upon it.

YOU NEED WISDOM BUT YOU DON’T HAVE IT

Should a single-mom use her insurance money from a car accident to have her old car fixed up or stretch herself by buying something more reliable?

Am I called to ministry, and if so, to what specific ministry?

Should a struggling family adopt a large group of kids who desperately need a godly family and home?

How should we handle issues related to COVID in our home when my wife and I see things very differently?

How do you handle the funeral of a baby of unbelieving parents, whose life was avoidably cut short?

Should a woman married to a man also “marry” another woman to bring her under the protection of her husband (a practice called “nyumba ntobhu”)?

Should I go to college, and if so, where?

What are my Spiritual gifts and how do I use them to strengthen the church?

How should we educate our kids?

And, of course, why is God allowing me to suffer so much for so long, and what am I supposed to do about it?

These are just a few of the countless real-life situations we encounter that require a kind of wisdom we desperately want, but usually do not have. Indeed, as Paul says in 1 Corinthians 3:18-19, “Let no one deceive himself. If anyone among you thinks that he is wise in this age, let him become a fool that he may become wise. 19 For the wisdom of this world is folly with God…”

V.5 begins with words, therefore, that ought to ring true for all of us, “If any of you lacks wisdom…”

Grace, I hope it’s obvious to you that anyone who has tried to follow Jesus for even three minutes has felt both the need for and lack of wisdom.

James 1:1-4 James, a servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ, To the twelve tribes in the Dispersion: Greetings.

2 Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds, 3 for you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness. 4 And let steadfastness have its full effect, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing.

INTRODUCTION

You’re running a late for a meeting with a friend and you notice the traffic is completely stopped in front of you. What happens in your heart?

You’re 24 hours out from a vacation you’d been planning for months. You need it really badly. You’re exhausted and a few days off the grid is just what you need. As you’re packing up the last few bags, you hear your kid throwing up in the next room. What’s your first thought?

Imagine going about your day and everything is happening mostly according to plan. It’s a pretty good day. And then your phone rings. It’s your Dr.’s office. The test results came back positive. You have cancer. What is your response?

You lied to your parents, telling them that you were sick so you didn’t have to go to school. In the middle of the day, your best friend texts to see if you can go skiing that evening. How would that make you feel?

You’ve been sharing the gospel with your neighbor for months and without giving you a reason he says he’s no longer interested. What happens inside?

Life as a whole just isn’t what you were hoping for. You don’t have the job you pictured yourself in, your church isn’t as healthy as you would like it to be and you’re not sure where you fit in, your health isn’t great, and on top of all of that, none of your relationships have the kind of depth you know they’re supposed to have. What do you imagine to be your dominant emotion?

You’ve prayed for God’s help for the same thing for months, but without any apparent response. How would you process that?

You’re on the mission field. You’ve poured the last five years of your life into sharing the gospel with a people who have never heard before. You’ve endured sickness, persecution, and rejection, but you’ve remained faithful and steadfast. And then a legal technicality forces you to leave the country. How do you feel about that?

Living in a fallen world means that trials are inevitable. The question, then, is not if we’ll face these kinds of things, but how we’ll respond to them when we do. Without any explanation James opens his letter with a command to have one main response to every trial that comes our way. Looking closely at his prescribed response is the heart of this text and sermon.

It is my earnest hope and prayer that with the Spirit’s help, I will be able to explain what James meant and why he meant it. And on the other side of that, it is my earnest hope and prayer that the Spirit would be pleased to move us all at least a little closer to obeying this command this morning. That is, I’ve asked God all week to be pleased to help us see and then respond to our trials differently in light of this text.

THE COMMAND

I know you just heard the passage read, and I hope you read it on your own recently, but to help you fully appreciate the weight and significance of the passage I want to ask you to try to forget what you know and try to think through the passage with me as if you were hearing it for the first time.

This short passage has two main parts. In the first part, v.2, James issues a pretty radical and extremely counterintuitive command. In the second part, vs.3-4, he gives the reasoning behind his command.

Grace, if we are to obey a command that calls us to do (as we’ll soon see) the exact opposite of what we’re inclined to do and the exact opposite of what almost everything around us is calling for and modeling, we’d better make sure we understand both the command and its rationale really, really well.

We had some recording difficulties today had had to use unusual methods to record the sermon audio. Please forgive the low quality.

Before this sermon was preached, the entire book of James was read for the congregation. Consider reading it now yourself. It’ll probably take you about 10 or 15 minutes.

INTRODUCTION

Welcome to 2022 and the NT book of James. Having spent nearly four years preaching through OT books (Hosea, Ruth, and Genesis), it’s good to be back in the NT. Likewise, having spent the better part of those years dealing with narrative, it’s good to be back in a letter. Of course, all of God’s Word is God’s Word and good to be in, but I’ve always felt more at home in the NT letters than anywhere else in the Bible. With that said, James’s letter is not a normal NT letter. There isn’t a clear structure and it can feel more like a collection of proverbs than a traditional letter. Nevertheless, the things I most appreciate about the NT letters—the pastoral tone and shepherding purposes—are impossible to miss.

In this first, introductory sermon on James my aims are to 1) Set you up well for the text-specific sermons to come by helping you see the big picture of James, and 2) Help you see a bit of the unique glory of God in James. To accomplish those twin aims, I’m going to answer three questions: 1) Who was James, 2) What prompted James to write this letter, and 3) What does James’s letter look like from high up? As I do these things, I think you’ll see that the banner over all of James is that God’s glory is such that we must not claim to believe in Him if we do not live in obedience to Him. Let’s pray that God would get glory and we would get help for godliness through this sermon and the ones that follow.

WHO WAS JAMES?

The letter opens with a fairly traditional greeting. In the first line, the author identifies himself as, “James, a servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ…”.

Who was James? That’s a question that takes up more room in the commentaries than I was expecting. There were (at least) four James’s mentioned in the NT. In Acts 1:13, when the apostles were choosing a replacement for Judas, we read of three of them.

And when they had entered, they went up to the upper room, where they were staying, Peter and John and James and Andrew, Philip and Thomas, Bartholomew and Matthew, James the son of Alphaeus and Simon the Zealot and Judas the son of James…

James, the brother of Jesus, is the fourth NT James. In Matthew 14:55 (and Mark 6:3), as the leaders of the synagogue were rejecting the authority of Jesus, they exclaimed, “And are not his brothers James and Joseph and Simon and Judas?”

Largely based on the relative obscurity of two of the four, the ages of the James’s as compared to the date of the letter, and also because of the near universal understanding of the early church, it has long been accepted that the author of this letter is James, the brother of Jesus.

As Jesus’ brother, James would have had a life-long, up-close view of Jesus. Perhaps no one would have had a better opportunity to assess Jesus’ messianic claims than James. I have one sister. She loves me dearly. I think it’s safe to say that she has a good deal of respect for me. And yet, I can promise you that if I ever began to make claims about being the sinless Son of God, she certainly wouldn’t be writing a letter to affirm my claims. Instead, she’d be ready with a laundry list of stories that would shatter any sliver of belief that anyone had. In other words, the fact that James accepted Jesus—his own brother—as the Christ, then, is a big deal.

It is interesting, however, that James is said to have become fully convinced that Jesus was the Christ only after the resurrection. In John 7:5 we’re told, “not even [Jesus’] brothers believed in him.” We don’t know why that was.

INTRODUCTION

Having made it all the way through Genesis over the past many months, we’ll spend one more week going back through the entire thing. My main aim is to answer one question, “What does Genesis tell us about our place in God’s plan?”. Or, “What does Genesis tell us about how to live our lives in a manner pleasing to God?”. We’ll see the answer to that question as we revisit six of the main themes in the book (creation, fellowship, work, sin, judgment, redemption, and fulfillment).

Before I pray, let me mention one more thing. The fact that Genesis answers (or at least begins to answer) the question, “What is our place in God’s plan?,” points to something greater still. We all have all kinds of plans of varying degrees of wisdom and with varying degrees of power to carry them out. But Genesis is ultimately about a God who has the power to perfectly create and carry out a plan for all time and space and to assign us a place in it. In other words, Genesis is really about God putting His immeasurable glory on display in the things He made. The aim of this sermon, then, is to help all of us come to know God better and live more in line with the perfect purposes for which He made us. Let’s pray that God would be pleased to use this sermon to make it so.

CREATION

The very first theme in Genesis, and the beginning of any understanding of our purpose in God’s plan, is creation. The book begins with the famous words, “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” Grace, remember this today: all that has been made, has been made by God. Nothing that has come into existence has come through any means other than the hand of God. Or, as John 1:3 says, “All things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made.”

God Rules

There are two keys to understanding creation in Genesis and its significance for our place in God’s plan. First, that God made all that has been made, means that everything belongs to God. Because all things have come from God, God rightfully rules over all things. This is easy to see from the beginning of Genesis as God tells light and darkness, sky, land, and water, plants, animals, and people—all that was made—what to do and all things obey without pause. Even after the fall, Genesis is filled with examples of God sovereignly ruling over the heavens and the earth, big and small events, weather and food, ordinary people and kings, barrenness and fruitfulness, and cities and nations. God created and God rules perfectly over His creation.

God Designed

The second aspect of God’s creation that we don’t want to miss, is that God not only brought all things into existence and rules over them all, He also created all things with a specific nature and purpose. That is, things are what God designed them to be—nothing more, nothing less, and nothing different.

That God not only created, but also ordered His creation is also made clear from the very beginning. After declaring that God made the heavens and earth in v.1, in v.2 we read that “The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.” What follows is two chapters (Genesis 1 and 2) describing God’s ordering of the formless and dark void; of God assigning (or revealing) the nature and purpose to everything He made. The main point here is that things are, and are for, whatever the Creator has said they are and are for.

What Does this Say About Our Place in God’s Plan?

I hope it’s easy for you to see that in light of God as creator (ruler and designer) of all, our place in God’s plan is as ones belonging to God. He is our God. We are not our own. We are not ultimately in charge of our own lives. We are not our highest authority. It is not up to us to decide who we are or how we fit in the world in the world.