Faith, like our bodies, grows best through resistance and challenge. As we seek to grow in our faith, we are reminder by James the joy we can know when we face trials. Not because trials are fun, but because you have a chance to grow, a chance to be transformed.

It's easy to live life as someone inside, as someone who thinks they have it all together -- that if we just do the right things, we're good. Jesus' interaction with a Jewish leader and a woman desperate for healing for her daughter teaches us that God's view of purity and holiness is different: what comes from inside us toward others reveals to us what God already knows about us. Are you willing to allow God to change those around you who need His love by changing you from within through His Spirit?

Does joy mean happy? Is kindness another word for nice? We get to hear and see the pure joy and excitement of our VBS kids, but what does it look like as adults? These 2 fruits are more than just being nice, but an attitude, a lifestyle, and a God-perspective on life and living.

You are standing face to face with temptations, trials, and pain, this fruit says you are supposed just smile and say I’ll be fine…or maybe not. What does faithfulness look like in the midst of challenges and struggles? What does faithfulness look like?

For both of these fruits the key issue is the same: trusting God. Do we trust God with our lives, our time, and our money? Do we believe that God is really at work and active in our world, or instead that we need to take life by the horns and take justice into our own hands?

Who doesn’t love to win an argument, or to be able to say I told you so at least once in a while? The spiritual fruit of humility though calls us stop climbing on our high horses, our soap boxes, and all the other places we feel that we have THE answer. Instead we called to remember who we are in comparison to our God.

Did you know love and generosity is competitive? The fruits of love and generosity are not just about a hug and a few dollars, but to exhibit these fruits, our passage says we are supposed to “outdo one another” in showing these fruits to others. We are called as believers to a unique and countercultural kind of love and generosity.

Christ's call isn't to be the top man, but rather to serve.

Where do we worship God? At church perhaps. What does worshipping God look like? Singing songs, a few prayers, hearing a sermon. Jesus speaks to a woman to remind her that the places and ways we can worship God are much larger than the boxes we tend to place Him in.

This week we look at the parable of the lost coin and lost sheep. How the shepherd and the woman were thought to be silly looking for something that no one thought they’d find – yet they did it and when the found them all rejoiced.

This is who we are as a Church – people might think we’re crazy for fasting for 21 days, etc. but when they ask why, we just say we’re sweeping the cracks looking for lost treasure.