Last week we started the letter of James – and it is my intention to work through this letter (sometimes in the morning, sometimes in the evening, sometimes – like next week and the two weeks after – at both) between now and December. I hope you will get to share my enthusiasm for it, because whenever I am preaching in the next couple of months, this is where we will be, in this particular bit of the Bible.
So let’s pray that it is going to be useful.
Lord God, in the Bible you have told us what we do not know and what we need to know – about yourself, about ourselves, and about the world we live in. Without your help we will not understand this letter, and, unless we understand what we are reading, it will not change our lives. So please give us that help now. In Jesus’ name, Amen.
Verse 1 of Chapter 1 tells us whom the letter is from and whom the letter is to. It does not tell which James this was, but he is normally assumed to be James the Just, brother of Jesus, leader of the Jerusalem church, martyred around 62AD. And when he addresses the letter to the ‘twelve tribes scattered among the nations’ (v1), he is referring in that way to Christians generally, to the true Israel of God, the believing Christian community throughout the world.
And that’s all I’m going to say about verse 1.
What is the letter going to be about?
Well, I think James spells that out in these first few verses that we looked at last week (2-4): A joyful process, through trials and testing, to maturity and completion.
We thought of a cake mixture, passing through the oven, to the finished product.
This week, let’s use a different illustration. Jesus told us that the Christian life begins with a new birth – “You must be born again,” he said. I’ve asked Katy and Elizabeth Townsend to join me up here because I want you to look at them. Elizabeth is just three months old, and daughter of Katy. A baby and an adult – both human beings, but what a difference! Indeed, an alien, if he’d just encountered Elizabeth, might even be inclined to wonder if she was the same species as Katy, an adult human being!
This letter is about how one becomes the other – growth into maturity. It is about growing up. The end of the process (see end of v.4 – ‘mature and complete, not lacking anything’) lies for all Christians the other side of death, when we will see God face to face and will finally be made like Him. (If you are someone who has not yet put your trust in Jesus Christ and you know that you are not yet born again, then I invite you to consider this process, as James will describe it to us, and weigh up whether you yourself would like to be a part of it.)
For the Christians here, James’ theme is going to be Growing Up, and that will mean…
1. Growing Pains (vv. 2-4)
Notice the nature of the Christian life according to James. v2 ‘Consider it pure joy, my brothers [and sisters], whenever you face trials of many kinds’. According to James, it will be a matter of meeting trials and encountering difficulty. Faith will be tested. If someone newly baptised was to say to an older Christian, who has been going for rather longer, "Is it going to slope uphill all the way?" we would have to say, "Yes, to the very end." "Is it going to be this hard always?" Well, the New Testament never allows us to expect anything else. Perhaps the non-Christian here is thinking, "It would be so easy if I could believe." Christian belief is such an escape, such a cop-out, isn't it? No, Christian faith will be tested. And if you have a Christian faith, it is being tested, day by day, moment by moment. That is the nature of the Christian life, that you meet various trials, things that make it hard for you and me to go on believing, even for one more day or one more week. It is the nature of Christian faith that it is tried in that way. And when we encounter these trials (and though we should not seek them, we cannot avoid them), then we are to count it all joy, according to this verse. We are to reckon ourselves fortunate.
Now, this is not the sort of foolish pretence, the sort of mindless attitude that says, "Praise the Lord anyway!" "Broken your leg? Praise the Lord anyway!" I had a friend at college who used to use the little catchphrase, "What fun!" the whole time. "What fun! What fun!" he used to say about anything. Another friend met him after his finals and asked him how he'd got on. "Failed them all!" he said, "What fun! What fun!" He had lost touch with reality.
The New Testament knows and understands human suffering and sorrow. We have a saviour who bore them himself. He never belittles them, never pretends that they are not there. It isn't a frivolous pretence that looks at pain and says, "This really is great fun." It tells us rather to think hard about those things in life that we find difficult. The things that test and try Christian faith, that say to us, "Can you go on believing in God if this has just happened to you (or to him, or to her, or to them)?" The loss of a job, the loss of a loved one, the loss of a hope, the breaking up of a relationship. The famine, the drought, the disease, the war, that afflict this planet. Can you go on believing? For only in this way of testing will Christian faith grow, like a muscle that needs exercise. Christian faith grows through trial, it lives by trial. It may not be fun, but it is necessary. What will come out of it? v3 ‘because you know that the testing of your faith develops perseverance’. And that is essential to reach the goal of v4, ‘Perseverance must finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything’. That is where God is trying to take us. Not if you are not a Christian — he has not got that task in your life yet. But if you are a Christian, that's where he's trying to take you. Now you and I would settle for much less, wouldn't we? We'd be happy with just a few minor improvements here and there in life. A little less temper, a little less laziness, a little less lust, a little more courage, a little more virtue or a little more zeal. But not Jesus. Oh no, He’s not content with a minor change in your or my life, a few little adjustments here and there. He has a vision of us as he means us to be. And He is going to get us there.
There is a theology that runs around these days that “God just wants to make you happy”. Well, like many of these things it’s a distortion of the truth. It is true – Jesus does want to make us happy. But He knows the only route to true happiness is holiness – and that means having my sin dealt with. And that is always painful. So there is only one way He can bring me to heaven –
I walked a mile with pleasure
She chattered all the way,
But left me none the wiser
For all she had to say.
I walked a mile with sorrow
And never a word said she,
But oh the things I learned from her,
When sorrow walked with me.
Pain makes us think. We talk, don’t we, about the problem of pain? We rarely ponder the problem of happiness. Why should a holy God give restful days, a healthy body, a happy home, a secure living, a kind family, to a sinner like me? I don’t deserve it, not remotely. And perhaps I should ask that question more often. And in the meantime I should be grateful for the things in life that do make me stop and think, the things that stretch my faith and bring me up short, in my assumption that I deserve all that comes to me. Every breath I breathe, I think I deserve it, I have a right to it. But it all comes by pure gift. And you and I do not deserve the next breath we breathe now.
God allows me to get into many things in life without praying about them, but He often sees to it that I don’t get out of them again without learning to pray about them. Perhaps we are not learning now to thank God for the good things He has already given us – our families, our friends, our health – But we may well learn to pray to him if he takes them from us. Parents, do we thank God for our children every day? Or, if we suffer some awful tragedy and bereavement, will it then be turned into bitterness and anger at God, that He took away from us something we never really thanked Him for in the first place? We don’t own our children, and we don’t deserve them. We need to apply that to family, to marriage, to friends, to health, to the talents and abilities that we’ve been given. Thank God, because trials will teach us to value them, even when prosperity doesn’t.
Although, notice, it is not the trials themselves that produce maturity; it is the perseverance under trial that must be allowed to (v.4) ‘finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything’. Perseverance has been described as cooperating with God in the process of growing up. And that is what James encourages us to do – to cooperate with God in the process of growing up – and for that we will need wisdom.
2. Getting Wiser
a) Asking for wisdom (v.5).
What are we going to need if we are going to be able to think through and ponder the painful struggles of life? We're going to need wisdom. There is an oriental proverb that says:
Pain makes you think;
Thinking makes you wise;
Being wise makes pain bearable.
That is the same logic. But James is not talking of merely bearing pain. He is talking about understanding pain. There is a God-given wisdom which allows us to see beneath the surface of our lives, so we begin to see God's purposes in allowing pain, trial and difficulty. We begin to see what Jesus is up to. Notice this wisdom is given by God freely and generously v5, but it is the testing in v2-3 that makes us ask for it. When my faith is under pressure and I'm close to despair, that's when I cry out, "Lord help me understand, open my eyes, why is this going on?" Victor Frankl said, 'Man is destroyed by suffering without meaning, not by mere suffering.' And it is this wisdom that provides a meaning to what is happening to us. It allows us to understand. It gives us a framework within which we can cope with it. Nietzsche said, 'If a man has a why for his life, he can live with almost any how.' And yet I find even a common cold produces this sort of reaction in me – “I can't understand why I'm suffering like this". Well, God wants to give me understanding. He won't reproach me for not understanding my suffering myself. God does not expect me to be wise. But he will reveal the answer to me, that he is dealing with me in his own infinitely loving way, to get me ready for heaven. That is not the privilege of the non-Christian, but it is the privilege of the Christian to know, with every experience that comes to us, that God is at work in me and on me.
But it is not just a case of asking for this wisdom; we must also be prepared to receive it.
b) Receiving wisdom (vv. 6-8)
Now, James is talking here about acted doubt rather than mental doubt. It's practical rather than intellectual. The issue is not whether God can give me this wisdom. It is whether I will trust in the wisdom God gives, or in something else as well. God may show us, and perhaps he is doing so even now as we look at this passage, that there have to be certain painful experiences in all our lives if he is to sieve and refine sin and selfishness out of us. But we may try to avoid those experiences. We put our trust in ways of escaping trial instead. God, for example, invites us to trust him with our money. But the anxiety is too painful for us. So we do some giving, but we have a pension fund, or an investment portfolio, or a few securities (which is a strange word for them when you think about it) and we put our trust in our own financial provision as well. He tells us to trust him with our marriages, but when the relationship gets difficult we start to look for consolation outside it. Or if we think he's not going to give us the marriage we want, we try to take our own measures to achieve happiness. We half trust him to satisfy us but we also look to fulfill our own ambitions to satisfy us as well, to achieve our own life-goals. And that's why our spiritual lives are sometimes so unimpressive.
Look at this picture of the unimpressive spiritual life in v6-8: ‘he who doubts is like a wave of the sea, blown and tossed by the wind. That man should not think he will receive anything from the Lord; he is a double-minded man, unstable in all he does.’ That double-mindedness is not, primarily, to be two-faced. It is not duplicity but instability. It’s not the wave breaking on the shore, it’s that instability of a sea. (If you have seen ‘The Perfect Storm’ you’ll have a good idea of it, probably, just how unstable that sea looks all the time.) It's the person with one foot on the punt and one foot on the shore, that familiar picture that we have seen in Cambridge during the last few months. It's putting one's faith on two things which are drifting apart. These things that I’ve been talking about, that we put our faith in, are drifting away all the time from the hope of heaven. It is you and I who say, "Yes, I do trust in God, but I must get my degree, I must have a sure job, a nice house, I must have a husband, or a wife, or a child." One foot on the punt and one foot on the shore, and they have a strange, strange way of drifting apart. That is the picture of instability that James is presenting here. Notice it does not say that God will not give to the double-minded person, but that the double-minded person will not receive, v7. v5 describes God's giving — it is to all, generously and without reproaching. v7-8 describe what it is that stops us receiving God's wisdom — it is a failure to trust God's word. If I will not trust God, then I cannot receive what he longs to do for me.
This communion service is a help to us here, because the act of receiving communion is a way of saying, “I am trusting in nothing but the cross for the forgiveness of my sins. As physical food keeps me alive physically, so in receiving the communion we recognise that what God did at Calvary, the death of His son, Jesus, is the one and only thing that gives us life spiritually. If you don’t believe that, please don’t share in the communion this morning, because they are an act that says, by what we do with our bodies, that we are putting ourselves entirely in the hands of God.
Does v.2 begin to make sense to us now? (That’s a rhetorical question – because if anyone shouts, “No!”, I will have to start at the beginning of the sermon all over again!)
The rationale for joy, according to James, lies in knowing that the various trials we face have spiritual value. Christian joy is pleasure in my (and other people’s) progress towards salvation. [It’s Elizabeth growing up into Katy.]
I do not know what griefs and sorrows you carry today. Perhaps no-one else here knows what pain there is in your body or in your soul at the moment. But will Sunday 10 September, in the year 2000, have been a good or a bad day for you?
Well, in the last resort, for the Christian, it will always have been a good day – because it has brought me one day closer to heaven and one day closer to the fulfilment of all God’s purposes for me, so I can count it joy.
Amen.