Testing and Persvering - James

James: Faith & Works

Week 1, Testing & Persevering

James 1:2-12

Series Slide

Good morning and welcome to worship on this beautiful day that the Lord has made. As a quick reminder, immediately after worship and celebrating Communion together, we will be heading down to the CLC and welcoming Shaefer as our new Associate Pastor. There will be homemade cookies (and I bet a few store-bought ones too) as well as coffee and juice. We will have a couple of gifts to share with Shaefer as he begins this new journey in ministry.

AND… We will also have the Senior Gift Bibles out for you to highlight your favorite passage or write an encouraging word in the margin for them to take off to College. It’s hard to believe we are already about to have our Senior Sunday on May 21! Time is certainly flying!

Speaking of time, I better get to the sermon before we run out of it! We are going to be spending the next several weeks in the Book of James looking at how our faith and our works work together as followers of Christ.

Before we dive into the first chapter, let me give a little back story. James was the brother of Jesus… I guess you would have to say, Half-Brother of Jesus. Some argue that he was the son of Joseph from a prior marriage – making him an older brother, others say he was the son of Mary and Joseph after Jesus was born, making him a younger brother. All that depends on your understanding of the Virginity of Mary – whether she was perpetually a virgin, or after the birth of Jesus, she had other children.

All that aside, as we read through Scripture, we see that James probably wasn’t a fan of Jesus’ ministry for the first few years. We can see times when Jesus was teaching and “his family” came to get him and take him back home. I can see James thinking,

“Jesus, Dude! You’ve lost it! What are you talking about!”

But, That was all before the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus. Somewhere between Nazareth and Jerusalem, James became a believer. Then, he became the pastor, or the Bishop, of the church in Jerusalem and underwent extreme persecution because he followed Jesus, eventually James was thrown from the top of the Temple and then beaten with clubs until he was dead. Some believe James’ letter was the first book of the Bible written, others place it somewhere between the 2nd and 3rd book.

All that to say, James knew Jesus firsthand. James likely heard and had been around Jesus longer than any of the others by virtue of growing up together. James knew a little something about the cost of living as a follower of Jesus. That’s why I find it so odd that the Book of James almost didn’t make it in the New Testament. His teaching and focus on “Works,” those things we do as a result of our relationship with God, seemed to be at Odds with the teachings of Paul, so they almost threw it out altogether… but I am so glad that God guided the hand of the leaders at the Council of Nicea as they compiled the Canon of Scripture.

So, over the next weeks we are going to be looking at the big ideas of the book. Today we are looking at testing and perseverance.

OK… Are you ready to dig in? Turn with me to James 1.

James 1:2-12

Wow, what a way to start, Amen. Hey – when you suffer… that’s a good thing! Count it as joy when you are persecuted and mistreated.

You know… I enjoy… I find joy in a lot of things, and I don’t think any of them involve pain, suffering, adversity, hardships… And yet, that is what James is telling the early church… not IF, but WHEN you experience these things, count it as joy.

Any of those scholars who think Paul and James disagree… they need to read Paul’s letter to Timothy where he told him, “All who desire to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted.” Not may be … but Will be persecuted.

I know, you’re sitting there thinking, “Wait, I didn’t sign up to be persecuted.” OK, true, we live in a place and a time where we don’t experience persecution like those who have gone before us. And, No, it’s not persecution when the ACLU wants to remove the 10 Commandments from the Courthouse. That’s not persecution, that’s politics. You want to see persecution, read Foxes Book of Martyrs… Go to parts of the Amazon, Africa, and the Middle East… Go to China and Korea. People are being imprisoned and killed for their faith. Here, we have to deal with hurt feelings because we said a prayer before a community event.

But that doesn’t mean we don’t have times of trial – and that’s a good thing. Trials and temptations are a form of testing. We can count it as joy to go through trials, temptations, and tests because we know that in those trials, in that testing of our faith, God is doing something amazing within us.

The Testing of our Faith

Testing is a good thing. Yes, students, as you face final exams… you may not think testing is a good thing… but when done right it is. It helps confirm what you know. It affirms the accuracy of data. I doubt any one of us would want to climb a ladder that hadn’t been properly tested. We look for crash ratings on cars when we buy them because we want to know that they have been tested.

James tells us that we will go through various types of tests and trials. That word here for “Various Kinds” is the word poikilos and one definition of that word is many colored.

Let me carry you down a strategic rabbit trail for a moment.

I didn’t grow up wealthy, OK. We were comfortable, but we were certainly not wealthy. So, when we went shopping for school supplies each August, we got what was on the list, including Crayola brand Crayons. I know, some of you were stuck with the yellow or white box of generic crayons and you looked at me like I had hit the lottery.

But then Amy walks in with her box of 64 bright colors in the flip top box and the built in sharpener… it was like the clouds parted and the angels sang when she pulled that thing out. She was the envy of every one of us, am I right… Oh, you were that Amy. I get it, it’s OK, I’m over it… maybe.

Ok, here’s my point, where it was 16 or 64 colors, try to remember what it was like as a young artist opening up and seeing all those colors to choose from to create your masterpiece. It was a varied palette of possibilities.

That’s what James is getting at here. There is a varied palette of pain and adversity that we face. Each one of us faces different things at different times.

Physical pain

Emotional or Psychological pain

Financial loss

Disease

Grief

And the list goes on and on…

I would bet there are some sitting here today… maybe it’s you sitting at home watching online, and you have dealt with some hard things, you have faced some trial that have tested your faith… it’s shaken you faith to the core, and you are to the point of asking:

Is God even real?

If God is so good, why did this bad thing happen to me?

Why doesn’t God stop this cancer?

Why can’t God stop the suffering in Ukraine if He’s so powerful?

It’s OK to ask these questions. Like I said last week, God’s not afraid of our questions and our emotions… God can handle it.

Here’s the other thing I’ll tell you. We all ask these questions at times in our lives. Even pastors.

We will all face trials and tests of many colors. The trick is to trust God through the process. I was working with a member of the PPRC from another church. They are previewing pastors, kinda like what we did with Shaefer and the other candidates, and he was lamenting this and that and the other… he wasn’t sure where to start… and I told him, trust the process. Start at the beginning and trust the process… God is in the process.

We have to trust God through the process of our testing. You want to know another name for that?

Perseverance

Perseverance works because it’s a churchy word and alliterates with Promise which comes next… but I like the word Tenacity. It’s a word that means persistent, stubborn, relentless. It means never giving up. In Patrick Lencioni’s book “6 Working Geniuses” he describes it as the skill of bringing something through to completion… of wrestling it down regardless of what gets in the way.

Webster defines Perseverance as “persisting in doing something despite of difficulty or delay in achieving success.” The New Living Translation uses the word “Endurance” here. In the Greek it is the word hupomonē; and it means, a patient enduring, perseverance, steadfastness.

When we struggle with something… when we go through trials… when we are tested… it produces perseverance in us, it produces endurance, it produces steadfastness, it produces tenacity… and the more we do it, the more tenacious we become… the more endurance we have.

It’s like running a marathon, or hiking up a mountain. I couldn’t take off today and backpack up 5, 10,000’ peaks in a week… but if I train, if I go through the trials of training, my endurance will grow, and I will persevere. I will be able to summit the peaks and more.

Why do we want to persevere? Why do we want to let the endurance grow? Because as verse 4 reminds us, when our endurance, when our perseverance is fully developed, we will be perfect and complete.

In other words, our testing helps us to be made complete. It helps us to become who and what we were created to be. And what are we created to be? We are to be little Jesus’… We are to grow into the likeness of Jesus. That is our goal. To reflect Jesus Christ in all that we do.

Adversity, and suffering, and pain, and all other kinds of trials build our faith and life as we seek to become more like Christ. And that’s a part of the promise.

The Promise

As you and I become more and more like Christ… as our faith grows… we learn to keep our eyes on Jesus. When we face small things, we learn to trust in the Lord… then when something bigger happens and our faith is tested andwe keep our eyes on Jesus… our faith grows a little more and a little more…

I love Paul’s words to the people of Philippi:

Philippians 3:12-14

I don’t mean to say that I have already achieved these things or that I have already reached perfection. But I press on to possess that perfection for which Christ Jesus first possessed me. No, dear brothers and sisters, I have not achieved it, but I focus on this one thing: Forgetting the past and looking forward to what lies ahead, I press on to reach the end of the race and receive the heavenly prize for which God, through Christ Jesus, is calling us.

Or the words of the author of Hebrews when they said

Hebrews 12:1-2

Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a huge crowd of witnesses to the life of faith, let us strip off every weight that slows us down, especially the sin that so easily trips us up. And let us run with endurance the race God has set before us. We do this by keeping our eyes on Jesus, the champion who initiates and perfects our faith. Because of the joy awaiting him, he endured the cross, disregarding its shame. Now he is seated in the place of honor beside God’s throne.

Look ahead to the race before you! Don’t let anything drag you down… you got some sin, throw it off… I love the little funny young love moments in the movie Jesus Revolution when Greg tells Cathe, “If you ever come between me and God, you’ve got to go.” They weren’t even going to let love get in the way of their relationship.

We can’t let anything stand between us and our relationship with God… and if something comes up, if we need help, James reminds us, just ask.

Verse 5 – Wisdom

Verse 6-8 – protect from doubt

Verse 9-11 – Let our humility grow with our faith.

In this life… we will face adversity. That is a fact. But I love how today’s passage ends.

Verse 12…

As you go through this next week, I want you to think about the trials you face… no matter how small or large… I want you to think about them and pray through them… I want you to ask God, “Lord, what are you teaching me through this trial… how am I being made in the image of your Son as I endure, as I persevere?”

If you are suffering… let us know…