Peaking in High School
James • Sermon • Submitted • Presented
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Perhaps one of the saddest statements about an adult is that they peaked in high school
It’s such a mean statement. For those of you that don’t know what that means, it means the best part of their life was high school, 14 to 18 years of age. When people thought the highest of them, when they were the happiest, strongest, best, was in a few short years before they even turned into an adult.
The whole show married with children was a show about a guy who peaked in high school. It’s so sad because high school is such an early time such a short, short time, and there is so much more life left to live.
Hold on to that thought, let’s take a weird turn.
You know every time I hear someone died, I often hear people around them say something to be comforting like, “they are in a better place.” For the most part, many people believe we are eternal. We continue on even if we our body dies. The Bible definitely teaches that we do, after all Jesus came to give us eternal life. All of us will continue, however God never says that all continue to a better place.
And if you live eternally, wouldn’t it be sad if this life is the best it is going to be. These short 60 to 100 years, in the amount of eternity.
Hold on to that thought, because I want to take another twist.
What if I told you it is the end of the world?
Today is the day, Jesus is coming back.
Today is the day, Jesus is coming back.
If you study Revelation in some churches, places or especially on the internet. They will give you supposed secrets hidden from everyone. Try and relate pieces of current news to a specific scripture. Always seems to be done from a spirit of fear or a spirit of pride, like they have the secret hidden knowledge and everyone else is just fools.
But what if Jesus comes back later today.
What are you feeling, if you reflect on that.
Do not love this world nor the things it offers you, for when you love the world, you do not have the love of the Father in you.
That feeling you might have, the fear might be from intense loss at the loss of things in this world, that is grief. Grief is what happens when we love. And after a fire, a financial catastrophe, or the end of it all we lose all that stuff.
For the world offers only a craving for physical pleasure, a craving for everything we see, and pride in our achievements and possessions. These are not from the Father, but are from this world.
Ever cleaned up after someone passes. I know most of you have. How much stuff did you throw away? How much did you work so hard to sell, so relieved once you finally got rid of it.
It all gets discarded so fast,
If everything that was important about a person can be discarded in the trash or is essential to remember like how funny they were or famous. Is that all there was to their life.
It’s all so meaningless.
Did you know what one of the most popular sports in America was in the 1870s? Drawing huge crowds?
Competitive walking. Edward Payson Weston and Frank Hart, hugely famous walkers.
Fame, power, money, disappears and no one cares.
See the Bible’s real take on life is that the apocalypse, when it comes, is just the last bell before graduation. The Holy Spirit reveals to us through the Bible that God is not fixated on us peaking in this life, the equivalent of peaking in High School.
It’s not just about the end of time either, it’s about what we are supposed to be doing with all of our life because up until now every single follower of Jesus who died, died before the second coming. So this day may be the end for everyone, it may be the end for just a person, or it may be yet another day, as the athlete's say to build on, to grow in our pleasing of God.
And this world is fading away, along with everything that people crave. But anyone who does what pleases God will live forever.
Doing what please God. Seeking Jesus first. In the last couple of weeks we’ve been going through the Bible book of James, which if you have a physical Bible is near the end of the Bible. The first week we talked about how we can count it joy when trials come our way and last week we talked about praying to God for wisdom is the most important thing we can do in those trials.
This week, we keep going in James and it’s really important to understand that this book of the Bible is really a letter written to people with instructions on how not to peak in the High School of eternity. It’s quick instructions, flowing reminders, a train of thought of important things to remember so we don’t peak in the high school of eternity which is this life we now live,
This letter is from James, a slave of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ.
I am writing to the “twelve tribes”—Jewish believers scattered abroad.
Greetings!
That’s a normal way in ancient times to begin a letter.
Dear brothers and sisters, when troubles of any kind come your way, consider it an opportunity for great joy. For you know that when your faith is tested, your endurance has a chance to grow. So let it grow, for when your endurance is fully developed, you will be perfect and complete, needing nothing.
Here it is the theme of the letter, Understanding faith and trials.
Then we take a little detour, a little, “oh yeah remember this,” a fancy word for this is a digression,
If you need wisdom, ask our generous God, and he will give it to you. He will not rebuke you for asking. But when you ask him, be sure that your faith is in God alone. Do not waver, for a person with divided loyalty is as unsettled as a wave of the sea that is blown and tossed by the wind. Such people should not expect to receive anything from the Lord. Their loyalty is divided between God and the world, and they are unstable in everything they do.
Like I said when James was writing about trials and faith He added the important advice of when dealing with those trials ask for wisdom, and then not to have faith focused on this world.
That focus, a faith not focused on our immediate, this world happenings, the high school of eternity, but an eternal focus is what we get when we look at the next verses
Believers who are poor have something to boast about, for God has honored them. And those who are rich should boast that God has humbled them. They will fade away like a little flower in the field. The hot sun rises and the grass withers; the little flower droops and falls, and its beauty fades away. In the same way, the rich will fade away with all of their achievements.
God blesses those who patiently endure testing and temptation. Afterward they will receive the crown of life that God has promised to those who love him.
It sounds like the kind of advice coming from a rich person. Don’t worry about being poor. The advice feels condescending.
Making the other person feel small, inferior, or stupid for complaining about being poor. It’s unintentional, but can be perceived as disrespectful and offensive. Like they don’t understand how hard it is to be poor.
Believers who are poor have something to boast about, for God has honored them.
Why would someone who is poor have something to boast about? You’d never see this verse on a bumper sticker. How has God honored them.
Yet this verse is written by James to people honored by God, a people, who are being actively rejected by their community because of their faith in Jesus.
Many of us have always lived in a time and place where people have told us to find faith in Jesus because Jesus will bless us, we were told positive things, we were sold on Jesus or at least respected. Because even though some people won’t like us we can’t get fired for someone finding out we are a Christian.
But these people because the Holy Spirit is working in their lives, and because they knew Jesus is God, and they were living that belief in their lives, their community, strangers, acquaintances, bosses and sometimes family rejected them.
Remember the beginining,
This letter is from James, a slave of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ.
I am writing to the “twelve tribes”—Jewish believers scattered abroad.
Greetings!
This was written to Christian Jews who lived all over the known world. It would travel as a letter and be read to Jews who were rejected by other Jews because they followed Jesus. Which would mean it would be harder for them to find jobs, people to support them when they were in need. In Jerusalem many of them were already having tough times with money. One of the first offerings we hear about is gathering money to take back to James and Jewish Christians in Jerusalem because they were suffering financially.
James actually takes this really hard negative thing, their poverty, and says wait, if your poor, it’s not so bad because this is not the main focus of this eternal life. Even though you are poor now you know Jesus.
It’s like meeting a kid in high school who is heartbroken because they didn’t get elected president of any club, a date to prom, or an invitation to a party. Because while that might hurt, plenty of us know people whose popularity in high school was built on addictions or short cuts that hurt them for decades to come. Or we can’t even remember a club or any president of any club. In the scheme of a life as old as me, now that this is my first sermon as a 51 year old, I can tell you, popularity in High school doesn’t matter. It’s hard to take high school all that seriously now, even though as a high schooler those issues were my entire world. Even if you didn’t want a school happening, you had other parts of your life that you thought were the whole world and looking back, you see it was for a short time, in a short point, of a very long life.
Can you see that when we speak of the things of God, the things of eternity, being poor for this moment is only for a brief moment. And the riches of this world are incredibly tempting, how many of us will say its ok to have an outburst of anger if someone takes your money. How many of us say its ok to “fudge” “hustle” “lie” if it is possible for you to get something that everyone else has. The things of this world force us into problems of our own ethics all the time.
Honestly how many of us know the effects that all of our own riches have on others. We live wealthier than any person who read this letter in its first copy ever could imagine. We can change the temperature of buildings, get fruit anytime we desire, we can be in communication with anyone willing to talk to us. We have so much free time and think it is immoral when we have to work more than five days a week. This was not the case for most centuries.
This should make us pause and reflect on our soul. It is very, very easy for us to miss focus.
Jesus said
Then Jesus said to his disciples, “I tell you the truth, it is very hard for a rich person to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. I’ll say it again—it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the Kingdom of God!”
For my 51st birthday, my wife gave me a special t-shirt. She’s been doing this for all of us the last couple years. So right after I got out of my morning shower, She handed me this cool little multi-color teddy bear shirt. Perfect for a teacher of 1st to 3rd graders on his birthday. But this shirt came out with a hole in the seam. She grabbed it and said I’ll sew it together. Then I heard her say, I need your help.
“Throw a needle.”
I have no idea what throwing a needle is, and then she said, no, no “Thread the needle.” Once again, I remembered on my 51st birthday that I am going deaf. But then she hands me the thread. I have my glasses on and I have to tilt my head way back. Some of you know why! Because of my bifocals. I can’t see this thread. She hands me this needle, and I know I looked drunk, My heads tilted back, my arms are swinging past each other, I know I can’t get anything through this eye of a needle.
I would have loved to have a camel because at that moment I felt ancient. What a way to begin my 51st birthday.
It’s possible to get thread through an eye of a needle, it’s impossible to get a camel. Now many rich people have come along and spoke about gates where camels had to stoop down to get through and whatever, but the easiest point of the metaphor is that Jesus is saying wealthy people care more about their stuff than they do about the things of God.
James repeats it,
And those who are rich should boast that God has humbled them. They will fade away like a little flower in the field. The hot sun rises and the grass withers; the little flower droops and falls, and its beauty fades away. In the same way, the rich will fade away with all of their achievements.
We have seen this in our own time. We have seen people who were once very popular become the most hated. We have seen people in history honored and then despised.
We have seen people lose everything, maybe some of you have lost everything.
Yet even still the things of this temporary life become so important people can’t help but focus on achieving more wealth, more power. Yet it all so quickly fades away.
Does this sermon seem dumb? Does what I am saying seem like it doesn’t make any sense? It sucks being poor. It sucks having to hustle for money and seeing so many other people getting things easier. It sucks when everything seems stacked against you. And the Bible is trying to say that is good?
NO! It’s not.
I have known people who are poor who are very, very close to the heart of God. They easily pursue what God has for them. They are surrounded by love, have incredible authority in the lives of other people, and yet they are almost always broke. Some because they are disabled, God has not made a way for them to be able to provide for themselves. Some because they squandered or did not have the resources they needed to make money but now they desperately focus on seeking God.
And I have known many more, many others who have no money and they are totally depressed. Filled with anxieties and pain. Constantly miserable and desperately seeking anything to get them out of their poverty.
The difference is their life focus.
God blesses those who patiently endure testing and temptation. Afterward they will receive the crown of life that God has promised to those who love him.
How long would you wait for your blessing?
I have seen people fight, bite, kick, scratch, claw, urinate at, and more because they were not able to wait for one minute to receive a blessing, One minute, and the world is a wreck. True its special needs children I teach, a story so general and universal its anonymous, but I have also seen grown ups do similar stupid, stupid things because they couldn’t wait for a blessing from God that they went ahead and did something they knew God would tell them not to do. Rejected God, because it didn’t make sense to wait. Rejected God because no one is getting in trouble for the thing God told people not to do.
Perhaps that is you today. Perhaps you’ve realized that I am talking about you, because I have done it too. The focus of our life, sadly, is peaking in the high school of eternity. We reveal our faith in God by thinking that this life is what really matters, that we have to have it all right now. God is good but we better get all that too.
Claiming to follow Jesus and can’t wait, saying we believe that God will bless and just limiting the amount of time that God has to bless us. He has this long otherwise we don’t trust him, believe in him, whatever anymore because God didn’t come through on our timetable.
Every mature person will recognize how wrong this is.
We recognize that He is God and we are not. That we desperately need him and our tantrum behavior, just like a child, needs repentance. We need to apologize and take actions of another way.
But if we confess our sins to him, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all wickedness.
What are you pursuing in your life right now? Will it burn up? Will it be gone after your gone?
Can you pursue it and while you pursuing it what comes out of you is the fruit of the Holy Spirit?
But the Holy Spirit produces this kind of fruit in our lives: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. There is no law against these things!
or do you find yourself doing:
It is obvious what kind of life develops out of trying to get your own way all the time: repetitive, loveless, cheap sex; a stinking accumulation of mental and emotional garbage; frenzied and joyless grabs for happiness; trinket gods; magic-show religion; paranoid loneliness; cutthroat competition; all-consuming-yet-never-satisfied wants; a brutal temper; an impotence to love or be loved; divided homes and divided lives; small-minded and lopsided pursuits; the vicious habit of depersonalizing everyone into a rival; uncontrolled and uncontrollable addictions; ugly parodies of community. I could go on.
This isn’t the first time I have warned you, you know. If you use your freedom this way, you will not inherit God’s kingdom.
My friends who love Jesus this world is not our home. Let us fix our eyes on the one who is calling us onward. Even as we close a great sale, take care of our family, deal with our doctors and our bosses, let us always remember, this world is not our home. Let us live wisely with our money, bless the world by living generously knowing that God is not a God of limits but the creator of all things and an incredibly generous God. Let us enjoy all that God allows us to enjoy, allowing others to show us love, and freely giving love, as we seek God above any power, fame, wealth or desire.
Let us peak in eternity with Jesus.
