James 1:2-4

Introduction:

**The year was 1805 when a large fleet of ships from France and Spain took control of the English Channel

-The French dictator Napoleon was in the process of attempting to conquer the known world, and up to that point he looked almost invincible

-A smaller British fleet led by Horatio Nelson sailed toward’s Napoleons forces that day

-As the battle began, Lord Nelson gave his captains a startling command and that went against the conventional wisdom of the day

-Instead of turning their boats parallel to the French and Spanish and exchanging fire, which was the standard tactic for naval battles

-Lord Nelson instead commanded his captains to sail their ships right at the line of the enemy

-This tactic put his ships at great risk, since they would be directly in the line of fire with no way to shoot back

-The command given seemed foolish, dangerous, and even unrealistic to ask of someone

-And yet, Lord Nelson’s command won the Battle of Trafalgar and began to turn the tide against Napoleon’s domination of the sea

-In this stunning move, his ships cut straight through the line of the enemy, separating the ships and making communication difficult for them

-This allowed his smaller fleet to to throw the enemy into confusion and thus divide and conquer**

Have you ever been given a command that didn’t seem to make sense or even seem realistic to follow?

-Perhaps you’ve had something like this in your workplace, or perhaps when you were a child still under your parents’ authority

-Today, we’re going to look at a command in Scripture that seems to make very little sense when we first read it

-This command can be disorienting at first, making us wonder how on earth we’re going to be able to obey it

The command is this:

The New King James Version Chapter 1

2 My brethren, count it all joy when you fall into various trials,

-My fear is that when a lot of Christians read this command from the Lord, it’s a hard one to understand and confuse us as Christians

-And so my goal for us today is to walk through verses 2-4 and unpack this startling command and the reasoning behind it:

-If you look at these verses, there are two commands given:

-One in verse 2, and one in verse 4

After each command, there is an explanation given about that command

-So that’s going to be our outline that we’re going to follow today:

-A command

-An explanation

-Another command

-And another explanation

And my hope and prayer is that you’ll leave here not just with a head knowledge, understanding this passage better,

-But that you’ll be greatly encouraged in your life as you navigate various trials that are going on in your life right now

-And that you’ll be able to love and worship Christ better through this

Would you pray this with me?

**pray**

A. The First Command

The New King James Version Chapter 1

2 My brethren, count it all joy when you fall into various trials

That’s quite a command isn’t it?

-Now, how on earth are we supposed to do that?

-What does that mean to count trials as all joy?

-Other religions and philosophies of the world want their followers to be able to joyful even in hard circumstances,

-So let me give you a couple of ways that people in our world try to fulfill this kind of command

-The first way of trying to fulfill this kind of command is what I’ll call false optimism

-It’s where someone pretends that something bad that’s happened is actually a good thing

“man, I’m glad that my girlfriend dumped me! that’s awesome!”

“wow, I’m so glad I got a flat tire this morning! I’d never be able to sit here on the side of the road and watch all these lovely cars go by if this didn’t happen!”

-This is where someone pretends that everything that happens is actually a good thing

And the second way that people in our world try to fulfill a command like this is when they pretend that pain and suffering is fun, sometimes referred to as masochism

**I played football in highschool, and football players sometimes act like this

-At practice, they’ll line you up against another of your teammates that’s way bigger, and stronger, and perhaps older than you

-And your coach blows the whistle, and you’re supposed to launch yourself across at this guy and knock him to the ground, and he’s trying to do the same thing to you

-And after the other guy completely wrecks you and they have to pry your body out of the ground with a spatula, you’re expected to pop back up and pretend you enjoyed the whole experience

-That you somehow really love the pain that comes with getting hit by a big, sweaty, strong guy into the dirt**

-Brothers and sisters, neither of these responses to trials are what God is teaching us to adopt this morning

-That word there “count” is describing a value judgement, a choice, to consider it a joy when we fall into trials

-God is not saying that the trials, in and of themselves, are good things on their own

-It’s not a good thing when a man’s wife cheats on him and leaves their family

-It’s not a good thing when someone lies about you and slanders you at work and smears your reputation

-Now, God can and does use those things for your good and His glory, but that’s different than saying those trials are good experiences

-All the trials we experience and face right now were absent in the garden of Eden when Adam and Eve were first created

-And one day, in the New Heaven and the New Earth, God will wipe away every tear from our eyes and we will be done with all these trials that we face down here

-So these trials we face are the results of the Fall, and are not good things in and of themselves, even though God promises to use them for our good

-Does everyone understand that?

-So God is not teaching us false optimism here

Also, God is not teaching us to adopt masochism, a love for pain

-That phrase “all joy” means that we are to count it great joy, huge joy, when we fall into these trials

-It does not mean “only joy,” as if other reactions or emotions are inappropriate or sinful

-It is perfectly normal and good to experience grief and sorrow when you lose a loved-one

-It is appropriate and right to experience longing and loneliness when you’re separated from someone you love

So God is not teaching us that we need to somehow pretend that pain is fun or enjoyable

-But he does say that we are to count it all joy, great joy, when we fall into various trials

-What is a trial?

-A trial is simply a hardship or inconvenience we face

-And “various” means all kinds of trials!

-No trials are excluded from this!

-All the trials we go through should fall into the category of what we count as great joy when go through them

Can I give you a few different categories of trials that you may be able to relate to this morning?

-This list isn’t exhaustive, but I’ve come up with 5 kinds of trials that will probably help cover most of the trials that we are all experiencing this morning

Trials of waiting

-These are the kinds of trials where you seem to be in a phase of life that you’re hoping to move out of

-Perhaps you’re single this morning, and you desperately want to find a godly person you can marry

-Perhaps you’re married and you and your spouse desperately want children

-Perhaps you’re working a job that’s really hard and that you don’t like, and you badly want a new job or career

-Perhaps a loved one is going through uncertainty with their health, and you’re anxiously waiting to hear what the results are

-and you daily feel the burden of whatever it is you’re waiting on, and you’re just trying to get through another day, another week, until something changes

2. Trials of grief

-Perhaps you’ve lost someone you dearly loved recently

-and you’re life is completely different because that person is no longer in your life

-Perhaps it’s not a person, but a job or a pet or a relationship that you lost recently and you’re trying to get used to living without something that meant a lot to you

3. Trials of relational hardship

-Perhaps you have an estranged family member

-maybe a child, or a parent, or a sibling, that is no longer in your life because they’ve cut themselves off from you

-Perhaps you have a difficult marriage

-Perhaps you have a boss or coworker that seems to be out for you, and not because of anything that you remember doing to them

4. Trials of financial hardship

-Perhaps you recently lost your job and you’re watching your savings account dwindle

-Perhaps your car is having problems or had a pipe burst in your house and now you’re having to pay for it

-Perhaps you’re just barely eking by each month on your paycheck, barely having enough to pay for your basic needs

5. Trials of physical health

-Perhaps you’re older now and it’s simply the frustrations of having low energy and not having much mobility

-Perhaps you recently got a bad diagnosis that’s caught you completely off guard

-or perhaps it’s not you, but a loved one who is really going through physical hardships right now

And these categories don’t even cover the spiritual battle we face as against temptation and sin

-or just the basic everyday hardships and obstacles we encounter, such as sitting through an hour of traffic to get home from work, having to wake up in the night with a child who’s not sleeping well, or having your life inconvenienced in various ways

-But brothers and sisters, all of these kinds of trials, whether big or small, fall into the category of “various trials,” and therefore are to be counted all joy when you fall into them!

Now, how do we do this?

-How does God expect me to count these hardships and trials as great joy?

B. The First Explanation (vs. 3)

The New King James Version Chapter 1

knowing that the testing of your faith produces patience.

The reason that you can evaluate falling into various trials as joyful is because you know something

-what do you know?

-You know that the testing of your faith produces something incredibly valuable

-It produces endurance

-So what does that mean?

-First, let’s start with that idea of “testing”

-that word in the Greek OT carries that idea of refining a precious metal, like gold or silver

**You see, when gold is mined, it’s often mixed with different kinds of rock or metal that aren’t very valuable

-so the gold has to be refined

-gold is refined at a temperature of almost 2,000 degree fahrenheit, so about 5x the heat you bake your frozen pizza at

-And when you do that, it melts all the metals

-And when that happens, the impurities rise to the top, and then the refiner scrapes that top portion off

-And this usually happens, not just once, but several times

-Where that metal is exposed to extreme heat for a duration of time, over and over again

-And it’s for the purpose of making that metal more pure, more beautiful**

-And brothers and sisters, the hardship, the trials in your life that you are experiencing right now in your life, those are designed by God to refine your faith

-to test your faith

-to make it more pure

-With the result that this process of testing your faith will produce something

-What’s it supposed to produce?

-Endurance

-Now, I understand that many of you have a translation of the Bible the might read patience

-But this is not the patience that you and I often think of

-We think of patience as sitting in the DMV for hours without getting mad at someone

-Or when your child asks you the same question over and over again, and you’re trying to resist the urge to explode

-But that’s not exactly the kind of patience that is meant here

-This kind of refining and testing of our faith produces endurance; perseverance

-What is endurance?

-Endurance is the ability to continue to go through a hardship without giving up or caving in

-And when you go through various trials, various hardships, various situations that put your faith to the test

-These cause you to wonder, “is God really good?”

“Does He really love me?”

“Does He really care?”

“Is it really worth it to live for Christ?”

-when you go through those things as a Christian, God uses that testing of your faith to produce in you the ability to endure, to persevere

-And brothers and sisters, please understand this:

-you don’t get perseverance without these trials

**In 1990, there was a massive scientific experiment attempted in the Arizona desert

-A huge domed facility was built that was meant to function as a closed eco-system

-In other words, nothing was allowed to be brought in from the outside

-Everything had to be produced from within this ecosystem

-the ecosystem was built with crops, animals, a body of water, trees, and even had humans who lived in it

-However, the first project lasted only 2 years as the ecosystem ran into several problems

-One of the more interesting problems was with the trees that were brought into this ecosystem

-These trees seemed healthy:

-they had good cells and were the right size,

-they had sunlight and water and soil in plenty

-But after some time, the trees eventually began to topple over and fall

-And this puzzled the scientists, who began to do experiments and tests as to why this happened

-And what they discovered is that trees actually need wind in order to build up the strength to stand up straight

-You see, the right amount of wind to push on the trees actually helps the trees develop stress wood inside their trunks,

-it helps them developt thicker bark, and a better root system to be able to hold themselves upright

-But without any wind in this biosphere, the trees never developed the toughness to be able to stand up, and so eventually they became too large and heavy to support their own weight, and they fell**

-Brothers and sisters, each of us needs endurance as Christians

Romans 15:4 “For whatever was written in the past was written for our instruction, so that we may have hope through endurance and through the encouragement from the Scriptures.”

Hebrews 12:1 “Therefore, since we also have such a large cloud of witnesses surrounding us, let us lay aside every weight and the sin that so easily ensnares us. Let us run with endurance the race that lies before us,”

In Jesus’ parable of the different soils, Jesus characterizes the good soil hearers as those who “hold on to [the Word] and by enduring, bear fruit.”

-All of those verses use the exact same word as what’s in our text

-And the way that God has decreed that we develop endurance is through going through various trials

**this is like the weight-lifter who lifts heavier and heavier weights

or the runner who runs longer and longer distances

-They know that by doing those things, that’s how they will train their bodies to compete at a high level**

-In the same way, you can evaluate your situation joyfully when you’re going through trials, not because it’s fun, not because you enjoy it, but because you’re gaining something so incredibly valuable

**In 2023, I took a group from our church to a South American country to visit an missionary that we support

-and we spent time at the seminary that they have there and met all kinds of young adults from that country who are being trained to go share the gospel

-Some of them are seeking to minister in their local churches

-One woman we met was hoping to go to remote people groups along the amazon who have never heard the Gospel

-We even were told of one young man who was from a remote people group up in the mountains, and if he went back to share the gospel, he could be beaten and thrown out of his village

-And the word at that seminary, the word that they emphasized and taught all their students, that the students even wore on T-shirts and bracelets was the Greek word

The Greek New Testament: SBL Edition Chapter 1

ὑπομονὴ

It’s the word here in our text that means “endurance”**

-So we count it all joy when we fall into various trials, not because it’s fun, but because God is working endurance in us

C. The Second Command (4a)

This brings us to the second command that God gives us:

The New King James Version Chapter 1

4 But let patience have its perfect work

-You see brothers and sisters, endurance is the not the end goal

-Trials are meant to produce endurance, but endurance is meant to produce something else

-That word “perfect” in your Bible there has the idea of maturity or completion

-In other words, Christians are to let endurance do it’s complete work

-Christians are to let endurance have the effect that it’s intended to have

What is that work?

-Why are Christians supposed to let endurance do its work?

-We’ll answer that in just a second, but its important to understand at this point that we as Christians are not to pull back in the face of trials

-Rather we’re supposed to allow God to do his refining work through trials, and we’re to allow these trials to build endurance in us, and we’re then supposed to continue to endure so that something else is produced?

-What is that?

D. The Second Explanation (vs. 4b)

-Christians are to allow the trials and the resulting endurance to do its complete work so that

The New King James Version Chapter 1

4 you may be perfect and complete, lacking nothing.

-We’ve already encountered that word “perfect”

-It doesn’t mean sinless

-We don’t believe that Christians will ever reach sinless perfection on this side of heaven

-the word means mature

-and the next word helps round out the picture

-Trials and endurance are meant to help Christians become mature, complete Christians, who are not lacking anything

-And brothers and sisters, we understand this because God has built this into all kinds of life-situations

Athletics are like this:

**Yesterday I drove down to Newberry SC with my friend Landon so we could compete in a Spartan race

-A Spartan race is a 5k, but with a bunch of obstacles thrown in

-Things like climbing up a 20 foot rope

-crawling under barbed wire

-And stuff like that

-And for the past several weeks, I’ve been training for that

-I’ve been going to the gym

-I’ve been playing basketball at the Y to increase my endurance

-And about once a week, me and my brother Brian would go over to a soccer field, and we would do various kinds of running exercises,

-things like using a weighted vest, running with a weighted sled, things like that

-And about 3 weeks ago, we went out there on a Monday morning to workout, and it was about 45 degrees and raining

-And let me tell you:

-It was MISERABLE

-Why on earth would we do something like that?

-Because you don’t get to the point of being able to compete in a Spartan race by sitting around watching netflix and eating chips!

-That would be a lot more comfortable and fun than exercising in the freezing rain!

-But it’s not going to do anything to prepare me for the hardships and the challenges of that race!

-Instead, the only way to become an athlete and a competitor who is well-rounded and can push through the challenges is to go through hardship and build up endurance so that I can try to be more of a complete athlete!**

Brothers and sisters, we also understand this from the way children grow up:

**My daughter is only 4 months old

-But I’m understanding more and more that a huge part of the development of a child is going through hard and uncomfortable things

-If you carry your child around their whole life, they’ll never learn to crawl or walk

-If you allow them to stop learning how to spell or read because it’s hard, they’ll grow up illiterate

-If you swoop in and get involved inall their friendship struggles everytime they have some disagreement with a friend, they’ll never learn relational skills

-God has built into the development of children the need to experience hardships in order to grow up and develop into mature adults!

-And when parents and adults do step in to protect their children from all of life’s hardships and discomforts, that’s how we end up with a generation of adults who don’t know how to show up for work or be responsible adults and contributors in society!**

-So brothers and sisters, I know that when we go through trials and hardships and frustrations, we want to know the specific reasons for why we’re going through them

-“When I got a flat tire on the way to work this morning, was that God keeping me from an accident further down the road?”

-“When my boyfriend dumped me, did God allow that so I could end up with a better boyfriend?”

“When I had to go through the hardship of watching that loved one pass, did God allow that so I’ll have a chance to witness to someone down the road who’s gone through the same thing?”

-We don’t know!

-All of those things are possible!

-But we don’t know for sure if those are the specific reasons

-But what you DO know

-What you can be ABSOLUTELY SURE OF

-What you can take to the bank

-Is the fact that God is using ALL of your trials and hardships to develop endurance in your life,

-and that endurance is producing Christ-like maturity

-Isn’t that what we want?

-Brothers and sisters, I’m sure that many of you are praying — perhaps daily — to be more like Christ

-to be more Godly

-to be more humble

-more patient

-more gracious

-more pure

-If you’re a Christian, you desire to be more like Jesus

-As a pastor friend of mine once told me, Christlike character and maturity is developed in the class room of trials

-And so the reason that you can count your trials as great joy, is because when you go through them, that’s God answering your prayers for maturity!

-That’s God answering your prayers for Christ-likeness!

-And brothers and sisters, that’s a reason to rejoice, isn’t it??

-If Jesus were to come to you and tell you, “I’ve heard your prayers for growth and Christ-like maturity

“And I’ve come to tell you that I’m going to answer you and grant you that request.”

-Wouldn’t you be excited for that?

-Wouldn’t that be an occasion for rejoicing?

-It absolutely is, even if it means going through hardship

-The trials aren’t fun in and of themselves

-The hardship isn’t joyful in and of itself

-But we can count it as great joy because of what we’re receiving:

endurance and maturity

Who are the Christians that you look up to and admire?

Who do you look up to and think, “I want to be a Christian that looks like that?”

**I remember being about 11 or 12, and we had a several college students that would come up from Bob Jones University to help our church with various ministries since we were still pretty small

-And there was a college girl that we called Beth-Beth

-And I remember even as a kid thinking that she seemed to be one of the most genuinely godly, joyful people I had met up to that point

-And after she had been coming to our church for a while, I remember finding out that her father had passed away somewhat recently

-and I remember pondering that: “how does someone who’s lost their dad exhibit that much joy?”

-And my guess is that she had allowed that incredible trial to test her faith and build her endurance, and that led to genuine Christian maturity and Christ-likeness**

Conclusion

Brothers and sisters, the application is very simple this morning:

“count it all joy when you fall into various trials”

“let endurance have its perfect work”

-I know that many of you are going through hardships this morning because you’ve shared with me and with others in our church family about them

-I know that some of you are really struggling with a family member that has wandered from the faith

-I know that some of you are going through real financial stress right now

-I know that some of you are really struggling with singleness and desperately want to be married

-I know that some of you are unsure about the future, and want your situation to change, but you’re not sure how that’s going to happen

-And this morning, God is telling you to count these trials as great joy

-Not because they’re fun

-Not because you enjoy suffering

-But because you have the opportunity to become more like Christ through them

-Jesus came to earth

-took on flesh

-And died in your place and rose again

-In order to save you from your sin

-And if you’re a Christian, you know that nothing in the whole world is better than loving Christ

-than worshipping Christ

-than being like Christ

-And when you go through trials, those trials are given by a loving God who doesn’t delight to see you suffer

-But desires you to grow into a mature Christian, because that is the best thing that can possibly happen in your life