Sermon Tone Analysis

“THESE are the times that try men's souls.

The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.”

These words from Thomas Paine were written during some of the most difficult days of America’s Revolutionary War.

In the beginning of the war, when shortly before the Declaration of Independence had been signed and sent to England, and George Washington’s troops had secured Boston Harbor for the Americans, it was easy to be an American patriot.

But as the war grew long and the Americans faced set backs, many of the initial patriots were beginning to turn back to England in an attempt to ensure they wouldn’t be hanged if America lost.

Thomas Paine was calling for the true patriots to stand with their country no matter what.

He was calling Americans to be patriots in deed, not merely in word.

For those who only give verbal allegiance to the country were proving to be patriots only when the sun was shining and winning looked easy.

Like America in those early days, Christianity is filled with summer Christians and sunshine believers, who in crisis and persecution are shrinking from living the faith they profess.

James is about doing.

James is less concerned about the theological foundation of our faith than he is about the practical outworking of our faith.

He uses imperative commands twenty-one times in these five chapters.

Compare that to a book like Romans that has 36 imperative commands with sixteen of those appearing in chapter 16 as Paul requests they greet someone he knows.

James is intensely practical.

This why James tends to be such a popular book among Christians.

We often react negatively to ethereal theological discussions about who God is and how He works; instead we want the nitty-gritty, rubber-meets-the-road kind of teaching that offers quick fixes that help us in our everyday lives.

However, even with all of that interest in the practical living of the Christian life, most of us are doing a rather poor job of putting James’s teachings into practice.

Why is that?

One reason is because we want quick fixes.

We are minimalists by nature which means we want a magic bullet of a command that will fix all of our problems.

However, that isn’t the way the Christian life works.

The Christian life is a process of transformation and most changes don’t take place in an instant.

We want our kids to follow God so we search endlessly for the one magic key that will ensure they won’t go astray.

Or we feel that because the constitution says that all men have the right to the pursuit of happiness, we look for anyway we can to be happy in the midst of the inevitable trials and struggles of life.

We hear the commands of Scripture like the golden rule, and we expect everyone else to treat us how they want to be treated so our relationships won’t have any problems.

The Christian life is a not one of quick fixes and minimalistic secrets to the happy life.

Eugene Peterson called it a long obedience in the same direction.

The commands of Scripture do work at making us more like Jesus, but they take time and a lot of repentance before they produce the result we are looking and in some cases we will fail and repent until the day we die.

James is not for quick fixes.

It is for those who are seeking to endure to the end.

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Another reason is because of how we approach the Bible in general and books like James in particular.

We look at Christian teaching like a self-help book.

We want the Bible to tell us how to live long and prosper, but that is a significant misunderstanding of the Christian life and how to use and read the Bible.

God’s purpose is to glorify Himself by saving a people for His name; therefore, God is less concerned with principles to live by and more concerned with what brings glory to His name.

It’s because we approach the Bible in general and books like James in particular like a self-help book.

We want the Bible to tell us how to live long and prosper, but that is a significant misunderstanding of how to use and read the Bible, and ultimately of the Christian life in general.

God’s purpose is to glorify Himself by saving a people for His name; therefore, God is less concerned with principles to live by and more concerned with what brings glory to His name.

This brings us back to James and its being about doing.

The only way we can glorify God by living by faith and trusting Him.

This faith and trust is not merely a belief that God exists and that the Bible is true, it is a fundamental submission to Him.

Faith is aligning ourselves with God.

This is exactly what God was asking the Israelites to do in the Old Testament: reject the so-called gods of the nations and align themselves with Him, who revealed Himself to them by delivering them from Egypt, the Red Sea, and covenanting with them at Sinai.

It also exactly what Jesus means when calls people to follow Him; listen to

This is the message of James.

James is calling us to more than a mere profession of faith in Christ; he calls us to a demonstration of faith in Christ.

Those twenty-one commands in James provide us with a practical ways that we demonstrate our faith in Jesus.

We’ll see this emphasis throughout the epistle, but let me point out to you the emphasis on our demonstration of faith by what we do.

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And these are only the most obvious references to the Christian demonstration of faith.

Each and every command throughout the epistle subtly emphasizes the same point: If you call yourself a Christian and follower of God, you must pursue a certain God-glorifying lifestyle.

This can make us Baptists a bit uncomfortable.

We are the ones who have embraced the Reformation doctrine of sole fide, faith alone.

We love to quote which reminds us that

However, while the doctrine of sole fide is immensely important, we cannot diminish the fact that when we truly believe something is true, we align our lives with it, and when we align our lives with anyone or anything, we must live differently.

This is the message James.

James identifies himself in v1 as “a bond-servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ.”

We have two possibilities in identifying this James.

He’s either John’s brother of Peter, James, and John fame or he is James the pastor of the first church in Jerusalem who provided leadership in the council of .

According to Herod had John’s brother James, put to death probably before this letter was written or at least at the same time, so he’s eliminated.

That leaves us with the other James, whom Paul identified as the brother of Jesus in .

Now think about this: James is the brother of the most important person in the world and the pastor of the most influential church in the world, and he starts off his letter calling himself a slave of God.

This shows James’s humility as he knew his status as a servant of God was far more important than who is brother was and what church he was at.

He wrote this letter to the twelve dispersed tribes.

I believe these Jewish believers were those who had been scattered from Jerusalem during the inter-testamental period following the exile and before Christ.

These had been reached with the good news about Jesus by those Jewish believers who had scattered from Jerusalem when the persecution of Saul recorded in .

Many of these believers faced a difficult road in their journey to follow Christ.

Not only were they Jews, who have received the ire of the nations for nearly their entire existence as a nation, but they were also Christians, who perplexed their world with their belief in a God who died and then rose again.

With this in mind, James starts off his letter with instructions for how they should face these trials, which he also calls the testing of their faith, and his instruction could not be clearer.

It’s right there in the beginning of v2

But this begs another question, what does it mean to be joyful when we encounter trials?

Most of the time when we think of joy, we associate it with happiness and feeling good, but that just doesn’t add up because we see Paul saying that he can sorrow and rejoice at the same time in .

Although a few New Testament verses imply a connection between joy and happiness, the majority point to something far deeper and longer lasting: contentment.

Joy is based more on our satisfaction with God and what He is doing in our lives than it is on how we feel about our circumstances.

The reason why we often associate joy with happiness more than contentment is because when we are satisfied in God, it will often show itself in a happy demeanor.

But to be able to sorrow and yet rejoice as Paul says he does, means that we sometimes face circumstances that remove our smile, but never destroy our satisfaction in God.

So

This also implies the impossibility of saying we have joy but never showing it on our faces.

The key is that joy has little to do with how you feel and much more to do with your faith and confidence in God.

Thus when James says, consider it all joy when you encounter various trials, he means that we must be content in the midst of trials.

And that is the truth I want you take home with you this week.

We must be content in the midst of trials.

Now this is really easy to say, and I haven’t said anything earth-shattering in this, but it is much easier to live.

So since James is more about doing than the theology behind what we do, we need to address the questions this raises: I hope that our discussion on the meaning of joy has helped with what may frustrate you about feeling happy in trials.

This isn’t some hypocritical “put on a smiling face while the world crashes down around you” joy; it is a deep seated satisfaction and contentment in God.

But this raises at least two other questions as well.

One is why we should be content in the midst of trials.

That question is answered by our discussion of the purpose of James earlier: our joy in the midst of trials is the kind of living that makes our faith known and God’s glory seen.

I believe you will see this fleshed out as we look at the rest of this passage, but ultimately, if our contentment or joy in difficult times, reveals the reality of our faith.

A perhaps even more substantial question that may hit us is how.

How are we supposed to be content in the midst of trials.

This is the question that I want to answer as we unpack this passage which reveals for us three means for contentment in the midst of trials.

(We’ll only get to the first of these three this week; next week we will address the second two).

I am going to give you all three of them, even though I’ve already given you the last two reasons there on your notes.

Three means for contentment in the midst of trials.

(We’ll only get to the first of these three this week; next week we will address the second two).

Recognize the necessity of trials (v2-4); Request the wisdom of God (v5-8); Refuse the transience of earth (v9-11).

So today, let’s consider the first means to being content in the midst of trials: Recognizing the necessity of trials.

Look at v2-4

V3 begins with the word knowing.