Sermon Tone Analysis

Big Idea: To communicate important background information about the book of James that will help us make sense of the different passages we will read later.

Communicate the overall desire of James for his readers to be perfect and mature.

That only comes as we put our genuine faith in Jesus and pray for wisdom to live faithfully.

Major takeaways in this: Faith without works is dead.

What is faith?

What is wisdom?

What is perfection as James defines it?

Why family church...

Same content easier illustrations & explanations

Fill out sheets of paper and give to Adam after service.

You are going to see a ** on the slides they can fill something out for...

Memory verse

Please give me some feedback.

Alright let’s get started...

So I want to start by talking about authorship:

Author

Do Greek and Hebrew bit...

**James’ real name was actually Jacob.

Explain the three James’ in Jesus circle:

James the brother of John…he died before the book of James was written (killed by Herod Agrippa)…as a side note, James the Apostle died in around 44 A.D. and the book of James was written sometime between 45-46 A.D. which makes the book of James the very first New Testament book ever written…even before any of the Gospels.

James the lesser - nothing is really known about him (maybe he moved to Africa, some think he went to Spain, and others think he went into Asia).

What we know for sure is that he didn’t stick around Jerusalem.

James (or Jacob) the half brother of Jesus.

What’s neat is we actually know a lot about this James from the Bible.

We know that he actually was very skeptical about his brother Jesus being the Messiah until after his resurrection.

We know that:

**One of James’ nicknames was James the just because he always tried to do what was right by following God’s Law.

We also get this verse in Paul’s letter to the Galatians:

This verse comes in a story about the Jerusalem council where a bunch of the early church leaders all gathered in Jerusalem to talk about some things in the church and did you notice who one of the pillars were?

Pillars is just another term for leader.

**James was the leader of the church in Jerusalem.

Here is the deal…if I were going to write a letter to a bunch of people who don’t know me and I wanted to let them know they should listen to what I have to say, I would think that telling people I was literally the half-brother of the resurrected Jesus would be the way that I could do that.

I probably would’ve started the letter like, James the half-brother of the savior of the world to the twelve tribes who are disperses abroad: listen up because this is really important.

Or at least I would’ve probably told people that I was a leader in the biggest and fastest growing church in the world…that might have gotten a few people’s attention.

And yet, James doesn’t do this.

We will talk about why in future sermons.

When you study a book of the Bible it is important to not only know who wrote it but who they were writing to.

Luckily James tells us right off the bat:

**James was written to the 12 tribes dispersed abroad.

Here is why that is so important:

James pastored the Jerusalem church through two severe famines.

Under James’ leadership the church also endured extreme persecution from the Jews and also persecution from the Romans.

James would actually be killed by the Jews not far from where his church was there in Jerusalem.

During James’ time pastoring the Jerusalem church, he had seen a thing or two.

James knew the struggles his people faced.

James knew the temptations they were most likely to give into and the things that caused them to take their eyes off of Jesus.

The best we can figure is that James guessed that if his people were struggling with these things then other believers were probably struggling too.

And so James wrote this incredible and very practical book about how to follow Jesus through some of the most difficult problems and temptations we face in life.

James actually doesn’t write anything new in that everything James writes comes almost directly from either the wisdom literature of the Old Testament or from Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount.

Here is the deal about that though…that can make the book of James both really easy and really hard to read at the same time.

The book of James is filled with short lessons filled with wisdom, axioms, practical lessons, and catchy one-liners.

Its because of this that But if you are someone who likes for there to be a central story or who thinks linearly its super difficult.

Do what is linear bit…?

A then B then C then __

James is not at all organized linearly.

In fact, James uses a style of Greek writing that is incredibly complex and we as westerners have a really difficult time getting our minds around it.

James’ writing is so profound in fact, that many critics say it would’ve been impossible for a poor, uneducated, peasant craftsman to have been able to produce it.

James is broken down into these twelve different teachings that all seem to stand alone if you aren’t tracking what James’ purpose for the book are.

So let’s take a few moments and look at the purpose James had for writing this book and then we will close things out.

Let’s look at verse four because it actually gives us the reason for James’ writing.

**James want the people reading this letter to be perfect and complete.

Does anyone have any other words in their Bible besides perfect and complete?

Let’s talk about being perfect for a minute.

Do the perfect hair perfect body funny bit...

Do the seat belt bit…seat belts save lives assembly at school…do we really believe riding in cars is dangerous?

The goal of the assembly at school (for which they got ever more graphic and scary each year) was to convince you without a shadow of a doubt that riding in cars is dangerous and wearing a seat belt can make it considerably less dangerous.

If you truly believe that riding in cars is dangerous and seat belts make it less dangerous then you will definitely wear your seat belt.

**For James, perfection, maturity, and completeness is about a consistency between what we claim to believe and how we actually live.

James knows that we are actually very fractured people who claim to believe one thing about who Jesus is, our devotion to him, and how that affects the way we live our life, and yet our actions display that we actually believe something different entirely.

James’ desire for the readers of his letter is that they will stop living fractured lives and become perfectly complete and lacking nothing.

To constantly remind us of this, James has included a bunch of these catchy one-liners

Here are a few examples that we will be looking at specifically over the next several weeks.

See if you can pick out the inconsistencies in our thoughts and actions that James is trying to highlight.

Or

Or speaking about the sins of partiality and favoritism we show to wealthy people while ignoring the needs of the needy.

If we claim to follow Jesus then we must remember that:

and yet we:

Here is his one-liner meant to call out our duplicity:

Or how about this one:

These don’t even get us all the way through chapter two! James still serves up two more one-liners meant to show how we live fractured lives just in the end part of chapter two.

This reality is like the key we have to hold in our minds if we want to read the book of James well.

These were incredibly relevant to the people of James’ day and that are still just as relevant to us today.

It looks like James has just written a bunch of standalone wisdom sayings but once you have idea in your head that the author James had in his, we will see how he masterfully weaves the theme of being perfect and complete throughout all of the seemingly disjointed teachings.

James is an incredibly practical book but in order to be changed by it, you have to take it to heart.

Listen to this statement James makes:

The word for look here is parakypsas in Greek and means more than just a cursory reading.

The idea is like stopping, bending down, and studying something intently.

For this reason, we are going to stop each week and highlight a particular passage of James for further study and memorization.

Kids, if you guys can memorize this and bring it to Mr. Adam next week, he will have a little something for you.

Mom and dad, I’m sorry but I won’t have anything special for you next week.

Well maybe I can have like some special coffee in the foyer or something.

The hope with family worship Sundays is that we can give you guys something to work on together as a family and really help you disciple your kids well.

One last thing and then let’s close it down.

James is going to tell us that we need three things if we are going to grow in maturity and perfection becoming truly complete.

While we are going to look at two of them in future sermons, he has actually already given us one of those things that make us perfect so I figured we had better talk about it.

Did you notice that James just assumes that you as a follower of Jesus are going to endure trials.

He doesn’t specify what he necessarily means by that and that’s actually the point.

We are all going to endure things that test our faith…that is to say that it will test whether or not we actually believe what we say we believe and will live according to that belief or not.

And we are to take joy in those trials because those are the very things that God uses (although he’s going to make certain we know in just a few verses that God didn’t actually send those trials) to show us what we actually believe and grow us into deeper belief that leads to right action and finally perfection.

Let’s go back to our seat belt example for just a second.