Sermon Tone Analysis

Introduction

Welcome everybody, glad to see you guys here today.

Last time I was up here I talked about some questions that we need to be tackling and ways to address issues of people have with the church.

The leadership team has been meeting weekly trying to work through some of that and how it is going to look.

We think it is really important and want to do it correctly, so in the mean time Cody asked me to do a series on the Book of James.

Now when I say a series, we are going to be taking a deep dive into James and really breaking apart the scripture .

I plan on doing a chapter a week so if you guys want to read the next weeks chapter ahead of me that would be awesome.

I would encourage you guys to do that so that when we are going through this, you guys have an idea of the content.

I also am going to be doing things a little differently with the series.

If at any point you guys have a question or feel like you want to add something please feel free to raise your hand or stand up and add your two cents in.

I want this to be less of me just sitting up here and talking and more of you guys asking questions.

And as I say that, please know that I don’t know everything, and I might not be able to give you a good answer and will have to do some thinking or research on it.

And if anyone else wants to attempt to answer that question they can as well.

My hope is that we can walk away from this series saying that we all learned something new about the book of James.

Personally, this is one of my favorite books in the new testament and I feel like i learn something new every time a read it.

I find that happens a lot with scripture in general.

But again, feel free to ask questions if something doesn’t make sense or if you are reading this throughout the week and come across something you would like further expanded in the chapter to post the question in group me and I will be sure to talk about it in my sermon the following week.

History

With that being said lets dig into James.

Now James is one of the controversial book in the New Testament.

Martin Luther, who was a very prominent figure in the protestant reformation called the book fo James an epistle of straw and considered it to have a secondary status in the N.T.

And modern theologians often dismiss the book as a holdover from Judaism that does not truly express the essence of the Christian Faith.

So it other words, the book is “too Jewish”.

Yet despite all of that, James tends to be the most popular book in the N.T.

It is one of the best known, and most quoted books.

And why is that?

It is because James is a very practical book for people looking for specific guidance on how to live a Christian life.

It is almost like the proverbs of the N.T.

It offers great advice that on the surface doesn’t really require a lot of thought right.

James doesn’t use metaphors that are hard for us to understand or comprehend, it is pretty straight forward.

Another thing that makes James likable is that he is very straight to the point.

In the book we see James make a point in a simple way, and move on to the next topic.

That being said, James didn’t become accepted as canon in the New Testament u until about 400 A.D. It was certainly used for teaching and quoted before that, but it wasn’t universally accepted as having biblical authority until around 400 A.D. The book, or should I really call it a letter because that is what it is, was written much earlier.

Some scholars think that the letter was written as early as 44 A.D. while others think it was written after 70 A.D.

Now two indications point to the letter MOST LIKELY having been written in the mid 40’s.

One of the most important indicators is the probable relationship between James’ teaching on Justification in chapther 2 and Paul’s teaching on the same topic.

Paul was teaching that faith, not works, is how we were justified before God.

We see that in Ephesians 2:8-9

“For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God—not by works, so that no one can boast.”

But James says that faith without works is dead in chapter 2. So it seems that James has not really come to grips with what Paul actually meant.

But a misunderstanding like this would not have happened after 48 AD because that is the year that Paul and James met to hash out a consensus on the requirements to be imposed on Gentiles for entry into the people of God.

Acts 15.

The historical scenario that is suggested is that Paul’s preaching in Tarsus from c. 36 (Acts 9:30; Gal.

1:21) and in Antioch from c. 45 (Acts 11:25–26) had been misunderstood by some who heard him.

They were apparently using the slogan “justification by faith alone” as an excuse for neglecting a commitment to discipleship and practical Christian living.

It is this “perverted Paulinism” that James attacks in chap.

2. James probably did not even know that Paul’s teaching was the jumping-off point for the view he is opposing.

He would have attacked such a teaching, of course, at any date.

But had he known what Paul truly preached (as he would have after A.D. 48), he would have put matters differently than he did.

The second indication that the letter was written in the mid 40’s is how casually James mentions the Torah.

Now we will get more into this later, but James was writing the letters to a Jewish audience, so it makes sense that he would mention the torah, but in 47-48 AD the conflict over the torah and how it related to gentiles arose.

Again, we see this issue addressed in Acts 15 which happened around 48 AD.

Now James was the leader of the council that met in 48 AD to address these issues.

So from that time on James would have been well aware of the question of how the torah related to Christians .

Again, his audience as Jews, but his casual references to torah in the letter make more sense if this meeting had not happened yet.

The Letter of James (B.

Date)

For these reasons, we think that James was probably written in the middle 40s, perhaps just before the meeting in Acts 15.

This time period also had some severe economic crises (there was a famine in Judea in A.D. 46 [Acts 11:28]) and the beginning of the serious social-political-religious upheavals that would result in the Jewish war of rebellion in 66–70.

Both circumstances fit the situation implied in the letter.

Authorship

Now that we have narrowed down the possible date, lets look at who wrote the letter.

There are a few possibilities but the most widely accepted answer is that James the brother of Jesus was the one that wrote the letter.

There were arguments in the early church that James, the brother of John, the disciple, could have written the letter, but if we go with the timeline discussed with it being written in the mid 40’s that is unlikely.

James, the brother of John was killed in 44 AD (Acts 12) while James the brother of Jesus and who was the leader of the church in Jerusalem was killed in 62 AD.

We know that James the brother of John was killed in Acts 12.

But for James, the brother of Jesus death, we have to go outside the Bible to a book called The Antiqueites of the Jews, written by Flavius Josephus, who was a Jewish Historian and military leader, around 93 AD.

Here is the excerpt from that.

“Festus was now dead, and Albinus was but upon the road; so he assembled the sanhedrim of judges, and brought before them the brother of Jesus, who was called Christ, whose name was James, and some others, [or, some of his companions]; and when he had formed an accusation against them as breakers of the law, he delivered them to be stoned:”

So this is the reason that James, the brother of Jesus, is given credit for writing the letter.

From a timeline perspective, it makes more sense if he was the one to have written it.

Nature and Genre

Now that we have the author and the date it was written lets talk about the letter itself.

The opening line of James is James 1:1 “James, a servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ, To the twelve tribes scattered among the nations: Greetings.”

This confirms for us that James is writting a letter.

It has a greeting, and an addressee.

Now what is really important for us to remember here is that we are reading a letter written to someone else.

When James was writing this, he was writing it with the mindset that it was going to be read by other people other than the people he was writing to.

He knew that this wasn’t a biography of Jesus, or that it would be used thousands of years later by us.

He wrote it with the purpose of addressing a specific group of people and the problems they were facing at that time.

That doesn’t mean that we can’t find way to apply what James says to our lives to day.

But the burden of find the best way to relate what James is talking about lies on us.

We have to interpret what James means when he says certain things and understand the context of the situation the readers were in.

If we can look at his letter through the lens of his readers, we can better find ways to apply it to our own lives.

Now the purpose of the letter is to encourage, give advice, and instruct and the theme of the letter is on spiritual wholeness.

So as we go into chapter 1, lets try and get into the shoes of our readers and put ourselves in the mid 40’s AD.

Chapter 1

James 1:1 “James, a servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ, To the twelve tribes scattered among the nations: Greetings.”

So here we see the introduction.

James identifies himself as a servant of God and of Jesus and the tells us who he is writing to.

The 12 tribes scattered among the nations.

Now the the 12 tribes is a clear pointer to the Tribes of Israel so we know that James is addressing a Jewish audience, and we see that he says they are “scattered” among the nations.

Now something important we have to pay attention to is this word scattered.

Keeping in mind the social, political, and religious issues that were going on during the time we know Christian were being persecuted and there is a good chance that James was writing to Jews who were displaced.

They have been uprooted from their homes and scattered across many different countries.

It is important for us to consider this when we go into the next set of verses.

You see in James, he never says in his letters what issues the people are facing.

And that makes complete sense.

If i am writing a letter to you that is full of advice I am not going to take time to tell you what you are struggling with or the situation you are currently in.

You already know your situation so there is no benefit of me telling you more about.