James 1

Hook:

IDK if this has happened to you, but every so often I have a water dream. Actually just last night had a dream that we were all on a vapur in the bosphersus (probably because we ran into the French school kids coming back to the Asian side on Wednesday). Any way in the dream when on a vapur and its pretty rocky and wavy. Bryce, Brian, Jared, and Jadon were all there, we were hanging out, I don’t really remember what happened after that… Super funny though. But it was a water dream. Have yall had water dreams?

Now I’m super old or anything, but when I have water dreams it usually means I have to pee pretty bad so I end up waking up in the middle of the night and running to the bathroom. Normally, this is no big deal because I’ve lived in my house for a while now and I can pretty easily navigate from my side of the bed to the bathroom in the dark with no issues. But the worst is when I have a water dream and I’m in a new place…especially if we’re visiting someone else because then I’m trying to be extra quit so I don’t wake everyone up. But it’s the worst because I inevitably bump into stuff, can’t find the bathroom, and end up just peeing all over everything! No, I’m just joking obviously, if I had an accident I wouldn’t tell you guys… Anyway, life is a lot like a water dream…if you don’t know the light of the world, when you find yourself in the darkness of trials, you might just end up stumbling around until you eventually pee on everything..

So let’s look at James and see how we can not pee on stuff… No but seriously, let me ask you a real question, I don’t want you to necessarily answer it, just think about it and we’ll talk about it as we go through the night and really as we go through the semester. My question for you all is this, after someone becomes a follower of Jesus, what should they do? What does it mean to follow Jesus? Over the next couple of months, we’re going to look through the Book of James and I hope that as we do so, you’ll be open to allow the word of God to soak into your lives and really impact how you follow Jesus and how you interact with people around you.

Book:

So the book of James is 5 chapters long and is written by a dude named……_____...... wrong! It’s actually written by a dude named Jacob. So in the Greek, James is actually Iakōbos which would be Ya’akov in Hebrew… don’t ask me why we call it James, I’m sure they had a solid reason or at least a reason I guess.. anyway. James (or Jacob) was the brother of Jesus (which we know because of Mark 6:3 who became a leader in the early church and who lived through a ton of hard stuff actually but we don’t super have time for all of that. Also, I’m not an historian so theres that..

Anyway, the main part of the book in chapters 2-5 has a ton of stuff about what it means to follow Jesus with your whole self. Today though, we’re going to look through chapter 1 which is essentially a little summary of the whole book. So if you have your bibles or your phones, I’m going to read James 1:1-27.

Look:

v.2-4 Testing/Perseverance

“Life’s trials produce endurance and can make us perfect.” -BP the word perfect is used 7 times in the book. In the Greek is teleioi. It gets at the idea of being whole and complete. Because of our sin, we’re broken people, like a cup that has been smashed to pieces, but through faith in Christ and the work of the cross, as we preserver through trials in our lives, we can move towards the goal of perfection that will be realized when we are finally with Christ.

v.5-8 Wisdom in Faith

So that’s all well and good, but how do we actually accomplish that? It’s one thing for the bible to tell us to preserver through trials, but what does it look like when the trial we are trying preserver through feels overwhelming?

The bible doesn’t necessarily tell us the way to preserver through each and every trial that we’re going to face, but it does tell us that we can ask for Wisdom in faith and we will receive it. It’s not a maybe, like if you ask God for wisdom he’ll maybe give it to you if you try hard enough…NO! It’s definite! We can ask God for wisdom as we go through trials and he’ll give us His wisdom.

v.9-11 Poor/Rich

James even gives us a case study: An example of how this practically plays out. Money and riches have always been a big deal. Right now in Turkey even the economy is super bad and it feels like everyday there are more and more worries about the financial future of this country. What is the bible’s wisdom for followers of Jesus struggling with poverty? To boast in our poverty as God richly provides for our needs. Notice that I said needs and not wants. That doesn’t mean God’s going to give you everything you want! But it does mean that God will give you everything you need.

v.12-18 Steadfast in trials

So again James reiterates that through the Wisdom God gives us, we’ll be able to remain steadfast and actually be blessed while we do that. So that now, it’s actually in the midst of our trials that we’ll get to experience a deeper relationship with God and be used by God more to serve others. As we stay steadfast in Christ, we’ll be blessed. But we need to be cautious because the opposite is true as well. If we give into temptation and sin, that will ultimately lead to death. Guys, the more you give into sin, the closer you are to death. Maybe not physical death (although if your doing a ton of drugs and what not maybe!) but it leads you further down the path to spiritual death that will eventually lead towards being separated from Christ for eternity.

v.19-26 Be doers

And so, we ought to be doers of the word. Not because doing what God says somehow wins us favor with God, but because if we are with God in relationship, then that means we will want to obey him. Don’t do things for God thinking that he’ll love you more. He already loves you so much that Jesus died for you. Allow the things you do for God, the times you pray for your friends, the times you tell people about Jesus, the times you honor your parents, the times you serve the church or each other, let all the good things you do flow out of your love for him.

v.27 True religion

And if you need a place to start, look at what James 1:27 says is true good religion. What would it look like even for us as a youth group to practice a pure, undefiled religion before God as we, “…visit orphans and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unstained from the world.

Took:

Now normally, I like to give some concrete ways that we can take the passage we just read and give you all some ideas on what it would look like for you to live them out. But I think that you guys are pretty solid and so what I’d rather do is transition into our small groups with the hopes that we can essentially do whats called a Discovery Bible Study. That means, we’re going to take some time to look at this passage, talk about what it teaches us about who God is, who the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are, and then who we as humans are, and then how we can follow it. So I’m going to pray for us, and then we’re going to split into some discussion groups.