2024-09-15 Covenant CRC - Sermon Only - Joel Kok

James 1:1-18

Transcript

So, let me offer a spoken prayer of illumination as well. Then we'll turn to James, the book of James, the Epistle of James, chapter one. Let's pray again for the Holy Spirit. Gracious God, your word is living and active. It's sharper than any double-edged sword. And even as your word reveals you and your truth to us, there's also so much mystery, so much more for us to learn.

So, we pray urgently for your Holy Spirit. You will speak to us through James this morning as we think about the particular words. We pray the spirit of the word, Jesus Christ, you became flesh and dwelt among us. We pray for all these things to come together so that we can see and live by as we hear your gospel truths this morning.

We pray this all in Jesus name. Amen. So again, the epistle of James, I think it's page 1880 if you need to search for a little bit. Yes, it's page 1880, and the Bible's in your chairs. And again, there will be multiple meanings for several of these words. So let's, um, with trust in our loving God, hear the word of God from James 1, beginning at verse 1.

We'll read through verse 18. Here are God's many words, as well as the word. James, a servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ, to the twelve tribes scattered among the nations, greetings. Consider it pure joy, my brothers, when you face trials of many kinds because you know that the testing of your faith develops perseverance.

Perseverance must finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything. If any of you lacks wisdom, he should ask God, who gives generously to all without finding fault, and it will be given to him. But when he asks, he must believe and not doubt because he who doubts is like a wave of the sea blown and tossed by the wind.

That man should not think he will receive anything from the Lord. He is a double-minded man who is unstable in all he does. The brother in humble circumstances ought to take pride in his high position, but the rich one should take pride in his low position because he will pass away like a wild flower for the sun rises with scorching heat and withers the plant.

Its blossom falls, and its beauty is destroyed. In the same way, the rich man will fade away even while he goes about his business. Blessed is the man who perseveres under trial, because when he has stood the test, he will receive the crown of life that God has promised to those who love him. No one should say that God is tempting me, for God cannot be tempted by evil, nor does he tempt anyone, but each one is tempted when he is dragged away and enticed by his own evil desire.

Then, after desire has conceived, he gives birth to sin, and sin, when it is fully grown, gives birth to death. Don't be deceived. My dear brothers, every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the father of the heavenly lights, who does not change like shifting shadows. He chose to give us birth through the word of truth, and we might be the first fruits of all he created.

This is the Word of the Lord. Thanks be to God. Well friends, towards the end of our reading, we just heard of our Lord speaking of giving us every good and perfect gift. And here I'll share with you that as we look at these words that are going to have multiple meanings in everything, the word, perfect, It's going to be one of those words that we're going to have to explore with its various meanings.

But right away, we can share and ponder that the Lord is giving all these perfect gifts through a man who calls himself a servant, James, who can also be translated as a slave, who will be martyred because of his faith in God. So he's still getting perfect gifts, and he's writing to a group of people scattered around the world.

These are Jewish believers in Jesus who would have faced various challenges and been scattered in various ways. So, somehow, God is giving every good and perfect gift to those people. And in our worship, God is giving every good and perfect gift to us. One of these perfect gifts is that God is making you perfect.

That is part of the perfection that is taking place in our worship. And in your whole life, one of God's perfect gifts is making you, making all of us, better. Perfect together in Christ, he makes us more and more perfectly like our perfect savior, Jesus Christ. And so, we'll get back to that word and that theme of perfection very soon as we explore God's word.

But to begin to hear the word perfection, which already has some mysteries and struggles. Am I going to be perfect? What does that mean? You know, we can think about all kinds of things now. But we can also be helped to hear God. We are speaking about perfection, making us perfect. If we spend a little bit of time with the word joy, as in James says to us, consider it pure joy.

It's all joy when you go through trials and here I'll share that I need to think about joy this past week going on amid all the trials that are part of a life For any follower of Jesus, really, for any human being. And I was able, very, felt very grateful I could talk about this with my high school students this morning.

One of the things in which God kind of reminded me of and helped me think about more is for me to participate in God making us perfect for all of us. One thing we need to do is make a distinction that I'm sure many of you are familiar with, but I think it's still good to review, is there's a difference between joy and happiness.

Because, again, as you probably recognize, my high schoolers did, when it comes to happiness, what we're referring to primarily are the circumstances that are going around about our lives that can make us feel a certain happiness, at least for a while. You know, I think all of us, if the Philadelphia Eagles win later, no, well, not all of us are eagles, but we can feel happy when relatively minor events can happen, and then that happiness can fade away in all kinds of ways.

So I think we can be grateful for some healthy happiness, but again, we need to distinguish it from the joy that God is speaking to us, and that is God sharing to us through his word, because joy is a reality that is everlasting and ever expanding. And joy comes not primarily from the circumstances around us.

Joy comes from our God, our loving God, who's giving us perfect gifts. That is a joy that we can receive and experience and express even when we are very unhappy. Because again, Happiness comes a lot from circumstances. Joy comes from God in a more direct way. And to give just a few Biblical teachings related to that, we can think about joy as the Apostle Paul talks about it in just a couple of passages, Galatians 5 and Romans 5.

So you remember in Galatians 5, Paul talks about what he calls the fruit of the Spirit. And the first spirit, the spirit that leads to all the other fruit being able to grow is love. And so the Holy Spirit gives us a love from God that we can return to God by listening to his word. And what happens when we have this love fruit?

That's when we get the joy fruit. Love. Joy. And then comes peace, patience, all the fruit of the spirit. They flow from love. They come from God. And what Jesus specifies when he talks about either joy or peace is that he gives us those kinds of gifts. He shares those realities to us again when we're having afflictions and troubles.

that can make us feel pretty sad sometimes. So that's the kind of joy we're going to try to be open to. We're going to try to experience and express the joy that's related to the gift, the fruit of the Spirit, through the Holy Spirit. And then just to add a little bit more to it, Romans 5 may have come to your mind already.

Because there Paul has this amazing thing that he says about joy. And here he puts it in terms of rejoicing joy. We can rejoice in God in all kinds of ways. And what Paul specifies, we can rejoice even when we suffer. Which is going to make us sad and unhappy in a lot of ways, but still we can rejoice in God even when we suffering.

Why? Because suffering produces perseverance, which James talks about here. Perseverance produces character, which we want a character more and more like Christ. Character produces hope, and we can have hope because God's love is poured into us through the Holy Spirit who is given to us. That's the perfect gifts all coming to us.

And so that's what we really want to recognize about the joy that we can have here. We can have that, even as we're struggling, feeling sad and unhappy, we can have a joy. Because here we can go back to this big message. Because God is making us perfect. God is giving us every good gift. Which includes making us perfect.

And here we can note that here we have this sort of multiple meanings, including mysterious meanings, regarding the word perfect. So, as you listen to our word, in some ways, we heard the word perfect only once. And that came out towards the end in verse 17 again, where we get every perfect gift from God.

But if we could read the original Greek all together, we could learn that a Greek word for perfect, this word telos, it actually comes up three times in our reading. Twice in verse four. Because there, through James, the Lord tells us that as we persevere to finish the works he's given us to do, that is a telos, that's a perfection.

That he's working in us. And as we work to become more mature, that maturity, again, is a telos, that is part of the perfection of God. That God is working in us. So just as joy has this rich and powerful meaning, so does tell us, so does perfection. That as we persevere in doing what we're called to do, as we become more mature, as we do that, we're growing in a character more and more like Christ.

We're becoming more and more like our perfect Savior as God does all that kind of things. And again, this is all part of the perfect gift from God. God, and that's just to point out that all these words have so much more truth and power in them than we realize initially. But if we ponder them, if we open ourselves, please know that as you stick to good work, even when you feel like quitting or you're sick of it, persevere, and God will make you more and more perfect.

Or if you just want to cry and be a baby and complain all the time, or if you grow mature so that you have these things like patience and all the other gifts. That is part of God making you telos, making you perfect. And then I'll just add that this is a, I was persuaded by this one scholar named David Gibson that this theme of perfection is really the central perfection.

Of the Epistle of James. Because if we were to look for that Greek word, telos, getting translated in different ways, we would find it seven times. And when a Bible writer puts something down seven times, that's, this is, this is the perfect expression of it. This is what it's all about. And so David Gibson, in a wonderful book about James, he has an opening chapter, which starts with chapter one, but looks at the whole thing.

And he calls it perfection. Because that is what God is doing to us through the Epistle of James. That is what God is doing through us now. He is heading us towards perfection. And so to be able to keep living out the joy and to have that lead us into a perfection, we'll move on to another word that has multiple meanings and a lot of mystery to it.

And here, in English, we're going to look at the word trial. Trial. As we rejoice in our trials and the amazing thing here is that the Greek word for trial that comes up in verse 2 and verse 12. That word is perip, er, per, perosmos, I'm not very good at Greek anymore, perosmos. That word for trial is translated as temptation in verses 13 and 14.

So here's this amazing thing. When we pray, Lord, lead us not in temptation. Again, if we were doing it in Greek, we'd say, lead us not into Phaerosmos. And the amazing thing is that word stands for both trial and temptation. And there we can be aware of a distinction, obviously, because James says to us, Count it all joy when you go through trials, pray Rasmus.

Blessed are you when you go through a trial, pray Rasmus. But on the other hand, when you have a temptation, pay Rasmus. Don't think that's from God. Don't blame it on God. Don't go along with that. So James is really wanting us to be aware of how different Powers are acting when we go through trials because what God is doing in those trials is He is perfecting us, in and through a related word, and that's the word testing us.

When we go through trials, God is testing us to make us stronger, to lead us more towards perfection. On the other hand, when we have perasmus as temptations, that means we're just listening to our own self centered desires. As we confessed earlier, we can sometimes put our preferences above God's preferences.

And when we do that, we're so open to the temptations of the evil one to lead us away from God. And so again, what multiple meanings. What mystery in that word, perasmus, trial, perasmus, temptation. Well, to understand God testing us in a way to make us perfect, we can turn to our perfect savior, Jesus, and we can see him experiencing both sides of that word in his journey through the wilderness.

And that is such a revealing time in Jesus life, because remember what happened just before Jesus went into the wilderness. Jesus got baptized, and when he was baptized, there was this joyful experience. The father said, you are my son, whom I love, with you I'm well pleased. It was just as joyful as anything could be.

And then what happened? The spirit led Jesus into the wilderness, where he experienced perosmos, and the gospel writers are explicit here. And that perosmos include, he was tempted. by the devil who's saying, Oh, if you're the son of God, how come you don't have everything you want? So, you know, that pay Ross Moss was going on as a temptation, but for Jesus, he knew that pay Ross Moss was more than that.

It was a testing from his father, a training, because when the evil one, when the devil tempted him that pay Ross Moss to say, just do whatever you want, let me give you the worldly power that you want and all that kind of thing. Jesus resisted that. By calling on the word of God in Deuteronomy 8, in the one story of God, Jesus is fulfilling because in Deuteronomy 8, our father explains to his people, I led you through the wilderness so that I could test you.

So that she could learn things such as we do not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God. So Jesus was able to continue in joy. He was continued to able to grow even more perfect than he already was because he knew his father, his loving father was testing him, making him stronger, giving him more and more wisdom as our truly human savior.

And so he was able to resist the perosmos temptations of, The evil one. And so that is another word then that I think we want to be aware of is test temptation, both from the Greek word, pay Ross Moss. And what Jesus shows us is that when we go through trial as pay Ross Moss, we really can have joy in our Lord.

Because he's working with us in the wilderness and the struggles in a good way. He's testing us to make us stronger and more like Christ, so we can rejoice because he's leading us toward perfection. And we can resist. The evil one, as he gives us Perasmus temptations. And one more sort of helpful passage here.

Another, we looked at Galatians 5. We looked at Romans 5. Well, here is Hebrews 5, helping us connect Jesus story to our story. Because in Hebrews 5 we read that when Jesus had his days of flesh, that is when Jesus lived as a totally human person here on earth like we are, he lived with loud cries and tears.

He went through some really times in which he could feel unhappy. And yet he was able to have the joy and everything he needed from his father because Hebrews 5 says Jesus learned. He already knew everything right, but no, he was totally human. Jesus learned obedience through what he suffered. And in that way he became the perfect Savior for all who obey.

And we would add, for all who obey him. By trusting in the joy of our Father in our time of trials as he's testing us. So that as we obey, we become more and more perfect, like our perfect Savior. So these are these mysterious words, these multiple meaning words, that I hope, um, you're hearing our God through them.

And so let's just go to Really one more word with multiple meanings, but two words we want to keep together. So we've looked at joy, we've looked at trials, which is related to temptations in some ways, and testing. And, um, we also want to move towards perfection by having another word, wisdom. And here we're going to put, you know, James says, pray for wisdom.

So if you're wondering, well wait a minute, what about joy? What about perfection? What about trials? Boy, do we need wisdom. James says, pray for that wisdom. But pray with faith, not doubt. And when we get to the word doubt, yet again, we get to another word with multiple meanings and a lot of mystery to it.

Because here we can observe that in the scriptures, we can speak of an honest doubt, And we can feel that, and we can distinguish that from a dishonest doubt, which James describes as being double minded. So, what would come to your mind if you think of honest doubt, of an honest believer? One just beautiful, revealing story there that shows how hard it can be, but how we can be honest in our faith.

As he, we feel doubt is John the Baptist, which I've referred to at other times, but it's always such a wonderful story to hear. Because how did John the Baptist feel when Herod arrested him and put him in jail? And it was moving towards a time when he would cut off his head. Here, James, John the Baptist was not exactly happy.

But he was able to live by the spirit and the joy of God towards perfection. And he went through that trial. And he did that by taking an honest question of doubt to Jesus, where he said, man, in effect, Jesus, I was expecting you to chop down all the bad guys like Herod. So he sent his disciples out of prison and said, are you, he said, are you the one who is to come?

Or do we have to wait for somebody else to do what I said you were going to do? That's an honest expression of a believer wrestling with doubt. And Jesus responded to that. With mercy and grace and with revelation. He said, well, I'm doing all these good healings and blessed are you. If you don't take offense at this, John, in other words, blessed are you.

If you understand that I'm doing the way of the cross rather than the way of chopping down to bring the new world to come and that kind of faith could help John as he continued in the way of the cross and lost his life for the life that Christ brings. And so please know. If like me, you're wrestling to understand, you're wondering what's going on with joy, with trials, with perfection.

If you're having some struggles that even are sort of like doubts in some ways, just bring them honestly to our Lord because he will honestly and truly speak to you. And one thing he says to us is, but don't fall into that double minded doubt, which again, as we confessed earlier, was us saying. Well, I actually would prefer to do what I want, God, rather than what you want.

And it just so happened this past week that as I was getting ready for this message, I heard a testimony from a fellow believer, a wonderful disciple in many ways, who talked about going through quite a few years in which he had what James calls this double minded faith. Because as he went through some trying times, as he went through some difficult times, he sort of did two things at once.

He'd pray, but whatever words he used, what he was actually praying was, God, do what I want. Do what I want. My will be done. He was praying, in effect. And that double mindedness just didn't open him to what God was doing, but the Spirit, who connects us to joy, to the path to perfection, that gets us through the trials and temptations, the Spirit gave him wisdom.

To understand that kind of double minded prayer and doubt that had to give away to a true faith where you can trust this crucified and risen Savior really to come with you in a way that can help you in every way needed as the Lord leads you to this ultimate telos. You remember what it is now? You are heading for a telos, a purpose, an ultimate goal is?

Perfection. So the Lord is making you perfect. Even as you wrestle with those words, wrestle with them until they bless you as Jacob did. And to help us do that, let's join in prayer. Now,

our father in heaven, we rejoice through that. Your word and spirit right now, you are connecting us with a powerful joy. through which you make us perfect. And we rejoice that you can do this and make us more and more like Christ, even and especially as we go through times of trials, as we work with you as you test us to overcome temptation.

And so, Father, as we trust and hope in you and your son and your Holy Spirit, we pray for the wisdom. that we need to have true faith in you. And we pray that that true faith will give us hope in your Holy Spirit and the love for you that we express when we listen to and learn to your word. And again, we pray all this in the name of your word, Jesus Christ.

Amen.