James Chapter 1 getting toward verse 4, verses 1-4

What did James Know that Can Help Us?

Briefly lets focus on verse 3, it's often overlooked as sitting between the heavy concept of verse 2 which opens the door on an entirely different way of reflecting on rough times, but here's where it has to get a bit strange, do you wonder that perhaps James may have heard, "Your brother doesn't make messes..." Just food for thought...so in verse 3 we see the idea of faith, the idea of it producing something which allows you to continue on in the midst of rough times.

What is amazing love? “2Consider it all joy, my brethren, when you encounter various trials, 3knowing that the testing of your faith produces endurance. 4And let endurance have its perfect result, so that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing.” This is amazing love, that you have the power to make all kinds of all kinds of things, different, but if you do, the result will be people who become servile, incapable of actually ever loving. Want to add a dose to your theology, consider that God often does indeed answer prayer by deepening what you think you know, until by not making the thing you pray so earnestly about, happen, “Bang,” you see, at some point in the not too distant future, that He, God, personally, taught you a fact of love. How’d He do that, by allowing what appears to be bad to teach you that good and goodness reside and flow from Him and Him alone. That’s a theological point you can only come to understand when you’ve been roasted with a couple of your friends, and suddenly a man was standing there letting you know He and He alone, controls the outcome of your trial. (Daniel 3:25)

Let me gently suggest to you that James lived a trial. Let me gently suggest to you that James saw his brother (remember we agreed to drop that half brother stuff...it’s understood...ok?) and his brother was in the family, dad, Joseph, had been through many things involving faith of life and death, in the birth of your brother (you play James here). Mom, Mary, was the evangelist of the crew, she’s the one who dared the King to try and kill

the real King who she carried, your brother; who it’s probably pretty reasonable to presume, she worshiped? (cf. Luke 1:46-55) So as you James grow up in this household it’s not hard at all to see there were times when you experienced without a doubt, both a sense of jealousy and some envy and some anger and resentment- along with the times of joy. Which, as an older man will you remember and write about? But even though you write about joy, it is now seasoned with years of experience, and, depth you did not have before you now finally have come to understand, yes – your brother was God.

Why gently suggest? Because when you wham people with the God/man stuff, the tendency is to reject it, maybe not vocally, maybe not expressly; but within their hearts, folks can accept and get they believe, what it means to have God. Big, high, glorious, easy, not present, not somebody, not real- very ethereal, very God. But Jesus as a human, not so easy, we humans, have all sorts of weird emotions and thoughts, and does the Bible really say that Jesus was just like us? In every way? Well hard as that might be to fathom, that’s

precisely what it says. (Hebrews 2:17-18) If we believe that it must make us sit down and reconsider what Jesus is in our lives? He isn’t somebody to be played with at all, He takes suffering to an entirely different level, and uses the same in entirely different ways to accomplish and us, what formerly wasn’t possible. The only question, which is the one James is actually asking is, will you be there for Him?