James 1:1
Our reading tonight is simply
one verse. It’s James chapter one, verse
one. This is the word of the living
God. James, a servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ.
To the 12 tribes in the dispersion, greetings. Well, most people
will sit through a brief sermon I had an attorney come to me
when I pastored in Greensboro, and he said, I go before judges
every week, and a judge says, counselor, keep it short. And
he says, so I’m here to tell you, preacher, keep it short.
And so I listened to him for a little bit, and I said, what
do you expect a sermon to be, and what do you expect a sermon
to do? And this is about what I got.
Most people will sit through a brief sermon. By that I mean
seven to eight minutes. It better be interesting, and
it better have a story, and I better laugh. Oh, and don’t step on
the toes. That was pretty much the gist,
and I recalled to mind several little ditties that I heard.
Sermonettes make Christianettes, right? And then I remembered
some of the church history vignettes I had heard where on the side
of the pulpit there used to be mounted in days past an hourglass. And some ministers talked about
the maturity of the congregation to allow them a turn or two. of the hourglass. So when y’all
get these nice, neat 23, 25, 26 minute messages, y’all should
take a sigh of relief. But y’all know the saying, when
the preacher leaves preaching, he goes to meddling, right? You’ve
heard the story of the preacher one day, he was preaching on
the evils of gambling and everybody was amening and amening. Then
the next Sunday he was preaching on the evils of staying out late
on the town and, you know, doing things you shouldn’t do. Everybody
was amen in that. And then the next Sunday he preached
a sermon on the evils of, I don’t know what it was, and everybody
amen that. Then the fourth week he preached on gossip. And the
room was rather quiet. Well, James is going to go to
meddling. James is going to give us in
just 100 verses, depends on how you count, maybe 108 verses.
He’s going to give us 54 imperatives. Now y’all remember what imperatives
are. That’s when your mom hollers out the back door, supper, right?
Supper with an exclamation point. That means get home, get washed
and get to the table. Um, an imperative is a do it
now verb, right? It’s a get it done, get it done
now type verb. And we’ve talked before about
how in very often in New Testament letters, especially Paul’s, the
first half of the book will be indicatives telling you what
is true. God is great. God is creator.
God is redeemer. You were sinners. You’re now
saved. And so like take Romans, for example, Romans chapter 1
through chapter 11 are all glorious theology. Who God is, what God
has done, how he has done it. And then you get to chapter 12,
verse 1, and it begins with the word therefore. Therefore, offer
your bodies as living sacrifices. Therefore, be transformed by
the renewal of your mind. And so, for example, in Romans
chapters 12, 13, 14, 15 and 16 are all based on chapters one
through 11, the indicative, what’s true. Then you get to the imperatives
that therefore do these things. Well, James just cuts out. all the indicatives. I mean,
you’ll get a few, but it’s do this, do this, do this, do this,
do this. And so the book of James is much like the Proverbs, just
bullet, bullet, bullet, bullet fired at you out of God’s machine
gun. Live this way, act this way,
be this way, do this way, don’t do that. And it’s so wonderful
to receive that wisdom in rapid fire from James here in this
book. But if you don’t want your toes
stepped on, if you don’t want the preacher to go from meddling,
James is not for you. Now, who is James? There are
generally four James in the New Testament that are up for grabs.
Who’s this James? Everybody agrees it’s the brother
of Jesus. Everybody agrees it would be
one of his younger half-brothers, right? Jesus conceived by the
power of the Holy Ghost, all the other brothers, yes, born
of Mary, but from Joseph, their natural father. So James, all
agree, the brother of the Lord Jesus. And it’s very interesting
as he addresses this letter, he doesn’t take a selfie with
Jesus and say, Look who I’m kin to, listen to me. Now, what does
he say? James, a servant of God and of
the Lord Jesus Christ. That’s significant. Three things
we ought to think about that. First of all, he’s a servant
of God, a doulos, a slave of almighty God. He’s a slave of
God and of the Lord Jesus Christ. So he’s going to, as we’ll note
in a minute, appeal to the Jewish audience. He’s a slave of God. He’s a bondservant of God. But
he’s also going to appeal to all these Jewish folks scattered
around the Roman Empire. I’m also a servant of the Lord
Jesus Christ. Contrast that with Caesar is
Lord. He’s identifying who he is Who
he belongs to and where is his allegiance? There’s a big statement
here of humility. He doesn’t say, hey, look, I’m
the half brother of Jesus. You know, we’re, you know, we’re
tight, right? He doesn’t say that. No, I’m
just a servant. No admittance to his being his brother. James is also known in church
history as James the righteous. He’s also known as camel knees. This righteous brother of the
Lord Jesus, of course, made righteous by his brother’s blood, was a
man known to be in such seasons of prayer that his knees were
worn out, always on his knees in prayer. He would die for the
gospel. Tradition has it that he was
thrown down and beaten, possibly stoned for the cause of his dear
brother, the Lord Jesus Christ. Now, the book of James is probably
the earliest written New Testament book, possibly next to Galatians. Remember, Jesus died somewhere
around 30 in the 30s. This would have been sometime
in the 40s, just 10, maybe 15 years later. When the books of
the Bible were being received by the church, James had a little
trouble getting in. In fact, a thousand plus years
later, Martin Luther would call it the epistle of straw. We all
know why that was. Martin Luther’s one, you know,
he had a hammer, nailed his 95 theses, of course, but what do
you do when you have a hammer? You gotta hit everything with
it. I got one from Christmas when I was a little kid and I
nailed nails into everything. But Martin Luther thought everything
was about justification by faith alone. And so what does James
say? You show me your faith, I’ll show you my works. And he
and Paul do not disagree. Paul is looking at justification
in one way. It’s through the righteousness
of Jesus imputed to us, received by faith alone. James is simply
saying, okay, you’re righteous. You show me that you’re righteous
by the fruit of your life. So you show me your justification
by your good works,” or in some sense he’s saying, your good
works justify your justification. Your good labors, your good deeds
follow you. But Martin Luther nevertheless
called it the epistle of straw. Now I want to read to you a list
of 13 themes that we’ll consider in the book of James. And you
tell me if this is an epistle of straw. or the word of God
for the people of God to bless their lives. He’s going to talk
to us about perseverance and suffering. He’s going to tell
us about trials and temptations. He’s going to tell us how we
should respond to the word of God. He’s going to teach us about
not being impartial in our love towards others or not being partial
in our love towards others, but being impartial. He’s going to
tell us about how our righteousness leads to good works. He’s going
to talk to us several times about our tongues and how they need
to be tamed. He’s going to give us wisdom
that is from above instead of the earthly wisdom that is foolishness. He’ll speak to us about worldly
indulgence, dependence on God, patient endurance under hardships. He’ll talk to us about telling
the truth, about being people of prayer, and then he’ll show
us what it is to have true faith as we help widows and orphans. Doesn’t sound to me like an epistle
of straw, but it sounds like the very word that we need to
hear in our daily living. A couple more thoughts here about
the book of James. It’s probably the earliest book
of the New Testament. It’s a general letter written
for wide reading audiences. This letter would have been received
and it would have been read publicly in the church. You could look
at it as a one long sermon or as somebody once described, going
to preach at a church and they wanted him to preach for 45 to
50 minutes. So he takes two short sermons
and jam them together. Well, it could be that James
is five or six or seven sermons jammed together. It’s a letter
that would have been written first to be read in the churches. And then for us on down through
the ages, read and studied and memorized. It’s a letter with
Jewish orientation. One of the most important aspects
we’ve not hit yet is James calls himself a servant of God. He
calls himself a servant of the Lord Jesus, and he addresses
it to the 12 tribes in the diaspora or the dispersion. And so in
this letter, you’re going to hear all kinds of references
to the Old Testament. all kinds of inferences to the
law of Israel. He’s going to call interchangeably
the people of God, the synagogue and the church. He’s going to
use agricultural terms, much like the preaching of his brother,
the Lord Jesus Christ. He’s going to assume much from
their Jewish background and apply it to their now coming to faith
and growing in the Lord Jesus Christ. Now, something to remember,
God’s people were gathered out of the nations. God called Abraham
out of Ur of the Chaldeans, leave paganism, leave idolatry, leave
this pagan land and go to the land of Canaan. That would be
the promised land, the place where God would dwell. And in
the course of all the centuries, God would gather people to that
nation for himself. But one of the things he would
always promise them, if you don’t love me, serve me, obey me, walk
with me, if you have other gods before me, or you serve foreign
nations, or you go after things that I don’t approve of, I will
send you into exile. And so several times in the history
of God’s people, they were scattered. The first big exile, of course,
came when Israel had to flee to Egypt. to escape the famine
in Canaan. And so at the end of Jacob’s
life, we’ve looked at this recently on Wednesday night, Jacob and
69 other children of God, 70 in all, a perfect number, a little
nation are gathered there in Egypt. They grew mightily and
Moses came and redeemed them later. God brought them out of
Egypt. He led them through the wilderness.
He planted them in the promised land and they lived for God until
they didn’t. And then Assyria came and exiled
the Northern tribes. Then Babylon came and removed
the southern tribe of Judah. The city of Jerusalem was destroyed
and little bitty bits of the nation would come back under
Ezra and Nehemiah, but it never was the same. But that little
gathering in Jerusalem lasted a few centuries. And shortly
after the death of Jesus, there was a great persecution in what
we call the diaspora or the dispersion. And so he’s addressing scattered
Jewish Christians across the Roman Empire. And so he’s addressing
also the church. And in 2022, he’s addressing
you and I. We need wisdom. We need to control
our tongues. We need to trust Jesus. We need
to commit our plans to the Lord. And so this is no epistle of
straw, but this is the word of God for the people of God. And
it transcends history. comes right to us and hits a
square between the eyes. I don’t know what y’all thought
when we were singing that John Newton hymn. We all love Amazing
Grace, don’t we? We all love the fact that God
saved a wretch like me, and you follow through the words of that
song, and you think about how difficult is the Christian life.
How difficult is the struggle with sin? How often we need wisdom,
we need help, we need understanding, we need God’s continued grace. And I think if we sit under the
message of James and let the spirit work in us, God will make
us wiser for it. And so look forward to what’s
ahead for us. Let’s go before God in prayer.
Lord, we thank you so much that you have not left yourself without
witness in this world. We thank you that you’ve given
us your word for our instruction. We’ve got your word so that we
can be built up in our faith. We’ve got your word so the church
can be strengthened and established and firmed up. Lord, this world
will assault us. Satan will assault us. Even our
own flesh will lead us astray. And so we give you thanks that
we have these words to take into our minds and our hearts and
put into practice in our lives. May it be so through Jesus, our
Savior. Amen.