When Trials Come (Part 1 of 3)

Today on Truth for Life, we're beginning a new series in the book of James. Our series is titled Faith That Works. If you've never read this New Testament letter, you will find it is a very practical book that focuses on everyday Christian living.

Today Alistair Begg takes us into the text we'll be studying for the next few weeks. He begins by opening with prayer. Father, we thank you that we're able now to turn our thoughts away from everything else and everyone else to you and to the Bible that you have given to us. We ask for your particular help that we might not do a disservice to its truth, either by our attitude or our demeanor or the words that we speak or think. Speak to us in the stillness of these moments and be our teacher. Lord, we pray for Jesus' sake.

Amen. We are beginning this morning a new series of studies in this letter of James, a letter that is intensely practical—the kind of practical help that the people of God need in our everyday lives. We are made very quickly aware as we read through these five chapters of James, and I hope that you might possibly read ahead and read the whole letter so that you'll be prepared for things, but we're made very quickly aware, when we do so, of the fact that God's Word was not given to us ultimately that our knowledge might increase but rather that our lives might be changed. And the emphasis in this letter of James is not upon becoming Christians, but it is rather on behaving as Christians. And it is very, very important that those of us who would profess to be Christians would face up to these particular and pressing challenges.

And they are challenging, I have read ahead, and I know. It's difficult for somebody who uses words as much as some of us do to be confronted by James' teaching on the use and abuse of the tongue—the fact he says that it is really wrong that out of the same mouth in the same period of time should come both words that build people up and words that tear people down. Or are you tempted to play favorites with people, and particularly as it relates to church? If so, James chapter 2 is going to be distinctly uncomfortable for all of us. You see, whenever faith doesn't issue in love, whenever doctrine, however orthodox, is unrelated to the living of life, whenever we're tempted to settle down for a kind of self-centered Christian experience that ignores the social and material needs of other people, or whenever our conduct doesn't match the creed that we declare, then these five chapters, some 108 verses, have something to say to us that we disregard at our peril. Now, when we read the Bible together, it obviously comes home to our hearts in different ways. We are, after all, individuals.

But many of us would consider ourselves part of God's family here at Parkside. And so when we study the Bible together in this way, we would anticipate that God would speak to us not only as a family but also as a wider church family. And when we look together at this, we're going to discover that there is far more imperative in it than there is indicative. You remember, the indicative tense indicates what is. The imperative tense has to do with exhortation and application. And you will find that in the 108 verses there are some sixty imperatives that just jump out and punch their way out through the text, as it were, sometimes almost appearing to punch us on the nose. You may actually like to look for them all—not right now—but at your leisure.

I can give you one or two. For example, verse 5, if any of you lacks wisdom, you should ask God. That's the kind of imperative statement. Verse 1 of chapter 2, don't show favoritism. And so it goes on.

A whole host of them. They're there to be discovered, and we will encounter them as we go. Something that we ought to recognize is that we are all of us in this together.

We're all in this together. If you look at chapter 3 and in verse 2, he says, Not many of you should presume to be teachers. We shouldn't add any more teachers, he says, because you know that we who teach will be judged more strictly. And then, notice what he says, we all stumble in many ways. There's something a little disconcerting about that.

There's also something a little encouraging about it, isn't it? In that, we can say, Well, we're all in this class together. We're all in the stumbling class. We might not all be the fastest runners spiritually. We might not all be hitting for the fences.

We may only be making a single every so often. But we know this, that we are all finally in the stumbling group. And I believe that God has something to say to us as the stumblers—God's word to stumblers.

But God will speak to us, and in these early chapters it may well be that the Word of God, through his servant James to his people here at Parkside, will sound a little akin to the longing of Eliza Doolittle as she sings to Freddie in my favorite musical of all time, as My Fair Lady. I woke up this morning about 4.30, and I couldn't remember where this song came from. About five o'clock, I asked my wife, Does this come from The Sound of Music?

I was hoping dreadfully it wouldn't. It's not my favorite. And she said, No, no, no, no, it comes from My Fair Lady. And Eliza sings to Freddie, Sing me no song, read me no rhyme, don't waste my time, show me. She says, I don't want you to write me poems. I don't want you to sing me songs.

If you love me, show me. That's essentially the book of James. That's what God is saying through his word in James. Don't sing me no songs. And we love to sing songs here. We understand the importance of that. Don't read me no rhymes.

Don't waste my time. Show me. So in other words, if the book of James takes root in my life, in your life, in our lives, then there will be a visible impact on Parkside Church. In other words, our doctrine must inevitably find itself on display. Our faith must inevitably begin to function in a way that is unavoidable and difficult to miss. For that reason, you see, it makes it distinctly challenging. This is not a walk around a gymnasium pointing out the various exercise machines.

This is an invitation to get on the exercise machines, and after a period of time, for people to be able to come with tapes, as it were, and measure the various bits that you get measured. And for people to be able to say, There is an observable difference in you, and directly as a result of becoming the doers of the Word which is provided for us in these chapters. Well, let's get straight to the first verse, where James is introduced to us as the writer. James, he introduces himself. We can safely say that he is a brother of the Lord Jesus—I can detail that for you, but I won't take time to do so—in which case we might be tempted to say, Well, why then, if he is the brother of Jesus, does he not introduce himself as the brother of Jesus? Incidentally, there's really only one person who could introduce himself as James without everybody saying, James who? This is James from Jerusalem.

Oh, really? But you see, that would be like getting a phone call that says, Hello, this is Elizabeth from Buckingham Palace. Okay. This is James.

Okay. Why not lay your credentials out? Why not lead with your best foot? Why not say, Hey, this is James, the brother of Jesus? Well, I think you know the answer to that.

I'm pretty sure we're right. Because James understood that the wonder of his relationship with Jesus did not lie in the fact of them sharing the same birth mother. It was not a natural relationship that caused James to marvel. It was the miracle of God's goodness to him in opening his eyes to understand that Jesus was the person he declared himself to be.

Now, we could do a lot of background on this, and we needn't, but I'll give it to you as just the broadest of outlines. John chapter 7, John tells us that the brothers of Jesus did not actually believe in him. It's a fascinating statement, that many people were coming to believe in Jesus, but the folks who lived right next to him, who, if you like, snuggled with him in his bed when they were growing up, they didn't believe in him.

They did not believe him. 1 Corinthians 15, Paul in his great chapter on the resurrection, points out that in one of the resurrection appearances, Jesus appeared specifically to James. And by the time you get to the writing of the history book, namely Acts, in chapter 15, this James, the brother of Jesus, is at the very heart of the council of Jerusalem, where the folks of the Jerusalem church are hammering out the relationships between these Jewish believers and these Gentile believers, and James is at the very core of calling for Christian unity in the whole experience. James, if you like, is a wonderful illustration of what we studied some time ago in 2 Corinthians 5, where Paul says in verse 16, So from now on we regard no one from a worldly point of view, though we once regarded Christ in this way, we do so no longer. Remember, we said there that what Paul is showing is that there is a magnificent change that is brought about in the person who comes to believe in Jesus. Until they become to believe in Jesus, they blow their own horn, they toot their own horn, they go their own way, they view things from a completely worldly perspective.

And they don't have any interest in these things. But when they are reconciled to God, they then no longer look at people the way they once did, and they no longer look at Jesus the way they once did. And that is essentially the testimony of James.

I no longer look at my brother the way I once did. No, you will notice how he introduces himself. He's a servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ. Look at how he heaps up the designations of Jesus. Lord, which is the word that was used when they translated the Old Testament into Greek. And they had to translate the unpronounceable word yahweh, and they translated it Lord. So whenever you find in the New Testament Lord, it is not an expression of devotion, it is a designation of identity. And that's what James says. He says, I'm a servant of God and of the Lord. And then Jesus—that is, Joshua, which means God is salvation or God is Savior, and Christ, which is anointed one, or Messiah. And notice what he is. He is a servant.

A servant. Isn't it interesting how the service industry has gone down the tubes in the last twenty-five years in America? When I came here for the first time in 1972, probably the single most striking difference between Great Britain and America was the service that you received in America.

Whether it was in a petrol station or in a restaurant or wherever it was, it was so wonderfully welcoming. One may question the sincerity in certain instances, but nevertheless, it was much to be preferred to what had been left behind across the puddle. One doesn't have to be an erudite student of interpersonal relationships to recognize that it ain't what it once was. Servanthood is on the outs. Take even the way titles are given to people in the structures of business or academia. There's an almost frenetic desire to make sure that everybody realizes, You're not a servant!

You're a manager or a sub-manager or an assistant assistant coach manager or—you are, you are, you know, you really are. And look at what we discovered James doing. He says, My name's James, and I'm a servant of Jesus. Do you know if you're a Christian, that's your biggest deal?

And mine too. You may be a servant carpenter, you may be a servant homeschool teacher, you may be a servant academic, you may be a servant mom, you may be a servant painter, you may be a servant whatever you are, but ultimately, your best piece on your resume is this—Audrey, Bill, Brenda, George, a servant of the Lord Jesus Christ. And, you know, even on our best days, we're unprofitable servants.

Why would we be surprised by this? After all, the brother of Jesus would have paid attention to his brother and marveled at him when he said, I didn't come to be served but to serve and to give my life as a ransom for many. And so James says, Well, I can emulate my brother in that. James, a servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ.

What about the readers? Well, they're the twelve tribes scattered among the nations. What does this mean? Is this distinctly Jewish? Is this a letter just for Jewish folks? In which case we would be hard-pressed to find any meaningful application after all this time and to a congregation such as this. Well, we need to think it out, don't we? I think we'd be helped by turning over two pages to the beginning of 1 Peter and to see the distinct similarity between Peter's introduction and James's introduction.

They don't use the same terminology explicitly, but it is pretty similar. Peter designates himself an apostle of Jesus, one who has been set apart and sent by Jesus. Who is he writing to?

Well, he's writing to God's elect. Who are they? Well, they're strangers in the world. Where are they? Well, they're scattered throughout Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, and so on.

And what is their distinguishing feature? Well, they all belong to God the Father, sprinkled by the blood of Jesus and sanctified by the Holy Spirit. And he's turned back to James chapter 1, and he writes to these people, the twelve tribes who are scattered among the nations. I think that what James is doing here is simply exploding the term which was a comprehensive term for Israel itself. The Israel of God that had been redeemed out of the bondage of Egypt as a result of the shedding of blood. An Israel that had been scattered and was at this point in time scattered throughout the world as well. And every Jewish person looked to the possibility of their return to their homeland, and they always saw themselves, in terms of their identity, being directly linked to the Passover and to the prospect of their reunification.

And the same is true today. James takes this, and he explodes it. And he includes in the terminology, it would seem, all, regardless of nationality, who trust in Christ as Savior. We have to wait till verse 18 to get the first real indication of this, where he says in verse 18 of chapter 1, the Father chose to give us birth through the word of truth, that we might be a kind of firstfruits of all he created. And then you will notice he begins chapter 2, addressing the believers in our glorious Lord Jesus Christ. And what we find, then, in these epistles—and expressly, again, back in 1 Peter—Peter in chapter 2 picks up these Old Testament pictures and applies them directly to the variegated company of both Jew and Gentile, where he says in verse 9, you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people belonging to God, that you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light, once you were not a people. But now you are the people of God, once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy. And so, in the same way as the Hebrew people would look and do look for a day when they might return to Jerusalem, so the believers in the Lord Jesus Christ are scattered throughout the world, anticipating the day of their own great homecoming. That's why, you see, it is important for us, as nationalistic as we may be in our fervor—whether it be the land of our birth or our adopted home—to always remember that the Christian's homeland is heaven, that our ultimate destination is there, and that the affairs of our world, as dramatic and as unsettling as they are, even in a week such as this, both internally within the nation and externally throughout the world, the only real way for us to gain any sense of sensibility to the vastness of it all is to take refuge in the designations that we have before us here—to recognize that we are those who are scattered throughout the world, but God knows that we're scattered throughout the world, and that God has a plan to deal with the scattering. We've been reading Matthew this week in our home, two of us.

There's only two who was in it. And… But this is what Jesus says, and then the Son of Man will send his angels with a loud trumpet call, and they will gather his elect from the four winds from the one end of the heavens to the other. Have you ever sit and look up at the sky and imagine all the people in China, and all the people in India, and all the people in Pakistan, and all the people in Indonesia, and all the people all over the place, everywhere, and you say, How in the world are all these people who believe in Jesus all gonna get together in one tribe and company and nation and all sing the song of the Lamb? Don't worry about it.

It's not your to-do. But that's God's purpose. And when we see our place in the vastness of that scheme, then we have an understanding of how we fit.

You're listening to Alistair Begg on Truth for Life. We will continue with part two of this message from the book of James tomorrow. Alistair reminded us today that if we are Christians, our home is in heaven. In the meantime, we have been called to live out our faith here on earth. Of course, the challenge is that as Christians, the things we believe puts us in the minority, and the opposition we're going to face is strong. That can be especially true for young adults today. If you are about to head off to college or entering the workforce for the first time, you're going to face some headwinds, some resistance to the things you believe.

If you have a son or daughter who is in that situation, they can expect the same. Colleges are overflowing with ideas and lifestyles that can raise questions and doubts about our faith. That's why we want to recommend to you a book titled Surviving Religion 101, Letters to a Christian Student on Keeping the Faith in College. The author of this book, Michael Kruger, anticipates the kind of pushback young believers are going to come up against on the college campus, and in response, he provides a reminder for us of what Christians believe and why we believe it, so that students will have an answer for their faith when they face opposition. Surviving Religion 101 is also a great conversation starter if you have a teenager at home. This book helps explain that the Bible is trustworthy and that it's still relevant.

It'll help prepare your teenager to face these hard questions before they get to college. You can request the book Surviving Religion 101 when you give to support the teaching you hear on Truth for Life. Simply tap the image you see on the app or go to our website truthforlife.org slash donate. Let me also mention, if you would like to purchase additional copies of Surviving Religion 101 to give away, the book is available to buy at our cost when you go online to truthforlife.org slash store. I'm Bob Lapine. Thanks for starting the week with us. Please join us again tomorrow as we're reminded that while there's no avoiding hardships or difficulties, there is a way for us to handle them. The Bible teaching of Alistair Begg is furnished by Truth for Life, where the Learning is for Living.