Sermon Tone Analysis
Overall tone of the sermon
This automated analysis scores the text on the likely presence of emotional, language, and social tones. There are no right or wrong scores; this is just an indication of tones readers or listeners may pick up from the text.
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Good Morning!
As always, I am excited to be with all of you this morning.
Today we are going to talk about patience, endurance, and being blessed by God.
We will get to all that, but I want to start by saying that it is such a blessing to enjoy God’s presence with all of you each week.
As some of you may know, Brittany, Able, Elijah, and Ari Meek were in town this week, and some of us got to visit with them briefly.
I also talked with Russ on the phone a few times, and both Russ and Brittany shared how they missed all of you.
Without getting too far off track and sharing a lot of details, suffice it to say that life has been difficult for them since they moved.
They greatly miss our church family, and I believe it is because of the spirit-filled worship and fellowship that we share.
Russ told me Wednesday about what they have gone through recently, and as I spent time with God throughout that day and the rest of this week, God has spoken and sent so much encouragement.
One of the ways God did this was through Carey.
I was sharing Russ’s story with him Wednesday night, and Carey shared one of the passages God had him in that day.
I want to read it with you this morning because it is a perfect intro to what James is going to say.
None of us in this room are strangers to hardship.
We could fill this time and much more with stories of difficulties we have faced in this life.
I bet we could fill our time this morning with just things that have happened this week.
Find comfort in knowing that you and I are not alone.
We see passages similar to this one in 1 Peter all over the bible.
Last week James called out the rich and their lack of care for those in need.
As we learned, all of us struggle with protecting our possessions.
There is this false idea in our culture that having more stuff will make the things that Peter is describing easier to deal with.
But pursuing more only leaves us with anxiety.
What we need more of is not wealth but trust in God.
Money is temporary, and an obsession with it will cause us to miss out on what God wants to do in our lives.
Our goal, as Gathering Place people, is to know God progressively more every day.
If we don’t allow God to change our hearts so that we are more motivated by His grace than we are by our possessions, we are going to miss out.
But do you know what the problem is?
Do you know why we all struggle with this?
We struggle because life is hard, and we have bought into the lie that more possessions will make life easier.
We aren’t the first, and we certainly won’t be the last.
So what is the solution that James gives for dealing with the hardships of life?
Look at James 5:7-11 with me.
First, notice the difference in tone.
In the previous section, he said, “come here now,” and in this one, it is “my brothers and sisters.”
James is addressing those that have been suffering hardships with compassion.
James asks them to do two things.
Be patient
Endure
Let me say this, I know that if you are in the middle of something difficult, being told to be patient and endure is the equivalent of a man telling his wife to calm down when she is upset.
Nothing good ever comes of that.
James gives us three examples of what it means to be patient and endure.
The first is that of a farmer.
In the event that you have never planted tomatoes, I’m here to tell you that there is nothing that takes longer than waiting for a seedling tomato plant to grow up and produce it’s first ripe fruit.
You water, weed, prune, weed, remove pest, weed, wait, water, pace, weed, remove more pest, talk the plant out of dying, weed, weed, weed, and finally you get three decent tomatoes.
Okay, maybe it isn’t that bad, but it’s close.
It takes a long time and there is nothing you can do to speed up the process.
You may think that adding more fertilizer would make it produce faster, but it won’t.
It takes what it takes.
For those of us that have small gardens, we have some luxuries that farmers don’t.
If the plants need water we can put out a sprinkler.
Unlike a farmer who must wait on the rain.
Sometimes it comes, sometimes it doesn’t, or sometimes you get too much or too little at the wrong times during the season.
There is nothing a farmer can do to determine any of those factors.
Therefore he/she must wait.
The same is true for some of the things we struggle with in life.
We can want things to be different, but often we are powerless to do anything about it.
And so what does James say we are to do?
We are to wait, be patient, endure, and strengthen our hearts.
We will come back to this idea of “strengthen your hearts” later today.
He goes on to say in verse nine,
The text doesn’t spell this out, but you have to think that James is dealing with these people’s feelings toward the group he addressed in the last section.
Here we have people who are suffering, and in the last passage, he is dealing with the rich that are allowing or even causing the suffering.
This is a hard thing to do.
James is getting into some deep-heart stuff here.
He is reminding the church of something that Jesus taught.
It is so easy to look at others, particularly the people that have wronged you or made your life difficult, and judge them.
In fact, they may be completely wrong in their actions, yet Jesus doesn’t say that it is okay to judge them.
Jesus says to quit focusing on the speck in your brother’s eye and deal with the beam in your own.
In other words, don’t be so obsessed with what has upset you because you are as guilty as they are, but just in something else.
We’ve talked about this before.
When we are wronged, we want to be angry, and we want to be justified in our anger.
James is echoing Jesus in saying that even if our anger is justified, we are still wallowing in guilt, just like the person that has upset us.
James says to be patient because the judge is at the door.
God sees what you see, but he sees it more clearly than you do, and that other person will stand before Him and account for their sins.
It doesn’t do them or us any good to compare our sins and find that theirs are worse than ours.
Sin is sin, and all of it separates us from God.
James is reminding the church of all those that came before who suffered in their service to God.
Don’t be surprised if your life isn’t carefree.
Jesus warned us that it wouldn’t be.
James spoke to this earlier in his letter.
James wasn’t the only one to address this issue either.
Look at Paul’s words to the church in Corinth regarding how the apostles were treated by the world.
I don’t know how you see it, but to my eyes, this doesn’t line up with “American Cultural Christianity.”
Culture says that if we give our lives to Christ, go to church, and promote moral living, we will be #blessed.
We will have all we want, and life will be stress-free.
#too blessed to be stressed
Look at James 5:11 because James says the exact opposite of what ACC teaches.
Wait, what?
We are blessed if we endure like Job?
Do you remember Job’s story?
It goes like this, he had everything a man could want, riches, a big family, great relationship with God.
All that was taken away, and he continued to believe that God was good and stood firm in that in the face of all his friends and his wife trying to convince him of the opposite.
What was Job’s outcome?
Remember Job’s three friends?
The ones that spoke against God and Job.
The ones that God calls into correction and tells them to go and apologize to Job.
James isn’t just saying that if we endure, God will bless us; he is referring to this very specific instance where these men we speaking ill of Job.
God tells Job to pray for them, forgive them, and then God blesses him for doing what God said.
The blessing comes after obedience.
We have to be careful here and pay close attention.
Are you still with me?
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