James 1:19-27
Notes
Transcript
Introduction
Introduction
We are walking through the wisdom of James over 10 weeks
And we get to a part right on the heels of him challenging us to consider how we interpret life and his challenge to our hearts from last week
And he is so good at giving us case studies everytime
This week he challenges us with what he ended with last week
How do we live as people who are born again
So we are going to see three things today
Your Worldview Determines Everything, How to Be Whole, and Religion Verses Gospel
Your Worldview Determines Everything You Do
Your Worldview Determines Everything You Do
My dear brothers and sisters, understand this: Everyone should be quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to anger, for human anger does not accomplish God’s righteousness. Therefore, ridding yourselves of all moral filth and the evil that is so prevalent, humbly receive the implanted word, which is able to save your souls.
If you are old enough you may remember those popular pictures where you stared for a long time and then you began to see a picture
usually they were up at a place called a mall
You are aging yourself if you know what I am talking about
This passage is like one of those pictures
The longer you observe it a picture comes into focus and its not at all what it looks like at first glance
This seems like what we are all against
That try harder be better kind of christianity we know we can’t do
But its not
To see the beauty of what James is doing we have to look at the end and work backwards
the end of 21- humbly receive the implanted word, which is able to save your souls.
What he is making us do is challenge how we are interpreting life
He is challenging what it is we believe we need to be like to be whole
What he is challenging is what is called a worldview
And we all have one even if we don’t think we do
Our worldview is how we answer lifes deepest questions
How can I be whole when I know I’m not
What must I do to be happy
How can things be made right
Who am I and what am I here for
How can my kids thrive and be whole
And how you answer those questions determines the why behind everything you do
what is telling you how to be in a world that isn’t how its supposed to be
And James is taking up his brothers words that wrecked him
We saw last week one of the most life altering questions of Jesus
John records them as the first words Jesus speaks in his Gospel book
Jesus asks those who a looking for hope “What do you really want?”
What do you long for?
James Smith says: This is the most incisive, piercing question Jesus can ask of us precisely because we are what we want. Our wants and longings and desires are at the core of our identity, the wellspring from which our actions and behavior flow
All of what James is about to lay out as our actions in verse 19 flows from considering your loves and longings and what you have come to believe will fullfill them
Here is the radical thing about real Christianity
Smith again: Jesus is a teacher who doesn’t just inform our intellect but forms our very loves. He isn’t content to simply deposit new ideas into your mind; he is after nothing less than your wants, your loves, your longings
See how the more you stare at what seems like behavior based christianity actually becomes an image we can’t imagine
James knows this
He has lived it
And everyone he is writing too lives in a Jewish world that says you better perform
You better follow the rules or God won’t love you
James is saying true christianity is radically different
It doesn’t start from what you know and do…it starts with what you love
It starts with answering lifes deepest questions with the gospel
It starts with coming to Jesus to see how we can be whole like we were always meant to be with Him
James Smith: human beings are made by and for the Creator who is known in Jesus Christ. In other words, to be truly and fully human, we need to “find” ourselves in relationship to the One who made us and for whom we are made. The gospel is the way we learn to be human
That is why James ended last week with the realization we must be born again
We have to acknowledge we a busted up
We have to acknowledge we have tried to fullfill our god given longings apart from him and seperated ourselves from the very source of life
We repent and believe
From answering Jesus’ first question- what do you long for
we come to him when he says come and see how to be human again
If the culture says self and pride is the way to be whole and it always leaves us empty the call of new life says come and learn a new way
The way of giving instead of taking
The way of humilty not pride
The way of wholeness through him
James says this exact thing look at how we receive new life implanted in our hearts…
We receive it Humbly in verse 21
How we move on from the new birth into the new life, then, is the question James is raising
And he is showing us where it starts
And how it is done
We have a culture that tells us how to live and it never satisfies
We aren’t told to want the right things the right way and we are never told to love the King who made us
They had a culture too
Anger at Roman rule and ocupation, open season on christians from the jews and romans, debates among there jewish family and friends about what they were doing being christian
Thats what verse 19 is - Everyone should be quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to anger,
He is pulling from proverbs on how to be new and be wise and be whole in a broken world they knew and we do
The one who guards his mouth protects his life;
the one who opens his lips invites his own ruin.
A gentle answer turns away anger,
but a harsh word stirs up wrath.
Do you see someone who speaks too soon?
There is more hope for a fool than for him.
Another wisdom book his audience would have know the Sirach says
22 Unjust anger cannot be justified,
for anger tips the scale to one’s ruin.
23 Those who are patient stay calm until the right moment,
and then cheerfulness comes back to them.
24 They hold back their words until the right moment;
then the lips of many tell of their good sense.
And that newness of life doesn’t come from pride
It comes from verse 21
the newness we receive when we accept the Gospel
Now that he has us in that flow of how to be human again he keeps going to tell us how to be whole
How to Be Whole
How to Be Whole
But be doers of the word and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves. Because if anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he is like someone looking at his own face in a mirror. For he looks at himself, goes away, and immediately forgets what kind of person he was. But the one who looks intently into the perfect law of freedom and perseveres in it, and is not a forgetful hearer but a doer who works—this person will be blessed in what he does.
James is all about wisdom to overcome a broken world and broken lives
What is cool is that the greek word for overcome is Nikeo
That is where Nike gets its name
And if you know Nike you know there signature tag line
Just do it
James is saying the same thing
You are new by new birth in repentance and believe in the Gospel
You are new
So live like it
Be free to be who you were made to be
Just do it
We can work backwards again in these verses to see the beautiful picture
Verse 25 The person who just does it- this person will be blessed in what he does-
That word for blessed means whole deeply happy free
We forget how to be whole and the people we were made to be if we don’t do what We are learning leads to wholeness
That is what he is saying in James 1:23-24
Because if anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he is like someone looking at his own face in a mirror. For he looks at himself, goes away, and immediately forgets what kind of person he was.
We forget how to be whole and free when we move away from the one who made us
That is why Tim Keller says you never move on from the gospel
The Gospel is not the ABC’s of the christian life it is the A-Z
Repentance and belief is the daily routine of the believer
And it makes us whole when we just do it
What does a spiritually whole person do what does it look like
Cornelius Plantinga has an amazing summary - He calls it spiritual hygiene
Although it sounds as if it might have something to do with the brushing and flossing away of small particles of vice, spiritual hygiene is actually wholeness of spirit—that is, wholeness of what animates and characterizes us. Spiritual hygiene is the wholeness of resources, motive, purpose, and character typical of someone who fits snugly into God’s broad design for shalom. A spiritually hygienic person is one who combines strengths and flexibilities, disciplines and freedoms, all working together from a renewable source of vitality
Do you hear the words of James in what doing new life sounds like?
Shalom means wholeness
It means how things are supposed to be
Someone who does new life becomes whole again
James never wants us to move away from what drives it
It isn’t that i do these things so God loves me
It is the reversal
Since God has loved me in the Gospel with an unimaginable cosmos shaking scandalous love I can trust Him to learn His ways to be whole
Plantinga again: faith fastens on God’s benevolence, it yields gratitude, which in turn sponsors risk-taking in the service of others. Grateful people want to let themselves go; faithful people dare to do it. People tethered to God by faith can let themselves go because they know they will get themselves back
You can live a bold life when you are tethered to The God who gave His son to save you
You can live an epic life daring to do great gospel things
You can be free to risk because you know the end of the story…you will get everything back but even better then it was
The point of our lives is not to get smart or to get rich or even to get happy. The point is to discover God’s purposes for us and to make them our own. The point is to learn ways of loving God above all and our neighbor as ourselves
But you have to just do it
And in doing it you learn to be whole again
That is what a spirtially whole person is
It is a person who has learned to consider their longings
Look to Jesus to satisfy them
Then lives in the freedom of what they learn from Him everyday
It is people who long rightly
It is people who immerse themselves in daily rythems of the Gospel because they are bold enough to do it
Plantinga is huge here : What are some features of this flourishing? As Christians see her, a spiritually whole person longs in certain classic ways. She longs for God and the beauty of God, for Christ and Christlikeness, for the dynamite of the Holy Spirit and spiritual maturity. She longs for spiritual hygiene itself—and not just as a consolation prize when she cannot be rich and envied instead. She longs for other human beings: she wants to love them and to be loved by them. As we might expect, her longings dim from season to season. When they do, she longs to long again.
Do you long to long again?
Then James is saying you have forgotten who you
Again James 1:23-24
Because if anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he is like someone looking at his own face in a mirror. For he looks at himself, goes away, and immediately forgets what kind of person he was.
Remember who you are
Remember again by remembering the Gospel again
Remember again Ephesians 2:1-5
And you were dead in your trespasses and sins in which you previously walked according to the ways of this world, according to the ruler of the power of the air, the spirit now working in the disobedient. We too all previously lived among them in our fleshly desires, carrying out the inclinations of our flesh and thoughts, and we were by nature children under wrath as the others were also. But God, who is rich in mercy, because of his great love that he had for us, made us alive with Christ even though we were dead in trespasses. You are saved by grace!
Remember what walking in the doing of the world got you
Where living outside of God’s design got all of us and gets us today
Sam Alberry says Western society tends to think of freedom purely in terms of the absence of restriction. The idea is that if we remove all constraints, we end up with freedom. So the imposition of rules and boundaries is a restriction of freedom, by definition. But in the Bible, real freedom is not the absence of any and every constraint, but rather, the presence of the right kind of constraint. Removing a fish from water does not give it more freedom, but less. It is designed to live in the water, not apart from it. Freedom from water is a removal of constraint, but it is also (for a fish) a complete misunderstanding of what freedom really is.
Our own true freedom is only found when we are in the environment which we were designed to flourish in. And that is obedience to God’s word
Now remember the God that came along and saved you through nothing you could ever do to earn it
He gave us new hearts to live in ways that make us whole
Now live an epic life of discovering every facet of the Gospel and how it changes everything
That is who we are meant to be in a world that isn’t how its supposed to be
It isn’t perfect
Like Plantinga said As we might expect, her longings dim from season to season. When they do, she longs to long again.
We go to the one who made us to long to make us long again in Him
That is how you become whole
And if we ever think he is simply calling us to some religious performance christianity he brings it home in verses 26-27
Religion Verses Gospel
Religion Verses Gospel
If anyone thinks he is religious without controlling his tongue, his religion is useless and he deceives himself. Pure and undefiled religion before God the Father is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself unstained from the world.
The proof that we truly listen and respond to God’s word is seen in the presence of certain “determinations” in our life.
Are we determined to be religious
Are we determined to follow some rules so god loves us
Are we determined to perform so maybe I can put God in my debt so nothing bad happens to me
Are we determined to place that weight of rule following on other people with what we say
That is what James is saying in verse 26
That kind of religion is worthless because it isn’t the Gospel
If you are that kind of religious you are communicating a worldview that doesn’t lead to life
But theres another way to follow him
It is called the Gospel
And he has shown us what he longs for in what Jesus did
We were orphans in a broken world
We were the ones who weep at a graveside in a fallen world
We were the ones in distress
And in obedience to the father he endured the cross to save us
In freedom now we long in right ways
We walk in ways that lead to wholeness and freedom
We listen to his words and live again
He tells us what he wants from us
Mankind, he has told each of you what is good
and what it is the Lord requires of you:
to act justly,
to love faithfulness,
and to walk humbly with your God.
When we do that we become human again
We become whole again
But it is only when we are motivated by the Gospel we can live as free people
Religion says I obey so I am accepted
The Gospel says I am accepted so i obey
Religion says I am motivated to follow some rules out of fear and insecurity
The Gospel says you are loved more then you could ever imagine and what I am showing you is the best way to live
The Gospel leads to the life we long for
But you have to take it as your own
And run after it with all you have
Lets pray