Let me begin by giving you a little bit of the background information to the book of James. The book of James is the first of what is known as “The General Epistles” in Scripture. The general epistles are seven in number. Besides James, they include 1st & 2nd Peter, 1st, 2nd & 3rd John and the book Jude. They are called general epistles because unlike most New Testaments letters, which are addressed either to specific individuals or to specific congregations, the general epistles are addressed more broadly to the Christian community. For that reason too, they are not named after the recipients of the letter, but they are rather named after the writers of the letters. And so, Romans, Philippians’, Titus, Timothy, those are all named after the people to whom the letters were addressed, but James, Peter, John and Jude are the authors of the letters. And so the book of James is not written to James—but by James.
James most likely, was the brother of Jesus. There are a number of James’ in the New Testament. The brother of Jesus didn’t originally believe in him, but after his resurrection, came to faith and then went on and became one of the significant leaders of the early New Testament church.
Now what’s really important for our consideration this morning is to understand the audience that this letter is addressed to, because it is addressed to Christians who are in exile. Listen carefully again to Verse 1. “James, a servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ to the twelve tribes scattered among the nations.”
The Greek literally says “the twelve tribes in the dispersion”, that is to say, they have been scattered all over the Roman Empire. Commentators are virtually unanimous in agreeing that this is a reference to Jewish Christians who were forced to flee Jerusalem and who were spread out all over the Roman Empire. We know from the book of Acts chapter seven that after Stephen, who was one of the first deacons, was martyred, the Bible says in Acts chapter eight, “a great persecution broke out against the church at Jerusalem, and everybody except the apostles were scattered throughout Judea and Samaria.”
And then a couple of chapters later on in Acts Chapter 11 we are told, “While those who had been scattered by the persecution in connection with Stephen traveled as far as Phoenicia, Cyprus and Antioch preaching the good news of the gospel.”
So, here’s the picture, you’ve got this comfortable Jerusalem church, God unleashes persecution on them or allows persecution to be unleashed upon them and it was part of God’s agenda to get them out of their holy huddle, I believe, to engage in world missions. Think of it as a big pond of water, you throw a big stone in it and the water scatters and splashes everywhere. These Christians are the twelve tribes scattered among the nations. In other words they are a displaced people. Now historically speaking, a displaced people are characterized by at least four qualities. Let me try to walk you through these as quickly as I can.
The first is they have typically experienced loss. Sometimes as you can see in the picture, it’s the loss of relationship or the loss of a loved one. More commonly it is the loss of possessions, typically when disaster strikes you have to make fast decisions about what you leave behind. Many times people escape only with the clothes on their back, highly traumatic. You lose what you’ve worked for.
Secondly they tend to confused and disoriented. Disaster as well as persecution often comes with relatively little notice and to be plucked up out of a safe environment, to be thrown into great uncertainty can snap even the strongest minds and can play very serious havoc with your emotional state.
I remember so very well back in 1953, I was five years old when our family went through a major flood in the Netherlands. Dykes broke and eventually we got eight feet of water in the place where we lived. By then we were gone – we ended up going to higher land, stayed there for five or six weeks while the lands were being pumped dry. I remember coming back to debris and junk and all kinds of things all over the place. But what was particularly traumatic about the experience for my father, in addition to the fact that a lot of his cattle drowned and all the usual disasters that you go through, one of my older brothers, just before the water hit, had been sent off with one of our horses to an Uncle of ours some distance away.
That’s when the water came, and for days my father had no information about the well being of my brother. And for days we wondered, “Is he dead or is he alive?” Well it turned out he was very much alive and lived to pester me for many years after that, but that is a whole other story. But you can imagine the disorientation, the confusion of people who wonder about loved ones or people who wonder, “Is anything going to be left that I’ve worked for, when I get back home?”
Displaced people have experienced loss, they are typically confused and disoriented, and are often angry and critical. Angry because of the events that have overcome them, critical because the people that you look to, to minimize the damage and to help you often are unwilling, you’ve seen the images, you’ve heard the reports, particularly of Hurricane Katrina, where help arrived too little and too late and many people ended up dying that didn’t really need to die, if the various government agencies would have had their act together. And of course, they are often focused on rebuilding.
One of the interesting things of life is that you don’t appreciate what it is that you’ve got until you lose it. Isn’t that true? Once you lose it, there is something in you that says, “I want to try and regain it.” And so, people that lose a lot, people that are displaced, typically fall into one of two categories. If it’s simply too overwhelming and life is too much, they just want to lie down and die. One of the early reports out of Hurricane Katrina you will recall was two policemen committed suicide. It was simply too much, they couldn’t handle it. Other people they pull it together, they grab hold of their bootstraps and they are found and determined that they will regain a life for themselves.
For that reason, typically immigrants and refugees all over the world tend to do well economically and materially because they understand the value of hard work, they apply themselves, they are willing to work long hours, willing to do whatever it takes in order to be established. It often makes them very materialistic. They often lose the next generation because they haven’t got the time for relationships that really should matter. It is a very natural response to being displaced and having lost things. You want to rebuild as best as you can.
Now we don’t know many of these characteristics were true of the twelve tribes in the dispersion. My suspicion is quite a few because if you read carefully through the book of James with this understanding of displacement in mind and the characteristics of displaced people, then you’ll hear those themes emerging again and again. He talks a lot about rich versus poor. About the poor being jealous of the rich and the rich oppressing the poor. He talks a lot about people who are so thrown into business that all other values failed them. He talks about people who talk too much or too loosely who are critical in attitude, and are trying to build their own kingdom, in opposition to the kingdom of God.
But here is that I really want us to understand this morning, it’s in this context of addressing displaced people who have experienced loss, who tend to be confused and disoriented who are often angry and critical and who are very much focused on rebuilding in the here and now. It is in this context then, that James says what we need to do is ask for wisdom. “If any of you lacks wisdom he should ask God who gives generously to all without finding fault and it will be given to him.”
Now wisdom is very different from knowledge. Knowledge is having the facts at your fingertips, wisdom is not only having the facts at your fingertips but it’s being able to apply it so that you end up looking at life from God’s point of view. So here is what James is saying. He says when life is difficult and problems are coming at you from all sides, and God calls you to count it all joy, in the midst of these difficulties, he says you can’t do that unless you first receive wisdom from God. And wisdom he says is learning how to look at life from God’s point of view as opposed to a human point of view.
Now what happens when you pray for wisdom? What happens when you start looking at life the way God looks at life? Well, three things start to come into focus. Here’s the first: we develop an eternal perspective. That is to say, we learn to look at life from eternity’s point of view as opposed from a temporal point of view. Notice how James continues, “The brother in humble circumstances ought to take pride in his position but the one who is rich should take pride in his low position because he will pass away like a wild flower.” Interesting comparison “The brother in humble circumstances should take pride in his high position but the one who is rich should take pride in his low position.” What is he trying to say?
He is trying to say that how you fare in this life must be seen from an eternal perspective. A hundred years from now, it’s not going to make a lot of difference whether you were rich or whether you were poor, whether you were unhappy or whether you were happy. What’s really going to make a lot of difference a hundred years from now is whether you are in Christ or not. “The lowly brother should exalt in his high position because those who are poor in the things of this world”, he says later on “are rich in faith.”
The rich brother should take pride in his low position because it doesn’t matter how many riches you have, in this life, you are eventually going to lose them and what really matters again is, are you in Christ and are you secure in Him? That’s why he goes on to use the analogy of the flower as describing the present situation. “The sun rises with scorching heat and withers the plant. Its blossom falls and its beauty is destroyed and in the same way the rich man will fade away, even while he goes about his business.”
Now the Bible never condemns riches. The Bible doesn’t condemn people for being rich. It’s what you do with your riches. What James here is trying to say, is that you’ve got to learn to look at life from God’s perspective. And when God looks at this world and all the glory in this world, He sees it like a flower. It is here today and it is gone tomorrow. It is what the Bible calls temporal. Why is it temporal, because it is infected with a deadly disease called “sin”. And while it is true that God is constantly at work trying to push sin back and to hold back evil, and is constantly at work trying to rescue and salvage and to restore, fact of the matter is, this present universe, in its present form is doomed for death and destruction because it is infected by sin. And God has no intention of simply patching it up and trying to make it work. Instead, the Bible says, it is going to be judged by fire. And God is going to make a new heaven and a new earth in which righteousness will reign.
We can’t even begin to imagine what that will look like. It will be everything that we have now in many, many ways and yet at the same time very, very different. But it will be characterized by three adjectives according to Peter. It will be imperishable, it will be undefiled and it will be unfading. We await a new heaven and a new earth.
The Bible furthermore teaches that the only way into that new creation is through faith in Jesus. And so getting an eternal perspective is starting to understand that no matter how gloriously wonderful or blessed we may be in the here and now, it is not our final destiny, it is not our final home. A hundred years from now what we experienced or didn’t experience here will be of no avail other than that somehow or another it helped us to get to know Jesus and to grow in Him. And so when you ask for wisdom, one of the things that happens is that God opens your eyes to the reality of a fallen world that is under judgment and God opens your eyes to the reality that you begin looking at life from an eternal perspective. And a wise person then, does everything that he or she can to live with eternity in mind.
The story is told of a court jester who was so hilariously funny that one day the King called him to himself and he gave him his scepter, tears of laughter streaming down his face and he said, “Here take this and if you ever find a fool greater than you, you give it to him.” Years went by, the court jester continued to have access to the King and to entertain him and then came time for the King to die. And so he called in the jester to bid him farewell. And jester said, “Your Majesty, may I ask you a question?”, and the King said, “by all means.”
He said to the King, “Your Majesty, in your days when you ruled as King, when you were going on a trip, you always made great preparation. You sent heralds ahead of you and you made sure that all things were prepared, Your Majesty, forgive me for asking but, what kind of preparations have you made for the biggest trip of your life, that you are about to embark on when you die?” And the King shook his head sadly and he said, “I have made no preparations at all.” And so the jester took the scepter the King had given him many years earlier and with tears in his eyes, he said to the King, “Here is your scepter, please take it back because you are a greater fool than I.”
“The sun rises with scorching heat and withers the plant. Its blossom falls and its beauty is destroyed in the same way the rich man will fade away, even while he goes about his business.”
So what happens when we ask for wisdom? We develop first of all an eternal perspective, we learn to look at life from God’s point of view but secondly we learn that the present prepares us for the future. For notice how James goes on in Verse 12, “Blessed is the man who perseveres under trial because when he has stood the test, he will receive the crown of life that God has promised to those who love Him.” Think of it this way, if you will. Think of yourself as a crown prince or a crown princess. Let’s say that you are born into a royal family and you look forward to the day, when you are going to be crowned king and you are going to be crowned queen. Think of it in terms of old royalty when they not only had glory and majesty, but power and responsibility, not just mere figureheads like many kings and queens of today. Now let me ask you, what practical difference would it make in your life if you knew that ten years, twenty years, thirty years from now, you were going to reign as king or you were going to reign as queen? Well chances are it would make quite a difference. It would affect your schooling, it would affect your training, it would affect what you give yourself, it would certainly affect whom you marry, how you live. Why? Because everything will be governed by the end product. The Bible says that how God views you and me as His children in Christ. Our destiny is to rule with Christ in the age to come. I don’t know what what’s going to look like, but I think you can take everything that we aspire to in this life, whether it’s riches or honor or reputation or glory or power or influence, or you name it. Multiply it by infinity and you haven’t yet to begun to understand the glory that God has given to Jesus in the Kingdom of God, that God intends to share with everyone of His children. That’s why He created Adam and Eve. That’s why He created this whole universe. “They should have dominion as sons and daughters of God Most High.” They were to build His kind of a civilization. Sin got into it, messed it up, God’s going to remake it on a more glorious and even more grand scale and anybody that bears the name of Jesus, the greatest King on this earth to the most humble slave is going to be crowned as kings and queens to reign with Christ eternally. I think we’ll all have our own sphere of influence, we’ll all have our own areas of responsibility and that will go on forever and ever and ever with ever increasing joy life and light to the glory of God.
Now, in order for that to happen, and in order for us to be part of that remember that there are two things that need to happen. We need to come to faith in Christ because only Jesus has earned back for us life and light and immortality. There is no other name given among men under heaven whereby we can be saved but the name of Jesus. That’s why it’s so incredibly important to proclaim Christ because without Christ nobody enters into that eternal inheritance that will never fade away. We need to be in Christ not only, but we need to be mature in Christ. Because remember, Adam and Eve in their innocence and in their immaturity were deceived by Satan. They lost the kingdom and brought upon themselves and upon all of us the grief that is so much a part of the human experience. God’s not going to take that chance a second time. And so many things that happen in life today, are geared by God in order to qualify us as sons and daughters, kings and queens of the life that is to come.
You say, “How does God do that?” Well, one way in which He does that is simply by sharing with us His favour. James talks later in this Chapter about “every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of the heavenly lights, who does not change like shifting shadows. He chose to give us birth through the word of truth that we might be a kind of firstfruits of all He created.” God throughout Scripture reveals Himself as a gracious, kind Father who wants to pour blessings into your life and into mine. And whenever He does that, whenever we marvel at a beautiful sunrise or a beautiful sunset, when we listen to the power of storms unleashed, when we watch a new baby being born or a our child take the first step, or see somebody come to new life, then God is looking for a response from you and me that says, “Wow, I can love You, I can serve You, I can trust You because I know that You’ve got the best in mind and in store for me.” “Do you not know”, said Paul, “that God’s kindness is meant to lead you to repentance?”
Unfortunately that is not always the case is it? Human nature being what it is, we often take the blessings of God for granted, sometimes even throw them back in His face, even as His own children. So God sometimes has to go the second step and He has to allow us to experience adversity. “Blessed is the man who perseveres under trial because when he has stood the test, he receive the crown of life that God has promised to those who love Him.” There is no crown without a cross and when sometimes God sees in your life and in my life things that are at odds with what it is He has in store for us, if He sees other relationships taking priority over His relationship with us, if He sees us rooted in the here and now in ways that cannot get our attention, if He sees that we are so caught up in values that one day are just going to burn up in fly away, then sometimes in His love, He’s going to come along, He’s going to pry our hands loose so that we can, even in the midst of the pain of that happening, we can be prepared for the greater good.
A friend of mine tells this story – he was a young boy in WW11, and he got serious boils all over his legs. Medical help was hard to come by and he well remembers how his mother did take him to a doctor but there wasn’t a lot of medication that they could use for the boy, and so while his mother and his father held him down, the doctor squeezed out the pus out of all his boils. And he remembers screaming to high heaven with the pain, wondering how in the world his father and his mother could not only stand by, but hold him down while he was experiencing that kind of pain. And yet today, he looks back on that and he understands that were it not for that treatment, he would not be where he is today, he might well have died.
And so you see, a lot depends on your perspective. Do you see things from God’s point of view or do you only see things from a human point of view. What happens when we pray for wisdom? We develop an eternal perspective, we discover how God is constantly at work in the present realities of life, always shaping us to be more like Jesus, blessing us where we can handle blessings, correcting us where we need to be corrected in order that we will not suffer eternal loss in God’s eternal Kingdom and it is when we get to that point when we understand God’s eternal perspective and how that is being worked out in the here and now that we finally experience a new attitude towards trouble.
For notice if you will, how James begins this chapter. Verse 2, “Consider it pure joy my brothers, when you face trials of many kinds.” Now let me ask you, what kind of pastoral advice is that to someone who is in pain? How would you like it, you’ve just lost your child, you’ve just lost your possessions, you’ve just come through the biggest hurricane in your life and some well meaning apostle comes along and pats you on the back, and he says, “Oh dear brother, count it all joy.” How in the world can you counsel hurting people in the midst of pain to count it all joy?
It depends on your perspective. If all you see is the here and now and if all you value is being happy, content and successful now, then any difficulty that you encounter or experience is to be rejected at all costs, because it robs you of the here and now. That is why so many people get so desperate when everything they have ever depended on and rested on is taken away from them.
Howard Hendricks, who for many years was a professor at Dallas Theological Seminary and I think a preacher par excellence, tells the story of waking up one morning to screams coming from down the street. He gets up, goes out and looks and discovers his neighbours’ house is on fire. The fire department is there, they are trying to put out the fire, but the thing that had drawn him and awakened him, was his neighbour on the front lawn, pounding his fists into the ground and cursing God, cursing the fire department, cursing everybody because he was going to lose his house.
I remember Hendricks making the observation that if your earthly possessions is all you are living for, then when you lose them, you better cuss because everything that you’ve ever lived for has just been taken away, and you’ve got nothing left. But if on the other hand, you look at life from God’s point of view, you understand that nothing but nothing happens to the children of God without the permission of God and that even the bad things that happen to us are geared by God for our ultimate good, yes, you are not going to smile and grin with a false kind of satisfaction, “Wow isn’t it great, I’m going through great difficulty.”
But you will find that in the midst of great pain and great loss, God is still God and one day you will look upon that and say, “I don’t ever want to go through that again, I don’t ever want my worst enemy to go through this, but with the Psalmist you will say,”it was good for me to have been afflicted else I would not have sought the Lord.”
How many of us here would not be in this place if God hadn’t somewhere pulled out the rug from underneath us, made our lives fall apart, showed us our inability to look after ourselves, and we’ve come to faith in Jesus and we have begun heirs of a Kingdom that is unfading, imperishable, undefiled and nobody can ever take it away from us. See it all depends on your perspective. Paul puts it this way, and Paul is a man who knew suffering. Paul was a man who knew what is was to lose everything for the sake of following Jesus. Paul said, “This slight momentary affliction is preparing us for an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison.”
James says, “Count it all joy.” Why? Because God is going to use it to make you bigger and stronger so that when you come into His Kingdom and you sit on your throne to rule with Christ, you are big enough so that you can receive the full splendor of the glory that He wants to pour out upon you, splendor and glory that you could not have held in eternally if it were not for what God had taken you through in the course of life. See that’s looking at life from God’s point of view. And I think, one day in the new creation, we are going to sit around and we are going, I don’t know how this is going to work, but I think we are going to sit around and we are going to tell stories of about “remember when”.
You see, Christians do that already a little bit today. When you are going through it, it is the most terrible thing in all the world, but then when you come through it and you look back on it you say, “Well that wasn’t so bad. I lived and not only did I live but I learned some things.” And you begin to swap stories of how the most miserable and most painful experience of your life, after you’ve come through it, not while you are going through it, you look back it and you say, “Wow, I never thought that it could ever turn out this way.”
So let me summarize it this way. What do you do when trouble strikes, because trouble will strike and it will strike the children of God just as much as the children of this world, in fact, those whom God loves He disciplines for the purposes of His redemption. What do you do when trouble strikes? Well the first thing you do is pray. James says later on 5:13 “Is any one of you in trouble? He should pray.” Somebody’s made the observation there are no atheists in foxholes. And prayer can never be banned from the public school because as long as there are exams, kids will pray.
Phillipians 4:6 tell us, “In everything by prayer and petition with thanksgiving, present your requests to God.” Not only pray, but pray for deliverance. Psalm 107:6 reminds us that, “They cried out to the Lord in their trouble and He delivered them from their distress.”
God is known in Scripture as the great deliverer. And our first response when we get into trouble ought to be asking for God to deliver us because God delights in showing His delivering power. We don’t have more time to get into it this morning. But I think that we can pray three times for God to deliver us from our situation. I say that because Jesus in Gethsemane prayed three times for the cup to be removed. Paul when he had a thorn in the flesh prayed three times for the thorn to be removed. Three is not so much a literal number as it is a concerted whole-hearted effort at engaging God and inviting God into our situation for His glory. Many times He’ll hear our prayers, sometimes He will not because He has something else in mind. Then what we do, is we pray for wisdom.
“If any of you lacks wisdom he should ask God who gives generously to all without finding fault and it will be given to him.” When deliverance does not show up, and the pressure does not get released, then we go to God, and we say, “Alright God, show me your way. Give me wisdom. What are you trying to teach me in the midst of this? Do you want me to keep on going or do you want me to lie down? Do you want me to continue in this relationship? Do you want me to give up on this relationship? Do you want me to fight it out in this job? Do you want me to give up this job? Lord, give me wisdom.”
And when God gives us wisdom, later if not sooner, we start looking at life from an eternal perspective. We start discovering what really matters. Not only that but we start discovering how God is working out His eternal purposes in all of the pain and all of the confusion of the here and now. We may not yet see that good side of the embroidery, we may only see the mess that is on the backside, but God is weaving a masterpiece for His glory. And then, even while the pain continues, it will not longer be blind pain, it will no longer be purposeless suffering. It will no longer be, “God where are You, why have You forsaken me?”
No, then, we begin to understand that it has a purpose that God is taking us towards and once you begin to understand that God has a purpose, the pain doesn’t diminish, but you learn how to live with it not only, and you can start thanking God even in the midst of the pain, that good is being wrought out of all of that. And then you can begin to understand why James says, “Count it all joy.” There will be a day, we’ll look back on all this when God makes us perfect in His wisdom and we will see that there is not one stroke that God has wasted. There is not one experience that we have gone through as His children, but it will have been used of God to bring Him greater joy and us greater glory in the age that is to come.
