All right, welcome back to our study in the book of James for the Bible Bee 2018. We're trying to cover the entire book by the grace of God in only six studies, so we haven't broken it up exactly in chapters. We covered last time both the introduction to the book and overview. and verses 1 through 16. That means we're starting in verse 17 this week of chapter 1 and we're working our way through a section halfway through chapter 2. We're going to try to finish verse 13 of chapter 2 and then we're going to leave for next study just the shorter portion at the end of chapter 2 because that shorter portion at the end of chapter 2 is the most controversial teaching that's in the entire New Testament. There's been a lot of debate and a lot of discussion and a lot of difference of opinion about what that last section of chapter 2 means, so we'll camp the entire study next time on that section. But for this section, today's study, we have a long, big section to cover, so let's dig right in. All right, so as I did last time, I'll do it again this week, which is instead of reading the entire section of our study, I'll read the verses that are connected just to what we're about to tackle. So for our study today, I'm going to break this section into six smaller bites. Here are the six sections. Chapter 1, verses 17 and 18. Then we'll look at chapter 1, verses 19 through 21. then chapter 1 verses 22 through 25, then chapter 1 verses 26 and 27, and then chapter 2 verses 1 through 9, and chapter 2 verses 10 through 13. Alright, first section, chapter 1 verse 17 and 18. Every good gift And every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change. Of His own will He brought us forth, by the word of truth, that we should be a kind of firstfruits of His creatures. All right, James has been teaching us, we saw in our study last week in the first 16 verses, he's been teaching the church about the experience of passing through what we call trials. And he's been exhorting us in how we should spiritually handle a circumstance of trial. Remember, a trial is a difficult, challenging life experience that you would never choose to go through yourself if you were in charge of your own life. If you could choose to avoid a trial you would always do so. But the point, and this isn't just James's point, this is the point throughout all of God's Word, is that God does choose and appoint for his children a to enter into, to pass through, and experience challenging situations in our lives that we would not choose for ourselves. And the main point we gained from our study last week is that God has a purpose in us passing through those situations. He doesn't appoint challenging trial circumstances just because he wants to see us squirm. He appoints those circumstances because he uses the circumstance to change us, to shape us, to mold us. The circumstance becomes a tool in the hand of God with him in the image of being a master craftsman. And he's using the various circumstances of life that he appoints for us. as a shaping, molding, changing influence on our character inside. Because his goal is this, that our character would be formed to be like Jesus himself. And it takes, at times, great pressure from the circumstances that God appoints for us to create or to cause great change to happen in us. And the reason for that is because we have a lot of growing to do. We're very much, naturally speaking, not like Jesus. And it takes great pressure at times to bring about great change inside of us so that we can become more like his son. Now in this section, verses 17 and 18, James has not suddenly stopped talking about trials. But now he is shifting the focus or the perspective about trials. He's been talking about us. And now he shifts the emphasis and he's going to talk in these two verses about the Lord. He's going to talk about God's role in our trials. So that we can stop for a moment, and this is what we should always do when we're actually entering into a time of trial. Stop for a moment and don't just think about how it feels to you to be in that trial. But think for a moment about why the Lord has brought you into that circumstance. who he is and therefore what he must be doing in taking you into and through that experience. The idea here is that James is concerned that while we're passing through the trial our hearts would be steadfast in it. Look back for a moment at verse 12. This is his concern. Blessed is the man who remains steadfast under trial. So what he's about to say in verses 17 and 18 Going to help your heart to remain steadfast. It's kind of the image of you're in a storm and The waves you're like a boat in the storm and the waves are going to tend to drive you one direction or the other but you need when you're in a storm to be anchored to one spot to one place and the anchor is is your heart's perspective about God. How you see God in your trial will have everything to do with how successfully you handle the circumstance of the trial. What James is doing in verses 13 through 16, leading up to verse 17, is he's correcting a common misunderstanding that all Christians, naturally speaking, tend to fall under the influence of when they enter into a trial, and that is to blame God for being in this situation that they would never choose. So, we've already studied why it is that we should not blame God in verses 13 through 16. Now, in verses 17 and 18, he is repairing God's reputation in our eyes when we find ourselves in trial. Now, what I mean by repairing his reputation, you know what a reputation is. It's what other people think about you. And it may or may not be what you actually are. It's just the conclusions that other people draw about you. So you have a reputation. For instance, everyone here knows everyone else in the room. As everyone else is thinking about you, they've drawn certain conclusions about you. That's your reputation. Whether that's who you really are, or not, that's who they think you are. And the problem for us in our relationship with the Lord, especially when we find ourselves in trials, is that we sometimes can draw the wrong conclusion about who God actually is. And so, God's true reputation is spotless. His character has no flaws. He's never, in the course of all of history, mistreated anyone or done the wrong thing to anyone, even a person who is in the most severe trial. God has never mistreated them. But, the person who is in the trial can fall prey to thinking the wrong thing about God, drawing the wrong conclusions about God's reputation. And so James is repairing our flawed perspective about who God is when we find ourselves in the midst of a trial. Now, who is he? James introduces God, or we could say it this way, James reintroduces God to us in verses 17 and 18. He does so just like if you're introducing someone that your friend has never met to your friend, you would say to them, I would like you to meet so and so, and then you call their name to the person that you're introducing them to. James here introduces God to the believers. Now the believers already know the Lord. But, James is reintroducing God to repair his reputation and in doing so, he calls God by a name that is one of the least common names that we find attached to the Lord in scripture. You may have studied this. I don't know if you're part of our church. You certainly have studied it in years past. We went through a study in our congregation of all the names of God in scripture so that we could understand how God wants us to know him and to understand his characteristics, his attributes. And there are many different names of the Lord that he's chosen to make himself known by in scripture. This one, in these verses, is an unusual one. It's unusual in the sense that it's not commonly referred to. Here, James introduces God himself to us, and he's focused on, of course, God the Father here. But he calls him the Father of Lights. The Father of Lights. Now, how many times have you ever, in your thinking about God, or your praying to God, have you ever thought of God or prayed to Him as the Father of Lights? And the answer is probably never. But there's a reason why James wants you to think of Him as the Father of Lights. It's what we would call a theological identification of who the Lord really is, who God the Father really is. Now, what lights is he referring to? What are the lights that he is the father of? Let me give you two passages of scripture. I'm going to read the second one, but the first one you need for your notes as well. Genesis chapter 1, verses 14 through 18. And then let's read Psalm 136, which is just based upon the Genesis passage. Psalm 136, verses 7 through 9. This is a song, a worship song, in the book of Psalms, they're all songs of worship, but this is a song dedicated to the theme of God's steadfast love in every circumstance that the people of God will ever pass through. The point of the psalmist is, no matter how challenging or difficult the circumstance you find yourself in, God's steadfast love is the constant backstory of that life experience. Verses 7-9 add this idea. To him who made the great lights for his steadfast love endures forever. The sun to rule over the day, for his steadfast love endures forever. The moon and stars to rule over the night, for his steadfast love endures forever. Alright, the psalmist identifies from Genesis 1 there are three categories of lights in God's creation. The three categories are the sun, the moon, and the stars. One category, the sun, belongs to what we call the day and defines day. If it were not for the sun and its light shining on the earth, there would be no days, there would only be nights. The second two categories, the moon and the stars, are also a display of light upon the earth, but they belong to the night and they are lesser lights, meaning there's less light that's actually affecting our experience and our perception on earth. But the point is this, that there is never Ever in on any day at any moment ever in all of human history a completely dark moment God because of his steadfast love according to the psalmist has provided for us a measure of light to enlighten every moment of our life experience and Now James takes the Genesis concept and the Psalm 136 concept and he applies it to the believer who's passing through a trial. What's his point? As you're entering into a trial, things seem, in your experience, to be getting darker and darker. And you may not see any light at the end of the tunnel at first glance as you're passing through this time of trial. But James is reminding you, there is never a moment in your life where there is no light. God has provided light every day and every night. And that physical light is just a symbol of the deeper, the greater, the more important spiritual light that he has provided for you. that He has revealed to you. And the back story to all of the light that God has displayed in your life is the theme of His steadfast love. James is reminding the believers, you're in a trial, it seems dark, it seems like God has forgotten you, it seems like there's no way out, but remember this, there is spiritual light that God has revealed even in this moment, and behind that light is the story of his steadfast, unchanging love for you. If you can only perceive it, and see it, and recognize it, and appreciate it, and thank him for it. Now, he adds to that concept, there is no variation of shadow due to change. A shadow is a spot on the surface of the world around you where the light seems to be blotted out. An absence of light. And his point is, When God brings you into a trial, it's going to seem like a particularly shadowy time, a particularly shadowy experience, a lack of God's light in that circumstance. But He has not changed, and His purpose for you has not changed, and it's not nearly as shadowy as it first seems. There is real and true light from God to be discovered even in the midst of your trial if you will only look for it according to the principles of what he's revealed about such circumstances in his word." Then he adds this statement where he says, Every good, and this is at the beginning of the verse of course, every good and perfect gift is from above. Our natural tendency when we enter into a time of trial is this, is to think that when things were better, when I wasn't in the trial, God was giving me the good stuff. And now that I'm in the trial, he's only giving me the bad stuff. And our natural tendency is to question His goodness based upon the goodness of the circumstance. James wants to remind us here, by the Spirit of God, that when we're in a time of trial, that even the trial is a good and perfect gift which has just been given to us from above. Now, at the moment, it doesn't seem all that good or perfect. You know, when I'm in a time of trial, my natural tendency is to feel like, I think God could give me a better gift than this. But there is a true gift from God hidden in the trial to be discovered. Now, what could that possibly be? Well, this goes back to the beginning of chapter 1. Let's head back to James for a moment. He's still developing this theme that he introduced at the beginning of chapter 1 and verse 2. Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds, for you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness. The point that James is making is, yes, the trial is difficult. Yes, the trial is challenging. Yes, the trial is hard. No, you would not choose this for yourself, but there is a hidden good and perfect gift within the trial. What is that hidden gift? The joy that you can discover even in the trial and the changing effect it has on your character producing steadfastness. Once that steadfastness is actually produced in you, you will be able then to look back and recognize, I would not be the person I am today had, by the grace of God, I not passed through this challenging trial that God appointed for me. Now, I'm much older than all of you here this morning. And I passed through many, many, many, many more trials than you have ever experienced in your entire life. And I can honestly say, looking back now on all the trials that God has taken me through, that every single one of them was a good and perfect gift from above. At the moment, I didn't feel that way. But now I recognize God gave me a gift when he took me through that. It changed me in a way I probably wouldn't have changed otherwise. Changed for the better by the grace of God alone. Because every trial can be responded to and reacted to in the wrong way. But if by the grace of God you understand the purpose of it, you obey God in it, you submit to his purpose for it. You will be changed by it and you will become a better person because of it. More like Jesus than you would have been otherwise. Now, he goes on to say then toward the end of this, of his own will he brought us forth, by the word of truth that we should be a kind of first fruits of his creatures." Here James is now focused on God's purpose, not just in the moment of trial, but his overall purpose and why he saved us. I don't know if you've ever really thought about this, but it's important that you do think about it. James is leading us to think about it. It's not just you need to get saved. You do. It's important to be saved. It's far, far better than the alternative of not being saved. But once you've experienced true salvation, It's important to understand that God saved you for a reason. He saved you for a purpose. There was something that was always in the heart of God that moved Him to save you. And that thing that was in his heart, that purpose for your salvation, is super important to understand. Because it really defines the reason for the Christian life. The reason to be a true disciple of Jesus. Now, what was that purpose? The purpose is to be made like Jesus. To be conformed to his image. Toward the end of Romans chapter 8 verses 28 and 29 the Lord through the Apostle Paul describes this great purpose that everything he did in choosing us and saving us through the saving sacrifice of his son was for the purpose of conforming us to the image of Christ so that God would have at the end of the whole story a family of Christ-like ones. And that's really what it means to be a Christian. To be a Christian is not just you've gotten saved and yet you're not really any different than you were before. The whole point of becoming a Christian is to be made like Jesus. And the experience of what we call being born again, the experience of the beginning point of your salvation, is just the beginning of that story of a continuing change of your character into the likeness of his son. Now here he describes that beginning point. That beginning point where our salvation story starts. Where he says, we were, and I'm rephrasing it now, we were recreated, we were reborn for his purpose and for his will. He says it this way, of his own will he brought us forth. Meaning he saved us by the word of truth. It's not of your will that you got saved. The story of salvation isn't, you know what, I think I'd like to get saved. That's a good idea. I think I'll be saved today. I choose to be saved. That is not how salvation happens to anyone. Salvation's story does not start with an exercise of your will. Now, it is true that an exercise of your will is part of the story of salvation, but it's not the beginning point of salvation. Your salvation story didn't start with you one day just waking up and of your own will decide, I think I will. I will choose to be saved today. It started with an exercise of God's will before you even ever had the idea of being saved, before there was any desire or motive on your part to be saved. It was God exercising His will to save you, which then influenced your will to respond by believing the gospel of salvation. James describes for us how it is actually we were saved. In the moment of our salvation, we were saved by the power of what he calls the Word of Truth. The Word of Truth is just another name for what we call the Gospel of Salvation. The Gospel, if we're going to boil it down to its most essential elements, we could find it described very simply for us in 1 Corinthians chapter 15. I believe it's somewhere around verses four through six. I don't have it in my notes. But the essence of the gospel is that Jesus died for our sins on the cross. Jesus was buried and Jesus rose again from the dead. Those three essential elements are the essentials of the gospel story. The death, the burial, and the resurrection of Jesus, which is a saving event in history. to accomplish the purpose of God to save those that He chooses to save. Now, this is what we call the Word of Truth. Ephesians chapter 1, verse 13, I won't turn you to it, but you need it in your notes, that is one of several New Testament passages that clearly identifies the phrase, the Word of Truth equals what we call the Gospel. So when James says, of his own will he brought us forth by the word of truth, the point of this is you can only be born again and saved by hearing, receiving, and believing the gospel message about Jesus, who he is, and what he accomplished for you. That is the beginning point of salvation. Now the aspect that I was emphasizing earlier, let me give you two passages for your notes to connect to this idea. It's not that your will doesn't matter in regards to salvation, it's just that your will is never the starting point of the salvation experience. Let me give you Romans chapter 9, verses 15 and 16. The Gospel of John chapter 1, verses 12 and 13. Those two passages, both Paul and John, both apostles of the Lord, make it exceptionally clear that the story of your salvation is not the story of you exercising your will, but God exercising His will. Now this last phrase is easy to misunderstand. And it's describing, because of a key word, one single key word as a connector, it's describing why God saved you. What was in his heart? What was in his mind? What was his purpose in saving you? We were saved that we should be a kind of first fruits of his creatures. The word that is the connector word. And it identifies the purpose in God's heart for saving you. But what does it mean that God saved us in order to be a kind of firstfruits? This is a key term that's taken from the ancient world. It's still used in our society and culture today, but not commonly among us. You would more typically hear this in a farming community than you would in a city kind of community. Firstfruits is a term having to do with the harvest. Harvest time and the first roots generally speaking like let's say if you planted a field of potatoes and it's coming that time of the season where the potato plants are actually producing potatoes and You're now wanting to harvest those potatoes in every field certain plants are going to produce their potatoes sooner than the rest of the plants and And if you could identify, that's hard with potatoes because they're under the surface, but if you could identify which potatoes are actually ready and you go out and pick those potatoes before the rest of the field, then those first potatoes that are picked in the harvest time are what you would call the first fruits of the entire harvest that's going to happen in that field. So the idea of calling us who are saved the first fruits indicates that God has a greater purpose. There's a field beyond your salvation that God has in his mind and heart for this whole plan of his, what we call the plan of salvation. Here, those who are born again in history, Those who are saved in history are in some sense the first fruits of a greater thing that God is doing. So what does that mean? Well, first, let me give you two passages that clearly identify all born-again Christians fit into this category of what James calls the first fruits of salvation. 2 Thessalonians chapter 2 verse 13. And a lot of these, I just won't take the time to go and read them. I'm just giving them to you for your notes. But I would encourage you, you need to read these passages on your own. And most likely, they will come in as a necessary understanding point when you're tested on your comprehension in the Bible later. So 2 Thessalonians 2.13 and Revelation 14.4. These aren't the only two New Testament passages, but these are two of the most important ones that identify every saved Christian is considered by God to be first fruits of some harvest that's even greater than just you and the others around you getting saved in history. What is that greater harvest? This one we will return to the book of Romans, chapter 8. This is a difficult concept, but I'll try to explain it in a way that you can understand it. Romans, chapter 8. I'll start reading from verse 19. Paul writes, by creation, what is he referring to? He's referring to the entire universe. The known physical universe. For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God. The revealing of the sons of God is Paul's way of identifying what we call the day of resurrection. When the Lord Jesus returns in his second coming and we are all raised to glorious bodies like his resurrection body. The creation, the entire universe, Paul's point is, waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God. For the creation was subjected to futility. What he means here is that when Adam sinned in the garden at the beginning of history, his sin had a far-reaching effect. We all know that his sin affected every human being that would be born into this world afterwards, including you and me. But Paul's point is, his sin affected more than just human beings. His sin affected the entire universe. Like a pebble hitting a still pond, sending out waves of effect and influence on the entire pond. It only takes one pebble to affect the entire pool of water. His sin was so important and significant in affecting God's purpose that God chose for it to affect the entire world around us. For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of him who subjected it in hope. The idea is that God had a purpose in allowing and ordaining the entire world to be affected by Adam's sin. In hope that the creation itself will be, that's it, some future point. This is at the second coming of Christ. The creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption, meaning the effect that sin has had on the world. and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now, and not only the creation, but we ourselves who have the first fruits of the Spirit." There's this first fruits concept again. grown inwardly as we wait eagerly for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies. Alright, this is the difficult concept and I'm going to try to simplify it. Paul's point is this, it's the same point that James is making in James chapter 1. Sin affected the whole creation. So redemption and salvation is going to affect the whole creation. The whole creation is going to be redeemed. But we don't yet, even though Jesus has already died on the cross, even though Jesus has already risen from the dead, we don't see the whole creation transformed yet, do we? But we do see If you've believed the gospel and been saved, we see you changed in the midst of that creation. So you're the first fruits of the eventual greater change that God is going to bring about. He's going to make a new heavens and a new earth. He's going to transform everything. And your salvation is the proof that God is committed to that eventual change of everything. The restoration of all things. All right. Let's move on to the next section, verses 19-21. Know this, my beloved brothers. Let every person be quick to hear, slow to speak, slow to anger. For the anger of man does not produce the righteousness of God. Therefore, put away all filthiness, and rampant wickedness, and receive with meekness the implanted word, which is able to save your souls." This set of three verses, 19, 20, and 21, is so important that I wish I could take the entire study just for these three verses. I really do. That's that important for you to really understand the points that he's making in these verses. But we'll just do a brief overview and try to make sure we at least grasp the main concepts. James has now finished his teaching on the section about trials. He finished it in verse 18. It doesn't mean that what he's about to say, though, has nothing to do with going through trials. It just means that now he's shifting his topic. He's introduced at the end of the previous section the concept of being saved. And how is it again that we were saved? By receiving the Word of God, the Word of Truth, the Gospel of our Salvation. So now in verses 19 through 21, and also through the rest of chapter 1, he's shifting his focus to what is it like when a person really believes the Gospel of Salvation? Not just what is it like, but what should it be like when a person truly receives the Gospel? How should it affect their lives? What kind of changes should we expect in the life of a person who's really believed the message? Not just someone who has heard it, and says, oh yeah, I think that's true, I agree with that, but someone who's heard it, understands the truth of it, and at a heart and soul level believes it and is committed to that message, what change can we expect to see in a person who has really embraced the message in that way? There's a common saying among Christians. I don't know, somebody came up with this a few years ago and they had good intentions when they came up with it. A lot of times Christians come up with sayings and they have good intentions thinking that this will help other Christians to understand God's purposes in the right way. But sometimes even Christian popular sayings can be dangerously wrong. This is the saying, and I used to see this on bumper stickers. I don't see it as much anymore. The saying goes like this, Christians are not perfect. Only forgiven. Now some of you young ones have never heard that saying, but some of the older ones among us remember that saying, and it was very popular among Christians a few years ago. Christians are not perfect, only forgiven. Now there's some truth in that saying, and there's some error in the saying. What's the truth of the saying? What's the error? The truth is, if I say to you, Christians are not perfect, is that a true or false statement? It's an absolutely true statement, and it will remain true until the second coming of Christ. There is no Christian in all of human history, even the best among us, even the best that there's ever been. Who knows in God's evaluation who the best Christian that's ever lived actually was? But I'll just use Paul the Apostle as an example. Paul the Apostle was an awesome Christian. I could only dream to be half the Christian that Paul the Apostle was. Paul never was perfect. Even on his best day, most mature day, his most obedient day, it was not a perfect day for him. He fell short at some point in living according to what God had called him to live by. So it's true, it's an absolutely true statement, Christians are not perfect. But it's the second part of the saying that makes it a false concept. Christians are not perfect, only forgiven. What does that mean? The implication of the saying is, If you're a Christian, you can never hope to achieve perfection. In fact, don't even try, don't even bother, because the best you can ever be is only a forgiven Christian, which paints a picture of the moment of your salvation when God wiped your record of sins completely clean. Now it is true, the moment you were truly saved, if you ever have been, God did wipe your record of sins completely clean. But the implication of that saying is, You were, even though you were the beneficiary of a completely clean record, you weren't changed by the experience of salvation, and you will simply go back to making the same kind of bad record decisions and behaviors over and over again. You've been forgiven by God, but that's all that's happened. You haven't ever actually been changed by God. The truth is, and this is what James is after in this section, and this is what he's after for the rest of the book. It's a very important concept. If you've truly been saved, you are being changed. Yes, you were changed in the moment of your salvation, but you are being saved, not just You know, I was changed a little bit when I became a believer, but I haven't changed much since then. James's point is if you haven't changed much since the experience of your salvation, you haven't understood much about the gospel message. So, he says it this way, know this my beloved brothers. This is how he introduces his word of exhortation. A couple of things here I want to mention. We mentioned this concept in our first study. I want to rehearse it again. The humility of the Apostle James is on display in the way he addresses the church here. He refers to them as his beloved brothers. That means he's not setting himself in a superior position to them. He's one of the brothers. He's not lecturing them. He's encouraging them and exhorting them. He's trying to help them to understand what he's had to come to understand as a true brother of the same family. Second thing that's on display here is his heart for the Christians. He refers to them as his beloved brothers. To call, using this term in the original language, to call someone beloved is describing them as that which you hold most dear in your heart. Nothing and no one is more important than that which is your dearly beloved. This tells us that James, of course, loves God more than anyone and anything else, but second only to his love for God, he loves his fellow Christians. He loves his fellow members of the body of Christ. He loves his brothers in Christ. Know this. The point here is that what he's about to describe is something that they already do know, not something that he's teaching them for the first time. They've heard what he's about to say before, and in a sense all he's doing is rehearsing previously learned lessons. Now if you've ever spent much time at all reading the Bible, one of the things you're going to discover about Bible teaching is that a lot of it has to do with what we call repetition. God rehearsing for our hearts things that we've heard before and learned before, but we need to be refreshed in on a regular basis. Because we live in an environment, in a society, and in a culture that disregards and ignores God. And because we're in such a society, we're naturally tending to be influenced by that disregard. And so it's important for us to keep our hearts and minds focused on this truth. So what is it that they should know? What is it he's exhorting them to remember? that they've already learned. He gives them what I'm going to call a triple exhortation or a three-part exhortation. Remember, an exhortation is a heart-to-heart word to change. Someone that loves you, someone that cares about you, coming alongside you, putting their arm around you and saying, you need to change in this area of your life. So James is like an older brother putting his spiritual arm around each one of us and saying, hey, I know it's hard. I know it's difficult. I know you tend to forget. But here are three critical areas that you've already learned, you've heard me talk about before, but you need to remember these three things. First, quick to hear. Second, slow to speak. Third, slow to anger. These are our spiritual responsibilities. These three things are not the only things that need to be changed in our lives in order to be like Jesus, but these are three essential things. If you don't learn these three lessons, you will never become much more like Jesus than you already are. And in terms of what you already are, you're not very much like Jesus at all. If I were to compare your character to the character of Jesus, I would see a lot of deficits. in the difference between his character and yours. And if I said to you, you need to grow up and become more like him. You need to change and become more like him. You might say to me, well, how can I measure my growth? How can I tell whether I'm becoming more like him? James starts this on the most simple level. He says, let me give you three examples of how you can measure whether you are becoming more like him. Because this is what he was like. This is what you need to be like. Three things. You need to become a person characterized by being quick to hear. Second, you need to become a person characterized by being slow to speak. And third, you need to be a person who is characterized by being slow to anger. That does not mean we will ever in this present life be perfect in any of these three areas. I'm certainly not, and I've had a lot more time to grow than you have. But it does mean that if you look at my life as an overview, you won't see me constantly failing and struggling in these three areas. You will see if you knew who I was 40 years ago, when I was born again, and you compared it to who I am today, you would say, well, he's certainly not perfect yet, long way to go, a lot of room to change, but he's changed so much from who he used to be 40 years ago, or even 30 years ago, or even 20 years ago, or even 10 years ago, and hopefully even last year. You will see a progressive growth and development and change in these three areas. So what are the three areas? Quick to hear. Simply means, and I don't want to make this too complicated, because James means it as a very simple and straightforward statement, a person who is always ready to listen and consider first in their minds and hearts before they react to the circumstance that they find themselves in. I said he shifted his emphasis from the going through trials thing, but this is a true principle that applies to every experience of your life, but even more important when you are in a trial. Are you characterized as a person that is thoughtful and considerate? A person that quietly is thinking about what they're going through instead of just constantly reacting to what's happening to them and just blurting out whatever pops into your head as a I've just got to blurt this out. I've just got to say what's on my mind instead are you characterized as a person that is Thinking first before you open your mouth and say anything. Why am I going through this? Why is this happening to me? What's God's purpose in all of this? How should I handle this what would please the Lord in terms of my response in this situation? Versus what would just feel good to me as I react to it That's what it means to be quick to hear. Now, slow to speak should be pretty obvious. And that means simply not when it's time to speak, you speak with a very slow voice. That's not what he's talking about. He's talking about being slow to even open your mouth and say anything. Now, let me give you one passage from the book of Proverbs. There are many that could be found in the book of Proverbs that teach this principle, but this pair of verses really captures the heart of this concern. Proverbs chapter 17, verses 27 and 28. James' point is this. If, in the circumstance you find yourself in, words are necessary to be spoken, Stop before you say anything and consider carefully what you should say. We have an even more simple way of saying it in our culture today, and that is think before you speak. Listen, if we could just learn this one principle and actually practice it, think before you speak. you would be so much better off than you typically are in your life. Most of the problems that I find myself in are a result of me speaking before I think, rather than thinking before I speak. To think before you speak is not just think, all right, how can I answer that person in a way that will really hurt their feelings? We're not talking about thinking about how to plan to say the wrong thing, but thinking about what would please the Lord. What should I say? Or even, should I say anything? The Proverbs passage will tell us that there are some circumstances where silence is the wiser and best option. Words are not always required. Reaction is not always required. Response, wise, considered response is always required. But not reacting to the circumstance emotionally and blurting out things that you will later regret and will actually cause the problem to be even worse than it was without your words. The third category, slow to anger. There are some circumstances in your life, we've all experienced them, that will stimulate a natural reaction of anger from you. You find yourself in this circumstance, it's a frustrating situation, or you're dealing with a frustrating person, and in that circumstance there is a natural tendency to react with anger. James does it. disregard that, he doesn't ignore that principle. He understands we all have a natural tendency to react to challenging, difficult, frustrating experiences with an angry response. But his point is, it's in exactly those situations that we can and must learn how to control our reaction to the circumstance. He's not saying, just to be clear, it's OK to be angry as long as you do it really slowly. Slow to anger doesn't mean just wait five minutes and then let them have it. It means consider how you're responding before reacting to the situation. Would God be pleased if you give an angry response in this circumstance? Would it serve God's purpose for you to give an angry response to this circumstance? If you could just ask those questions before you react, you will again save yourself all kinds of heartache in the years ahead of you. I'm thinking about this as I'm teaching this principle right now. You're all so young. And you've got so many experiences ahead of you in life that are going to frustrate you to no end. And if you can just learn to measure your response before reacting, and choose the other option than the anger option. Like there's a panel of buttons in front of you. And one of them is the anger button. The other though is the wisdom button. the self-control button and you can choose in those moments which button you hit when you find yourself in that circumstance which button you hit is going to shape your life it's going to define your life people get married and then many too many after they get married they get divorced why do people get divorced they hit the anger button instead of the other buttons people are in challenging circumstances at work. They've got a boss that doesn't understand and is being hard and unreasonable. They have an option in front of them. Do I hit the anger button or do I hit the wisdom button and the self-control button? The button you hit will determine whether you continue in that place of business or not, whether you continue to be employed or not. There are just all kinds of circumstances we could talk about. The point is, There is another option. Anger is not a required response in the circumstance that you face. Now, James is essentially teaching that a Christian, a true believer, a true disciple, a true follower of the Lord, must never allow themselves to show unrestrained, uncontrolled anger as the reaction to a circumstance. Each time you do, understand this, if you choose to hit that anger button, you're choosing to sin. You're choosing to disobey God. You're choosing to displease the Lord. And whenever you do sin, whenever you do disobey God, whenever you do displease Him, you're also purchasing consequences for yourself. You're going to think in the moment of frustration, anger will fix this. If I get angry, I'll regain control of a circumstance that's spinning out of control. That's what you're going to be tempted to think. But Jaynes makes this point. The anger of man never produces the righteousness of God. You're going to think, I can make this right by just showing how angry I am. Jaynes' point is that never makes it right. It only makes it more wrong. So the circumstance may be incredibly frustrating, but you're not going to fix it by displaying anger. The other options are required in order to navigate through that difficult circumstance and get to the place where you need to be in that situation. Now, we have a way of saying it in our culture. It's absolutely true. when he says the anger of man never produces the righteousness of God. We could rephrase that and say two wrongs don't make a right. So it's wrong in a sense that you're in a situation that's so frustrating to you that the only thing you can see is to get angry to fix it. But adding your anger to an already wrong situation never makes that situation more right than it was. It only makes it even more wrong, even worse. It just messes up a messy situation even more. So if you have wisdom, you'll recognize that it's never the solution. It's never a smart idea to add my angry response and reaction to a difficult circumstance. Then another word of exhortation, and he says it here as kind of a conclusion, and he's summing up his point when he says, therefore put away all filthiness and rampant wickedness. His point is that anger is not the only wrong thing you can do in life. There's a whole menu of wrong reactions and wrong responses. There's a whole menu of sins that are available for you to commit. God's call is not just to put away anger and to think to yourself, okay, now that I'm not acting in anger or reacting in anger, now I've really got my act together. His point is, there's a whole menu of things to avoid. He calls it here, all filthiness and rampant wickedness. But he tells us this, this is our response, this is our responsibility. Put away all filthiness and rampant wickedness. This phrase, put away, means to cast off or lay aside, and it's a word picture for taking off clothing. When do you take off your clothing? At the end of a long, hot, sweaty day where you've been out working in the field and your clothing is drenched with sweat, but now it's all dried up, And you're just caked and covered in dirt. And your clothes are, as your mom would describe them to you, filthy. And what does she tell you? Go into the bathroom, take off those filthy clothes, take a bath or a shower, and get ready for dinner. This is the word picture when he says, put away all filthiness and rampant wickedness. The point is, we live in a world that's filled to the overflow with sinful influences. And because we've lived in that world, and we do live in that world on a daily basis, we are all too much easily influenced by the world's way of reacting and handling situations. sinful reactions, like anger is just one example among those differing sinful reactions. Rampant wickedness means an abundant amount of evil. So what are we to do? We're to put away, we're to strip off those filthy clothes. The clothes here are our behaviors. Those filthy habits of behaving in a certain way to difficult circumstances and situations in our life. And the verb tense that he uses is a verb tense, you don't need to remember this word, but it's called the aorist verb tense. It's a specific kind of verb in the Greek language that we don't have in English, and it refers to a once and for all action. Some actions that the Lord calls us to are repeated actions, but some, he says, do it once and be done with it. Here he's saying, strip off those old behaviors like anger and other expressions of wickedness and strip them off once and for all. Don't put those filthy clothes back on. Once you've thrown those into the wash, don't go in before the wash is done and put those filthy clothes back on yourself. Don't re-clothe yourself with old behaviors. Instead, receive with meekness the implanted word which is able to save your souls. Meekness here is a difficult word to define, but I'm going to define it this way. A willing acceptance with a right attitude of God's authority in your life. To receive something with meekness, and this something is being given to you by the Lord himself. is to receive his gift with a willing acceptance and a right attitude toward his being in charge of you. And it's a word picture that was commonly used in the ancient world. The best example I could give you is a well-trained horse. A well-trained horse is a meek horse. It doesn't mean it has no strength. It doesn't mean it has no spirit. It means, though, that that horse is not wild and unrestrained any longer. So have you ever seen an old western on TV or in the movies where they were trying to break a horse? What they mean by that is they're not trying to harm the horse by breaking it. It means they're trying to change the horse's attitude. And they get on the back of the horse, and the horse becomes what we call a bucking bronco. The horse doesn't want that rider on its back. The horse is used to being free to do what it wants, when it wants, the way it wants, how it wants. And the rider is trying to teach the horse, no, you're going to be under my control from now on. And at the moment of the horse bucking, it's a test of wills. Who's gonna win, the rider or the horse? But in this picture, you're the horse. Who's the rider? God himself, the Lord is the rider. The idea of receiving with meekness the implanted word is that God has revealed his word to you. But that word requires you to act differently than you're used to acting. And when you first hear it, it doesn't feel like what you want to do. You're used to acting the way you want to act. God says, no, we're done with that. You're going to now act the way I want you to act. And now you become a bucking bronco. Your natural tendency is to say, I don't like that God wants me to live that way. I still want to live the way I want to live, but I want all the benefits of salvation that go along with him saving me. And his point is, yes, I've saved you, but what that means is we're going to change your attitude. And so here's the most important thing you can learn. Receive with meekness the implanted word of God. Hear the word of God. And of course the focus is still on the gospel, but we can expand it to the entire Bible, because all of God's word is meant to change us, from the first verse of Genesis 1 to the last verse of the book of Revelation. All of God's word is being described in a word picture here as a seed. that's been sown in your heart. Now why do we sow seeds? How many of you have ever planted anything with the intention of it producing something? How many of you have ever had a garden or planted anything? Okay, why did you sow that seed? Let's say you were trying to grow, I don't know, give me an example of something one of you has grown before. Carrots, okay. So why did you plant carrot seeds? Why? Why did you plant carrot seeds? Because you want to eventually eat a carrot. That's it. The only reason to plant a carrot seed, otherwise you're just wasting time. If you're just planting seeds and you don't hope to actually eat a carrot, the whole point is just a waste of time. So the point here is that God is the farmer. and he planted the message of the gospel in your life because he wants to eat carrots. The carrots are the changes that he desires to see in your life. You becoming like his son Jesus. So he planted a message in your heart that has power within it. It's an amazing thing the way God has designed the world of vegetation. And that is, everything in the world of vegetation grows from seeds. How many of you have ever seen a carrot seed? How big is a carrot seed? Tiny, tiny seed. It's an amazing thing that out of that tiny seed comes a carrot. And not just a carrot, a whole bunch of carrots. If you plant that seed, water it, take care of it in the way that you should, within that tiny little seed is the power to produce a whole harvest of carrots. So the gospel was planted in your heart and it has within it the power in that seed of that saving message. It has the power and the potential to completely change you and make you like Jesus, which is more amazing than making carrots. I mean, it's pretty amazing to grow a carrot, but it's much more amazing to grow a Christian. to grow one who is like Jesus. But that's why God planted the seed of the gospel in your heart. Therefore, we have a responsibility when we receive that message. What's our responsibility? James says it this way. Receive with meekness the message. Receive it with the right attitude. Receive it recognizing this message is meant to change me. It won't always feel comfortable to be changed at the depth and level that I need to be changed, but that's why God saved me. That's why he brought this message into my life. I need to be changed in every area of my character, in every area of my life, in every area of my behavior. Receive with meekness the implanted word which is able to save your souls. That's the potential of what it can accomplish. Now let me just give you for your notes, Matthew chapter 13, verses four through 15. This is a parable that Jesus told, and it's the parable that we call the sower sows the word. It's a word picture describing this whole process that we've just been talking about. With Jesus as the farmer, The seed that's being sown is the gospel message and the ground that that message is planted in are human hearts. But how that ground receives and responds to that seed will determine the harvest. That's why James says, receive with meekness the implanted word. But he wants us to be sure to understand that message has the potential and the power within it to actually save your soul. Now, let me clarify. In the Bible, there are what we could call three tenses of salvation. There's a past tense of salvation, a present tense, and a future tense of salvation. All three are important to understand. Most of the time, when Christians think about salvation, they're only thinking about the past tense of salvation. Here, James is focused, though, on the present tense, the second part of the salvation experience. So the past tense is this. The moment you were saved when you first believed the gospel. That, hopefully for you, has already happened. That moment in time that redefined your life from an unbeliever to a believer. The second tense of salvation is present tense and this applies to every present moment of your life. you are currently still being saved. Now does that mean you never were saved? No. If you were ever saved, if you were ever born again, if you ever truly believed the gospel, you were saved. But on top of that, you are now presently still being saved. What does that mean? It's what we call theologically sanctification. the progressive continuing change of your character, shaping and molding you to become more like Jesus. And then there's an eventual and final third tense of salvation, a future tense, we will all finally one day be saved, in the fullest, complete sense. That refers to the future second coming of Christ. and the resurrection of our physical bodies in which the work of salvation will be finished and finalized as far as your experience is concerned. Now when James says, Receive with meekness the implanted word which is able to save your souls. He's talking about the middle group, the middle category. He's talking about what happens to you on a daily basis. Every day that you wake up and start your day, including this present moment, is a day in which you are being saved, being sanctified, being changed, being transformed, being conformed to the image of his son. But that will only continue to happen as you continue to receive the implanted word with the right attitude in your heart. If you suddenly decide to get stubborn and resistant to God and his intention to change you, don't be shocked or amazed if your growth stops at that exact point until your heart gets right with him again. Alright, verses 22-25, next section. But be doers of the word and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves. For if anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he is like a man who looks intently at his natural face in a mirror. For he looks at himself and goes away, and at once forgets what he was like. But the one who looks into the perfect law, the law of liberty, and perseveres, being no hearer who forgets, but a doer who acts, he will be blessed in his doing. Okay, the word but here is a connector word, but it introduces to us a warning, a word of warning from James of a common pitfall among even true Christians. The warning is this, be doers of the word and not hearers only. This phrase, be doers, is a verb in a specific construction that is in the Greek language that's not easily translated into English. It's what we call a present imperative. Let me briefly explain that to you. An imperative is a word of commandment. It comes from God, from his throne, with the fullness of his authority. Whenever God gives an imperative, you have no option other than to either obey or disobey. Those are your only two choices to an imperative word from the Lord. So the Lord speaks in the imperative tone, and he says, be doers of my word and not hearers only. So you have two options now. What are your options? Obey or not obey, which is to disobey. There's no middle ground. There's no neutral territory. You're either doing what you should or you're doing what you shouldn't in response to God's command. Present imperative means it's a command that applies every day, constantly and continuously. There is never a moment in your life where the present imperative doesn't apply. Because at any moment in your life you can stop and say, what moment is it? And the answer is, it's the present moment. That means you're under the responsibility of this commandment every present moment of your life. So what are you responsible for? To be a doer of His Word. Let me just rephrase that. It means this. Put His Word into practice. Follow the requirements of his word. Apply the principles of his word. Behave like his word requires you to behave. Choose what his word requires you to choose. And then he warns us about the alternative, not hearers only. Now this is describing someone who has listened to the true message and agrees with it. How many of you here are listening to me teach this morning? Is anyone not listening? It's a trick question. Obviously, you should be listening. So all of you are listeners to the word this morning, right? OK, let me ask you this. How many of you agree with what I've said so far? You better. It's the truth. Not just because I said it, but because this is the meaning of God's word. So you've all heard the message and you've all agreed with it, but if that's all you do with what you've heard this morning, then you are falling into the exact pitfall that James is trying to warn you against. You can hear the true message, and you can even agree with it and say, yeah, that makes sense to me, that's true, I don't doubt that, I don't disagree with it, I'm not going to even argue with the ideas that I've just heard. But if you do know more with it than that, you've failed in that circumstance of Bible study. So, what does this require of us? Hearing the message, agreeing with the message, is simply the starting point of why God brought you the message. The message is always, always, always meant to be applied to your life. To be acted on. To be responded to. To be obeyed. Always. You can do the best Bible study. You can read the Bible every day of your life. You can listen to the best Bible teachers. You can nod your head and heart in agreement. You can memorize large sections of God's Word like you're encouraged to do in the Bible Bee. But if you are not Becoming a doer of what you have read, what you have studied, what you have meditated on, what you have learned, what you have agreed is true. If you are not applying all that you've received, you have failed in all that you have spent time doing. You've wasted your time, and you've actually ended up in a worse position than if you had never heard the message to begin with. Why? Because to whom much is given, much is required. You have the great blessing, you do in this room, just trust me on this, I never knew any of these things when I was your age. You have a great blessing that's been poured out upon your life. To have more understanding of God's word than the average person your age ever understands. but that makes you more responsible to then live according to the things that you've learned. Now, James warns us that there is a danger ahead, immediately ahead. Anytime you're doing Bible study, you don't normally think about this, but I want you to think about it because this is where James is focusing our attention. Whenever you're doing Bible study, like we're doing Bible study as a group right now, but it could be your personal reading, could be your personal studies, your personal memorization times, could be at church on a Sunday morning listening to a sermon, could be like this in a Bible study circumstance. Anytime you're doing a Bible study, you're in danger. You're not only in danger, but you are in danger. And you're in big danger. How many of you knew before you walked in the door today, coming for this study, I gotta get ready, I gotta get prepared because I'm gonna be in danger. Spiritually. I don't see any hands. You didn't think about that, did you? You need to think about that. James is saying, think about it. When you're studying God's word, you're in danger. What's the danger? The danger of self-deception. The danger of self-deception. What do I mean? We are susceptible to being deceived. To be deceived means to think the wrong thing and draw the wrong conclusions. There are three deceiving influences that we face in life. The Bible teaches us and warns us about all three. One is Satan and the demonic realm. They're always trying to pull the wool over our eyes. and to influence us to think the wrong things about God, wrong things about the world, wrong things about life, wrong things about ourselves. And leading us in that deceptive influence to make the wrong choices and to behave in the wrong way. Second deceiving influence, the world. The whole culture, the society around us. The society which pretty much disregards the Lord, ignores Him and His Word, and has its own ideas about what life is all about and how life should be lived. Living in such a culture tends to have an influence on the way we think, and we need to be guarded against that. So if I said to you, If you don't live your life according to Satan's influence, you'd say, yeah, you're right, I need to be on guard against that. Even if I said, you need to guard yourself against being influenced by the culture and the society and the world that's been so influenced by sin, you might say, yeah, you're right, I need to be on guard against that. But if I said to you, every time you're in Bible study, you're in danger of deceiving yourself, you might not recognize that danger so easily. The point James is making is this, if you listen to God's word, which you are, and if you agree with the truth of it, which I hope you are, and then you go out from that time of study and act according to how you feel or what's natural to you, rather than according to the principles that you've just learned, you've just entered into self-deception. You've just effectively pulled the wool over your own eyes. You've convinced yourself that it's fine for me to know these truths but live according to how I want to live anyway. You have deceived yourself. Now I will ask you this, which is the worst deception of the three? Self-deception is the worst of the three. It's the most Deadly of the three why because it's the hardest to discern. It's the hardest to recognize It's almost easy to recognize when Satan is trying to deceive you It's almost easy to recognize when someone in the world is giving you their own opinion And it's so obviously contrary to God's principles. It's very difficult when it's your own thoughts your own ideas about the permission you give yourself to live according to your own rules and rather than the rules of God that he's just made known to you. So to warn ourselves against this deadly danger of self-deception, James gives us an extended word picture. The word picture has to do with you and a mirror. How many of you own a mirror or have a mirror available to you? Here's your assignment. after the study today. You don't have to do it immediately, but sometime today, before you go to sleep tonight, I want every single one of you to find a mirror alone, just you, because that's the picture he's painting here, and just stand and look at the mirror for a while. What will you see? You will see yourself, in all your glory, And if you look carefully and honestly in all your flaws. The thing about a mirror is it's just a tool. It's functional. And what it serves to do is it reveals the truth. It reveals you as you really are. We all have a certain view of ourselves. I'll give an example. I play table tennis. as a hobby and as a form of exercise. When I'm playing table tennis, I have a certain picture of how I'm hitting the ball. A friend of mine helped me out one time because I had a certain flaw in my technique of hitting the ball. He did me the favor of recording on his cell phone me playing. He called me over after I was done playing and he showed me the video. I could not believe it was me. because the guy in the video was playing terrible. But in my mind, I was like a world champion when I was hitting the ball. The truth of the video exposed to me what I had deceived myself about. I had thought, I'm hitting the ball exactly the way I should, and I was doing everything wrong. Everything wrong. And the video served to open my eyes to that. That's what a mirror is meant to do. It's meant to expose the truth to you about you. So it can be a very useful tool in that regard. But here's the problem. This is the word picture that James is giving us. The mirror in this case is God's word. And you're the one staring into it when you do Bible study. God's Word reveals the truth of who you really are and what you're really like. It reveals all the good qualities if you have previously responded in the right way to what God asks of you and requires of you. But it exposes, without any consideration of your feelings, it exposes all of your flaws. and it forces you to see things in yourself that you don't like seeing in that mirror. So James says this, if you're a hearer of the word and not a doer, you're like a man who looks intently at his natural face in a mirror with all the flaws exposed. If you don't like what you see, what's your natural tendency? Blame the mirror. Avoid the mirror. I know certain people that won't look at themselves in the mirror just because they don't like what they see. It's not the mirror's fault. Don't blame the mirror. So you study God's word and you see yourself as you truly are. Don't be mad at what God has exposed about you to you. The point is it's serving as your helper. It's serving you in a wonderful way to show you what yet needs to be changed. He says, this natural man, he looks at himself in the mirror and he goes away and at once forgets what he was like. Why? Because he doesn't want to think about it. He saw himself in the mirror and he went, OK, I don't like what I see. I'm turning away. I'm going about my business. And he quickly and easily forgets what he saw in the mirror because he doesn't want to focus on that. So the idea of Bible study is, When you are studying God's Word, you're meant to think about it after you close the book. You're meant to consider what it revealed to you about you. It's meant to work its way into your deepest understanding and perspective about yourself so that it motivates you to change. The man who goes away and forgets what he looks like, he forms a new picture in his mind. Not the picture that the mirror showed him, but his own ideas about himself. And that replaces the truth of what the mirror displayed. This is an image of what we were calling self-deception. Self-deception is walking away from that mirror, forgetting what you actually saw, and then making up your own story in your head about what it looked like when you looked in the mirror. And you will always naturally tend to think of yourself more favorably than you actually should. That's the point. That's why we need the mirror. That's why we need the revelation of God's word to expose our flaws to us because we just don't like to think of ourselves in those ugly terms. and we want to think better of ourselves and yet we need to see the truth so that we can be moved to change. James says the one who looks into the perfect law, the law of liberty, here he's making sure that we understand the mirror is the word of God. And he refers to it by two terms, the word of God. The word of God is the perfect law. What does that mean? It means that the law of God, and this is specifically in the focus of James, the law of God is a perfect revelation of God's righteous standards. The law perfectly reveals to us what God says is the right way to live versus the wrong way to live. And it's also referred to as the law of liberty, which is unusual when we think of the law, because normally we think of the law as restraining or constraining us, but here he says the law sets us free, the law is a law of liberty. What he means by that simply is the law exposes to our hearts our real need for a savior by exposing our flaws. And it's only by coming to know the savior that we're truly set free. And it displays for us, God's law displays for us, the righteous path that God calls us to follow, following the day of our salvation. That is a path of freedom. By following and staying within the boundaries God has appointed for us. He says this man who is looking into the law of liberty, the perfect law, needs to persevere in doing so. That simply is referring to, don't Don't make a quick glance into God's Word and then turn quickly away, because you will just make yourself susceptible to self-deception. You need to keep staring into the Word of God. Keep your perspective focused on His Word, and that will lead to your continuing change and transformation. In so doing, you will not be like a hearer who forgets, but a doer who acts. The self-forgetfulness, the self-deception only happens when we turn away from God's Word. I could tell you stories of people that used to be part of the church that I'm part of, and chose at some point in their life to turn away from not just the church, but away from God's Word. And they began to change, but not change to become more like Christ, but change to become less and less like Him, more and more like the world around them. It's only as you keep staring into God's Word, like staring into that mirror, that you can truly change and be changed in the way that God wants you to. And in doing so, James promises you will be blessed in your doing. Okay, last two verses of chapter 1, 26 and 27. If anyone thinks he is religious and does not bridle his tongue but deceives his heart, This person's religion is worthless. Religion that is pure and undefiled before God the Father is this, to visit orphans and widows in their affliction and keep oneself unstained from the world. James here in these last two verses is still describing the nature of self-deception. And he makes sure we get that by saying, if anyone thinks he is religious, the idea is many in this world think they are religious, but in God's evaluation of religion, they are not actually religious at all. There's two kinds of religion. In other words, there's true religion, which is defined by God only. And then there are all kinds of false religions. that men commit themselves to, including even atheism, which claims to be a denial of all religion, but is in itself its own form of self-religion. All other religions other than true religion are false and self-deceptive. Now, James gives us one test. It doesn't mean this is the only test to determine whether your religion is true or false. There are many tests that need to be applied. There are several biblical tests, but other books in scripture describe that for us. For instance, we did a study in an earlier year of Bible Bee in the book of 1 John, which is a whole series of tests, a whole teaching on how to test whether your religion is true or not. Here, James just mentions one of those tests, and that has to do with your words. with your tongue. If anyone thinks he is religious and does not bridle his tongue, but deceives his heart, this person's religion is worthless. hear, slow to speak, slow to anger. So it's that quick to hear, slow to speak thing that now he's rehearsing when he says bridling the tongue. Remember I gave you the word picture of a horse under the control of a rider? You're the horse. The bridle is now on the horse. That means the horse is now under control of the rider. This is you under the Lord's control. And one of the ways to measure that most quickly is by measuring the words that are coming out of your mouth. Do you tend to speak words that are pleasing to the Lord, or do you just blurt out whatever you want to say whenever you want to say it, however you want to say it to whoever you choose to say it to? That's one of the essential tests of evaluating whether your religion is really true or not. Now, what James says is if you don't speak with a bridal tongue, and whatever else you may believe about the truth of God's word, your religion is worthless. The word literally is empty. Empty religion. That means there's no real spiritual substance in your religion at all. Now, he then goes on to contrast that with what he calls true religion. Pure religion, undefiled religion before God the Father is this. First, this phrase, before God the Father, is critically important. Every single person in this world, without exception, has a religion, whether they claim to or not, trust me on this, everybody has their own religion, even atheists. Question is, what does God think about their religion? It doesn't matter what you think about your religion, all that matters on the final day, because on the day of judgment, which we will all face, which we will all experience, we come before a throne, and whose throne is it? It's not your throne. It's his throne. He is the one that evaluates our religion. So, pure and undefiled religion before God the Father, meaning all that matters in the end is how he evaluated your religion, the way you lived your life. And he gives an example, actually a pair of examples, to show us what true, pure, undefiled religion is like. I say a pair, it's actually three examples, but two of them function as one. These are not the only ways to evaluate whether you're living by true religion or not. Religion that's, in the eyes of God, pure and undefiled. But these are important practical ways for us to measure whether we're living the way that God wants us to live. First, visit orphans and widows in their affliction. Now, orphans and widows in the day that James was writing in were the two neediest groups in the entire society. There are still needy groups in our generation today. But the measure or the degree of neediness is not as great today as it was in those days. To be a true orphan or a true widow meant in those days that you were without any practical ability to make a living and to what we call fend for yourself. You were truly needy. You could only survive on the mercy and gifts of other people. And so Christians, among all the people of the world, were called by the Lord to visit the neediest people, to help them, to practically provide for them and encourage them. and be a blessing to them. James's point is, if you don't see examples of this kind of heart coming from your idea of your religious following of the Word of God, if you don't see things like this on display in your life, don't draw the self-deceiving conclusion that your religion is a religion that's actually pleasing the Lord. is true religion is always marked by this quality and this commitment to keep yourself unstained from the world. The idea here in this word picture is the world in which we live, the society, the culture that you live in, is filled with the spiritual pollution of various kinds of sin. And you must, as you interact with the world around you, always guard yourself from soaking up the sinful influences of that society and of that world. Alright, next section, verses 1-9. I won't read these 9 verses just because they're long. You're familiar with it. Chapter 2, verses 1-9. He now shifts gears and he focuses on one particular sin that a Christian can commit. If you and I were to make a list this morning and say, what are the most serious sins that we should avoid? This sin, that James spends nine whole verses focused on, probably wouldn't have been on any of our lists. I hope if you're making a list of sins to avoid, you'd put the five that are from the second half of the Ten Commandments on that list. But you might not have put this sin on your list, because you might not have even thought of this as a sin. But it was a big sin in those days, and it's still a big sin to avoid in our days. It's what we call the sin of partiality. What is partiality? It's showing favor to some people more than others. Treating some people better than treating other people for one reason and one reason only. The advantage, you were convinced, you will get out of treating someone else well. So you go into a new social circumstance and you meet a bunch of new people. And you are evaluating each new person that you meet. And you're making decisions every time you meet a new person on how you're going to treat that person. and you are always going to be susceptible to treating one person in that group better than another person based upon what you think that one person will do for you in the future if you treat them the right way. James calls that partiality, showing favor to one over the other based only on the advantage you think you'll gain from treating them well. Now he splits up these people into two groups. The groups are poor people and rich people. This is not the only way to divide up all the people you will ever meet. It's just one of the most important ways to recognize the differences in people you meet in society. You will meet in the future poor people and you will meet in the future rich people. How you choose to treat them will have everything to do with whether you're going to be a doer of the principles of God's word or whether you think that I'll gain an advantage by treating one better than the other. Now, in a circumstance of you're meeting a poor person for the first time and you're meeting a rich person, just based on natural tendency, which of the two would you tend to treat better? If you're going to treat one better than the other, which would you naturally tend to treat one better? Which one would you tend to treat better? Jane's point is, you will always naturally tend to treat the rich person better than the poor person. Why? Because if I treat the rich person well, there's a chance I'll get to share some of his riches, or I'll get to benefit from some of his influence because he's a rich person. Like if you went into a room and you were meeting a bunch of Dodger fans. How many of you here are Dodger fans? A few. You were meeting a bunch of Dodger fans. And you happen to find out one of the persons that you're meeting, and they're all Dodger fans, one of the persons owns a luxury box at Dodger Stadium. And the other person goes to the stadium and actually, because they're such a fan but they can't afford it, they hitchhike to get to the stadium and then they stand outside and they just beg for a ticket to get inside and you're meeting both of those fans which one do you think would you tend to treat better? be honest now, you're a dodger fan you're going to tend to treat the one that owns the luxury box, why? Because you might, maybe not, but might one day be invited to join him in his luxury box. The other option is the poor fan might invite you to come beg a ticket with him in the front of the gate. Hey, come on, let's go beg tickets together. And you say, oh, yeah, good luck with that. I'll see you inside. I'll look down on you from my spot in the luxury box, because I just buddied up to the rich guy that owns the luxury box. That's James's whole point here, but the point isn't Dodger fans. The point is church. The point is Christian church. Church meetings. He says, you're having church, and a man comes into church one Sunday morning, and you notice he's wearing a gold ring, which It's not that uncommon nowadays, but in the ancient world, if someone was wearing a gold ring, that meant they were a rich person. He's wearing a gold ring and fine clothing, and he comes into your church meeting that Sunday morning, and then right after him, through the door comes a poor man in shabby clothing. This literally means it's the same word that he used earlier in James, in James chapter one, to talk about filthy behavior. He's wearing filthy clothing. Now who wears filthy clothing to church? How many of you? When it's Sunday morning, it's time to get dressed, intentionally, purposely go and find your filthiest clothes to put on to wear to church. How many of you? So who in the world would wear filthy clothes into church? Who would do that? Someone that only owns filthy clothes and has no ability to wash them and has no change of clothing. It's what we would now call, in today's day and age, a homeless person. How many of you have ever seen a homeless person wearing shabby, filthy clothing? So two people have come into church that Sunday morning. One wearing the nicest, finest clothes, wearing expensive jewelry. They just drove up in a brand new Mercedes Benz. And you just thought, oh man, what a ride. Maybe I could ride in that car someday. And they just walked in the front door, and right behind them comes a homeless guy in just shabby, grimy, filthy clothes. Now you have the option of, during the greeting time, of greeting these two people that have come in the door. Which one are you tending to gravitate to greet? Come on, I mean, we all know, right? We're gonna go greet that rich guy. And we're gonna say, hey, so glad to have you with us. It's great that you could be here today. You know, we're gonna have our offering in a few minutes, you know? We need some new carpet. The pews could use some repair. So glad you came to church today. The whole idea of greeting him, treating him well, saying, oh, look, we've got a nice seat reserved for you right here. Come and sit in this prime location so that you can enjoy the service. And all the homeless guys, it's not that you're kicking him out, but you say to him, you know, look, we got a spot over here in the back, or in those days, they didn't have all kinds of seats, so why don't you just sit right over here on the ground. They're making room for the homeless guy, but they're not making the same kind of room that they are for the rich guy. They're showing partiality. They're showing favoritism to the rich man. And James identifies this as a sin. True Christians should not make such distinctions. He says, listen my beloved brothers, has not God chosen those who are poor in the world to be rich in faith and heirs of the kingdom, which he has promised to those who love him? He wants us to look at those two people that just walked in. One is rich, one is poor. He wants us to look at them through God's eyes for a moment. He wants us to look at their souls, not their clothes. Which soul is more valuable to the Lord? And the idea is, based upon the people, neither soul is more valuable than the other. Yet, interestingly, God tends to choose to save more poor people than he does rich people. It doesn't mean that it's technically impossible for a rich person to get saved. But we know what Jesus taught about that. He said it's very difficult. It's almost impossible for a rich person to get saved. And yet God has saved many, many, many, many poor people throughout the generations. Let me give you this passage for your notes. 1 Corinthians 1 verse 26-28. It does not mean that every poor person is chosen for salvation. Not everyone is. And it doesn't mean that no rich person is ever chosen for salvation. But it is true, and it is biblical, that God tends to save more poor people than he does rich people. He's basically saying, evaluate yourselves. How rich were you when God saved you? The answer is, you probably weren't. So why would you treat the poor person worse than you treat the rich person? He goes on to say, you have dishonored the poor man, or not the rich, those who oppress you. What James is reminding the church of here is, remember, they're in a circumstance of persecution. The world around them, the society around them, is persecuting the Christians. He's saying, if you want to correctly identify your persecutors, understand, your persecutors are all coming from one group. They're all coming from the rich and powerful group in the world. And yet here you are treating the rich people better than you're treating the poor people, and all of your persecutors are coming from that group. It doesn't even make sense. It's not even logical. So, he concludes by saying, if you really fulfill the royal law according to the scripture, here he is referring to one specific law out of the many laws of God. Which law is he referring to? Leviticus 19.18. It's important to get that in your notes. That verse says, love your neighbor as you love yourself. James identifies that as the royal law. That means it rises in significance even above the other laws of God. Jesus later quotes Leviticus 19.18. He does so in Matthew 22 verses 36 and 40 in which Jesus summarizes all of God's laws down to two. The first, love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength. And the second, which is like it, he says, love your neighbor as you love yourself. James here is just focused on the second of those two principles, but they're twin principles. This is what God's law is really all about. So if you fulfill the royal law, according to scripture, you shall love your neighbor as yourself, you are doing well. But if you treat the rich man better than the poor man, if you show partiality, you are committing sin and are convicted by the law as transgressors of God's law. Our last section, verses 10-13. For whoever keeps the whole law but fails in one point has become guilty of all of it. For he who said, Do not commit adultery, also said, Do not murder. If you do not commit adultery, but do murder, you have become a transgressor of the law. So speak and so act as those who are to be judged under the law of liberty. For judgment is without mercy to one who was shown no mercy. Mercy triumphs over judgment. All right, let me say it this way. I'm going to summarize this. I'm going to try to simplify this very important principle in verses 10 through 13. How many of God's laws does he call us to obey? That's a good answer. You're on the right track. How many of God's laws were there originally if we were to total up the number? 613 individual laws. It's an amazingly large number of requirements. But it took that many to fully display all of God's righteousness to us in the form of laws. So he's called us to obey how many laws? 613 laws. That's the requirement. You cannot excuse yourself and allow any violation of His law. If you do excuse yourself and intentionally disobey it, you are now again involving yourself in self-deception. Now, what if I said to you, I know a Christian, a really good Christian. And they have consistently obeyed 612 laws. They've got an almost perfect record. 612 out of 613 they have kept, and they've kept faithfully. What would you say about that person? You would tend to say, just like I would, that person is better than I am. That Christian is a more obedient Christian than I am. That Christian is almost perfect. Right? What would God say about them? He would say, that person is a lawbreaker. Or you say, well, yeah, yeah, technically, that's correct. But they only broke one out of 613. Listen, if you went to Bible Bee Nationals this year, And they happen to test you on 613 memory verses. And you got 612 right. And one, you just messed up really bad. Would they then trot out the big trophy and the big check at the end of that whole process and say, we want to award you for having really mangled that one verse? What would they say? They would say, sorry, you lost. and they'd give it to someone who got all 613 verses right. The point is that God evaluates differently than we do. We would say 612 out of 613 is pretty darn good and that's good enough for me, it should be good enough for God. And God says, no, if you violate any one of my laws, and this is the part that catches us off guard, you violated all 613. You break any one of the 613, you've broken all of them. How could that possibly be? James says it this way, if you don't commit adultery but you do commit murder, you have just committed all of the violations of God's law. How can that be? Because the law isn't just a list of do's and don'ts. The law is a display of God's righteousness. If you violate any point of that display, you've violated God's righteousness. And you're convicted of falling short of His standard for your life. Now, of course, none of us are going to be able to obey all 613 laws. But the point is to make your heart aware of how much you desperately need a Savior. And if you say to yourself, patting yourself on the back, I've kept 612 laws. It's like the rich young ruler. You remember him when he approached Jesus? And Jesus said, you know the law. Go and obey it. And he says, well, I've kept all of the Ten Commandments since I was a young person. And Jesus said, OK, let's just take a moment and evaluate where you really stand since you have kept all of the Ten Commandments. What I'm calling you to do is I want you to go and sell all that you possess and give it to who? The poor. This is like the orphans and the widows, James chapter 1, pure religion, undefiled religion in the eyes of God. And then come and follow me. and the rich young ruler goes away sorrowful. The idea isn't, I have done most of what God requires of me, therefore I can pat myself on the back. The idea is, God calls you to a standard that will expose to you your heart's need of a savior. At the end, he says, we will be judged by the standards of God's word on the final day of judgment. And at that day, you're going to discover how critically important it is that you have treated other people around you with mercy, because God is going to use your own standard of how you treated others when he evaluates and judges you. Let me give you a series of four passages from the Gospel of Matthew. We won't read them. but you should read them in relationship to this final portion of James, chapter 2. Matthew 5, verse 7. Matthew 6, verses 14 and 15. Matthew 7, verses 1 and 2. And Matthew 12, verse 7. All four of these sections are on this issue of showing mercy as the only way that God will then show mercy to you, which then puts you in a position of His mercy triumphing over the judgment that you actually deserve from Him. All right, that's the end of our study for today. God bless you, and we will, Lord willing, pick up with James chapter 2, verse 14, and finish chapter 2 next time together.