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ប្រតិចារិក
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All right, if you have your Bibles or the sheets of paper in front of you, you can open with us to James chapter 5. And actually, what you didn't realize as you picked that verse is that is perfectly in line with the passage we're about to read. We're going to be in James chapter 5, and we're going to go ahead and jump right into reading it because you'll see exactly what I meant by saying that the passages at hand really deal quite well with the text that's before us. Our text this evening, taken from James, oops, I'm gonna redo that one. James chapter five, beginning in verse seven, and we're actually going to read all the way down to verse 11. So if you have a sheet of paper, it takes up both sides of the piece of paper. Let's read that. I'll start reading here. It says, be patient, therefore, brothers, until the coming of the Lord. See how I told you that in the song you just sang? See how the farmer waits for the precious fruit of the earth, being patient about it until it receives the early and late rains. You also be patient. Establish your hearts, for the coming of the Lord is at hand. Do not grumble against one another, brothers, so that you may not be judged. Behold, the judge is standing at the door. As an example of suffering and patience, brothers, take the prophets who spoke in the name of the Lord. Behold, We consider those blessed who remain steadfast. You have heard of the steadfastness of Job, and you have seen the purpose of the Lord, how the Lord is compassionate and merciful. You know, as we come to this text this evening, I don't think it'd be hard-pressed to think that most of the people to whom James is now writing are all kind of asking the same question. Here's what they're asking. Why Why doesn't God do something? And I believe they're asking that for a really obvious reason. If you remember, James has been dealing with a great deal of tensions and trials and tribulations that have entered into the early church. And this is particularly true even as we know from the six verses of chapter five. James has dealt with these difficulties. And many of these difficulties in verses one through six have to do with injustices handed down to them at the behest of those who are treating them poorly. And this is often a familiar refrain, the refrain of this question, why doesn't God do something? We find it in the lips of those who see something tragic happen. Disappointments, bereavements, trials often call for this kind of a reaction. And we need to look into the Bible in order to find God clearly provides an answer to that. In fact, James has noted this all throughout his entire book. James has been noting that God has done something, God not only has done something, but God will, and that's certainly something that we'll see in this passage together, and God is currently doing something. And this is certainly something that James has been driving at. But what's interesting to know, as we'll pick it apart here in a second, is that as James begins to get into this text together, James will know he is pointing forward to something not yet happened to help these people with their present problem. Note what he's pointing towards. He notes it in verse 7. Be patient until the coming of the Lord. He says that in verse 7. You'll also know in verse eight, you also be patient. Establish yourselves, what for? For the coming of the Lord. He'll note the same thing in verse nine. Do not grumble against one another, brothers, so that you may not be judged. Why? Because the judge is standing at the door. So what James is going to do with He's gonna say, you are presently struggling with something, and I'm gonna help you with your struggles by pointing forward to something that has not yet transpired. Someone help me out, if you've been with us throughout the Book of James, though. What is one overarching word that we have used to describe the Book of James as it's given to us? What is the word that we've been using? Yes. Cyclical, we'll get to that one. That's certainly the structure of the book. But there's another word I'm looking for. Perspective. Perspective. James has been looking at life from a godly perspective. And now again, in these verses, he's going to give a perspective. He's going to say, I'm aware that you are having a present problem. And I'm gonna give you a perspective of that problem and what is the perspective of their problem that he's going to look at that we even highlighted already. What's the perspective they should keep in mind in light of their present circumstances? Patience because of the coming Lord. You're both right. We'll give you both points for that one, right? But I want you to know something is that this is different. Rebecca already noted something. This book of James is structured as a cyclical book. Now for those that are with us again, what do I mean when I say that the book of James is a cyclical book? Anybody remember? It keeps going round and round. So James will introduce a topic and then he will come back to that topic over and over again. That is not true when it comes to these verses. Now there's a reason for that. And the reason is that James in his cyclical structure is noting that history is not cyclical. What I mean is history is moving somewhere. It is going in a direction. And only as you understand history as moving in a direction can you have proper perspective in your present circumstances. Now listen to this quote from C.S. Lewis and we'll pick it apart. It's a little longer quote. I don't always give longer quotes but I found this one helpful. The doctrine of the second coming is deeply incongenial to the whole evolutionary or developmental character of modern thought. In other words, he's saying the doctrine of the second coming of Christ flies in the face of modern thinkers. We've been taught to think of the world as something that grows slowly towards perfection. In other words, with each coming age, with each coming modern invention, we are getting better at doing life. That's kind of how people view the world. The Bible offers no such hope, says Lewis. It does not even foretell a gradual decay. The Bible foretells a sudden, violent end imposed from without, like an extinguisher on a candle. A certain curtain comes down on the whole play, and a voice from the wings will eventually call out, halt. and everything stops," end quote. What Lewis is saying is that is not how people think. We think in culturally speaking, I'll just use the collective we, culturally, and I think, although I'm only American, I think that may be true for other cultures as well, we think of our world as increasingly getting better And even many preachers will preach in such a way as to say, well, if you do this or that, your life will get better, you'll be happier, you'll be less depressed, you'll be free from anxiety, yada, yada, yada. If you just do X, Y, and Z, all of things will snap into place, right? you can have, as one preacher said, your best life now. And what Lewis is saying is that doesn't, that is not how the Bible portrays it. And particularly in the book of James, as we've noted all along, James is cyclical in structure, meaning that he will cycle back to these things that he introduced, and suddenly he halts his normal structure at the end, towards the end of his book, to give us a unique structure, verses 7 through 11, and it's very interesting. I know we know different paragraph sections, and I do appreciate the ESV usage of them, and they are very helpful. This is actually a very unique paragraph section to the rest of the book of James. It really is. So if you've been locking in on those paragraph sections, make sure you especially lock in here. Because James is communicating something that is different, perhaps, than what he's even communicated, or at least in a different way than he's communicated up until this point. Now, we're going to get to the outline of this text here in a moment, and we'll see that there are three temptations to be avoided. We'll read them in a moment. There are three examples to follow. and there are two overarching truths that need to be taken to heart. But before we get there, we're gonna do something very different. Before we even get into the text, I think it'd be really wise for us to really explore what James means, I erased too much, what James means by this whole idea of perspective, perspective. Because if we're going to understand the text at hand, we need to explore more fully perspective. And secular philosophies of history, we'll start there before we get into the text, often have a different perspective and large swaths of mankind have what I would just categorize as three major views of life and they put all of life under that spectrum or that perspective. So here's the worldly philosophies of perspective. One would be a perspective I would call a perspective of pessimism. As if to say, oh, that didn't write that one right, did I? Pessimism, let's make sure we spell it right on the screen, right? Pessimism on the screen. Pessimism, it's a completely gloomy approach to life that holds out the only possibility of hope in a cyclical approach whereby you may get another crack at it down the road, much like more Eastern thinking. And if you don't get another crack at it, in other words, you don't get reincarnated into another life, then it's an increasingly pessimistic worldview because your whole, whether it's your body aches and your weaknesses as you age or everything just breaking, it's no matter what you do, it's almost a view of rearranging the chairs on a ship that's going down, right? It's just this whole kind of negative outlook. And there are large, groups of people inside and outside of the church that view life through a pessimistic worldview. Wouldn't you say? You know that's true. There are certain people you just don't want to ask, how was your day? Because you know you're going to get their medical history, right? It's just their whole outlook on life is gloom and doom, right? And there are, both inside and outside of the church, there are people that have this pessimistic outlook. But there are others that may have more of what I would say is a bizarrely optimistic outlook on life. We could say perhaps this would even fall under the lines of greater philosophical thinkers like Karl Marx, who endeavored and determined that by moving the economics around, you could get a world that was trouble-free, where everybody was on the same equal playing field. And that hasn't worked out so well with those who have tried. But that was certainly his bizarrely optimistic outlook, as if to think, well, we could all just get along, right? It's like the song, We Are the World, right? It's just this, you know, if we can just, you know, maybe if we could just be like the Who's in Whoville. We can just kind of all sing, hold hands around. And the reality is, it is a little bit bizarre, because we know in any human relationship, there's going to be a breakdown there. And the problem with having a worldview that says it's just gonna be perfect, right, everything's just gonna be awesome, is that when things do come in that are difficult, and they will, your whole worldview breaks down because you have this bizarrely optimistic outlook. And so others would say, well, those are the two extremes, right, the pessimistic worldview, the bizarrely optimistic worldview, so I will be the cynic, right? And there's this cynicism. And the cynicism is this increasing skepticism about the possibility of finding any meaning in history at all. I'm just moving, but I'm not learning. Their clarion cry would be, that history teaches us nothing, is what they're basically saying. Just live and let live, it doesn't really matter. And I would say, broadly speaking, that these three, this perspective of pepsimism, bizarrely optimistic, and this cynicism, these are the approaches that most of mankind has. Where do we go from there? And I would say, unless we put ourselves under the tutelage of the Bible, we will violate and vacillate between these three poles, unless we put ourselves under the tutelage of the Word. That is why it's vital for believers to go to the Bible in every realm of life, at every turn of life. When we turn to the Bible, we can find a realism, What I would call a Christian understanding of history, or we could say a Christian worldview. What is a Christian worldview? How would you define that? Well, it's a perspective of looking at life from a Bible-informed way. So that's why it's important for believers to go to the Bible in all realms. The Bible is a fascinating book because number one, obviously it's inspired and it's profitable. But the Bible gives us the good, the bad, and the ugly, doesn't it? Even the great heroes of the Bible had some major warts that the Bible doesn't ignore. Can you think of some examples? David, right? Samson. Saul, or Paul, it's the same man. He didn't change his name. Just wanna make sure that we get it. Oh, King Saul, yeah, yeah. Both of them, yeah. Any number. Can you think of, there's only two examples of characters outside of Jesus of whom the Bible says nothing negative. Do you know who they are? There's only two. Joseph is one. Daniel had something negative said. Mary, no. No? Samuel. Samuel. Samuel. That'd be the two, right? So these are the characters. But broadly speaking, you can think of those that did something, whether the Bible says something negative or they did something negative, but God always shows it to us. And that's a helpful point. The Bible shows us. Therefore, I bring that up to tell you that the Bible introduces you to the most realistic outlook of life you can have. Enter then the gospel message of hope. The gospel message of hope gives us the prospect of what is next built upon what was past. I should probably write it down there, right? The gospel hope, gospel hope is this. It gives us the prospect of the future the prospect of the future built on the past. What specifically in the past jarred the realities of life and changed them on their head? After all, until we understand what future building project took place that we can build our future upon in the past, if we can't understand that foundation, we can't come to this text before us. That's why I'm starting with a longer introduction. And the answer is the cross actually first. Obviously sin spun the whole world into these weird perspectives, right? But the weird perspectives were changed and given a right perspective at the cross. The cross gives us the place in time that makes sense of all the fracturedness and all the mess and all the disappointments and makes possible true future restoration. 2 Corinthians 5 verse 1, if you want to write down that passage. God made him to be sin for us so that in him we might become the righteousness of God. That's the moment that perspective shifted. And if you take the cross and out of that perspective that God entered our fractured world and put death to death with his resurrection, you don't have any building projects to build upon. The only way to look forward is to return in confidence to the past. Does that make sense? Now I bring that introduction all full circle to our text because it's important that we drill down on biblical foundations of worldview before we ever approach the text before us because if we don't, it would be distinctly possible for a preacher, pastor, even myself, to preach on patience when it comes to this text. Right? And I actually was interested in doing so, so I went on. We use sermon audio for our recordings of our sermons here, and other churches do as well. And the predominant messages are just on patience. And patience is certainly an applicable point, but that is not the purposed point that James is drawing at. What is James' point? what is his perspective-altering shift that he is pointing them to? It's actually, and we'll get to this in a second, James' point is that he is drawing our attention towards the most repeated theme in all of the New Testament. In fact, there are over 300 references to this theme. It is the number one most repeated theme in all of the New Testament books. The coming of the Lord. And before we move any further, it's really important that we understand this. Because if we don't, we'll just preach on patience. And that's not the point James is trying to make. James is gonna talk about patience, but that is a subsidiary point to his main point. His main point is Christ is coming. Now before we go any further, I hope we can understand some things about the coming of the Lord. We don't know when, right? And that's intentional. If we did know when, what would be our temptation? If we knew when it was gonna happen, what would be our temptation? Yeah, I mean, why not just wait until right then, right? Absolutely, that would be our primary thing. So we don't know when, but we do know it could come at any moment. And we do know that God is up to something. So getting back to our question at hand, and then we're gonna get into our text at hand. Why doesn't God do something? Remember the question? Why doesn't God do something? That was our question. And the answer James has been saying throughout this whole book is that God is doing something. And God's purpose is, in this book, he's noted it two different ways. His purpose is to have a people And we won't take the time to do the exploration together this evening, but you can do it at a different time. Just go through the book of James and circle all the words of brethren, brothers, sisters. His purpose is to have a people, and his other purpose is to have, have a people, a people, that wasn't terrible, look like Jesus. That's his other purpose. Can you think of a passage we've already looked at in James that talks about the second purpose? Remember this, the glass, the mirror of the word, and you behold it, that's one. There's certainly a, there's a bunch of them. That's his purpose. So ultimately, even in the face of their persecution, what James is saying is this, ready for it? And it's almost, it is very countercultural. It's not about you. That's James' point. You want to have a perspective, shifting change on whatever dynamics you're living in. Number one, you need to understand it is not about you. Now all of that is preliminary to our exploration this evening. Whether we get through all of these, we will see. If we don't, we will certainly come back to them. at a different time, and I'm gonna erase the highlights we've already looked at, because we're gonna look at these together, and we're gonna start by noting, number one, three temptations, three temptations to avoid. And I'm gonna write that in green, and I'm gonna use a green highlighter, if I can get one, to highlight the three temptations to avoid. On the first temptation to avoid, is the temptation, I should write it down first before I highlight it, the temptation, number one, to be impatient. In the midst of your trial, the first thing you need to avoid is impatience. And it's the corollary to his command. Notice in verse 7, two times he says, verse 7, be patient, my brothers, until the coming Lord. See how the farmer waits? Then he says, again, in verse 7, being patient. He'll use the same phrase again in verse 8. There it is. Be patient. And then he'll use it again in verse 9. Do not come, do not grumble against one of the brothers so that you may not be judged. Behold, the judge is standing at the door and knock as example of suffering and patience. There it is. Brothers, take prophets who spoke in the name of the Lord. Behold, we consider those blessed who remain steadfast. You've heard of the steadfastness of Job and you have seen the purpose of the Lord and the Lord is compassionate and merciful. These are all commands to be patient. And the negative corollary is So James is alerting his readers to the danger the people of God face in the face of something. But there's a specific trial that he's alerting them to, because we need to fit this still within the context of chapter six. What is going on in verses one through six that he's saying you need to make sure that you remain patient through? What type of trial? This is not just any trial, although the application can still stretch to that, but there's a specific type of trial. And the specific type of trial that he's alerting them to is injustices. These are the wealthy that are keeping you under your finger. In fact, you can go back and you can read more about them in chapter four, you'll remember. James has addressed them in chapter four. He addresses them in chapter five again. We noted last week that in that culture there were just two major groups, right? They didn't have that middle class that we speak of. And this is an injustice. And the temptation when we have injustices is to take things into our own hands. right, to face the injustices with as much tenacity as we feel is being poured out on us. And while James might be writing to the first century Christian, I think the application is pretty applicable to 2022. But what exactly does he say to those who are struggling through this internal battle to just take things into their own hand? What does he tell them? What should you do? Be patient. And there's a danger if you're not patient. Did you notice the danger? If you're not patient, what will happen? Well, he says, basically, if you're not patient, what will happen is, do not grumble against brother and brothers so that you may not be judged. And the danger is right here. You, if you are not patient, you will begin to grumble against one another. You ever notice that to happen? All right, when things are not going your way, perhaps at work, and you take it home with you, and now you're fighting with your spouse, and it has nothing to do with your spouse at all, but you just took it home, right? We've all probably been there. James saying, what will happen is if you are facing the injustices of those outside, presumably, and you are struggling through this, and I'm gonna urge you to be patient, and if you're not patient, be careful, because you're going to bring it in, and you're going to find yourself fighting with your brothers. So be patient, a temptation to avoid. Number two, the temptation is not only to be patient, but number two, he says, the temptation to be fainthearted. So the temptation of faintheartedness, faintheartedness. And we see that again in verse eight. Oh, maybe I should use a different color, huh? That would make it easier for you to highlight it. So I'll erase faint heartedness and I'll use a different color here. We'll use purple so that you can kind of highlight it in purple if you want. Number two, faint heartedness. And where do we see faintheartedness on display already in our text? Well, look down to verse 8. What is his command? Looking for a saint. You also need to be patient. What should you do? Establish your hearts. Now the word establish, and let's just kind of highlight and focus in on that word. The word establish that we find here, James just used, is a word that means to tie down. Or to anchor is what he's saying. What is being tied down is to tie down something. Establish your hearts. So tie your heart down. Be anchored on a truth. Now what is the truth? Can you see it? What are you to, if you are anxious, if you are fretting, if you are faint hearted, what should be your anchor? the coming of the Lord. There it is. So tie down your heart to, right there, the coming of the Lord. You know this is happening. I'm so thankful, by the way, that faintheartedness, command, temptation, he's talking about it, comes right after being patient, because most of us, that's our biggest struggle, right? My hand wouldn't be up. My biggest struggle is I just want things to be done right away. And you'd say, boy, I, you know, even in my impatience, I'm getting fainthearted. And James saying, okay, then, tie yourself down to what truth? The truth is that the coming of the Lord is at hand. It is uncertainty about the eventual outcomes that causes many people to be anxious, right? We're honest. And James is saying, here's an outcome you know is going to happen, so tie yourself down to that certainty. Jesus is coming again. And there's a third temptation. There's a third temptation that James warns us about, and he says here, and I guess I'll use the color orange for this one, James says the third temptation is a temptation to be grumbling, grumbling. What is James talking about when he says grumbling? Well, let's look at grumbling, if you will, for a second. Grumbling we see in verse nine again. Do not grumble against one another, brothers. And there we already highlighted it a moment. Frustrated by the pressures about you, you begin to grumble. So, here's our three temptations that you should be avoiding. be avoiding the temptation to be impatient, be avoiding the temptation to faint-heartedness, and be avoiding the temptation to grumbling. But James continues and says, there are also then, if you're struggling, there are also three examples to follow. Three examples to follow. What's the first example? Well, the first example is that of the farmer. Did you see the farmer there? See, let me make sure we get to the farmer here. See how the farmer waits for the precious fruit of the earth. James has used farming analogies already, you know, to that, and waiting for them. How many have worked in, anybody worked in kind of agricultural farming, even as a young person, all right? You know the work that goes into it, and there's a lot of work. Ultimately, though, at some point, it's completely out of your control, all right? My friend, Michael, he just went back. He's now back in the senior pastor at the church he grew up in. He grew up on a farmer in a farmer's home. His dad owns one of the bigger farms in the state of Ohio. And I was just talking to him once. We went up to visit. And his dad was talking to me about how they take out these grand insurance plans for their crops. Well, there's a reason for that. If that crop doesn't come out, That's gonna be a lot of money down the drain, literally in the ground, in the soil, just totally wasted. They are waiting. There's a lot of work going in, and there's a lot of angst if they're not careful. There's a lot of, he was explaining to me how there's a lot of worry that can come about. Day after day, and it's incremental growth. But James says, if you want an example to follow, and you're struggling through patience, here's someone you could look to. look at the farmer. But James continues, he says, not only can you look at the farmer as one example, but you can also look at the prophets as another example. Did you see the prophets there? James says, let's look at the prophets. Here's the prophets in verse 10. In verse 10 he says, as an example, the suffering and patience brothers take the prophets who speak in the name of the Lord. The prophets, by the way, were not at all popular. There are some classic examples of the suffering caused of the obedience that they had of sharing their message. You can jot some of these down. Elijah in 1 Kings chapter 8, Amos in Amos 7, Jeremiah is called the weeping prophet for a reason. Not just because he weeped for his nation, but because we know in Jeremiah 38, the tenacity on which those who did not like him came upon him. In fact, there were so many prophets who, in their obedience to the Lord, had people literally gnawing at them, that Stephen, in his famous sermon in Acts 7, would ask this question to his Jewish audience. And this is the question that eventually, when he finally asked it, they were enraged. because they knew he was right. Ready for his question? Which of the prophets did your fathers not persecute? It was a rhetorical question. The answer is, you persecuted all of them. So remember, who's James writing to? Remember, all the way back to chapter one of the book of James. What is going on that these people are struggling through? They're being persecuted. Specifically, it's the diaspora. It's the dispersion, right? So these people are just, they're like, we're doing the right thing and we're feeling the squeeze. And James says, here's an example for you. You ready for it? The prophets. And there's another example. You can probably give it to me. I'm gonna turn the page, but what was the final example that we see? Job, Job, exactly. James says, here's another example, I guess I'll use gray. James says, consider Job as your final example of one. He says, you have heard of the steadfastness of Job. When you read the book of Job, it's a fascinating study of patience and perseverance. And I actually am pleased to let you know we're coming to the end of 2 Timothy, so I've got to start planning. We've gone through like 1 John, and write immediately before 2 Timothy. So we've been in epistles twice. Before that we were in Joseph, which is historical literature. Before that we've been in Ecclesiastes, which is Old Testament literature. I have yet to preach poetical literature, although Ecclesiastes has a form of that, and we're going to be in Job. So not this week and not the week after that, but the week after that we will start in the Book of Job. And I don't have a title for it yet. I'm working on that. I'm outlining it and getting ready and starting some of the messages, but I don't have like, you know, we try to get like a snappy title that we kind of come together for the Book of Job. I don't have that yet, but I do have the outline. And part of the reason is because I was preparing this and I thought, the example of Job. So we won't spend a lot of time on Job right now, because we will spend a lot of time on Job in the end. But I do want to close with these thoughts. James has been going through this, and James says, now I want to show you two truths. And these are the two overarching truths that they should pull all of this together. Number one, what is the major truth? And this is review. What is the major, major truth that James has been drawing on? And maybe I should use the color yellow, because blue's hard to see. What's the major truth? Christ is coming. The Lord is coming. Friend, does that change your perspective on life? If you know that the Lord is coming, it's going to change your perspective, does it not? You know, you've got friends coming over to your house, let's say, tonight. And it's a dignitary. And they're gonna come and they're gonna stay in your guest room. Are you hanging out and talking to everybody? Or are you making a beeline home, cleaning the sheets, vacuuming the floor? Of course you are heading straight home. Why? Because someone's coming over and you want to make sure things are in order. You want to be ready. What would it look like, just kind of rhetorical question, what would it look like if we lived our lives in the constant awareness that Christ is returning at any moment? Probably changing a lot of our lifestyles. No wonder, then, it's the most repeated theme of the New Testament. and this is a truth. Nothing is more frequently and emphatically stated in the New Testament than the truth that Christ is coming again. In the New Testament alone, it is mentioned some 300 times. It's actually mentioned more than that even in the Old Testament. It is precisely because we don't know when that we must always be ready. The Lord is coming. And the last one, another truth that he highlights is that the Lord is full of mercy and compassion. And for this phrase, I just take it right from the end of this book. Look, the Lord is compassionate and merciful. That wasn't the highlighter tool that I was using. The Lord is compassionate and merciful. This is who he is. God is slow to anger and abounding in love. And I imagine that's a pretty nice thing for some of these people and for us to learn tonight. You say, boy, I'm looking at these examples up here. I've not really been a good farmer, so to speak. I wouldn't say that I've been as obedient as the prophets. And I think Job's a pretty tall one to try to follow after. And I have failed in all of those. What do I do? and you come over and you see on ours, it happens to be the second page, aren't you glad the Lord is compassionate and merciful? Even if I fail at this, and we all do, the Lord is compassionate and merciful. He has given us proof, proof of his compassionate mercy in the one perspective-altering historical moment that we stake our claim in, in the past, that pushes us to the future. What is the proof of God's compassion and mercy? The cross. The very same thing we use to introduce this text, then, is the very same thing that motivates us as we close from this text this evening. So we covered a lot more material than I thought we'd get to, and that's because I wasn't taking as many questions as I may normally, and I was hastening forward. Any comments or questions as we were getting through it? I've given you a lot more material tonight. Bobby? Can I ask you about Daniel? Yes. I'll have to go back. It's what he does more than what he says, but I do know for sure that it is Samuel and Joseph that the two are never spoken of in any evil, only good. Yes? Only spoken of that we have is those two. And Elijah too. Well, definitely not Elijah. Yeah. Yes? Any other comments and questions? What? Well, we went through a lot of content tonight, quicker than I thought we'd go. If you want, though, I did make a kind of a sort of announcement. We will be looking at Job as we come together, not this coming Sunday. We still have two more messages in 2 Timothy. and then we'll jump into the book of Job. I don't know if I've bitten off too much than I can chew by so doing. Job is a big one, it's a challenging one, but I hope it's good. And maybe we can just chase this rabbit for just a second. It's really good for us to look, I appreciate, and it's not too much of a rabbit, because Pastor Paul introduced it. There are different forms of literature in your Bibles, and Pastor Paul noted that. even in your Scripture readings, and you should not read them the same, right? The exercises that we are doing in the epistolatory literature like James would very much be helpful to you in other epistolatory literature like Second and First Timothy, but your Bible study shouldn't be done exactly the same when it comes to, let's say, the poetical books, or the books of history, or even the Gospels, because the Gospels give you parallel accounts. If your Bible study is always the same form, I encourage you to go back and read more about how Bible literature comes together, because Bible literature is written as a literature form. How many love English class? Anybody? Just a huge English class fan? All right, nobody? Raise your hand. A few? All right, we got a few. Do we have any avid readers in the room, though, that just really love? OK. So you understand. Now, do you have a favorite literature style that you like? Is it like non-historical fiction? Do you have it? All right? You kind of put that in your mindset, right? Now you understand. If you're not a reader, maybe we could, you know, how many would prefer to watch a documentary? Anybody? Over like a TV show. Anybody like that? How many would prefer a TV show over a documentary? All right? All right? Now, you understand that each medium has different stylistic choices that they make to make their point. Right? The same is true when it comes to your books of the Bible. It is very wise for you to get familiar with your Bible as it's given to us, obviously as a cohesive whole. There are 66 books, but also understanding that each book is maybe formulated as a different genre or a different style, and read it as such. Right? For example, if I were to tell you today that our next book we're going to go through is the book of Proverbs, and I announced it to you as such and said we're going to go verse by verse through the book of Proverbs. You would have every reason to have eyebrows going, how is Pastor Caleb planning to go verse by verse through the book of Proverbs? And the answer is, you can't, because it wasn't designed to be done that way, right? So there are different ways to do it. So exposition, don't equate it verse by verse because of one obvious example, Proverbs, but also get familiar with other literature. So why are we gonna do the book of Job? Because we as a church, at least since I've been here, haven't camped out in the political books. So we will be doing so in Sunday mornings. Any other questions, thoughts, whether related to James or what I just brought up into our conversation tonight? All right, well, there's a lot of good food for you to enjoy. We'll close with a word of prayer, and we don't wanna see anything left over. You just consume it. Don't forget, we do have the signups for the Bible study reading plans that you can certainly sign up for. I just gave you a kicker if you've never done that one. That might be an interesting one for you to get familiarized with, the one I just mentioned. and then we do have immediately, we'll try to start in the next five minutes, so at 15 after, we'll try to start with our connection team in the auditorium, all right? Let's pray and then we'll get dismissed. Lord, we thank you so much for your word that we can explore this evening. Lord, we covered a lot of material tonight and we're thankful that we could, but we pray that would be an encouragement to us. We anticipate your return at any moment. May we live
James 5:7-11
ស៊េរី Journaling Through James
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