434: James Series Introduction | Tim Henderson

So you guys, we today are beginning a new series that's gonna take us several months to finish, and it's on a book from the New Testament. I wonder, did you know that there is a book in the New Testament whose inclusion in the scriptures was questioned by some? People have thought that it perhaps appears to be at odds with other key teachings in the New Testament, particularly things that Paul said. In fact, in a fascinating twist, this book, this letter, quotes the exact same passage that Paul also quotes in Romans, but he uses it to make a point that seems to be the exact opposite of the point that Paul was making when he cited it, which has been aggravating to some people, to say the least.

Martin Luther was among those who expressed skepticism of this book. He famously said this:

In a word, Saint John's gospel and his first epistle and Saint Paul's epistles, especially Romans, Galatians, and Ephesians, and Saint Peter's first epistle are the books that show you Christ and teach you all that is necessary and salutary for you to know, even if you were never to see or hear any other book or doctrine. But this epistle is really an epistle of straw compared to these others, for it has nothing of the nature of the gospel about it.

What is the book? What is he talking about? Do you guys know? James. It is James that gets all of this shade thrown at it. James is the book, and Luther's downstreaming notwithstanding, we're gonna study it all semester long. In fact, we are going to study James for the exact reasons that some people have not been terribly fond of it. It is God's word. It is every bit as much of what we need to know as Paul's letters are and the gospels and Peter and the poets and the prophets and all the rest.

It is different. Those that are confounded by James are right that there's something about it. It's a little bit odd. It's a little bit different. But I think that the things that make it different are what make it valuable, what make it needful, and I love it.

I also love the apostle Paul. Paul, honestly, is my hero. He is probably the greatest church planter, the greatest missionary, the greatest exegete, the greatest discipler. Paul is incredible, and I think that Romans is the greatest thing that's ever been written. And I think that Paul himself and Paul's writings are actually very balanced. Paul does a fantastic job of giving us equal parts orthodoxy and orthopraxy—this is what you should believe, this is how you should behave. He's stellar at theology and at application.

But come here for a second. Listen to me. What we take from Paul, I think, is often unbalanced. I think many evangelical churches, probably many reformed evangelical churches are more Pauline in our theology than we are in our practice. We like these heady ideas and theological concepts, and maybe we're not quite as strong on what do we actually do with it.

And so what I think is so helpful about James is that he just puts his thumb on the scale of practice. He's very interested. Like, okay, but so what does it matter? What do we do with it? He does have theology. There's actually some pretty important theology interspersed throughout James' letter. But what rings the loudest is this rapid fire exhortation, and James just goes after it. James is the master at the ethics of Christianity. What do we do? Why does it matter? So he's gonna say things like, you believe that? Well, good for you. But what are you gonna do about it? I'll tell you what you should do about it. You should start doing this, and you should knock that off, and you should stop being foolish.

James is not afraid to call balls and strikes. He's also not terribly concerned with how you feel. He just does not spend a lot of energy holding your hand. He's a little more like Doctor Phil than he is like Oprah Winfrey. He is more like Jordan Peterson than Mister Rogers. He is more like James Carville than Jimmy Carter.

I love James. James is great. He also uses a lot of vivid imagery—all these pictures, right, those are all snapshots from the book of James. He loves very concrete things, very practical things, very get your head around this. He's not esoteric. It's just very bottom line, this is what's real, and he's great.

Here's a sample of James being direct:

When he asks, he must believe and not doubt because he who doubts is like a wave of the sea blown and tossed by the wind. That man should not think he'll receive anything from the Lord. He's a double minded man, unstable in all he does. — James 1:6-8

Don't merely listen to the word and so deceive yourselves, do what it says. — James 1:22

You believe that there is one God. Good. Even the demons believe that. — James 2:19

The tongue is also a fire, a world of evil among the parts of the body. — James 3:6

It corrupts the whole person, sets the whole course of his life on fire, and is itself set on fire by hell. — James 3:6

If you harbor bitter envy and selfish ambition in your hearts, do not boast about it or deny the truth. Such wisdom does not come down from heaven, but is earthly, unspiritual of the devil. — James 3:14

You want something, but you don't get it. You kill and covet, but you cannot have what you want. You quarrel and fight. You do not have because you do not ask God. But when you ask, you don't receive because you ask with the wrong motives that you may spend what you get on your pleasures. — James 4:2-3

You adulterous people. Don't you know that friendship with the world is hatred toward God? Anyone who chooses to be a friend of God becomes an enemy of the world. — James 4:4

You catch the vibe? James is just like, snap, snap. So if you don't have time for a bunch of religious verbal nonsense, you're gonna love James. But if you really do like kinda pie in the sky religiosity, you need James. Right? James gives legs to faith. His motto might be, make this matter.

Overview and Invitation

So we're gonna be in James. This week, I want to invite you to read it through. It's five chapters long. You can read the whole thing in like ten minutes. Next week we're really gonna begin in earnest, a chunk by chunk investigation of the book. Today is just gonna be all high level.

Over the course of the week, you could easily read James two, three, four, five times. It'll just take you—it's really short. But you could read it and begin to grow in your familiarity, to understand more. What are these images? Maybe find all those little pictures that were up there. Maybe you're gonna think about what it is that he's doing. But I'd love you to start it.

I'm gonna just give you a couple of overview insights this morning, then we're gonna sing some more songs and meet at the table.

Three Overview Questions

So overview, three questions. Number one: who is James in the first place? This guy that feels so comfortable sticking his finger in your chest, who is he? Number two: what is he talking about? Like, what is the essence of his message? And then number three: why is it important for us? What's going on with this?

Who Is James?

The truth is there's a whole bunch of dudes named James in the New Testament.

The first is James, son of Zebedee. We meet him in Matthew chapter four. James, son of Zebedee, is one of the twelve. He's one of the disciples, and his brother is John, the disciple that Jesus loved. So James and John, together with Peter, these guys were the inner circle of the disciples. All twelve had access to Jesus, but very often we'll see the phrase "Peter, James, and John." That James is James, the son of Zebedee.

Second, James shows up in Matthew chapter ten for the first time, and he is James the son of Alpheus. He is sometimes known as James the Little or Little James or James the Younger. He's the one if you guys are fans of the TV show The Chosen, he is the one that The Chosen depicts as walking with a limp. That's entirely made up, by the way. No biblical basis that little James walked with a limp.

But there's one more James. There's actually two more, but the other one doesn't really count. The third one—you know who the third one is? James, the son of Joseph and Mary. That's right. James, son of Joseph and Mary, was Jesus' half brother. And Catholic theology notwithstanding, Matthew is actually very clear that Joseph did not lie with Mary until Jesus was born. There's no biblical reason to make the case that Mary remained a virgin for her entire life, and there's no reason for her to remain a virgin her whole life. There's nothing theologically that would suggest that if Mary were to enter into a joyful physical relationship with her husband, she would in any way become sullied. And so there's really no basis for that ancient claim. In fact, the New Testament makes clear that Jesus had multiple other brothers and sisters, among them James, the son of Joseph.

So those are the three most likely candidates. There is a fourth, but he never really rises to any kind of significance.

Which one of these guys wrote the book? Do you know? Jesus' brother. The third one wrote the book. The first guy, James, the son of Zebedee, he gets martyred too early. He dies in Acts 12, and he just dies before the opportunity would have arisen.

James, the son of Alphaeus, honestly never became terribly prominent, didn't achieve the stature to write a book like this. But the third one is a big deal. He's the primary leader of the church in Acts 15. And it's really amazing. Like, what is it like to grow up the brother of Jesus? Do you think he ever heard his mom or dad say, "Why can't you be more like your brother?" What a nightmare. He starts off as a skeptic—as you would have if your brother claimed to be God—but he ends up a believer, as you would have if your brother was Jesus. And so he's our guy. He's the guy that's gonna write the book, incredibly significant leader. Broad historic scholarship would say, yeah, it's the third guy. It's James, the son of Joseph, who writes the book.

Overview of James

Now what does he write about? This book kind of defies organization. If you read through it, I think you'll get a sense of the stream of consciousness to the book. He's all over the place. But a couple of little hints I'll give you: Chapter one is the TLDR of James—the executive summary. Everything that happens in chapters two, three, four, and five is rooted in chapter one. In fact, you could go through chapter one and just draw lines to every other idea that he puts in there.

He's gonna talk about faith and love and service. He's gonna go pretty hard after people that trash talk other people. He's gonna talk about arrogance and wealth. He's gonna be pretty strong on gossip, on favoritism. He's gonna talk about patience and endurance and prayer. Lots of very practical, applicable things about what we do and how it all works.

Sources and Themes

When he does this, he's gonna talk about these things in ways that reveal his two absolutely favorite sources. They are the book of Proverbs and the Sermon on the Mount. If you're fluent in the book of Proverbs, if you've been one of the people that reads it regularly—like a lot of Christians on the first of the month read Proverbs 1, on the fifteenth read Proverbs 15—you'd notice that there are 31 chapters that just works really nicely. If you're fluent in Proverbs, you'd be like, "James is stealing that and that and that and that and that." He does it all the time.

And then the second thing that's really interesting is that he loves the Sermon on the Mount. This is a very early book in the New Testament, and he clearly makes allusions to the Sermon on the Mount over and over again. He has a demonstrated internalization of the words that he heard his brother say. He was probably there and has been mulling over these things, and he's gonna bring it home to help us apply it.

So watch for Proverbs, watch for Sermon on the Mount. Watch for those concrete images. Watch for the things that are particularly contradictory to you and the things that you might wanna change. James is highly applicable.

The Concept of Telos

The third reason this book is important, the reason we're gonna study it, is this: James loves the idea that you have what we might call a telos—t-e-l-o-s. Telos is a Greek word that means an end or a goal. Teleology is the study of purpose of the universe, really. James believes that there is some state of completeness, of maturity, of perfection to which we should all be aiming. He's not gonna say that we can accomplish it. It's like a limit we're approaching it, we're moving towards it. We should be making progress towards this maturity, this completion.

Inherent in that claim is James' really central idea: our faith is not an end. It is not a telos. It is a means to an end. It's supposed to do something. It's supposed to matter. Sometimes we get means and ends confused. For instance, money is a means. It is not an end. You're supposed to exchange it for something. You're supposed to buy something with it, or give it to somebody so that they can exchange it for something. When money becomes an end, you just stack it up, and money becomes a scorecard. We're supposed to spend it to some end.

Faith also is a means, not an end. The heart of James in the letter, the heart of this book is beyond question the most controversial passage in the book.

We're gonna address it more thoroughly in a few weeks, but I just wanna highlight it now. I just kinda put it before you. In fact, when you come across it as you read it in these weeks to come, I'd like you to start chewing on this and trying to figure out what is going on here.

Here's what James says. We'll pick it up in verse fourteen:

What good is it, my brothers, if someone says he has faith but does not have works? Can that faith save him? If a brother or sister is poorly clothed and lacking in daily food and one of you says to them, go in peace, be warm and filled without giving them the things they needed for the body, what good is that? So also faith by itself, if it does not have works, is dead. — James 2:14-26

That passage drives evangelicals and particularly reformed evangelicals crazy. Right? Even more so when he says a paragraph later:

You see that a person is justified by works and not by faith alone. — James 2:24

Do you see why that's fighting words? And in the same way:

Was a prostitute justified by her works when she received the messengers and sent them out by another way? For as the body apart from the spirit is dead, so also faith apart from works is dead. — James 2:25-26

What on earth is James saying, and has he not read Romans? Right? What are we to do with this?

We're gonna unpack that. It'll be a few weeks till we get there. I hope it will bother you until then. I hope that it will bother you enough to study it, to be curious, to try to think, what is happening here? But I'll simply say this for now, just to take a little bit of the edge off the contradiction that seems to be the central claim that Paul makes in Romans.

John Calvin said this: "It is faith alone that justifies, but the faith that justifies is never alone." That is spot on. It is faith alone that justifies, but the faith that justifies is never alone.

What Should Accompany Our Faith?

This spring, what we want to do is consider what should accompany our faith. What will accompany genuine faith? What can we do to demonstrate our faith, to enliven our faith, to strengthen our faith, to prove our faith? And James is a master at that.

So think about it like this, and pardon me for what I'm about to say. We have a tank in the back of this sanctuary that we use for baptisms. Tobias, have you seen a sweeter baptism in this church than Tobias? I do. Yes. I will, with God's help. What a great kid.

We love the reason we do these baptisms—we want there to be this moment for new believers to identify with Christ. We go into the water identifying with him in his death. He died. We died with him. And we come out of that tank identifying with him in his life. He was raised from the dead, so also we are raised to newness of life. That's why we do it.

But I wonder, have you ever been curious? If faith genuinely saves you and to die in Christ is to be headed to infinite and increasing joy, why is it that when we baptize people and we put them down in the water, why don't we just leave them there and send them on to glory? Why don't we? If Paul says:

I desire to depart and be with Christ, which is better by far. — Philippians 1:23

Why remain? Do you know why we remain? It's because remaining gives the opportunity for fruitful labor. There is work to do. There are people to love. There are wounds to heal. There is grief to comfort. We are blessed to be a blessing, not to just hoard it and get all the good stuff.

And James is just really, really, really strong at helping us think about what are we to do when we come up out of the water. What does it look like to live lives of faith that are concerned with the good of others?

I hope that you might lean in with us this spring. I think it's gonna be really fun. We wanna think really deeply. What does it mean to live lives worthy of the calling that we have received? So read it with us. Jump in. Read through it several times. Sloop's gonna kick it off next week. We're gonna start going chunk by chunk, figure it all out, and understand what does the Lord want us to take from the book of James.

Response in Worship

Now we're changing things up. We started with prayers of the people earlier, and we're gonna do a few things a little bit differently. In just a minute, I'm gonna invite you guys to come forward. I'll tell you about that in a second. And then we're gonna do three things all at once because you're such brilliant people. Most churches couldn't pull this off, but you can.

Three things are gonna happen. One, we're gonna sing a song in response. We're gonna worship the Lord because he is just so good, and the lives that he's inviting us to, that he purchased for us on the cross are good lives. We wanna sing a song to him. We wanna praise him.

Second thing, we're gonna respond to what he's done. It might be that some of you are like, I just don't wanna go sing a song. I need to go talk to Jesus. Come forward.

We would love you to come and just have a moment. Maybe there's some part of your life that you're like, "I want right now, before I change my mind, I want to repent. I want to ask him to take this part of my life." Or maybe there's just some burden you're carrying, you want to come down. We'd love you to do that. And we'll have friends in the back by that prayer banner if you want to pray with somebody.

Then the third thing we're going to do is we're going to take our offering during that. So we're going to sing a song. We're going to respond in faith. We're going to take our offering. We're going to do all those things all simultaneously. And then I think the next thing is we're going to meet at the table. We're going to enter into this meal that we celebrate with him every week.

So come on down, worship, come on down, talk to him, deal with stuff, whatever you want to do. And when the usher comes to your aisle and takes the plate, don't just wave him off. Take it and pass it across the way. We want to do a better job of having these things go all the way across so it doesn't miss somebody in the middle. So take the plate, send it across.

Lord Jesus, we love you and we want to love you. We want to love you well. We want to love the people that you love. I pray that you might help us really this spring as we dig deep into James, that we would be soft and receptive when he puts his finger on our chest, when there's some correction he gives that we need.

Lord, your word is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting, and training in righteousness that we'd be thoroughly equipped for everything you want us to do.

Lord, I pray that we would receive that here, and I pray for those right here today that they're bearing some burden. Lord, we know that life is hard. Would you meet them? Would you walk with us? Would you not abandon us in our sorrow and grief, but we'd experience you closely, Lord. We love you. Amen.