Message Title: Street Level Living
Author: James
- Called ole camel knees
- Leader of church in Jerusalem (Acts 15)
- Martyred in AD 62 by being thrown from the Temple.
Date: AD 50- 2 years before Paul’s first letter
Setting: Written to scattered Jewish believers
Themes: main theme is practical living… Trials, temptations, faith and works, Speech, Wisdom, Prayer
- Trials (whenever), Spontaneous (many), Numerous (various)
Testing’s of life tend jolts us out of our comfortable ruts that we tend to settle.
Two Responses Toward Trials
- Avoid and live in a fantasy but get problems anyway
- Embrace and use them for your good.
Why Do Trials Come? (James 1:3-4)
Trails come to mature us and Correct us and Direct Us
- It makes us perfect (mature) –Teleios – means full grown living
By the way in which we meet every experience in life we are either fitting or unfitting ourselves for the task which God meant us to do.
2. It makes us complete – Body, Soul, Spirit
3. It makes us not deficient (lacking in nothing)
Trials come thirdly to Direct Us (James 1:5-8)
- Knowledge…is the accumulation of information
- Understanding…is the interpretation
- Wisdom…is the application
Wisdom is knowing and doing life from God’s perspective.
When one asks God for wisdom, we must remember two things:
1.How God gives? Generously
2.How does the asker ask? Confidently
- Double minded means double souled – there is a civil war going on inside of trust and distrust.
- Loyalty is divided
- “unstable” means restless
Faith, like health is maintained by growth, nourishment and exercise not by fighting sickness.
