In the Grit of Life

TRANSCRIPT:

What we're gonna do today is start a journey that is gonna carry us through the vast majority of the summer.

So, if you're new here, the way we like to do this is grab a book of scripture, and then we just work through it, verse by verse by verse, passage by passage by passage, and today we start our journey in the book of James.

So, in some ways, I really want you to think about today as sort of like it's an introduction. It's almost like the first day of school where you get like the big overview, but don't go all that far into the details.

But we're gonna get somewhere by the end of our time together that I think is gonna be practical and helpful for all of us. So, before we get to James, I'm just curious, this is not like a moral test or anything like this, so don't be shy.

It's just more of like a church personality test. I'm just curious, did any of you watch the film Tar? Right, again, this is like no moral judgment, like you raise your hands and I'm like, repent sinner.

It's just more like I wanna know. Cool, nobody. Okay, great.

Skipping the illustration. No, no, it's interesting that you have not seen the film. It was released in 2002 and it was one of the most critically acclaimed films of the last five years.

It was actually nominated for an Oscar in the 2003 cycle for best picture and best actress. It featured Cate Blanchett and just critics loved it.

Now, those of you that are Googling real, real fast, you're like, yeah, critics loved it, but nobody else did. That's why you haven't seen it. It was a total box office failure.

It actually lost $6 million over the course of the life of the film. And of course, we like, we know that's a possibility, right? Critics loved it and nobody else did.

We're probably more familiar with the inverse, right? Also released in 2002, this little film called Jurassic World, Dominion. I'm not going to ask if you've seen that because then I would judge you.

Not morally, just whatever. That's the inverse, right? That was a box office smash.

I mean, it grossed like a billion dollars globally, just off the box office alone. Off the box office alone, Universal Pictures made about $800 million, but critics hated it. 29% on Rotten Tomatoes, if you're wondering.

It was like a cottage industry who could be most artful in their critical takedown of that film. It was like, ooh, there's a new way to brutalize that thing. Yet, I don't think $800 million later, Universal Studios cared all that much.

They're like, you can keep your Rotten Tomatoes, we'll keep our $800 million.

I'm bringing this up, not because I'm testing all of our knowledge of the film industry, but because it's a helpful thing to know that the Book of James is more Jurassic World than it is tar, right?

It's this book that is like universally loved among followers of Jesus. It contains some of the verses that you are most likely to quote offhand, right?

It's the Book of James that gives us, Oh, every good and perfect gift comes from the Father above, right? You can't have thanksgiving without that verse, right?

It's the Book of James that gives us, you want to not just be hearers of the word, but also doers of the word, right? It's the Book of James that talks about our tongue. It's the Book of James that talks about confessing sins.

The Book of James talks about all of these things that we hold near and dear to our hearts as followers of Jesus. Yet, Biblical scholars and academic theologians really struggle with the Book of James, right?

They have a number of challenges with it, not least of which is the seeming lack of organization. Like, it's really tricky to trace a central argument through James.

If anything, it reads more like somebody's Twitter feed than like a theological treatise, and that bothers Biblical scholars a lot, right?

There's this movement that won't die that suggests that James and Paul have a different Gospel and that Paul's is right, and James' is a little out of step with where the church ultimately lands so that we need to just kind of ignore James because he

was a great guy but not an awesome theologian. So we just kind of push it to the margins as like, yeah, it happened. There's like some nuggets of truth in there, but whatever, right?

You've probably heard it said Martin Luther, the famous German reformer, called the book of James an epistle of straw, right? He hated it, didn't want anything to do with it because he felt like James' theology and Paul's theology were in contrast.

One of my little mini goals over the summer is to convince you that that's not really the case at all. But part of what really bothers scholars is this sort of seeming disconnect between various portions of the letter, right?

As we get into the intro, I'll show you what I'm talking about, right? Because on one hand, it is super clear that this letter is written by a very specific man to a very specific audience going through very specific challenges, right?

James, chapter one, verse one, James, a servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ to the 12 tribes dispersed abroad, greetings. All right, let's start with the specific man himself, James. This is the half brother of Jesus, right?

We say that because he's the biological child of Mary and Joseph. This is the same James that we see referred to in Matthew, chapter 13, verse 55. Isn't this the carpenter's son?

That was a reference to Jesus. Isn't his mother called Mary and his brothers, James, Joseph, Simon, and Judas, right? It just adds an interesting dimension to the overall letter to know that James is writing about his older brother.

So think about what has happened in this man's life, that by the end of his life, he is happily referring to himself as a servant of the Lord Jesus Christ, right? That's a really big deal, right?

Many things may happen in the course of my two sons lives, but I'm willing to bet that my middle child, Aidan, is never going to describe himself as a servant of the Lord Jack MacGowan. Ain't happening.

And if he does, I'm going to be like, ah, ah, ah, Jack is many, many wonderful things. Sinless is not one of them, right? There's no way that a younger brother refers to an older brother that way, unless something dramatic has happened in his life.

Now, it doesn't just add a little intrigue into the letter.

Knowing that this is James, the half brother of Jesus, also helps us understand when this was written, because we know from biblical and extra biblical sources that James was martyred in 62 AD.

Which means this is one of, if not the first epistle written in the history of the church. So you want to get in on what were followers of Jesus wrestling with? What were they talking about in the early church?

What was the conversation? The book of James gets you really early in the chronology. People will debate when in his life he wrote this.

Some will say 40s, 50s, but either way, it was really, really early.

James was the undisputed leader of the church in Jerusalem, and we see his status in Acts chapter 15, when they hold the Jerusalem Council, which was this really momentous theological moment, where they had to decide specifically, did Gentile

converts to Judaism need to get circumcised? But it was really this question of, as followers of Jesus, did you need to follow the Mosaic law, or were you free from that?

And James' role in that council is really interesting, because there's all kinds of people sharing their experience, giving their perspective, but then what Scripture records in Acts 15 verse 13 is, after they stopped speaking, right, so James is

playing the part of the wise elder. Everybody else is gonna talk. Everybody else offers their opinion. Here's what I think, here's what I think.

What about this text, what about this text? And then as sort of a senior leader, James jumps in at the back end of that and says, brothers, listen to me, and then he essentially outlines the plan that the church adopts.

He essentially writes the letter that gets sent back, right, to answer the question. James is not a theological lightweight. He's a revered elder and a source of wisdom.

And very clearly, he's writing to Jewish followers of Jesus who have been driven from Jerusalem by both famine and persecution, right? Specific guy, specific audience, specific set of circumstances.

At the same time, from the very beginning, James is clearly up to something more than encouraging a persecuted minority.

First of all, he chooses to write the letter in Greek, not Hebrew or Aramaic, as you might expect with him writing from Jerusalem to Jewish followers of Jesus.

In fact, the Greek that he uses is one of the things that trips up biblical scholars the most. Because it's really elevated, right? It is a well-written letter.

It's grammatically correct and it's nuanced in its Greek, so much so that the argument becomes, no, no, hey, hey, there's no way that this largely uneducated Jewish kid born into a working class family, there's no way he learned to write that well.

And people will use that to try to discredit James as the author, right? I don't think that argument holds a lot of weight. The guy could write and he's writing under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, but he is writing in Greek.

It's like he has something broader in mind. Moreover, all of the letters in the Ancient Near East began by following a very standard format. If you've been around the Bible before, you've heard that.

But maybe what you haven't heard is that, although there is this standard format, there are some subtle differences between the standard format for a letter written in the Greco-Roman tradition and for a letter written in the Hebrew tradition.

Even though he's writing to a Jewish audience, James so clearly follows the Greco-Roman construct. He's up to something bigger. He also doesn't write to one particular church.

This is undisputedly the first of what people will either call the universal or the Catholic epistles. That he's not writing to the church in Ephesus or the church in Corinth or Colosseum or anything like that.

He's writing to a specific group of people, yet to the whole church at large. And it's really that disconnect. It's really that sense of like, what is he doing here?

What is he up to? On one hand, it just feels like a series of tweets to a bunch of people that are going through a really hard time. And on the other hand, it's clear from the beginning, he's like, no, no, there's something else happening here.

I think it's that tension between a very specific audience and broader goals that helps us get to the core of what I believe James is up to in this letter, to get to the core of the lens through which we're going to approach it over the summer and

kind of give us the thematic unity that sometimes people insist doesn't exist in the book of James, right? Part of what you have to realize is James is writing to a church that is still in a transitional moment in church history, right?

They are still forming as a community, right? If you look a little bit deeper into the letter, you see that these followers of Jesus, committed to the Gospel, though they are, they have not fully left behind their Jewish roots.

James chapter two, verse two, says, For if someone comes into your, and then depending on your translation, it almost certainly says either meeting or assembly, which you would assume underneath that he has used the word ekklesia, which would be the

common word not just for church, but for an assembly, for a meeting. You would assume there's a number of words he would use. What he actually uses is the Greek word synagoge.

This is a group of followers of Jesus who still, from time to time, for various purposes, find themselves coming into a synagogue, perhaps for the purposes of prayer, perhaps for the purposes of Bible study, probably less for the purpose of

sacrifice. But they're still kind of emerging from the vestiges of their Jewish tradition. On the other hand, you go to James chapter five and you realize they've been at this church thing long enough that they definitely have elders in place.

So on one hand, it's like this embryonic church that's just getting started and trying to figure it all out. And in other ways, they've made some progress. They're starting to develop as a community, right?

And I think when you look at this church that is in transition, you start to realize that what James is doing is he is writing very much as a pastor to a young and forming church that is struggling to figure out what it really looks like to live in

what I'm going to call Gospel Community. They're still trying to figure that out.

And under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, James has this sense that, wait a minute, for thousands of years to come, there are going to be successive generations of new churches that are forming and struggling to figure out what does it look like

to actually live in Gospel Community. Right? Maybe James could envision a church like ours, that yes, ten years old as a church plant, but really ravaged by COVID and kind of looking and feeling more like a three-year-old church plant.

Maybe a community like ours that's still trying to figure out what does it really look like to live in Gospel Community? And what I want to argue over the summer is that James is giving us a road map.

He's saying if you want to live this thing called Gospel Community out, I'm here to help you. Which is why the letter feels like a successive series of off-speed pitches. Right?

Because sometimes in order to live in Gospel Community, we need to drill into a robust theological understanding of the true nature of the Gospel. Faith without works is dead.

James chapter 2, we got to make sure we understand the glory of grace, and we need to make sure we understand the call to discipleship. Sometimes you got to go big picture.

Sometimes it feels more like James chapter 3, which is like, hey, y'all got to stop gossiping about each other. If we don't stop talking about each other and start talking to each other, we're never going to actually build community.

This to me reads like a letter that is meant to engage the real world struggles of a local church. It's a letter that has some resemblances to my email inbox as the pastor of this church, right?

Sometimes it's like, hey, let's have this really high level theological philosophical discussion, which I love.

And sometimes it's like, hey, can you help troubleshoot this one difficult relationship, this one thing that we can't seem to figure out within our community, but this one thing we can't seem to figure out within our ministry team.

Hey, can you help me like real super street level? It's what a local church looks like. It's what a local church feels like.

And James is like, hey, look, isn't this great? God loves you so much that he hasn't just sent you out there to figure it out on your own. There's a letter in scripture to help us try to figure this thing out together.

One of our deepest held values as a community is that church is not just an event you attend, it's not just something that takes up free space on your calendar on a Sunday morning, it's a community that you join. And that sounds so great in theory.

I would like to tell you, I believe it's even better in practice. But you know, whenever you go from theory to practice, before it gets better, it gets harder. And James is like, man, I'm here to help you, right?

I'm here to help you form a Gospel community. So, this summer is going to feel a lot like a specific call to action.

Now, what we want to see today in terms of like, all right, let's take one small, practical step, kind of first day of school style, is that Gospel community is formed in the grit of life.

And I want you to hold on, Gospel community is formed in the grit of life.

Knowing a little bit of the background of the letter, it shouldn't surprise us, but it is really helpful to see how directly James deals with the challenges that these Jewish believers are facing as a result of famine and persecution.

And what he says is surprising.

Consider it a great joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you experience various trials, because you know that the testing of your faith produces endurance, and let endurance have its full effect, so that you may be mature and complete, lacking

nothing. I mean, you talk about a letter where he kind of comes out swinging. Hey, it's me, James. Here's who I'm writing to.

Greetings. Hi. How you doing?

Anyway, consider it a great joy whenever you experience various trials, because you know that the testing of your faith produces endurance. There is a way where James is being pragmatic.

If he doesn't acknowledge the elephant in the church, they're going to have absolutely no ability to pay attention to anything else he says. He's writing to a group of people for whom life is extraordinarily difficult.

It's a challenge to make it through the day. And if he doesn't start there, who cares what's coming next? You've got to remember that these believers in Jesus have been cut off from everything they know.

They've been cut off from family, from livelihoods, from life in the synagogue, at least in Jerusalem, from their friends, from literally everything they knew.

And it's happened because famine and persecution have made life in Jerusalem insufferable to them.

So they're now living as expats in parts of the world that have never been particularly friendly to Jews, yet alone to this weird little band of Jews who insist that their Messiah has come, died, and risen from the dead. Right?

There is a sense of like, are you kidding me? You didn't think you fit in before. Like, you've abandoned all hope of assimilating into our culture.

This is lunacy what you guys believe. Right? So in every conceivable way, this is a challenging moment.

And James jumps in and he says, look, I just want you to know, as we do this whole journey together, as we do this Gospel Community thing, I want you to know that I get it. In fact, I think you don't have to work very hard to read between the texts.

This is him as a pastor saying, I miss you guys. These are people that he would have seen in the gatherings of the local church in Jerusalem. He used to be their pastor.

He used to have meals with them. He used to pray with them. He used to be in contact with them, know all of their struggles.

And he's like, look, I get it. I know why you're not here anymore. But man, I miss you guys.

I care about you. I want you to know we're going through the same kind of things here in Jerusalem. It's not like life in Jerusalem has all of a sudden gotten easy.

It would have been hard if you stayed. It's hard if you went. We just got to figure out what does it look like to follow Jesus in times of struggle, right?

Life for Gentile Christians isn't seemingly going great either at this point in the life of the church, which brings us to a place that is enormously practical, even if it is enormously challenging.

In James' theology, in James' understanding of the Christian life, he believes that trials are both a miserable and a necessary part of the Christian life.

So what it means is that if you're serious about following Jesus, if you're serious about living as a disciple of Jesus, you are going to walk through trials that test your faith. That's what he's talking about here.

He's not just saying you're going to have good days and bad days. He's not just saying, hey, you're going to have good seasons and bad seasons, you have days where it all comes easy and days where it all feels hard.

What he's saying is, no, you're going to walk through seasons that are going to cause you to question whether this whole following Jesus thing is worth it. You're going to walk through seasons that cause you to question if God is real.

You're going to walk through seasons that cause you to question if you're really saved. You're just going to walk through seasons where you're like, what is going on? It feels like it would be easier if I just walked away.

It was like, look, I had a little thing. I did a little Jesus season in my life. I did a little church thing.

That didn't work out so great. Life got really hard, so I just walked, right? And sometimes when we're in those moments, we believe that it is as a direct result of our own sin, and that is certainly a possibility.

You can make a series of life choices that bring you into a season of intense trial. But it's not always the case. It's not always the case that difficulty in your life is a reflection of the judgment of God against your sin.

Sometimes you're just trying to be faithful to Jesus in a world that is moving in a different direction. Sometimes the weight of swimming upstream feels overwhelming.

And what James is trying to do is to say, hey, I need you guys to understand that the road to biblical community does not lead us away from trials. At times, it leads us into them.

Which is why he feels this pastoral need to help people figure out what does it look like to live in gospel community. It's not particularly hard to get this right if the life of faith leads us always progressively away from trials.

If it was like, look, just follow Jesus, and then it's all sunshine and rainbows. Look, just follow Jesus, and it's all prosperity gospel. Look, just follow Jesus, and it just all gets good.

First of all, your experience wouldn't substantiate that for maybe more than a couple of years. You'd be like, well, it's not my story.

At which point, we either slip into mass delusion and pretend that it's our story, or we do the hard work as a community of rolling up our sleeves and being like, huh, what do I do about the fact that my discipleship to Jesus seems to have

complicated things at my job, not made them better? What do I do about the fact that I feel like it just can't get a break financially? What do I do about the fact that I'm so tired? And I understand the answer is get rest.

And the question is like, uh-huh, where, how, when? Tell me more. I'm on board.

I just need help making it happen. Are we willing to walk with each other in those moments? Or are those the moments where we're like, oh, bro, I'll be praying for you.

Let me know when everything gets back to good in your life and I'm happy to reengage again. Right? Oh, you've got some space to work on that.

And then when you get it all figured out again, let's go back and grab coffee. Or are we the kind of community that says, no, no, no, no, no. It's when life is the most flipped upside down.

It's when things are the most confusing. That's not when we give each other space, y'all work that out and then come back when you got yourself cleaned up. That's like, no, no, we're gonna move in real close.

We're gonna be right there. We're gonna be right there with each other. That takes a lot of courage on behalf of the people that are moving close to you in a season of trial.

It also takes a lot of courage on your behalf because it means you have to find a way to let us know that you're walking through one of those seasons. Right?

We're real good at putting on a brave face, cleaning up well and projecting the like, I got it all together kind of thing.

For some of us, the most challenging thing that you might do this summer, the most courageous thing you might do in the rest of 2025 is actually admit that you don't have it as much together as the rest of us think.

We were like, no, so I'm walking through a season that feels like it's nothing but trial. And I do want people to come close, but I got to be willing to raise my hand and let others know what's going on.

I want to be really clear, the text does not call us to rejoice in the trial itself. That's crazy. Right?

That's not like, oh, the air conditioner blew up. Thank you, Jesus, because I was just, you know, probably becoming a miserable person in my climate-controlled world.

You're like, no, you want the air conditioner running over the course of the summer in DC. You don't rejoice in the trial. You rejoice in how God is using it.

Because no matter what's going on, God is at work to build endurance in us, which is a necessary but often neglected part of spiritual maturity. Right? We want to measure spiritual maturity in terms of biblical knowledge.

We want to measure spiritual maturity in terms of fidelity to spiritual disciplines. We want to measure spiritual maturity in terms of how much somebody gives or serves or sacrifices or how fruitful somebody is. And none of those things are wrong.

Like those are all essential parts of the Christian life.

We are less comfortable and less familiar with a conversation that says, hey, look, in order to be a spiritually mature follower of Jesus, you're going to have to develop some resiliency in your life.

You're going to have to develop some ability to run with endurance. It's going to be hard at seasons.

And the people that end up where James was, this wise elder who has so much to offer a young church, it's because he's walked through some things as well. Right?

Sure, he had to humble himself to describe himself as a servant of the Lord Jesus Christ, but he also had to watch his big brother be tortured for the sin of the world.

He also had to figure out whether he was going to have the courage to leave behind the comfort of his status and his role in the synagogue, and cast his lot fully with those of them who believed that his brother was the Son of the living God, and to

head out into this journey of what you and I call the church, and you and I look back at it now and we're like, well done, James. You put your chips on the thing that ended up changing the course of human history.

But he had no idea that was how it was all going to play out when Jerusalem was in chaos. And he's like, no, I know who this Jesus is. And I know that he's building a church.

And I know that the gates of hell are not going to prevail against that. So I'm just going to lean in with everything I have. Right, right, James had developed a spiritual maturity that included endurance, right?

Real spiritual maturity is not a question of short bursts of passion for the glory of God. Real spiritual maturity is, to quote Eugene Peterson, a long obedience in the same direction.

God is at work in your life and in mine in a million different ways, one of which is to develop in us a heart of endurance. The Christian life is not a sprint, it's a marathon.

So the step for us today is to just get comfortable with the idea that Gospel Community forms in the grit of life. Gospel Community forms as we're walking through trials, as God is bringing us through things that are producing endurance in us.

Gospel Community forms when we have the willingness to say, hey, that's me, I'm struggling right now. And Gospel Community forms when some of us come around you and say, we're right here. See, here's how I wanna wrap this up.

I wanna make sure you understand that there is a difference between Gospel Communities and some of the other kinds of communities that we sometimes settle for, right? Gospel Community is formed in the grit of life.

That is different from religious communities that attempt to provide an escape from the grit of life. Gospels in the grit of life, religion is usually an escape from the grit of life, right?

Religious communities feel the need to put on a good act for each other, to pretend that it's all good, we're all making the right moral choices, we've all got life figured out, and isn't God impressed with us, right?

Religious community doesn't want to hear about the divorce. Religious community doesn't want to hear about the bankruptcy. Religious community doesn't want to hear about the heartbreak, doesn't want to hear about the struggle and the trial.

It's like, you just could do that somewhere else, and come back and do Jesus things with us. Gospel community and religious community are not the same thing. Gospel community is also different from theological community.

Theological community reflects on the grit of life, offers interesting observations, maybe even writes some great books about it. But again, it's a reflection on the grit of life, not something that forms in the grit of life.

Right, you see this play out all the time in popular conversation.

I think all of us probably know, we live in a day and age where it's very trendy, it's acceptable to talk about what Vivek Murtha would have called the epidemic of loneliness that we're experiencing as a country.

And everybody has their go-to stat that like loneliness is as bad for you as smoking or all these different things.

I read some survey data this spring that said based on the number of adults that live alone in an apartment building, Washington DC is the loneliest city in the country, just based on the number of single resident in an apartment unit.

And we all get it that we live in an increasingly isolated world where we're scrolling ourselves to death and having this illusion that we're connected to thousands of people. But have nobody to eat dinner with. Have nobody to go for a walk with.

Have nobody to tell our story to. Have nobody to share our struggles with. Right, it's very fashionable to shake our head at that and be like, oh yeah, we've read books about it, we've listened to podcasts, very trendy.

It's good, awareness is important. But at the end of the day, we don't want to be a group of people that come together to reflect on community. Gospel Community is formed in the grit of life, not by reflecting on it.

So that's the challenge for us, right? I started the sermon by taking a risk, seeing if any of you had seen TAR. Turns out you haven't.

It's okay, by the way, full disclosure, I have not either, that was the result of Google searching. But I'm gonna end the sermon by taking a different kind of risk.

So I just, I'm gonna say that because I'm like, if nobody responds to what I'm about to do, I'm cool, that's fine. Like I, please, please don't fake it because you feel like you need to be nice to me, okay?

But I do want to give you a way to visualize at least what Gospel Community really looks like, right? Religious Community is an escape from the grit of life. Theological Community is a reflection on it.

Gospel Community forms right in the middle of it. So in just a minute, I'm not gonna ask you yet, but in just a minute, I'm gonna give you a space.

If you're walking through a season right now, where you're like, I'm in the middle of a trial right now. Like I'm going through something that the idea of considering it all joy seems ludicrous. I could just, I'm not even gonna go there today.

I'm just gonna tell you, I need endurance. Like that, I'm living in James one, two through four. God's producing endurance in me.

In just a minute, I'm gonna see if you'd be willing to stand up. Right, here's the deal. We're not gonna ask you any follow up questions.

We're not gonna be like, pass the mic and be like, ooh, what's going on with you? You're just gonna get to stand up and be like, that's me. I'm in a season like that.

And then what I'm gonna ask is maybe one or two people, this would be a great moment if you consider yourself a leader in our church, just ask you to go over and just pray over that person.

Again, you don't know what the trial is, you don't know what's going on. I'm just gonna ask you to pray for somebody and then I'm gonna pray for us and we're all gonna come and take communion together. I don't know what God's gonna do.

Some of you may really feel this blessing of standing and saying, this is what I need. And I'm gonna be prayed over by somebody in my community.

And if the moment passes and none of us lean into it, at least we have a picture of the project ahead of us. At least we have a picture of the work ahead of us. Because Gospel Community is formed in the grid of life.

So again, no pressure. But if you're going through a season of trial right now, if you're in a season where you know God's producing endurance, I just want to invite you to stand.

And after you've had the chance to do that, we're just gonna ask some leaders around you to just come and pray over you. If it feels like this isn't the moment for you, why don't you just bow your head with me?

It's weird, because you gotta open your eyes enough to see the people that are standing, so you can cheat. But I just want to invite some leaders to move towards the people who are standing right now.

It's not that God doesn't hear your prayer from a distance. It's that our brothers and sisters who are struggling, who are in a time of trial, need to feel the love of your hand resting on their shoulder.

They need to feel that sense of somebody coming alongside them. And just in the name of Jesus, saying, You're not alone. We see you and you matter. God sees you and you matter to Him. So with those of you that have come over to pray, I'm going to give you a minute to do that. The rest of us, you can pray from your seats.