Tested Transformation | James: Tried, Tested & True

By way of a reminder, we do have Nuria White's and Ali Novotny's bibles here.

They were baptized last week, Mother's Day.

Having a mom and a daughter be baptized on Mother's Day was very special.

I know for all of us, I always say that those kind of things will go in the book one day.

To be able to baptize a 95-year-old is always a tremendous work of the Holy Spirit.

So feel free, they'll be up for this week and next week as far as if you have a little note you want to send them on the inside cover.

Or one or two verses that you want to highlight.

That would be wonderful for them to have a little keepsake and a study Bible to continue to grow in.

We continue now, one of the last two messages in the book of James.

And to be honest, we could have probably done James over like a 13-week period.

But we only did it for about a month and a half.

Last week we talked about the tongue.

And I know that pretty much every one of us was convicted because the majority of you sent me some kind of message.

Thanking me, blaming me, or whatever of how that day or week went for you.

And we're going to continue a little bit in that understanding of how we speak when it comes to our understanding of being tested in life.

So let me ask, how many people here love standardized testing?

Nobody?

How many people did well on like their ACT's or the SAT's or?

Okay, alright.

I'm not sure how to take that.

That, yeah, so not a lot of you like it.

And how many of you have no idea what I'm talking about?

Okay, alright, one of you.

But no one really likes to be tested in this.

Some people actually secretly love to be evaluated in all of those kind of things.

And that is great.

I remember when I graduated seminary, what we had to do was called an oral defense.

And this was first as a three-tier defense of what is the pastorate?

What is your theology of the pastorate?

And you had to kind of give, it was like an hour and 15-minute presentation of all of what you've kind of learned in seminary.

And first you had to defend it to your classmates.

And they could try to, as iron sharpens iron and all of those things, give you pointers.

Like, hey, that was greater.

Don't say that again because it didn't make any sense.

Or whatever it was.

But then you had to defend it to a group of professors and faculty members.

And then the final defense is the one you were graded on.

You had to defend it to about a dozen or so ministry leaders in the area.

So this was in Lombard.

So from all of those suburbs, different pastors or ministry leaders to pretty much defend your understanding of the pastorate.

And there was a part of it that I absolutely loved.

Because I loved being able to kind of get people to understand my understanding of things is for a grade.

And there was a part of it that terrified me because these were people that had pastored 25, 30, 40 years.

That, you know, they've been pastoring at that point longer than I've been alive.

They knew a couple of things.

And I remember some of the encouragement I got was that is a grand idea that you will never live into.

Wow.

Okay.

Like that seemed harsh, but it's true.

Or wow, that is just a bunch of naive thought.

I mean, it was humbling.

But I think it helped me make me the pastor I am today to know that I'm never going to have all the answers.

And I'm never going to reach a top of a spiritual mountain even as a pastor.

And I think for a lot of us, we strive for that.

We want to have no issues in our life.

We would love to just have the paycheck comes and we got stuff to do.

And we've got a sense of purpose in life.

And we're pretty much just going to coast on this whole faith thing because life is good.

But James talks about when life's not good.

He starts it.

He starts the whole book with that.

He says we're supposed to find joy in trials.

Remember that a couple of weeks ago, almost a month ago now?

That in trials we're supposed to actually find joy in the testing and the growth of God.

But I submit today that for a lot of us, if not all of us, we can get tired of that really fast.

But what we have to understand is transformation is the process of the Holy Spirit.

It is the work of the Holy Spirit.

And I'm saying not on my best day could I ever plan this because I planned this sermon series four years ago

that it would land on Pentecost Sunday.

But the transformation of the Holy Spirit is the key work of all of your life and all of my life.

That Jesus said I need to go up to the Father and the Advocate, the Paracletos, the Spirit,

will come and guide you into all truth.

So what is the goal of all of our days is to grow in the truth of God's Word.

And we get a very clear taste that this isn't going to go well all the time.

That there's going to be a direct conflict in the world called sin against what we should have as kind of our modus operandi

or the goal of living our life in all truth.

We have a world that wants to just be lies and deception.

So right off the bat there's testing.

You cannot live even in the most remote small towns of rural Midwest where the church actually is the center of the town,

where pastors are more revered in there and get asked to be on school boards and all of those things,

all the way to the most progressive city that have very much want the separation of church and state.

And all in between there's going to be conflict in faith.

Even if we all believe we think the same, we look the same, we act the same, there's going to be conflict.

And nor do I ever want that in a church.

That sounds like the most boring church ever.

We all agree on salvation through Christ alone and that in of itself will cause conflict in life.

Why? Because we have to understand the nature of human desires and conflicts.

Because here's something we all have in common.

We all find ourselves in conflict in one way or the other.

Oh, pastor, I don't get in conflict in life.

I'm really easy going, I'm pretty passive.

Though there are times I may kind of get aggressive.

Well, good thing there's a term for that.

It's called passive aggressive and that's conflict too.

Sweeping it under the rug does not mean you are not a conflictual person

because what happens when you sweep everything under the rug?

Eventually it what?

It irritates, eventually you trip over it and it all comes spilling out.

And instead of dealing with the elephant when it's two pounds,

we deal with it when it's 2,000 pounds and no one wants to and it hurts.

Understand that we need to understand that we have a very much internal conflict

when it comes to walking out the life of faith.

We have conflict for when testing and trials come.

In James 4, the beginning kind of points us to the right place.

So chapter 4 starting with verse 1.

What causes, going to verse 3, what causes quarrels and what causes fights among you?

Is it not this that your passions are at war within you?

You desire and do not have so you murder.

You covet and cannot obtain so you fight and quarrel.

You do not have because you do not ask.

You ask and do not receive because you ask wrongly to spend it on your passions.

So he's asking some pretty big questions here.

What's causing the issues?

Hey Jews, Gentiles, believers in Jesus, why do you have fights?

Why do you have quarrels?

Why is all of this drama going on?

Because we want to appease the flesh.

We need to be honest this morning.

But there are times that sin looks just far more appealing.

And I think life's going to go better if I dive into it.

I'm going to allow it to define who I am.

And I'm going to get it to the point, even though it's lies,

I'm going to say it to myself enough to where all of a sudden I'm going to start to believe it.

And you've just deteriorated in your faith.

Well, but you know, as long as, you know, it's salvation, then everything's going to go my way.

No, it's not.

If you're reading the Bible that way, then you're wanting to read it that way

and you're reading it in a true way.

That we are going to have convictions.

We are going to be persecuted.

We are going to have a war inside of us always.

And here's the kicker.

We all lean into that war in the good way and the bad way every day.

It's one of the reasons that I've said this before, that Martin Luther had a little baptismal by his bed,

because he needed to feel that justification for his sins that he committed every day.

And he would do that.

He writes about it.

I'm not saying we need to do that, but in order to understand and make sense of the conflicts

and the fights among us is to understand the grace of God.

That if I've been shown grace for all the junk that I have done in my life and you have,

then we ought to A, show grace to ourselves.

That is okay.

But also show grace and forgiveness to others.

But therein lies the rub.

Because you know what?

You've already forgiven that person once and they've gone back to the well and hurt you again.

Or the church you were at just hurt you again.

Or whatever it is, what system or individual or groups or whatever.

So I'm supposed to forgive them again?

I just know they're going to do it again.

So you're already prejudging that this person's not going to figure it out

because it's the third time now that they've hurt you with the same thing.

And I'm just sick of forgiving.

Okay.

Then I think you struggle in the understanding of how often do we forgive.

We're supposed to forgive always.

Because we've been always forgiven in that sense.

That we have been forgiven to show grace as Paul and Peter and John say in all of their writings.

Yet these trials and temptations, they're supposed to teach us something.

And it's not to teach us to not trust people.

To just stay sequestered by ourselves, kind of hermit in life because we're afraid of the outside world.

No, we need to, a Christian engages these things to help bring peace.

Remember Jesus said bless are the peacemakers.

So we have to understand that the fall of humanity is always going to be in each and every one of us.

And there's always going to be a battle.

And we pull this from the Belgian Confession.

Article 14, the creation and the fall of humanity.

That we believe that God created human beings from the dust of the earth

and made and formed them in his image and likeness, good, just, holy,

able by their will to conform in all things to the will of God.

Beautiful stuff.

But when they were in honor, they did not understand it and did not recognize their excellence.

But they subjected themselves willfully or willingly to sin and consequently to death

and the curse lending their ear to the word of the devil.

For they transgressed the commandment of life.

You shall eat all of these things except that one.

That was the first perfect commandment given, pre-sin, which they had received.

And by their sin, they separated themselves from God, who was their true life, having corrupted their entire nature.

So they made themselves guilty and subject to physical and spiritual death,

having become wicked, perverse, and corrupt in all their ways.

They lost all their excellent gifts, which they had received from God,

and retained none of them except for small traces, which are enough to make them inexcusable.

So we understand from our Belgian Confession that we were made good, we are now wicked because of sin.

That's nothing new.

If that's the first time you've heard that, maybe you haven't been to church in a while,

but we're so thankful that you're here.

But the intended kind of relationship was what God created, and sin ruined it.

And we are now bent against God for eternity.

So no, not for eternity, for in this life, in eternity, when we get there, we won't be.

What we see dimly in a mirror, we will see face to face.

And so understanding that God's grace now is going to be transformative from death to life.

And you know what? That's really easy to say.

That's really nice. It's very hallmarky to understand that I have been brought from death to life.

But what does that mean when the death is still very active in the world?

Though you may be saved and though you may be raised to new life and you have professed and you believe,

that doesn't mean you have this force field around you where everything's going to be great.

That life's going to be good, I'm going to have no problems.

I'm going to not deal with any sickness, I'm not going to deal with any death.

No, because those are still very present in life.

It's one reason why our dear sister Peg, though she is mourning,

she is praising God for her mom's 95 years of faithfulness.

What if we didn't have that hope?

Think about that. What if we didn't know the hope of glory that we have in Jesus?

Anyone want to react to that? What if you didn't have that hope?

What if Peg does not have that reassurance that mom is now in glory with Jesus?

What if that hope wasn't there? How would life be to live?

Empty, good word. Despair. Anyone else?

You would find it in something else. Thank you, Matt.

That is a great answer. The first two were good, but the third one was better.

And understanding that we are people that need that hope.

And how do we know that we get attracted to hope, even on an artificial level,

because of the things we have in the world, because of the belief systems in the world,

because of the worship that even the church can do, not of things of God.

And friends, we come by it honestly, but that is no excuse.

As Moses is up getting the tablets from God himself, what is Aaron and the pastors doing?

They are creating a golden calf.

Because they went back to the environment they knew before their encounter with God.

How much should I just define some of our, if not all of our stories?

That before our encounter with Jesus, whatever point of life that was for you,

in whatever faith, understanding you had, maybe you grew up in the Baptist church,

where you make that decision, you get baptized in the Reformed church,

where you recognize that God's always got you, and now you recognize that

because of the work of the transforming work of the Holy Spirit in your life,

and you profess, or maybe you are on your deathbed,

and that connection finally makes because you had unrest in your soul, in zero peace.

Talk to Nuria White, though she is not on her deathbed,

that is one of the things that brought about that spiritual transformation.

And everywhere in between, that we struggle that we want to go back at times to our old life.

We want to go back to what we thought we knew,

because submission to God's sovereignty is hard, but that is the call of every believer.

And let me just ask it, to me it is a simple question with not a simple answer.

If God is all-knowing, if God is sovereign, and he has our best, his best for us,

which is way better than ours all day, why wouldn't we want to submit to him?

Because there is a force in the world that tells you you don't need to and you shouldn't.

And James urges us, he urges believers to submit, starting in verse 7.

Submit yourselves therefore to God, going to verse 10.

Resist the devil and he will flee from you.

Draw near to God and he will draw near to you.

Cleanse your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded.

Be wretched and mourn and weep.

Let your laughter be turned into mourning and your joy into gloom.

Humble yourself before the Lord and he will exalt you.

Whoa!

James is calling it out now that if you're not going to submit to God,

then how in the world can you have joy?

Submit yourselves and resist the devil.

Resisting, right, is a verb.

That we are going to be actively tempted, we're going to be actively tested by Satan,

by the evil one, in all of our daily living.

Now, understand that Satan is not omnipotent, he's not omnipresent,

he is not on power with God, like a lot of people do that.

They go, God v. Satan.

No, God's up here, right?

Satan's never on God's level.

Yet he still sends those demons out to you and me to try to get us off track,

to get us to take away our joy, because the minute our joy gets taken away,

who do we blame?

Other people, systems, our job, the garbage man, but God.

That without this understanding of joy, we will blame God all day

and twice on Sundays.

That we will blame God for the things going on in our life,

when really what God is offering you in those moments is His grace.

I don't know how many verses that we have to read where Jesus says,

I will never leave you or forsake you.

I go back to Isaiah 43, when you walk through the waters,

I will be with you, the flames, the waves will not overwhelm me.

When you walk through the fire, you will not be burned,

for I am the Lord your God, the Holy One of Israel, your Savior.

And that understanding of Jesus being our Savior should be a two-fold blessing.

It should be the comfort that we have in life, that there is a plan there,

and a hope that there is something better.

But not as a dangling carrot, but as our understanding of how to live this life.

Because when God says, I got it, He does.

The temptation and the trials come from when we doubt that.

Because we are always drawing for these comforts in life.

Because if it isn't God, we are going to put something else in there,

some vice, some pride, some sin is going to want to take that place.

That's why the truth of Lord's Day 1 of the Heideberg Catechism

that we can draw upon today, and consider these comforting truths,

where the question is, what is our only comfort in life and in death?

And many of you know it, but I am going to read it anyway,

that I am not my own, but belong, body and soul,

in life and in death to my faithful Savior Jesus Christ.

Friends, that should be enough.

We should be able to stop there and go, I get it, I am good, let's go.

But even the writer of the Heideberg doubles down to remind us

that he has fully paid for all of my sins with his precious blood

and has set me free from the tyranny of the devil.

He also watches over me in such a way that not a hair can fall from my head

without the will of my Father in heaven.

In fact, all things must work together for my salvation.

And I love this, because I belong to him, Christ, by his Holy Spirit,

assures me of eternal life and makes me wholeheartedly willing and ready

from now on to live for him.

There it is.

That should be enough.

But we struggle.

We struggle because we get caught up in the very beginning,

this understanding of life and death.

Probably the number one, tied for probably in the top three questions

I get all the time, outside of why does a good God allow bad things to happen

or why does a good God do bad things, different question,

but similar conversation, is, pastor, what happens in the afterlife?

Walk me through my death.

I can't, I've never been there, I've never done that, I don't have the T-shirt.

But we can read in God's Word that those who belong

have nothing to worry about.

That there is not going to be any pain, or there is not going to be any

forever pain, if you will.

We may go through pain on this life, and I look out at all of you,

and I can't see you online, but I'm sure it's the truth for some of you,

you have felt pain.

You may be in pain right now.

You may be going through an active test of your faith right now.

My guess is that that probably won't cost your life, but it might.

The call of Jesus might actually go that far in your life.

And the question I have for us today is are we okay with that?

Are we really bought in that we believe this with every fiber of our being,

or do we hold just a little bit of our control freak in us?

No, I need to, I know, life, yeah, God could give me life great,

hallelujah, amen.

But this death thing, I'm going to need more.

I need to know what the next step of my life is going to be.

I'd love to see a mile down the road when sometimes God gives you just one foot,

one step, but we don't like that.

We don't like that because we need to understand that in order to receive the

grace of Christ, there needs to be a humility, because the prideful do not

believe they need grace.

And James is going to talk about that too, that we need to depend not only on

God's sovereignty, but understand that God is working for us, not for us the

way we want to define it, but the us the way God's already defined you.

There's some conviction there, that's a whole other sermon.

But what we need to understand is that God's providence trumps all of our say.

And I guarantee you there are some of you today that don't like that, that want

to throw something at me or are going to try extra hard to dunk me this afternoon.

But I think that's where life starts.

Life truly starts for the believer when they understand and accept the providence

of God.

Now, in our reform circles, we don't like that word accept, that God has sovereignty

already done it, and I get that his providence is all over our life.

Are you going to see it?

Are you going to engage it?

Are you going to say my good is God's top priority, but not my good the way I

want to be good?

Because if it's defined by our good, then how are we defining it?

What are we using to define good then in life?

Anybody want to take a guess?

If it's the world according to Jim, right, how do I want to define life then?

If it feels good, do it, right?

Maybe I could become six feet, something, right, that we have these desires, we

want to put all of that, and it becomes the gospel according to me.

Guess what?

The gospel according to Jim never saved anybody.

The gospel according to Jim never brought anybody new life.

The gospel according to Jim never brought God's providence because it's about me.

And there are some of us that we struggle with the me because the me takes a real

big role in your life.

But God's providence tells us otherwise.

And the doctrine of God's providence can be found in a good way to kind of wrap

it up is Article 13 of the Belgian Confession that we understand.

Or do I have to read James first?

Thank you, April, I have to read James first.

So James 13, come now, you who say today or tomorrow we will go into such and

such a town and spend a year there and trade and make a profit that you do not

know what tomorrow will bring.

What is your life?

For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes.

Instead you ought to say if the Lord wills we will live and do this and that as it

is you boast in your arrogance.

All such boasting is evil.

So whoever knows the right thing to do and fails to do it for him it is sin.

How many planners do we have in the congregation today?

Don't lie, Jesus is watching.

Okay.

All right.

I judge a third of you because I know you and you didn't raise your hand.

No, a lot of us are planners.

I can be a planner.

Sometimes in my job I have to be.

And for a lot of us we know exactly what this week is going to do.

We have planned it down and we have enough authority over our life that I know what

Monday is going to bring.

I know what Tuesday is going to bring.

We try to do our best just like the weatherman to understand what our week is

going to bring.

But I guarantee you none of you actually know.

How do I know?

Because the Bible tells me so.

And none of us know.

We can plan all day, right?

Lisa, the team, you all planned for a beautiful day and I am not sure what

sacrifice you made to get this because I was playing real hard for rain.

But you got a beautiful day, right?

So you must be higher in God's eyes than me and I submit to that.

But understand that we all fall into this.

Don't look away.

Don't go, no, I depend fully on God.

I frog my life fully relying on God.

You remember that from 2002?

That we understand that we don't all the time.

Sometimes we stink at relying on God because we know God is going to show up

not in the way we want him to.

Because we know what we desire in our life is actually sinful.

Ever think about that?

That there are aspects of your life that you desire to happen that probably

have sinful tendencies.

Because you are making it about what is good for you.

What feels good for you.

What you want.

Maybe you have made enough money where you can have all your wants and needs

ever met.

But you still don't have that ultimate control.

How do I know?

Because I will get random phone calls of things that happen randomly in your

life and you want to make sense of it.

And sometimes I don't offer much of a word.

It is sit in it.

What is God trying to teach you?

I was talking with Paul Katz yesterday about kind of where we are going as far

as the future of Munster Church.

We are going to talk about it.

The family meeting first weekend in June.

Then we are going to have our congregational meeting.

You are here all about that in the coming week or two.

But Paul and I both, we both feel like God is doing something unique and we

don't know what it is.

We are excited.

We want to stay humbled.

As I tell my leaders and you all the time, stay a little terrified because God

can do big things.

But there is just something there and we are really excited about it.

We don't know why.

Paul, you and I are both kind of planners.

Let me not ask you.

Lois, he is kind of a planner.

I have office hours.

That will get me out of the dunk tank if you guys have conflict.

So start fighting and then we will meet in my office.

Sorry, Lisa.

But understand that we are planners and we would love to see our plans come to

be.

But the believer submits all things to Christ first.

The plans you have for your house, for those secret feelings of terror you have

that the school year is going to be ending and you have absolutely no idea what

to do with your kids all summer.

I see parents shaking their heads.

We need to submit it all to Jesus first.

The plans of this church, the plans of the council, the plans of the ministries,

the committees, all of these things, we have to submit it to Jesus first.

Because what happens when we do that and then we take time to actually reflect

and listen, he will guide.

It is a great way to keep our personal opinions, our personal agendas that we

all have out of it.

Are we going to do it perfectly?

No.

But we need to embrace the humility and our dependence we need to have not only

on God but God's providence.

And I close with this from the Belgian Confession Article 13.

We believe that this good God after creating all things did not abandon them

to chance or fortune but leads and governs them according to his holy will

in such a way that nothing happens in this world without God's orderly

arrangement.

Yet God is not the author of and cannot be charged with the sin that occurs.

For God's power and goodness are so great and incomprehensible that God arranges

and does all his works very well and justly even when the devil and the wicked

act unjustly.

We do not wish to inquire with undue curiosity into what God does that surpasses

human understanding and is beyond our ability to comprehend.

And finally, but in all humility and reverence we adore the just judgments of

God.

Stop there.

That doesn't mean we adore when God smites and God still does but that we

understand that God does this for a purpose.

That if we believe that God is orderly and God is just then we need to believe

that God is orderly and God is just.

Which are hidden from us being content to be Christ's disciples so as to learn

only what God shows us in the Word without going beyond those limits.

Next week we're going to come and we're going to experience a little different

of a service.

And I want you to lead into it because next week we're going to have a service

of prayer.

We are still going to do a sermon.

We are going to still worship, right?

But what chapter five is going to tell us is that not only is the spirit

constantly transforming you and bringing you to new understandings of yourself,

of God's Word, your giftings and all of those things, but one of the things that

chapter five is going to implore us to do is to give our ideas, our thoughts,

our everything to God and to leave it there.

And there's no better way to do that than through prayer.

To pray to God and leave our fears, our anxieties, our worries, our curiosities,

all of that at the foot of the cross.

So the worship committee, myself, we're going to weave us through chapter five

while taking time to pray for very specific things.

Tomorrow night the council meets to propose and recommend a budget, right?

A budget is what a church needs to continue its ministry.

But we're going to talk about the future.

We're going to talk about the horizon in the month of June.

We're going to talk as a church family many times about these things.

And the first thing we want to do is we want to give it to God first and have the

audacity to have the faith, to have the understanding of grace to say your will

be done.

Because as a church that's where we need to sit.

So I'm going to ask you and we're going to email it again this week, come with all

of that crazy, I know I have it, I know you guys have it, with those questions,

with those wonderings, with those worries, those anxieties, those things that we

feel great about.

Let us offer together as a church not only the day but the future and to someone

who's already told us today through the prophet Jeremiah, I know the plans I

have for you.

Let us come next week to trust and to give that collectively.