7/12/26 - James 1:19-27: The Book of James - Heath Ferguson

Good morning.

My name is Heath.

I'm one of the elders, and I'm not the pastor.

For anybody new.

Um, but it's good to be here.

It's a good day.

Had a great Sunday school lesson this morning.

Thank you, Hunter.

All during that lesson, there was so much that did fit uh hand in glove with what I'm going to be sharing today.

He was in Acts 8 talking about how the dispersed church came to be dispersed.

And uh today we'll be looking into, as you've heard in the word, how James reached out and directed that church.

I want to read again the passage one more time.

This is the word of God.

Know this, my beloved brothers.

Let every person be quick to hear, slow to speak, slow to anger, but the anger of a man does not produce the righteousness of God.

Therefore, put away all filthiness and rampant wickedness and receive with meekness the implanted word, which is able to save your souls.

But be doers of the word and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves.

For if anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he is like a man who looks intently at his face, natural face in a mirror.

For he looks at himself and goes away and at once forgives what he was like.

But the one who looks into the perfect law, the law of liberty, and perseveres, being no hearer who forgets, but a doer who acts.

He will be blessed in his doing.

If anyone thinks he is religious and does not bridle his tongue but deceives his heart, this person's religion is worthless.

Religion that is pure and undefiled before God is this to visit orphans and widows.

Let's pray one more time.

Thank you for this church.

Thank you for this body of believers.

And you have stationed here in this place on this day.

I pray a blessing on every household here.

Dear God, I pray a blessing on this gathering today, inviting your spirit to do work in us and helping me, God, to preach beyond my capacity and to share the truth, the beautiful truth of your word, your son, our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.

And it's in his name that I pray.

Amen.

So we're looking, uh we're continuing to look into James this week.

The elders, we decided to that this would be a good time to preach through James, as we're a church who's uh prayerfully and carefully looking at and understanding ourselves in a in as healthy a way as we can for the sake of understanding who we need to find as our next pastor.

Um I think of and how good it is to read uh through or preach through the book of James, or at least uh some of the book.

But when we open the book of James, we're not reading a detached theological essay, we're reading a pastor's letter to a suffering and worried church, a church experiencing hardship, pressure, and persecution as a community.

James addresses these twelve tribes in the dispersion as he opened his book.

These are Jewish Christians who've been scattered and driven from their homes and their communities out into other lands.

Many fled Jerusalem after Stephen's martyrdom in Acts 7 and in Acts 8, where Hunter, from where Hunter shared this morning, there arose a great persecution against the church.

We need to understand that these are people that were Hebrew, Jewish people who had existed in a land that they had been given for hundreds of years, living out an identity spiritually and politically and socially, like completely crafted for their security, for their ability to exist uh in a way in strength.

And now as they've converted, they've been run out of that place, Jerusalem, and now they're in these uh these cities in and around the area, and they are struggling.

I mean, we think huddling, maybe shivering people, uh you know, like you you find astray, and that kind of that feel is what I kind of see.

Um, and James, if you don't understand that, and it took me a long time to see James as as the book of James as a careful, loving admonition, leading, guiding, and caring for uh these churches.

Because James can be a little bit harsh, more harsh than Paul.

And um it he calls a lot out and he calls us to action.

And but I think in that admonition, it's sort of like any of you as parents have like had a child that you get out of the car at Walmart and they start running, and you you just you get pretty loud, and because you want the best, you want safety.

You're like you know, you scream at your child, stop.

And they're and he's he's intense because uh intensity is called for.

Um and these believers have scattered into foreign cultures, foreign cities, and foreign expectations.

Uh they these dispersed were congregations living in Roman-controlled regions where their faith made them outsiders.

Their neighbors didn't understand their worship, their employers didn't trust their convictions, their families often uh rejected their allegiance to Jesus.

They lived in a culture, they moved into a culture shaped by Hellenism, Roman power, Greek philosophy, and pagan religious practices.

Christianity had zero privilege for these people, no political protection and no uh cultural familiarity.

We have no clue what that's like.

We are in the buckle of the Bible belt.

We have no idea what that has to be like.

Now we have friends on uh different in on different parts of home.

We visit with them, we hear about that, but we have no idea what that must be like.

These churches were small, vulnerable, poor, they met in homes.

They relied on one another for survival.

They were learning how to be the people of God without the comfort of a familiar environment, without the stability of central leadership, without the security of being surrounded by others who shared their faith.

They didn't have 2,000 years of church history to understand themselves and be defined through that.

Their suffering was corporate, felt by the whole church.

Their insecurity was personal, found in each believer's heart, felt in each believer's heart.

And James writes to them as a pastor who knows that their world is unstable and their future is unclear and their identity is being tested.

Redemption, we have a lot going on right now.

Um, however, we are not a fragile church plant anymore.

We've already done the fragile church plant panic eight weeks into our existence when COVID hit.

Um, those of you that were here then remember that.

Um we're a church with our own history, with our own relationships, with ministry rooted in this community that does uh praise God spread to other parts of this country and other parts of the earth.

Uh and at the same time, we are walking through a transition.

We are feeling the weight of change.

I'm sorry, I'm nasally, I've been sick all week.

I'm it's a miracle I have a voice.

I didn't have a voice most of the week.

But we're asking honest questions about identity, direction, and calling.

We are feeling, all of us, at one to one degree or another, the tug of insecurity.

Not because we doubt God, but because we're human.

We might even be feeling the temptation to scatter at this time.

Not because we don't love this community, but because uncertainty is hard.

And yet here we are, still gathered, still worshiping, still seeking, still believing that God has placed us here for a purpose.

It is so easy to forget that.

But if you're here and you've come into this fledgling church, you have had you had to have decided like this is here for a reason.

I'm going to exist in this space for a reason.

And James writes to a church full of people that have to be experiencing something similar, shaken and uncertain.

And he says to them, hold fast to God, hold fast to his word, let suffering refine your faith, let insecurity drive you deeper into your identity in Christ.

And he gives them in this passage that we're going to look, that we're looking into today, three ways to do that.

First is to be quick to hear.

Second is continuing to know.

And third is ready to do.

So first, quick to hear.

James begins with a gentle but firm, as James was, exhortation.

He said, Know this, my beloved brothers, let every person be quick to hear, slow to speak, slow to anger, for the anger of man does not produce the righteousness of God.

Therefore, put away all filthiness and rampant wickedness and receive with meekness the implanted word, which is able to save your souls.

Praise God.

The suffering, this church was, these churches were under pressure.

And pressure makes communities and individuals reactive.

It makes congregations tense.

Individual believers become insecure.

Insecurity makes hearts restless.

They were afraid.

Behind anger, if you ever arrive at anger, you've first experienced fear.

If you ever see anger, you can know behind that anger is fear.

Anger in these moments is destructive.

And James is communicating that.

And James is calling us here to a different posture.

Be quick to hear, not quick to defend, not quick to react, not quick to accuse, quick to hear.

Why?

Because hearing is the posture of humility.

Scripture consistently teaches that listening is the doorway to spiritual life.

Romans 10, 17, faith comes from hearing.

Proverbs 2, 1 and 2.

Make your ear attentive to wisdom.

Psalm 46, be still, Sonny.

Be still.

We were talking about that this morning.

And know that I'm God.

Stillness is the soil where trust grows.

Your elders have spent hours in stillness praying through this season.

Hours.

Hours slowing one another down, listening to one another, encouraging one another.

That stillness has allowed us to, the elder board, to grow closer and trust than ever before.

I pray that we become comfortable in that prayerful stillness.

Continuing on to the 21st verse, he says, put away filthiness and ramples.

I was stricken by the three words, the implanted word.

The phrase is, I think, is the theological heart of the whole chapter.

Implanted word is the fulfillment of God's purpose.

James is drawing directly from Old Testament promises of a new covenant.

Jeremiah 31, 33, I will put my law within them, I will write it on their hearts.

God Himself places His word inside of His people.

Ezekiel 36, 26 and 27, I will give you a new heart and cause you to walk in my statutes.

The implanted word is not information as much as it is transformation.

Power.

It's the instrument of regeneration.

It's what he's saying here, which is able to save your souls.

James has already said in verse 18, right before this passage, of his own will, he brought us forth by the word of truth.

We have been granted a faith delivered to us, a gift, and an ability and a will and a desire to believe.

Now, that encounters doubt and worry and it frets.

But the faith that we exercise is a faith, not a faith that we've mustered up ourselves, it's a faith that we've been gifted.

And brothers and sisters, if God's given it to you, it won't go away.

Take security in that.

If you have a faith, even a mustard seed of it, it is yours.

It is yours for eternity.

The word is alive, the word is active, and the word is planted by God Himself.

The implanted word is living, growing, and fruit bearing.

Jesus taught this explicitly in Luke.

He said, The seed is the word of God.

In Mark 4, they hear the word and accept it and bear fruit.

Accept it.

The implanted word is not static.

It grows, it sanctifies, it produces obedience.

The implanted word is a source of spiritual stability.

An unsteady church needs stability.

Well, we have exactly what we need to grant us that stability.

We have a belief.

We are here together because we share the belief.

That's the only reason that we are here is because we share a belief.

Everything comes from that.

We get assurance from our belief by way of the implanted word.

And concerned believers need assurance.

John 17, 17, sanctify this is from the prayer, Christ's prayer.

Sanctify them in truth.

Your word is truth.

So what I'm asking you to do is to pay us, gives us all that we need.

We have all that we need right here, right now, today.

But the implanted word needs to be received with meekness.

Meekness is teachability here.

It's humility here.

It's the opposite of pride or defensiveness, or this idea that we need to think our way through our concerns independently.

Instead being humble.

Isaiah 66, 2, he who is humble and contrite in spirit trembles at my word, trembling at his word because of the awe that we have in the power of his word.

Leadership may change, seasons may shift, but the word planted in us has not and will not move.

Our future may feel uncertain, but our foundation, our foundation is secure.

The implanted word is God's guarantee that He is not finished with us.

He is not finished with us.

Which moves us to the second point.

Continuing to know.

Here James moves from posture to practice.

But be doers of the word, not hearers only deceiving yourselves.

Hardships can create spiritual passivity in a church if we're not careful.

Difficulty can make a church lose focus.

Uncertainty can make individual believers forget who they are and whose they are.

James compares scripture to a mirror for the sake of seeing and understanding the self and one self position with his or her creator.

It says, For if anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he's like a man who looks intently at his natural face in a mirror, for he looks at himself and goes away and once and at once forgets what he is like.

This is not merely forgetting information.

This is forgetting identity.

To forget what you're like, to not recognize your step and not have this understanding of self.

An anxious church can forget its mission.

A worried believer forgets his or her identity in Christ.

And importantly, to remember forgets the power that we have in Christ.

Faith in the face of doubt requires continual looking, peering in.

Continuing to know means peering into the word to remember who we are.

James says to the faithful person, look into the perfect law.

The Greek parakypto means to stoop down, bend over, peer intently, thinking, looking into a microscope, or at our house, a telescope.

Really leaning in, engaged, peering intently.

It's intentional, effortful, identity-forming engagement.

We peer into scripture because we forget so easily.

We peer into scripture because the world lies to us constantly.

We peer into scripture because suffering can distort calling.

We peer into scripture because insecurity whispers that this false identity might be easier and better.

We peer into scripture because we must continually realize our identity is in Christ.

Scripture calls us to ongoing engagement.

Meditating.

Psalm 119, 15, I will meditate on your precepts.

Joshua 18, meditate on it day and night.

Listen, it's not easy to lean in to the word.

I have to study Scripture three or four different ways just to feel like I've done it well once a day.

I get so lost.

It takes work.

But it's the only hope we have at understanding and maintaining fruitful identity in Christ.

Moving on to the 25th verse.

But the one who looks into the perfect law, the law of liberty, and perseveres, being no hearer who forgets, but a doer who acts, he will be blessed in his doing.

Another phrase that struck me: the law of liberty.

This phrase is profoundly theological.

The law of liberty is the gospel-fulfilled law that Christ fulfills.

He says, I came to fulfill the law.

He also says, I came to set free.

So when you read Law of Liberty in this passage, read the love of Christ.

The law of liberty frees us from condemnation.

Or the love of Christ frees us from condemnation.

Romans 8:1.

Romans 8:1

The law of liberty frees us from sin's bondage.

The love of Christ frees us from sin's bondage.

Romans 6.

The law of liberty frees us to obey joyfully.

The love of Christ creates an earnestness that moves us to obey joyfully.

Galatians 5.

The law of liberty is perfected.

The law of liberty is perfect because it is Christ's love for us.

It is the law interpreted through the one who perfectly obeyed it.

Church, we are in a season of identity searching.

We may be tempted to drift.

We may be tempted to move on.

Listen, I've felt it.

Every time there's something big, I can't tell, I don't even remember how many times I've told Steve over the years, I don't want to be an elder anymore.

I don't want to be, I want out.

You hear something bad happening at a church down the road and think about what it would be like if it happened here, and I was like, it might happen here.

I don't want to be an elder anymore.

It's easy to just, you know, go into that flight mode.

But James says, peer into the word, persevere, and remember who we are.

We're not a church defined by a pastor, although I love that pastor.

We're a church defined by the bridegroom.

Our mission is not paused, it is planted.

Our calling is not uncertain.

It is anchored in Christ.

Continuing to know is how we continue to be who God made us to be.

Continuing to know takes that peering in.

Holding the word, hiding it here.

And lastly, ready to do.

James concludes pointing to and calling for the evidence of genuine faith.

Religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is to visit orphans and widows in their affliction and to keep oneself unstained from the world.

Suffering can make a church turn inward.

Insecurity can make the believer turn inward.

But obedience forces us to turn outward.

The test of speech is to be quick to listen, quick to hear.

The test of attentiveness for the sake of holiness is peer in, lean in, hold to the word.

And the test of compassion is to be ready to do what we are called to do even in the midst of change.

Redemption, there's still work to do.

If we aren't careful, we can act as if injured.

Or when a manager makes the call to the bullpen, everyone kind of takes a knee, gets some water.

The network might even cut to commercial.

That can't be us in this right now.

We're not making a pitching change.

We are still a church.

Called to exist, to turn outward, to care for one another, lifting and loving one another.

Ministry is still going, and the harvest is still plenty.

We've come here to be equipped and served.

You showed up today in common belief for the sake of being equipped to serve.

Let's lean into that now as much as we ever have.

As much as we ever have.

In conclusion, James writes to a suffering church and insecure believers with tenderness and urgency.

And now his word lands directly on us.

Church, we're in a season of worry, a season of identity searching, a season of temptation to move on, to scatter, to give up, and to lose heart.

But hear James' pastoral voice, quick to hear, continuing to know, ready to do.

Leadership may change, it will change, but our mission hasn't.

Seasons may shift, but our calling has not shifted.

The future may feel uncertain, but praise God, our identity is secure.

We are a church planted by God.

We are a people indwelt with the implanted word.

You are a people, we are a people with the implanted word in all of its richness in your heart.

We are community freed by the law of liberty.

Individuals, families, houses freed by the law of liberty.

We are witnesses called to share gospel in this community.

Now it is here as much as anywhere hard to live in this world and not of this world.

It's hard to remain faithful when circumstances change it.

It's hard to continue on with boldness when the future seems unclear.

But God has planted his word within us.

Christ has set us free.

The Spirit empowers us.

Obedience leads us to a blessing.

Obedience will lead us to a blessing.

This is the shape of genuine faith.

This is the fruit of the implanted word.

This is the life of a believer and a church transformed by grace.

Let us pray.

Dear God, help us to not forget.

Help us to peer into the beautiful, perfect, holy truth that we are loved and held in that love by the creator and sustainer of the universe, our Lord and Savior, upholding the word, upholding the universe by the word of his power, Jesus Christ.

God, we're empowered.

Help us to remember we're empowered.

Help us to live boldly as empowered people.

Dear Lord, thank you for saving our souls, for stirring us to belief and gathering us together.

That we might make much of you, love one another well, and share you with the world.

I pray all of this in Jesus' holy and precious name.

Amen.