01: How To Learn From Experience

Good morning, Redemption Church.

Thanks for joining us this morning.

My name is James Rathman.

I'm the pastor here if this is your first time joining us.

This is a really heavy week to preach and to share the word.

It's hard to remember a week like it.

I mean, maybe think back to the last time that there was an 8 o'clock curfew in Denver.

It was a very strange feeling last night.

So I'm going to go ahead and read our text for the day.

Then I'm going to pray.

And as is usual, I map out these sermons just before the beginning of the year and map out the whole year.

And today's text falls in a really appropriate way that I think can serve to assist our hearts in the difficulties of discerning a time like this.

If you find this time particularly difficult to discern, then I hope that this sermon will be helpful for you.

It uh speaks directly to that type of experience.

So I'll go ahead and read our text for today.

This is James chapter 1, verses 1 through 8.

James 1:1–8

It says, James, a servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ, to the twelve tribes in the dispersion, greetings.

Count at all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds.

For you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness, and let steadfastness have its full effect, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing.

If any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask God, who gives generously to all without reproach, and it will be given him.

But let him ask in faith, with no doubting, for the one who doubts is like a wave of the sea that is driven and tossed by the wind.

For that person must not suppose that he will receive anything from the Lord.

He is a double-minded man, unstable in all his ways.

This is the word of the Lord.

Let's pray.

Father in heaven, you are King of all, and all authority in heaven and earth has been given to you.

Lord, what do you ask of us but to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with you?

I pray that you would assist our hearts as we gaze out into a world that's uh full of the contamination of sin, that we see the brutal effects of it explicitly, and Lord, even find our own hearts caught up in it.

Lord, I pray that your patience and kindness towards us would assist us in an act of repentance and an act of hope for the redemption that you bring.

Lord God, would your word speak to our hearts today?

Lift us up, provide us a solid foundation under our feet that we might actually stand on while the whole world seems like it's been thrown up in the air and our uh boundaries are difficult to discern.

Would your word provide a solid foundation that it might still ring true in our hearts, and that by your spirit it might take place in the world.

Father, I lift up to you uh our city and the cities across the United States.

I lift up to you our our nation in the midst of struggle and in the midst of uh uh this tension of disease, and Lord, in the midst of that, this tension of racism.

Lord, how clear it is that we need to be saved by you.

We praise you for your work of salvation and ask that we would see it this morning in your word.

In Jesus' name, amen.

Well, good morning, and welcome to church this morning.

Thanks for gathering together with us.

Uh we're meeting in uh a little under a week.

We're meeting this Saturday as an elder board.

We're taking a full day, uh, kind of just like an in-city retreat.

And uh we're planning out our rollout then and how we're going to be um begin gathering back together as a church and uh the the uh kind of conditions that we're gonna be placing around that in order to accommodate what the city's requested and uh as well as to honor the consciences of the people in our church.

Uh so uh that's something that I'm looking forward to.

You can be praying for our wisdom in that regard.

Uh today we are beginning a new series, which will be our series for the summer, and we're going to be moving through the book of James or the letter written by James, the brother of Jesus.

Now, James is a really practical book, and I realize that the whole time I'm preaching this, it's going to sound like I'm talking in the third person, like Bob Dole, but I'm not.

Uh I'm just uh that's the we happen to have the same name.

He had it first, I was named after him.

Uh sort of a Michael Bolton situation.

But we are uh moving through this book because it's a very practical book.

Uh the letter of James is so grounded.

It's often referred to as the Proverbs of the New Testament.

And I think of James uh like a friend that you have when you're right in the middle of a crisis.

There are certain friends that you call uh who are who will come and sit next to you and they're like, okay, let's make a plan.

We'll be able to get you out of this.

Um I think of this.

Uh my my oldest sister is like this.

Uh uh, her name's Kristen.

And if there's like something really going on, she's the one that you pick up the phone and she'll be like, okay, here's what you need to do.

In fact, I'm in the car right now, and we're just gonna come and fix this.

Uh and James, this letter is like that type of a friend in our lives.

And I hope that it will serve us in that way uh as we move through this summer, reading through this letter.

So, since we're going to be spending the whole summer here, uh I uh think it's important for us to get to know what uh uh who exactly is writing this and who he's writing to.

So we get some insights right away in the very first verse.

This is James 1.1.

It says, James, a servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ, to the twelve tribes in the dispersion, greetings.

So who is the James?

Uh there's a couple of Jameses throughout scripture.

This one is the brother of Jesus.

So uh this is he's actually Jesus' younger brother.

If we want to be particular about it, younger half-brother, of course, uh, but there's he is the younger brother of Jesus, um, which means that he grew up seeing Jesus as his older brother.

You think you had it bad.

Um uh there was uh and while uh he was on the earth, in fact, James and the rest of Jesus' brothers uh actually rejected Jesus.

They did not see him as the Lord, they did not honor him as his true identity was.

In fact, there are some terrible scenes where his family shows up and they try and pull him out of his ministry, and other times where it is obviously very dangerous for Jesus to be going to Jerusalem and they're kind of coaxing him to go into Jerusalem.

Um and so uh Jesus has this very difficult family dynamic that he lived through.

Um so if you thought that there was uh that that was something that perhaps Jesus couldn't relate to you regarding was a difficult family dynamic, you most certainly could.

But after the resurrection, Jesus uh, excuse me, after the resurrection, James becomes one of the central figures in Christianity.

Uh he becomes an elder of what is the the most populous and and the most influential church in the first century, which is the church in Jerusalem.

Uh it's it's James that will uh be the defining voice in the institutional bringing in of the Gentiles into the church.

Um, at the time of the writing of this letter, that hasn't taken place yet.

But at this time, James is writing, as he says, to the twelve tribes in the dispersion.

It's because this is one of the earliest letters that we have written by an apostle, and it is uh written in the early to mid-40s.

And uh that means that the church is almost exclusively Jewish.

Uh, it's made up almost exclusively of Jewish converts.

So when he says he's writing to the 12 tribes in the dispersion, it's kind of a way of saying, I'm writing to the Jewish Christians that are scattered throughout the Roman Empire.

Uh that's who he's speaking to, and he introduces himself uh as the servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ.

So someone who at an early stage in their life did not uh see Jesus as the Lord, in fact, looked at his older brother and thought that he was perhaps just fraudulent.

Later in his life, after the resurrection, would say that his older brother is the Lord and the Christ.

It's an incredible transition that would take place in a human soul.

Now, the community that he's writing to is going through a deep change of their identity.

Their understanding of themselves as the chosen people of God is going through this dramatic transition because of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.

And James, as a leader of the church at that time, is helping to guide his people through this transformation of their identity into Christians, people who view Christ as their highest authority and the sent Messiah, who is now who is God Himself and sits at the right hand of the Father who has all authority.

And James will also play this uh pivotal role in bringing in the Gentiles into Christianity.

Uh, he will make the final statement that that is the one that stands and lasts for how to integrate these two disparate communities, these two different ethnic identities, the Gentiles and the Jews.

And it's a complicated and difficult transition that they uh go through, but James offers this grace and practicality through that transition.

Uh, you can read the account in Acts 15.

What I love about understanding the context of this letter is that James is going through a transformation that I think we think of as primarily theological.

It's primarily in the realm of ideas.

If you were to understand, uh, you need to reunderstand how Christ fulfills the prophecy.

You need to re understand how we are united to him, and you need to re understand how the temple sacrifice system has ended and we are atoned for completely in Christ.

These are all these deep theological implications of the Christ event that you would think the church would be mostly focused on working towards at this point.

But instead, James takes this approach of an extreme practicality, where he says, you know, the implications of this Christ event are going to take place in our day-to-day lives and the way that we understand our own experience through the death and resurrection of Jesus.

This will be extremely informative at a day-to-day level, a ground-level view of the implications of Christ.

And I think it's particularly helpful for that reason.

Because for many of us, we have difficulties with theological questions and with philosophical hang ups, and those are real things and worth leaning into and exploring.

But I think that there it is often the case, probably most often the case, that we wake up on a Monday morning and we think, but what does this mean today?

Or we have a week like we've had as a nation, and we think, okay, but where do I go from here?

What are my what do my next steps look like?

James is helpful there.

He takes his people by the hand and he says, look, we can do these next steps together.

So let's do that with him throughout this series.

All of my uh sermons are titled How To Something for this series in the name of James's practicality.

Um and I've also read some articles that, like, that's how you make a megachurch is you have how-to sermons.

Uh so figure it's worth a shot.

Okay, so this sermon is titled How to Learn from Experience.

And I want you to consider.

Uh we've we've encountered, and I bet you have in your own life encountered uh two types of stories.

One is a person who had a closeness with the Lord, and then a terrible event took place in their life, and it drove them away from their faith.

And then you can imagine someone else who maybe was living in a way that was distant from the Lord.

They have a similar terrible event take place in their lives, and it drives them towards the Lord.

It drives them deeper into their faith and deeper into their convictions.

There are some people who at the end of their lives we meet and we say, wow, life has really hardened this person.

Uh, and it's really made them difficult and painful to be around.

There are other people who at the end of their lives we think, wow, life has really softened this person.

And it's really given them a wisdom and approachability that's so deeply beneficial.

Well, what's the difference between those two people?

I think one of them is able to learn from the experience of their life.

One of them, the difficulties and the experiences that they face in their life is a generative process, and the other one is a degenerative process.

So James lays out this morning how we learn from experience, how we have a life that has an arc, a trajectory, rather than one that's just tossed about randomly.

There are two things that he focuses on steadfastness and prayer.

So those are the two things that we're going to focus on this morning.

How to cultivate steadfastness and prayer.

These two things allow us to learn from experience.

He says, Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds.

Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds.

Now it's strange because trials are not something to be joyful over.

And yet he's saying, Count those as joyful things.

When events come up into your life that you would say, look, this is just difficult, this is painful, I don't understand, I'm confused.

Count those as joy.

Now I'm putting this under the heading of steadfastness.

You know, keep going through these things.

And if you look throughout scripture, that's something that's deeply celebrated.

Uh we see the steadfast faith of Abraham, who, when told to sacrifice Isaac, he follows through and is led right up to the moment of sacrificing his son and demonstrates his faithfulness towards God in that moment.

Uh we see Daniel, who says, you know what, I'd rather go to the lion's den than betray my steadfastness to the Lord.

And throughout the New Testament, excuse me, throughout the Old Testament, we see this steadfastness is celebrated as sort of a stubborn faithfulness to the Lord.

I'm not budging from God.

I will remain loyal to the God who's rescued me.

But in the New Testament, we start to have this new flavor, this new element that's coloring the steadfastness of the Christian.

And it's joy.

That throughout the New Testament, there's this new understanding that, you know, in our steadfastness, we're we're supposed to, in when we're facing these trials, we're supposed to consider that a joyful thing.

It's not just a stubbornness, but it's a lightness and a joy that's causing us to meet our trials.

Now, if you were to talk to somebody in the midst of deep suffering and say, look, you just need to count this joy, you would think, uh, look, what are you trying to do?

Like, why are you trying to force me to put on a happy face while I'm going through something that's so difficult?

You know, this type of verse can just grate against your skin if you're in the midst of real suffering or real confusion.

But what James is saying here is not, look, just put on a happy face.

If you're a real Christian, then you'd smile through your suffering.

Now, it we in fact that can't be what he's saying here, because uh it's just a couple chapters later in James chapter four, verses nine and ten, where he will likewise command us, be wretched, mourn and weep.

Turn your laughter to mourning and your joy to gloom.

Humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will exalt you.

So the one who's calling us to this joyful disposition is not just saying something uh uh uh as useless as put on a happy face, because he's likewise calling us to grieve, mourn, wail, turn our laughter to mourning, and our joy to gloom over the reality of sin in our lives.

So what is James saying here?

You know, he introduces himself as a servant of the Lord Jesus Christ.

And this is written, as I said, in the mid-40s.

Uh so that means that the Christ event uh took place just about like 12 years earlier.

So it's 2008.

Okay, so think all the way back to 2008.

The Dark Knights just came out.

We're still talking about it.

I'm still talking about it.

Uh my point is this is not that long ago.

And uh he's thinking back over that time, and you know what he saw then in 2008?

He saw his older brother crucified by the state, and then three days later, he rose from the dead.

He was resurrected.

And so there's this new fact in James' understanding of the world, which is that the ultimate destruction in the gospel can become a place of ultimate joy.

And that understanding colors his whole worldview now, such that he would open his letter and he would say, Trials, haven't you heard?

Trials are different than they used to be.

Trials are not just the type of thing that you endure.

You know, even death is different than we used to be.

We thought it was just the end.

It turns out it isn't.

We thought that death was purely destruction.

It turns out that in the hands of Christ, it can be the very means he uses to accomplish our salvation.

Have you heard about trials now?

You can count them joy.

He continues on and he gives us the reason for that.

From James 1, verse 3 through 4.

James 1:3–4

He says, For you know that test that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness.

And let steadfastness have its full effect, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing.

This is where the joy is.

The joy isn't in the trial.

We're not saying, oh, you know what?

Uh my wife and I really can't communicate with each other.

Hurrah! No, it's nothing so foolish as locating it in that.

But it's that we know that the testing of our faith produces steadfastness.

That's where stability and an understanding of a life with a trajectory and an arc that's moving towards something gets established in us.

It's in the testing of our faith through trials.

And what does that steadfastness result in?

If we don't get in its way, it results in a completeness in us that we might lack nothing, maybe perfect.

Something we won't see on this side of the resurrection, but something that we most certainly will enjoy and experience at the resurrection of Christ.

Now we hear that word testing, and we think, okay, so what's happening is the trials come into my life, and that's how God knows whether or not I really believe.

This determines whether my faith is real or not.

Or not.

But that's actually not what the word testing is meaning or implying in this part of the uh text.

What the word testing relates to is a refining.

It's metal that is tested.

It's a silver that's tested by the fire that is then purified and it becomes its most true self, that its most silveriness is expressed.

It's gold that's tested and its refining becomes its true gold.

And so too with our faith, that in the testing it is refined.

So what that means is that our trials in Christ, when we're experiencing them and when we're moving through them, are producing in us.

They aren't diminishing us.

Many of us think the way to make it through and have a whole healthy life.

We use the term, I'm just riffing now and this is dangerous, but we use the term healthy so much to describe so many things.

And perhaps we're, I wonder sometimes if we're operating in the wrong metaphor.

Because sometimes dishealth or experience of it's of not being healthy can actually be a trial that's producing in us a glory.

You see, the joy isn't in the suffering.

This is the point.

You can write off that last part.

The joy isn't in our suffering.

But in the midst of, beneath our suffering, there is joy.

And what is the joy?

I know that this trial isn't diminishing me, but it's actually creating a steadfastness in me.

It's purifying me and it's aligning me with Christ.

It's producing a work in me.

I'm reading a great book about sexual sin right now.

It's called Unwanted, uh, it's by Jay Stringer.

Uh, and it's been really helpful for me.

I recommend it to you.

I'm recommending it to everybody.

Um, but in this book, he uses this metaphor.

Um uh and it's from Shark Week.

And you know, to quote Tracy Jordan, you should live every week like it's Shark Week.

So in light of that, we are uh uh it's an interview with a cameraman, and he's an underwater underwater filmer, and he is talking about how how do you okay, I said filmer.

I don't think I don't think that's actually a word either.

Uh yeah, today we're filming in front of the peanut gallery.

Uh but the he's an underwater.

He takes pictures of sharks.

And the question the question asks this, well, uh uh, how do you avoid getting bit uh with these super predators that you're uh f photographing?

He says, what happens is when a shark starts to get aggressive, you swim directly at it with the camera, and then it will avoid you.

Uh if you swim directly towards it, then you're safe.

Now I love this analogy because what James is calling us to do is approach the trials that enter our life with that same disposition.

That we can swim directly towards them with a sense of joyful curiosity.

You know, it says trials of various kinds.

Trials and uh the word here, this can refer to uh uh just like tragic events that we experience, they can also refer to our own sin and our own shame.

Now, imagine if you treated your shame that way.

Instead of something to be avoided and hidden from, what if you looked at your shame as a trial of various kinds and you could approach it with a sort of joyful curiosity?

Swim directly towards it with a confidence that, you know, in facing this head-on, this won't destroy me.

But in fact, it will produce a steadfastness in me.

And in that steadfastness that'll contribute to my completeness, that my life has a real trajectory that's one towards the Lord.

Perhaps at the end of my life I might be soft-hearted and wise because I swam straight towards my shame with a joy that's grounded in the gospel.

The joy isn't because of the suffering, it is because in the gospel, even the destructive forces in our lives can become creative.

We might swim directly towards that shame.

Now, Paul and Peter have similar uh lessons in their writing in 1 Peter and in Romans 5, uh, where it's our trials that produce a character, that produce a hope.

Uh, but James, ever practical and always wanting to involve you in your sanctification, uh he adds an element of what we do in this.

And what we do is we let steadfastness have its full effect.

You let it have its full effect.

So that implies to me that the way to get uh the way to stop this process um is to interrupt all those ways that we try and avoid our shame.

That's not letting steadfastness have its full effect.

Don't interrupt it.

So you may be thinking, I don't even know where to begin looking at my shame.

I I don't even know where to begin to get out of a trial like this.

Considering this, when you know the details, when you know the particulars, i you wouldn't be able to discern where joy could possibly be experienced in a situation like I'm in.

You may be thinking that to yourself.

The next thing James does is he pivots to wisdom.

And our wisdom is developed in prayer.

This is James 1, verse 5.

James 1:5

If any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask God, who gives generously to all without reproach, and it will be given him.

James pivots on his word lack.

Earlier he said, uh your steadfastness, you'll you'll lack nothing.

Then he says, but if you do lack something, you'll lack wisdom.

So what do you do if you lack wisdom?

Well, uh you ask God to give you wisdom.

That's the move that James describes to us here.

So a simple reality that he's showing us is what's one of the first steps in acquiring wisdom?

Recognizing you don't have the wisdom.

What is one of the first results that he's anticipating from us leaning into our trials with a sort of joyful disposition, expecting them to produce something in us by our engagement with them?

What does he expect us to then realize?

I'm not wise enough to figure this out.

There's a lot here that I just don't know and I can't understand and I can't reconcile it.

Do you see how this is relevant for today?

I'll make it explicit soon, so don't worry.

If you're wondering, like, is he ever going to talk about George Floyd and we can get grounded in this?

I am.

So hang with me.

But I want to build this framework first.

In leaning into the trials that we face, we recognize that there are places where we simply don't have the wisdom to understand.

That's what James gives us guidance in.

When you lean into your trials, expect to be exposed as not having the wisdom to make it through them.

This means confronting the terrible realization that some of your problems are your own fault.

And for some of you, it means confronting the terrible realization that some of your problems are other people's fault.

Christians tend to neglect both of those.

If all my problems are my own fault, I get to be in control of the outcome.

And if I just learn, I can just learn my way out of this.

But if some of my problems are other people's fault, a place that I don't have control, that means I'm in a position where I have to be saved.

That's a much more vulnerable place to be.

It's right where Christ would have us.

Ray Dalio, founder of Bridgewater Associates and uh social media whiz kid, is a uh uh he wrote this book called Principles, and in it he has this uh equation.

He says pain plus reflection equals progress.

Now, I think that's really helpful, and I think it maps onto what James is saying here really well.

Look, I've leaned into these problems uh it with a sort of joyful disposition.

I've discovered I don't have understanding here, and that that lack of wisdom is a pain point, and then it requires reflection, then from that reflection we gain a progress.

Uh I think that's a helpful way to view this.

I think it's a it's a really helpful sort of like grasping some sort of a psychological basis for how to learn from experience.

But that's not what James says here.

He says, if you realize you don't have wisdom, pray to God for wisdom.

Ask God to give you his wisdom.

And God will give it to you.

Do you see how clear and spiritual this is?

Have you considered maybe I don't have wisdom because I haven't asked God to give me wisdom.

God, I I don't have understanding here.

Lord, will you give me wisdom?

And then James calls us to understand what type of God you're asking.

And we have to get this, because if we don't get this, then we won't turn to God for wisdom.

Instead, we'll just remain cloaked in our shame of not understanding.

How does God provide us this wisdom?

One, uh this is just following the verse.

He gives generously to all without reproach.

He gives.

That means the wisdom from God is free.

It's just for the taking.

It's given completely of his own accord.

It need only be asked in order to be received.

He gives generously.

Another way of translating this is single-mindedly.

So God gives, and he's not in the back of his mind tallying up your debts of what you will then owe him for the wisdom that he's giving you.

He gives only thinking of his provision for you.

That's the way God gives to us.

He gives to all you're in that category, just in case you were thinking you weren't in the category.

Without reproach.

Listen to this.

He gives you wisdom without reproach.

That means when you come to him and you say, I don't know how to work through this situation.

I don't have the categories of my brain developed.

I'm confused.

Lord, give me wisdom.

He gives without reproach.

He never reprimands you for asking him to give wisdom where you don't have it.

How many of you have hidden good questions because you've thought, man, I should have known this by now?

I should have worked this out by now.

And it's because when we ask, what we expect to hear is like, seriously, you don't know this already?

You haven't you haven't settled this one in your heart?

Really?

You you don't understand like how you've been alive for this long in the United States, and you don't understand how how race relations are structured.

We're never met with that reprimand.

We say, Lord, I don't have the wisdom.

There's no reproach.

He freely gives it.

If we don't understand the God that we're talking to, the God that we're asking wisdom from, then we will remain in our ignorance, cloaked in shame, afraid to ask and acknowledge what we don't know.

But when we understand who God is, the way that He freely gives to us, then the cloak of shame is removed, and we're able to move towards the trials in our lives, the difficulty in understanding, even our own shame, with a sort of joyful curiosity that says, Lord, the shame is removed.

You can show me where I'm wrong.

And in showing me where I'm wrong, you are unveiling to me your own wisdom.

These are incredible things to put together, this steadfastness that causes us to approach the trials of our lives with a sort of joy that there may be a real new understanding for me in this, in the encountering of our limits, and then that God fills those in just by giving us his wisdom, just when we ask for it.

Lord, give me your wisdom.

James continues on, and we have to get this clarity for how we're called to ask for this wisdom.

This is James 1, verse 6 through 8.

James 1:6–8

But let him ask in faith, with no doubting.

For the one who doubts is like a wave of the sea, that is driven and tossed by the wind.

For that person must not suppose that he will receive anything from the Lord.

He is a double-minded man, unstable in all his ways.

Now, when James is talking about doubting here, we shouldn't get the understanding, okay, when I ask God, Lord, give me wisdom now, all right, I'm just gonna really focus.

God's really gonna give me wisdom, God's really gonna give me wisdom.

Yeah, I've got these concerns or or or uh questions that I still want to explore, but I'm not allowed to explore those anymore.

Uh, because James in chapter one said, don't doubt.

You'll be like you're tossed about.

Here's what the doubting refers to here.

Doubting is a double-mindedness.

That's the literal translation, and it's actually what he says.

Double-minded.

Do you know that uh that term in Greek, double-minded, a double-minded man?

Uh James likely coined that term, which is cool.

Uh it's the first instance of it in history.

And what he's saying is don't ask with mixed allegiances.

Don't ask for wisdom.

Here's another way to put it.

Don't ask for God to reinforce what you already think.

That's having a mixed allegiance when you ask God for wisdom.

You know what you want God to confirm, you know what you want Him to honor.

But what God calls us towards is this disposition of, Lord, I've encountered a trial, I truly don't know, but I can approach it with a sort of joy because of the gospel.

Lord, in my not knowing, would you give me the wisdom to navigate this?

And Lord, let it be your wisdom.

Can I tell you, uh, that place in your heart is an incredible sense of freedom?

And I think that ultimately that's what James is calling us towards.

If you don't consider yourself a courageous person, I ask you to lean into that part of this text.

That like James, you are a servant of the Lord and you are called to lean into these difficult areas of your life.

And if you do so without a mixed allegiance, then you can rest, knowing that uh all that's you're getting rid of the thing that was at stake that you might lose.

Instead, you're saying, Lord, let me rest in you alone.

Now, the person who acts with mixed allegiances, they have no trajectory of growth in their life.

They're just tossed about by the sea and the waves.

So consider this.

You approach a trial in your life, you're able to experience it with joy.

Because you know that the trial is not destructive, but it's actually by looking at the trial steadfastly, letting it do its work in you.

The joy is knowing that this is producing in me, it's moving towards something that is complete.

Now, in that process of moving towards our trials, we encounter times where we say, look, I just don't understand this.

I don't know how to integrate this into my story, I don't know how to understand the harms that I've done or the harms that I've uh received.

Lord, give me wisdom in this.

And I know you'll give it to me lavishly.

That's the type of person who grows in their life.

Uh that's the type of person who's not afraid of encountering their wrongs because they trust God to bring them through it.

Now that's at a personal level.

So we ought to consider this at a cultural level as well.

Our nation's in the midst of a trial, a clear one, COVID-19.

But the past several weeks, amidst this COVID-19 trial, uh, we've seen in such explicit ways a trial that's been a part of our nation's history forever, which is the trial of racism.

Our nation, uh, the the murder of George George Floyd, that video, I think this is one of the most visceral things uh that that many of us had had ever seen.

I d I don't know the last time that I saw someone die on camera, actually die on camera.

And it's uh it's uh it's horrifying.

Uh the completeness of that moment.

And uh that event has sparked uh it's set off so much tension into our culture.

It's like a this been this this huge release of of energy that's that's poured out uh as a result of it.

I you know, we uh uh uh live just a couple blocks from downtown.

And so last night we weren't able uh uh to we were walking our son, we were on a scooter ride.

He was riding the scooter, we weren't all scootering on the same scooter.

And uh he we were like, oh my goodness, we we get this alert on our phone.

It's like we have to go into our house in the next 10 minutes.

Um that's how the the tension has been understood that's been released.

I'm just saying, just bring that up to demonstrate that this is this is real, this is a real thing here.

Now, the problem that we can have when we're looking at a situation like this.

So we can say, look, it's just a really visceral video.

Uh and it's caused, it's caused a lot of tension, and then we can Look just at the tension or just at the release.

But what we need to consider is look, this unveiled something that's just really here.

We have a country with a context.

We aren't born and thrown into neutral environments.

We're born and we're thrown into history.

And history is an unfolding story with a real past.

I'm going to say something controversial.

The past affects the present.

We have a real history of white supremacy and black oppression.

And like many of our own histories, there are parts of it that are too shameful to look at.

And there are parts of it that we think, look, if I if I look at this, there's no way that I could possibly have any understanding or any real ability to uh to wrap my head around it, let alone contribute something positively in the midst of it.

It's too easy to get our words wrong.

But what if, like James calls us to in our own lives, what if instead of ignoring the shameful parts, those various trials, what if we look directly at them?

What if we actually did consider this is difficult to look at a systemic injustice?

Maybe especially because I'm the beneficiary of it?

What if we owned being the beneficiary of it?

What if we swam towards that and we said, God, I don't have the wisdom to understand this?

Lord, would you give us the wisdom to understand this?

He will.

But in the gospel, it's true.

And then assessing it, uh, we're able to, we're able to realize, wow, there's so much here.

There's a whole world here that I just don't know.

You know, as I've considered this in my life for for the past week, it sounded like, you know what I haven't done?

I haven't allowed space for this to be hard.

And in doing so, I've made it harder.

On people I love, that means this is something that's really in me.

So then we'd think something like this.

I wonder why that's in me.

I wonder what part of a story I am where that would come from.

What role am I really playing in that story?

Oh, this brings up a lot of confusion.

I feel inadequate standing at the foot of this mountain.

Lord, would you give us wisdom?

As a vast majority white church, how important for us to turn, have the courage from Christ to turn and look at our shame so that we might create space for the real hurt of our black brothers and sisters, and especially in Christ, but just generally, for that pain to be heard and seen.

I can't imagine that our church I I can't imagine I ha I hate that our church wouldn't be safe for that.

And I think I know that there are places that I've made unsafe for that.

I repent.

Let's pray.

Father, would you work in our hearts so that we might see those things in in legitimate ways that actually bear fruit?

Give us words, give us the language, give us the wisdom.

Give us the eyes to see.

Lift this up in Jesus' name.

Amen.