Tongue, but deceives his heart, this person’s religion is worthless. Religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this, to visit the orphans and widows in their affliction and to keep oneself unstained from the world. Here is God’s word. Please be seated. It’s a pleasure to be here this morning. I see lots of familiar faces. My wife, Tracy, probably knows even more as being a music teacher for more years than I’m allowed to say in the valley. She knows lots of folks, and we’ve worshiped with you a few times in the past. My recent retirement from Faith Church kept me from doing that, although I do enjoy coming to Vespers. Thank you for doing that for our community. So thank you for that. It’s an honor to be here, and I’ve known the Pearsons for a long time. From when I first came here, which is a long time ago, and then from their Y mom days, they lived in an apartment across this parking lot from our church. So we’ve known them for a long time. So today this passage talks about a gift. It’s the idea of every good and perfect gift comes down from heaven.
So we want to think about that. And I’m going to talk about three gifts, but also the source of those gifts, God’s word. And so I want to start with understanding a little bit about God’s word and how it brings that gift. Let’s think about gifts. We are often asked to do that, birthdays, Christmas. You think about, What do I give this person? What would be a perfect gift? And so you think about, What would they use or what would they treasure? How do you find that gift? Now, you can ask them, and you might get an answer like, Oh, anything’s fine. Just whatever you want, or I don’t need anything. Don’t believe that. They still want you to express your relationship. But maybe it’s not as hard as we make it. Maybe you should just ask them, but you might get the answer. I don’t know. Our Father God does not have that problem. He knows how to give the perfect gift because he knows what we need even when we don’t know. And this description for verse 17, Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change.
The perfect gift. But what exactly is that? And what is he talking about when he says the heavenly lights? What in the world is that? James is full of these phrases, these images. He likes to talk that way. The idea of heavenly lights, it means a lot of things. It talks about… It means it wants us to connect to the stars and planets, but also to angels. But in this passage, we’re included That is, Christians, believers, who the life of God is in, is also included in that idea about heavenly lights, because we have received a gift, a gift of life. Coming down out of heaven, that’s another interesting phrase, but maybe more familiar with that. Jesus used it quite a bit. He said, I’m the bread of life coming down out of heaven. That echoes a thought that we want to continue later on. Now, the word of God can mean many things. In our church, we have a mission statement that says, know God’s word, show Christ’s love, grow disciples one person at a time. I know Pastor Lloyd, we go back a long way. We played basketball. He showed up in a church one day at the basketball game at a T-shirt that had the mission statement of faith covenant, serve, sacrifice, die.
I think that was a joke that someone came up, but I got many chuckles of that over the years. We played basketball together until I aged out. I think Trent, our service leader, played a little bit with us, too. I think we roughed him up one too many times back of the day. But thank you for doing that. That was a good mission statement. I like the one that’s on your bulletin, too, here. This is great, spreading love for God in his glory. I think the idea of mission statements, maybe that was a little bit too branding, too much commercial at that time, whatever. But I like the one that our church uses, know God’s word because there’s an intentional ambiguity with that. Because knowing God’s word can mean some different things. It can mean understanding the Bible. It means you know what the Bible says, you know what it teaches. But it can also mean having a life experience with Jesus Christ. It can mean both of those things. And those aren’t distinct things. Those are two things that actually rely on each other, that have to go together. Because we, unlike James, we have to know who Jesus is through the written word.
We understand him through that. We get to know who he is. And so through the written word, we encounter Jesus. And it’s this marvelous dualism where knowing God’s word is something that scholars do. And the idea of knowing someone is what lovers do. So you can know God’s word and you can know God’s word. Here’s an illustration of one way of knowing God’s word. It’s a story I picked out of one of the books. It’s about the Prince of Grenada, who is an heir to the Spanish Crown. He got on the wrong side of politics, and he was sent to prison for life. It was a dirty, dreadful prison. It called the Place of the Skull. You knew that once you were in, you would never come out alive. The Prince was given a book to read, one book, the Bible. With one book to read, he read it over and over again. When they came to clean out a cell, when he died, he had made notations about the Bible. But they were like this. Psalm 118:8 is the middle verse of the Bible. Esra 7:21 contains all the letters of the alphabet except the letter J.
The ninth verse of the eighth chapter of Esther is the longest verse in the Bible. No word or name of more than six syllabus can be found on the Bible. Now, did the Prince of Grenada know God’s word? Well, in one sense, he did, but we have no indication that he ever had a religious or spiritual commitment. To him, the Bible is just about Trivia. So when you come to know the word of God in the biblical way, James talks about the word being implanted in you. Implanted. It’s the idea of a seed being there, and it describes the changes that takes place. Now, in the first part of the chapter, he talks about trials and temptations and practical living. And James isn’t really known as a grace-filled book, but it’s absolutely clear that James is permeated by his encounter with the written word and the living word. Grew up with his Jesus. That’s pretty amazing. And so the word of God is something that gives us gifts. And so these are the three gifts that I want us to think about today. The gift of life, the gift of self-awareness, and the gift of liberty.
So the gift of life. The word of God gives us a new life. It says in verse 18, Of his own will, he brought forth by the word of truth that we would be a first fruits. Now, that’s an interesting phrase. First fruits, harvest. We understand that you bring the first fruits. But the way that it was actually celebrated is that immediately you harvested the grain, you brought that first harvest before you finished the harvest, before everything was safely stored away, before you knew what it was going to be like. You brought that to the Lord. You did it right away. It was a way of expressing faith. And so while the harvest is still going on, you bring the first fruits. It’s not the end of the harvest. But what does it mean that we are the first fruits? So what of crop is God raising in the world? Well, you and I, as first fruits, are the ones who are being changed, conformed, given life that God wants to bring back into the world. James Epistle says that we’re flawed and frailed, but we have these glimpses of what God is doing and what he is wanting to bring into the world, you and I, this first fruits.
Jesus is harvesting his first fruits right now. He’s building his kingdom. He’s reconnecting us with God. He’s bringing the life of God, changing the way we relate to him and the way we relate to the world. And that’s something that the world is longing for. I know you’ve been looking at Romans, in Romans 8:19, it says, The creation waits an eager expectation for the sons of God to be revealed, that all of creation, the universe, is waiting to see the work Jesus has begun on the cross. And it’s not just in some great cosmic sense that Jesus is coming back, that he’s going to make everything right again. But in a very personal way, in a very deep way, that is being completed in your life as a believer, as a follower of Christ. Those two things, God’s great plan for the universe and the way you live your life day to day, are deeply and intimately and inseparably connected. In this dumpster fire of a world that you and I live in, We are the examples, the first fruits of what God wants to do. That you have been gifted with the capacity to taste of the age to come, that we are sharing of the redeemed, and we’re bringing that into the world.
I read an author, Dallas Willard. He’s a spiritual formation guy, and I want to share just a thought that he had. I think he put it well. See, the Christian faith is committed to a picture of God in the world that makes every event ultimately redeemable and therefore permissible by a personal God who is both willing and able to nurture into a being a creation that cannot be improved upon. It does not hold that every event is good in itself, bad things, even horrendous moral evils, do come to pass. But in the vision of Jesus Christ communicated to his people, all human beings, and yes, even the sparrows and the lilies are effectively cared for. For every person is invited to say in faith and obedience, The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want. He’s making a way. We’re the forerunners of that. We’re the first fruits of that. The building blocks of the kingdom that’s coming. We don’t really have to accept that everything is going to turn out exactly as we think it will. But James is pointing out that there is a way that he wants to establish his kingdom in the world.
Now, justice is a word that the Bible uses. We hear a lot about it today. It’s a buzzword. We tend to think that the way that justice comes is we fight others until we win, and then we establish our control over them and we establish justice. But James talks about something very different. He says, 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 that God requires. It’s that word righteousness and justice that are linked together. So getting mad at the evil in the world, that doesn’t help. That’s not going to bring about the righteousness of God. Those who are trying to implement justice that way end up causing more injustice. But what is this? Well, it’s what the word says. It’s when we live in our relationships and in our communities, bringing about the things that God would want to see happen. And We’re not called to cut and run, to hide out. It’d be so much easier that way to find some quiet place to wait and hide and then for Jesus to come back and fix everything.
But Christians are to be building and supporting the places that we live in, our communities. 1 Peter 2 says this, Be subject to the Lord’s sake to every human institution, whether it be to the Emperor Supreme or to the governors as sent by him, to punish those who do evil and to praise those who do good. For this time, for this is the will of God, that by doing good, you should silence the ignorance of foolish people. Jesus did not take us out of the world, but he sent us into it to be the first fruits. And it’s with the life that we have from the word of God that we do that. We have this supernatural gift of God that comes when the word begins to flow in us. It says, be quick to listen. That’s not talking about letting About listening to others and then saying what you want. That’s not what that’s actually talking about. It’s saying be quick to listen to God’s word. Make that your focus. Seek out Jesus. Hear the good news. Bring life to the world. This implanted word is what can save your souls. It’s the gift of life.
The second gift is the gift of self-awareness. James says, For anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he’s like a man who looks intently at his natural face in the mirror. He looks at himself, he goes away, and at once forgets what he is like. I picked up a couple of thoughts here from a man named David Daniels, and James uses this illustration of someone who goes and looks in a mirror. The idea of a mirror. We know what they’re like. Mears were designed to reveal imperfections. You look in it, you say, Oh, I need to wash my hair down. I need to put on my makeup. I need to do this. The The mirror informs the looker about what needs to be done different. Then it’s up to the one who’s looking in the mirror to make the changes. If you don’t do that, if you don’t act on what the mirror tells you, the mirror doesn’t do any good. Now, the word of God functions like a mirror because it shows us what we’re really like. We can have a self-deceived, inflated picture of who we are about our spiritual life.
But when we begin look at the word of God, what it is saying to us, then we begin to discover God’s intentions and who we are. Do you remember the fable or the story Snow White? There was a wicked witch. She has a mirror and she says, Mirror, mirror in the wall, who’s the fairest of them all? And the mirror, because mirrors don’t lie, tells her, Well, you are. So for a while, that’s true. But then Snow White comes along and the mirror has to say, Well, you’re not the fairest one of all. And she reacts with anger. I’m going to kill Snow White rather than accepting the truth of what happens. James tells us we need to look at the word. And when we hold it up, we may not like what we see, but at that moment, we have a choice, whether we can reject it or we can respond to it, and we can apply the word of God. Now, this is a struggle because Well, it’s a struggle for Christians. It’s a struggle for those who are outside because we’re living… Let’s talk about those who are on the outside first, those who are not part of the followers of Jesus, not part of the church.
Their idea of looking at who you really are comes to a very different conclusion. They think, know yourself, or you might add believe in yourself. It’s the advice you’re likely to get. You are enough. It’s not a new idea, but it’s one that’s particularly appealing to people in our time that says, What’s deep inside of you. That’s the answer to all your problems. If you look deep inside you, you’ll find what’s good. If you listen to your desires, they’ll provide everything you need in the universe, and you’ll be right with the universe. You’ll find true peace and satisfy your inner self. Now we’re seeing the wreckage that that causes all over the place. But the Bible, the apostle Paul, especially, talks about something very different. When he talked about looking inside himself, when the word of God began to began to influence him, he says, wait a second, not only don’t I like this picture, when I hear it, I want to do exactly the opposite of what it says in Romans 7:18, for I know that nothing good dwells in me that is in my flesh, for I have the desire to do what is right, but not the ability to carry it out.
For I delight in the law of God in my inner being, for I see in my members another law waging war against the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members. He’s saying to us that human beings in in a natural state, we hear what’s good and we resist it. You can’t tell someone, Don’t do this. It’s bad for you. They go, Oh, maybe I should try that. It’s the word of God who helps discover who we really are. Now, for believers, we have to be careful because we hear the word of God and we think, God, that’s right. I need to do that. We’re going to try harder, and then we don’t. This is a potential problem for any of us, and especially people who sit in church week in and wake out and we hear the same things over and over again. We can enjoy the experience. I love that story. I love that message. I love that song. I love it when the word of God is open for us, and then we walk away and we’re not transformed because one little thing, we don’t put it into practice.
It’s trying to put into practice the word of God is where we discover who we really are. Do not merely listen to the word. Don’t merely be a hearer of God’s word. Do what it says. James, if he was writing to us today, he would probably have added, Don’t just read the word of God. Don’t just podcast the word of God. Don’t just study the word of God. Don’t merely listen to it in that way. He’s saying, It’s not until you try and do this, it’s you discover who you are. Because when you try and live out God’s word, you’re going to find out who you’re truly like, and it’s not a pretty picture, because we can’t measure up. We discover, Wait, I’m having problems here. There’s something that I really need. And that is the gift of self-awareness. And it’s absolutely crucial because it allows you to receive the last gift, the gift of freedom. James 1:25 says, 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. The law of liberty. Now, that’s one of those great phrases, right?
Law of liberty. Liberty means being set free. Now, think for a minute, what would happen if you were being judged by your own actions, if that was the only standard you were ever going to happen? When we hear about what’s true religion in James, I mean, that’s tough, right? Who among us has responded in all the ways around us? Not being angry, being unstained from the world. We can become so… And to those in need. There’s so many needs in the world, and we can become hardened to that. If you follow even a basic news cycle, there’s earthquakes and cancer and another war, another accident, and more people in need. And we would become so burdened if thinking, This is up to me. But the law of liberty says, Yeah, that’s right. You are not enough. You need a savior. It tells us to turn to Jesus, where he finds forgiveness for our personal flaws and justice and truth for the world. It grows more precious to us every day. In Romans 8:2, it says, For the law of the spirit of life in Christ Jesus has made me free from the law of sin and death.
I’m free. Christ has fulfilled the law for me. I look inside myself, I see the… When I try to do this, maybe on a good day, I do it a little. But God’s word points out all that, what you see in his word is beauty, his love that you’re struggling with, that’s been given to you through Jesus Christ. And he sets you free to do the law. That’s the gift of freedom. Now, if you know the love of Christ, you know you can’t keep it to yourself. It is like something deeply implanted in your soul. It is a living word that sets people free. It becomes the great desire to please him. He knows this very well, but he doesn’t have to go any farther than to say, So speak and act as to those who are to be judged by the law of liberty. Because If you’ve known the freedom of Christ, you’ve known what he’s done, you don’t have to be coaxed into obeying the law. You know that this is the best way to live. This is what I want. This is how I have a deeper relationship with the Father. When we persevere, things begin to happen.
Things begin to change. The good and perfect gift begins to glow and then to shine and then to beam. When you fail, God does not find fault with you. When you suffer and angry or discouraged, that’s not the end. He simply calls you to stand fast. He says, Keep going. That’s what he calls you to do. How do you know if you’re on the right track? Well, we tend to measure our religion by what we think. Do we believe the right things about God, about what’s right, about what’s wrong? Those are important, and they are an essential foundation. If we get a little deeper, we might measure our religion by what we feel. I’m inspired by this, or I like to have the word of God in my life. I like this sermon. I feel at peace when I go to church. But James measures it a little differently. Verses 26 and 27. If anyone thinks he’s religious and does not bridal his tongue, he deceives his heart. This person’s religion is worthless. Religion that is pure and undefiled before God and his Father is this, to visit orphans and widows in their affliction and to keep oneself unstained from the world.
See, bridling the tongue. Well, that’s impulse control. It goes connected to that slow to anger part that we talked about. The law of liberty, once we understand it, removes the need for anger, the reason for it, because I’ve got what I need. I’ve been given that and no one can take it away. Why widows and orphans? Well, That’s what they can’t give back. You can’t get anything out of. We tend to give love and gifts to people that can return that to us. This is what Jesus was talking about when he addressed the host of a dinner that he’d been invited to. He said, When you host a dinner or banquet, do not invite your friends or brothers or relatives or rich neighbors. Other ways, they may invite you to return and you will be repaid. But when you host a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind, and you will be blessed. Since they cannot repay you, you will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous. Why unstained from the world? Because the world looks at things very differently than the gifts of the Father. Now, these are the gifts.
They come, this freedom comes through his word. Another interesting phrase in this Book of James, look into the perfect law. Look into the perfect law. The idea is to gaze. Gaze. Think deeply on the word of God. Think deeply on what Christ has done on the gospel. Think deeply about the beauty and the truth of what God calls us to. Jesus, the one who had the greatest relationship with the Father. He had the scriptures embedded in his heart and mind. When he was a human being, he was always talking about it. When he was challenged by Peter, he pointed to the scripture. When he was confronted by the devil, he pointed to the scripture. When he was hanging on the cross, he quoted scripture. When you gaze on the word, when you look deeply into the word of God, you’ll find that perfect gift. Keep looking and learning that good and perfect gift that comes down out of heaven from the Father of lights. Discover the living bread that came down from heaven, that if anyone eats this bread, he will live forever, because in that you will have everything you need, the perfect gift that comes from above from the Father of and you will never, ever be disappointed.
Father, as we have gathered here today, as we think about your word again, would your spirit take the amazing gift of your word and help us to embrace it, to feed our souls on it, to discover the great power of the gospel, the great beauty of your law, and become a people that brings it into our lives and into our community in Jesus we pray. Amen.
Discaimer: This sermon text was generated by an automated transcription service.