4 min
James 1:2 Built on the Rock
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- Christianity
Today's verse begins the book of James, and unlike other authors, such as Paul, who often open their letters with gradual introductions, James dives right in without warming up or giving comforting introductory words. Instead, we're right into the foundation of his letter.
So how does his letter start? With a profoundly challenging command.
"Count it joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds"
In essence, we're being told that we should find joy in bad things happening to us. Yet, that's exactly backward from a normal human response to times of hardship. And even though James' readers at the time of his writing this letter most likely were facing poverty and persecution, he uses the words "trials of various kinds" on purpose - because everyone experiences trials. So now I have a question for us to consider:
What does this verse mean? Why would James write such a demand of suffering people?
And as usual with our dives into Scripture, we need to look at the context of this verse - which in this case are verses 3 and 4. If you were to stop with this verse alone, you could very easily develop a deep misunderstanding of the point of this passage and of what James means.
"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."- James 1:3-4 ESVWhat does James not say in these three verses? He doesn't tell us to feel happy when trials and hardship comes. And if you were to stop reading at verse 2, you could easily draw that conclusion. Instead, we're told to "count it" joyful - which means to label our trials and hardships as something worth rejoicing over.
The "count" comes from the Greek ἡγέομαι (hēgeomai), which is an accounting term and relates to the organization or collecting things. This is important, as this means that James is telling us that instead of "feeling happy" in times of hardship, we enter those moments as deposits into our life's bank account, not withdrawals. Again, this doesn't mean our immediate response to an illness, job loss, flat tire, or death is that of joy. Instead, James is talking to us about how we categorize these moments when we assess our life as a whole.
I fully understand that this doesn't mean that the command is easy, by any means, it's still hard to do. Instead, what I want you to get from this, is that through this command, James is acknowledging something incredibly important that we don't always admit to ourselves: we can decide how we will describe any moment to ourselves. We can't always control our circumstances. Sure, things in life happen outside of our control. However, we can control how we think about our circumstances. And we're supposed to.
So today, keep this in your mind: when something bad happens, we can immediately say something like, "This is terrible, and today is horrible." Or, "my life is going completely wrong; why is this happening?" Or - we can approach these situations and say, "This is bad - and today's a bad day, but I'm going to get through it. I'm going to get stronger through this and learn from it. And it's the growth and strength that is worth rejoicing over, even though this hurts."
This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis:
Podcorn - https://podcorn.com/privacy
Podtrac - https://analytics.podtrac.com/privacy-policy-gdrp
Today's verse begins the book of James, and unlike other authors, such as Paul, who often open their letters with gradual introductions, James dives right in without warming up or giving comforting introductory words. Instead, we're right into the foundation of his letter.
So how does his letter start? With a profoundly challenging command.
"Count it joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds"
In essence, we're being told that we should find joy in bad things happening to us. Yet, that's exactly backward from a normal human response to times of hardship. And even though James' readers at the time of his writing this letter most likely were facing poverty and persecution, he uses the words "trials of various kinds" on purpose - because everyone experiences trials. So now I have a question for us to consider:
What does this verse mean? Why would James write such a demand of suffering people?
And as usual with our dives into Scripture, we need to look at the context of this verse - which in this case are verses 3 and 4. If you were to stop with this verse alone, you could very easily develop a deep misunderstanding of the point of this passage and of what James means.
"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."- James 1:3-4 ESVWhat does James not say in these three verses? He doesn't tell us to feel happy when trials and hardship comes. And if you were to stop reading at verse 2, you could easily draw that conclusion. Instead, we're told to "count it" joyful - which means to label our trials and hardships as something worth rejoicing over.
The "count" comes from the Greek ἡγέομαι (hēgeomai), which is an accounting term and relates to the organization or collecting things. This is important, as this means that James is telling us that instead of "feeling happy" in times of hardship, we enter those moments as deposits into our life's bank account, not withdrawals. Again, this doesn't mean our immediate response to an illness, job loss, flat tire, or death is that of joy. Instead, James is talking to us about how we categorize these moments when we assess our life as a whole.
I fully understand that this doesn't mean that the command is easy, by any means, it's still hard to do. Instead, what I want you to get from this, is that through this command, James is acknowledging something incredibly important that we don't always admit to ourselves: we can decide how we will describe any moment to ourselves. We can't always control our circumstances. Sure, things in life happen outside of our control. However, we can control how we think about our circumstances. And we're supposed to.
So today, keep this in your mind: when something bad happens, we can immediately say something like, "This is terrible, and today is horrible." Or, "my life is going completely wrong; why is this happening?" Or - we can approach these situations and say, "This is bad - and today's a bad day, but I'm going to get through it. I'm going to get stronger through this and learn from it. And it's the growth and strength that is worth rejoicing over, even though this hurts."
This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis:
Podcorn - https://podcorn.com/privacy
Podtrac - https://analytics.podtrac.com/privacy-policy-gdrp
4 min