Trey VanCamp Teachings Podcast Trey Van Camp

It’s part of our human nature to play favorites. We often move towards, look up to, and speak highly of those who have wealth or achievements while also looking down to, ignoring, or withholding mercy from those who lack these things. Christians aren’t immune from this sin of favoritism, and it goes back to the very beginnings of the church. James likely witnessed his half-brother Jesus correcting this sin by extending mercy to the poor, the ignored, the marginalized, and the outcasts.
According to Jesus, the Kingdom belongs to the least of us. As a leader of the early church, James applies the way of the Kingdom to how we treat others. By accepting the free mercy of God as a gift rather than as something we have to achieve, we can then extend that same mercy to everyone regardless of their wealth or status. But to try and earn mercy or to withhold it from others is to neglect the heart of the gospel itself.

James 2:1-13 CSB

James 1 confronts us with a painful reality: life will be hard. We’ll be persecuted, gut-punched, and exposed as we continue practicing the way of Jesus in our everyday lives. But James 1 also gives us a vision for the kind of people we can be if we endure these hardships with humility and patience. The church is at its best when we’re people who speak graciously, serve selflessly, and live holy.
To become this type of church, James invites us to examine how we react when people offend us, and when the Bible confronts us. When in conflict with others we often react with anger, and when exposed by the Bible we often react with apathy. But to learn to submit ourselves to God in both of these situations will allow us to mature into the kind of church God has called us to be.

When most of us think of simplicity, we think of digital minimalism, materialism, and wealth. But few of us would consider the practice of simplicity as something that involves our speech and relationships. And yet, when we examine how often we use sarcasm, exaggeration, and flattery to manipulate people and get what we want, we might be surprised to see that our speech is not simple or wholesome by default.
Jesus himself says that our speech is an automatic result of what’s already in our hearts, and the apostle James warns us that our speech has the ability to stain our whole bodies. Left to our own, we can find ourselves trying to manipulate others, gain status and approval, or win arguments.
To fight against these impulses we practice simplicity of speech; we speak honor in place of flattery and contempt, secrecy in place of gossip and exaggeration, and silence in the place of rage and manipulation.

As Americans our identities are often shaped by the quantity and quality of the stuff we own. Security, stability, and satisfaction are only possible when we buy and accumulate more wealth. And while we’re really after deep contentment, we falsely believe that the very joy we’re searching for is still on the other side of the next purchase. Cue our endless cycle of buying more so we can desire less.
But Jesus offers us a better way.
He does this by confronting our attachment to our stuff and our lack of trust in him, and also by modelling a life of simplicity. When we study the Scriptures, we find a deeper truth than the lie we’re trained to believe — real contentment is actually found by limiting what we own and increasing what we give.

We live in the age of the attention economy. From social media ads and online shopping to streaming and news, our hearts and minds are often cluttered and rewired for discontentment. We live chasing accumulation, or what Jesus calls “the worries of this age, the deceitfulness of wealth, and the desires for other things.”
And for most of us, this discontentment comes directly from our digital consumption.
But the way of Jesus is an invitation to simplicity — learning to be content with less, not more. To start this practice, we must first train ourselves to curate our digital consumption. By limiting our digital intake, we can rewire our brains towards contentment and train ourselves to be more present and attentive to God and to those around us.

For resources on simplicity, go to: https://formedbyjesus.com/simplicity/


TIMESTAMPS
0:00 - Formation is happening whether you like it or not.
2:20 - Mark 4v1-20
7:48 - Nothing crowds our time and attention like the digital world.
19:05 - The Practice of Simplicity
20:53 - Our definition of simplicity
22:35 - Jesus practicing solitude
28:18 - The way OUT of the digital chokehold
36:32 - Don’t fear the desert.

In this message, I give a 10-minute recap of the entire book of Revelation and end with 2 takeaways we all need to apply as we conclude this study.
Revelation 19:6-16 CSB