Rich man, poor man; James 1:9-12

James started off his letter speaking about the need for enduring faith in the midst of trials. Trials are an inescapable part of life.  And James says rather than seeking immediate relief from them, we need to endure them with persevering faith, knowing that God uses trials to refine our faith, so that our faith might be complete, lacking in nothing. Then he adds to that process the need for divine wisdom, so that we might understand God’s purposes and plan for our salvation, that we might have hope and confidence in God’s plan for our lives.  Today then, as

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Seeking Wisdom, James 1:5-8

James is full of these pithy passages which some have called imperatives of the faith. And it’s tempting to take these simple imperatives at face value but somewhat superficially and usually out of context, and expect to use them sort of like a formula, whereby if we do x plus y, we will get z.  And perhaps that is possible, on occasion.  But I don’t think that is James’ intention.  I imagine that I am not alone in applying such a template to this passage before us today.  There have been a few situations in my life where I have

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The testing of faith, James 1:1-4

Today we begin our study of the book of James.  We’ve studied James before as a church, but we’ve reached the point where we have gone through the entire New Testament, and so we are now on our second round. But I think that’s a good place to be.  As we learned in Jude last week, we need to be reminded.  We need to remember.  And so I look forward to gleaning more from this harvest than we did on the first. However, perhaps due to the fact that we have studied James before, I don’t want to spend a

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Kept by God, Jude 17-25

Today we are going to finish our study of Jude.  This short letter was written by Jude who was the brother of James.  What he does not mention is that he is also the half brother of Jesus Christ.  They had the same mother -Mary, but different fathers, Joseph being the father of James and Jude, and the Holy Spirit being the father of Jesus. Jude wrote this letter to the churches, having first desired to elaborate on their common salvation, but he was urged by the Holy Spirit to write something else instead – a warning that certain ungodly

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God’s judgment on false teachers, Jude 11-16

We begin this section of scripture with Jude uttering the phrase, “Woe to them!”  It is a phrase that cannot be understood without the context of what came before it.  And so if we have not been here in the last couple of weeks, we must find out who is “them”.  Who is Jude talking about.  We find the summary answer to that question back in vs 4, “For certain persons have crept in unnoticed, those who were long beforehand marked out for this condemnation, ungodly persons who turn the grace of our God into licentiousness and deny our only

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Reminders from history, Jude 5-10

I said something in our Bonfire Bible Study last Wednesday that I think bears repeating.  I said that there seems to be two basic types of theology out there.  But only one is correct theology, and the other one is wrong, even though it is the most popular.  The most common theology, the most popular theology,  has as it’s premise that God exists to serve man.  They may not say it so crassly, but nevertheless, that is the basics of it.  That God serves man, God loves man, God gives things to man, God helps man.  God is not much

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Love in the truth, 3 John

We come today to the study of a short letter which John wrote to a man who I believe was a pastor of a church of his day. Last week, we looked at another short letter to yet another church. But before we get into the letter, I think it might be helpful to make sure we understand some things about the churches that John was writing to. I think there is a certain misunderstanding of the early life of the church that causes us a lot of confusion about the way God organized the church, and designed the church

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In Defense of the Truth, 2 John 1:5-13

We are continuing in our study of 2 John today.  Last week we looked at the first four verses, in which the word truth is used five times. The importance of the truth is the theme of this epistle.  As we continue in our study of the remaining verses, you will notice that we no longer see the word truth.  But nevertheless, the truth is still the focus of the passage, it’s just referred to in different ways. For instance, starting in vs five John refers to the truth as the commandment.  God’s commandments are truth.  He is not merely

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Living in the Truth, 2 John 1:1-4

For those of you who may be unfamiliar with my history, I grew up as a pastor’s kid. I actually was born during the time my dad was in Bible college and he became a pastor shortly thereafter.  So consequently, I spent most of my early life in church. I grew up hearing the gospel, the stories of the Old and New Testament, singing the hymns, participating in some sort of church service at least three times a week, and sometimes more. But when I was about 21 years old, I left home, pretty much abandoned my faith, and ran

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Epilogue, part two, 1 John 5: 18-21

We have finally come to the last message in the book of 1st John. I’m a little saddened by that. John has a unique style of writing, and a particular message which is absolutely essential to the Christian life. His whole epistle is a series of dogmatic declarations concerning how we may know that we have eternal life. And that theme is summarized here in these last verses by a series of doctrines which he says enables us to know that we are born of God. The theme of the entire letter was summarized in vs 13, which says, “These

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