James: Identity And Expectation Series

#47. James: Identity and Expectation

James 1:1-12

Good morning! Please open your Bibles to the book of James. My favorite book of the Bible. Not just because my name is James, although I’m not gonna lie—I remember looking at the Table of Contents in my copy of the Children’s Living Bible when I was first learning how to read, and realizing there was a whole book of James. I remember going up to my big brother Allen and saying, “Where’s YOUR book of the Bible?”

It’s funny—I don’t think I remember anything that happened after that. He must have punched me.

But I love the book of James because it is so practical. It is so action oriented. There are 108 verses in the book of James, and there are over fifty imperative verbs. Imperative—that’s saying “do this” or “change that” or “don’t do this.” It’s about how to live life a life that pleases God. James isn’t about how to become a Christian. It’s about how to live like one.

It’s also very pastoral. Even though the church started with Peter’s preaching, it was James that was the recognized leader of the church in Jerusalem. Paul called him a pillar of the church, along with Peter and John (Galatians 2:9). Paul planted lots of churches, but the longest he stayed with any one of them was a year and a half. But James led the Jerusalem church. Even after the Jewish believers were scattered after Stephen’s martyrdom (see Acts 8:1), James continued to pastor them. And you see the love and concern James has for his flock throughout the book.

By nearly all accounts, this was the first book written in the New Testament. It was probably written between 48 and 52 AD, just a handful of years after the death, burial and resurrection of our Lord. So the book of James gives us a great window into what mattered to the church in its earliest days. I’ve heard it said, Jesus started the church the way he wanted it, now he wants the church the way he started. So if we want to be a Christ honoring New Testament church, James gives us an incredible blueprint.

And so with that, let’s dive in. Our text is James 1:1-12. I want to point out four things James teaches about who we are in the world, and then five things he commands us about what to do in the world. So here we go: James 1:1-12. Please stand to honor the reading of God’s Word:

[READ and pray]

May God bless the reading of His word. Let’s pray.

Who In the World Am I?

The first identity question we have to deal with when we read the Book of James is, “Which James was this?”

James starts off this letter straightforward way: “I’m James.” But there are three different James’s in the New Testament. There were two of Jesus’ disciples named James: James, the brother of John, the Son of Zebedee, and James the son of Alphaeus. But the first James was martyred too early for him to be a good candidate, and either one of them would probably have added, “an apostle of Jesus Christ” to the greeting if it was one of the disciples. So by process of elimination, it was James, the brother of Jesus.

Other than the birth narratives in Matthew and Luke, we first hear that Jesus has a family in Mark 3:21, when his family, who has apparently heard that Jesus is healing people and calling disciples to himself, comes to seize him, saying “he’s out of his mind.

A few chapters later we first hear the Jesus had a brother named James in Mark 6, when Jesus is rejected in his home town of Nazareth. At that time all of Jesus’ former neighbors are like, “Who is this guy? Where did he get this wisdom? Isn’t this Mary’s boy? We know his brothers—James, Joe, Jude, and Simon. We know all his siblings.

In John’s gospel, we learn that not even Jesus’ brothers believed in Him (7:3).

And yet, twenty years after Jesus was crucified, James is the head of the Jerusalem church. Clement of Alexandria calls him James the Just because of his reputation for virtue. One volume of church history said he was also nicknamed “Camel Knees, because he spent so much time in prayer that his knees became calloused.

So what does it take for a skeptical younger brother to become the leader of the Jerusalem church? How does that happen?

It happens when someone rises from the dead. In 1 Corinthians 15, Paul is giving his defense of the gospel. He says,

3 For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, 4 that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures, 5 and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. 6 Then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have fallen asleep. 7 Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles.