A. In Max Lucado’s book, In The Eye Of The Storm, he tells a story about a parakeet named Chippie.
1. Chippie the parakeet never saw it coming -one second he was peacefully perched in his cage, and the next he was sucked in, washed up and blown over.
2. The problem began when Chippie’s owner decided to clean Chippie’s cage with a vacuum cleaner.
3. She put the end of the hose into Chippie’s cage to clean the bottom, but then the phone rang.
4. She turned to answer the phone, and barely said “hello” when she heard “ssssopp!”
5. Chippie was sucked into the vacuum.
6. The bird owner gasped, put down the phone, turned off the vacuum, and quickly opened the bag.
7. There was Chippie…still alive, but stunned.
8. Since the bird was covered with dust and dirt, she took him to the bathroom, turned on the water and held Chippie under the running water.
9. Then, realizing that Chippie was soaked and shivering, she did what any compassionate bird owner would do…she reached for the hair blow dryer and blasted Chippie with hot air.
10. Poor Chippie never knew what hit him.
11. A few days after the trauma, the reporter who had initially written about the traumatic event called Chippie’s owner to see how the bird was doing.
12. “Well,” the owner replied, “Chippie doesn’t sing much anymore…he just sits and stares.”
B. And it’s not hard to see why Chippie doesn’t sing much anymore and just sits and stares!
1. Sucked in, washed up, and blown over…that’s enough to steal the song from the stoutest heart.
2. “Sucked in, washed up, and blown over” - doesn’t that about sum up how many of us feel at times when life hits us hard?
3. M. Scott Peck begins his famous book The Road Less Traveled with a three word sentence that is packed with simple, yet profound truth…it reads, “Life is difficult.”
4. And he is so very right. Life is difficult. Who said life would be anything other than that?
C. Last week we started a new sermon series on the book of James called “A Faith That Works.”
1. Today, as we begin to work through the first chapter of James, we notice that the first subject James tackles is the problem of trials.
2. James knew that the recipients of his letter were facing many trials - many of them had been forced to leave their homes in Jerusalem under the threat of persecution.
3. They were forced to live in places new to them and among strangers, and they were having to adjust to their entirely different situation.
4. The message that James wants to give them is the same message that is communicated throughout the Bible about suffering.
5. The Biblical record shows that the people of God over and over turned defeat into victory and trials into triumphs.
6. No matter what the trials we face, through our faith in God, we can experience victory, and the result of victory is spiritual maturity.
D. There are many ways that we could approach the first chapter of James, but I have decided to take it slow and to address each of the initial subjects separately.
1. I noticed that when I preached through James many years ago, I tackled James 1:2-12 in one sermon – that was a lot to tackle in one sermon.
2. I will try to balance not going so fast that we miss the understanding and application of God’s truths, while not making the study of James too long and drawn out.
E. So, let’s start where James does, by talking about the reality of the trials that we face in life.
1. Job 5:7 says that “man is born for trouble as surely as the sparks fly upward.”
2. I see no way to deny that statement - we are a troubled people living on a troubled planet.
3. In addition to the fact that the world has been suffering under 15 months of a terrible pandemic, we hear bad news almost every day of mass shootings, hate motivated violence, internet hacking, global warming, and sin being promoted and celebrated.
4. Because we live in a fallen world, nothing works the way it’s supposed to.
a. Sin has stained every part of the physical universe and sin has deeply infected the human heart.
b. Because of that things break, our bodies wear out and we grow old and die.
c. People hurt and even kill each other and marriages come apart.
d. People get hooked on drugs or alcohol or sex – or all three.
e. Sometimes our leaders disappoint us and our friends turn into enemies.
f. Sometimes our employer decides to downsize or the boss decides that we aren’t the right “fit” - whatever that means.
5. And while our Christian brothers and sisters have been persecuted because of their faith in many places around the world for a long time, I believe that hard times of persecution will be coming upon Christians who live in our country in the near future.
F. And when all kinds of trials come our way it is so important that we have the right perspective.
1. A preacher named Ray Pritchard tells about some advice a friend gave him many years ago.
a. The friend said: “Ray, when hard times come, be a student, not a victim.”
2. That’s good advice, isn’t it?
a. A victim asks “Why did this happen to me?”
b. But a student asks, “What can I learn from this?”
3. In many respects, that is a good summary of what James says about facing our trials.
G. So let’s closely examine what James stays about turning our trials into triumphs in James 1:2-4.
1. And let’s notice that James begins with a command: Consider it a great joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you experience various trials (James 1:2).
2. James begins by reminding us that sooner or later (probably sooner), we will all experience trials of various sorts.
3. Picture yourself driving down the road on a beautiful, sunny summer day with not a care or concern, and all of the sudden you have a tire blowout, or the engine light comes on and your car sputters to a stop, or someone runs through a red light and t-bones you.
4. Isn’t that the way life happens?
a. No matter who we are or where we live, trouble is just a phone call away.
b. A doctor may say, “I’m sorry. You’ve got cancer.”
c. Or the voice may inform you that your daughter has just been arrested or your son has been in a car accident.
d. Or you may be fired without warning.
e. Or your husband or wife may decide he or she doesn’t want to be married anymore.
5. The list of possible trials is endless because our trials are “various” or “multi-colored” or “many kinds,” as James says.
H. How, then, should we respond to these hard times that suddenly come to us?
1. James offers what appears to be a strange piece of advice: “Consider it great joy” (CSB) or “Consider it pure joy” (NIV) or “Count it all joy” (KJV).
2. That sounds like such odd advice that one wonders if he is serious.
a. “Count it all joy? Are you nuts? Do you have any idea what I’ve just been through?”
3. It does sound rather idealistic, if not downright impossible, right?
4. But that is the exact command that James lays out here – his language is clear and uncomplicated – “consider it great joy whenever you experience various trials.”
5. Here are a couple of paraphrases of that verse:
a. The Message: “Consider it a sheer gift, friends, when tests and challenges come at you from all sides.”
b. The J. B. Phillips translation: “When all kinds of trials and temptations crowd into your lives, my brothers, don’t resent them as intruders, but welcome them as friends!”
6. What a strange and difficult perspective: we must not see trials as intruders, but as friends.
I. This is obviously not our natural inclination or response.
1. A natural inclination or response to trials and trouble would be anger or despair or complaining or running away and trying escape them.
2. It isn’t “natural” to find joy in hardship, but that’s the whole point.
3. James isn’t talking about a “natural” reaction, he’s talking about a “supernatural” reaction made possible by the Holy Spirit who enables us to see and to respond from God’s point of view.
4. Therefore, “counting it all joy” is the conscious choice that God wants us to make when hard times come.
5. And it will need to be the conscious choice that we will have to make again and again, because we are going to face trials again and again – there is no “one and done” when it comes to trials.
6. And here’s an important practical thing we must keep in mind: We must not trust our feelings!
a. We just finished a series on emotions, and we hopefully learned a lot of important things about our emotions and how to embrace them and employ them.
b. But hopefully one practical lesson we learned is that we can’t trust our emotions to be an accurate guide – we can’t let our emotions be in charge and drive the train.
c. That’s certainly true about the feelings we may have surrounding our trials and suffering.
7. When we, or others we care about, are suffering greatly in a trial, our first and primary feelings are not likely to be feelings of joy, gratitude and faith.
a. Rather our first and primary feelings may be a whole bag of negative emotions.
b. So, how do we keep from being overwhelmed by the negative emotions in the midst of a trial?
c. We must seek to put our trust in God and see things from God’s vantage point.
8. Seeing things God’s way doesn’t cancel our trials and it doesn’t turn them into non-trials, but it does transform our evaluation of those trials.
a. When we seek to obey the command: “Count it all joy”, we also must keep in mind that joy can have different meanings.
b. We tend to think of joy as a synonym for happiness.
c. When we often think of joy, we think of a a pep rally or a New Year’s Eve bash.
d. Therefore, to us, joy means the absence of all pain, but that’s not usually what the Bible means.
e. Spiritually speaking, joy is deep satisfaction that comes from knowing that we are in a relationship with a good, loving God who is in control of all things and will make all things right in due time.
f. With a spiritual connection with God and with the spiritual perspective of God, we can experience the deep satisfaction of joy, even while we weep over the pain and hardship of the trial we are undergoing.
9. That spiritual perspective is the next thing that James mentions about turning our trials into triumphs.
J. After giving us the command to “count it all joy,” James gives us the reason: “because you know that the testing of your faith produces endurance.” (James 1:3)
1. Every word of this verse is crucial.
2. How is it that we “know” that the testing of our faith produces endurance?
a. We know it because God says so and we know it from experience (the school of hard knocks).
3. The word “testing” refers to the process by which gold is purified.
a. In order to separate the gold from the dross, the gold ore is placed in a furnace and heated until it melts.
b. The dross rises to the surface and is skimmed off, leaving only pure gold.
c. That’s a picture of what God is up to in our “fiery trials.”
d. We all have to undergo some “furnace time” sooner or later.
e. And some of us may spend an extended time in the furnace of affliction.
f. But the result is the pure gold of Christ-like character.
g. Job spoke of this experience when he declared: “He knows the way that I take; when he has tested me, I will come forth as gold” (Job 23:10).
4. How true is it, that in many ways, until our faith is put to the test, it remains theoretical?
a. We never know for sure if our faith is real until hard times come, right?
b. It’s when we face a trial, that we find out, for better or for worse, just how strong and real our faith really is.
c. It’s when the phone rings with bad news; when life comes apart at the seams, that’s when we discover what we truly and actually believe in the depth of our soul.
d. Until then, our faith is speculative because it is untested.
5. God uses our trials to produce endurance, or “perseverance” or “steadfastness” or “patience.”
a. In the book of Revelation, we are told that Christians had to remain faithful to God and refuse to receive the mark of the beast.
b. Revelation 14:12 says: This calls for endurance from the saints, who keep God’s commands and their faith in Jesus.
c. This is “battle-tested” faith that stands up under persecution from the enemy and does not cut and run.
d. William Barclay notes that in the early church the martyrs gained the respect of unbelievers because in the moment of death, they had this quality – endurance - to the very end, they died with their faith intact. Of them it was said, “They died singing.”
e. It is the quality that Meriam Ibrahim had, when she was pressured by her Muslim persecutor in Sudan to renounce her Christian faith, knowing that her life was on the line, said, “I am a Christian and I will remain a Christian.”
f. That’s what perseverance looks like – and it isn’t tested in the good times, but it can only be exercised and developed in the hard times.
6. So, with God’s spiritual perspective, we welcome our trials with joy because we believe that through them God can develop in us a great benefit that cannot come any other way.
K. James finishes this section on trials by describing the promised outcome: “And let endurance have its full effect, so that you may be mature and complete, lacking nothing.” (James 1:4)
1. All of us want to be mature and complete and lack nothing, right?
2. But do we want to go through the process of trials that leads to that end product?
3. The kind of testing of our faith that leads to endurance and then complete maturity has a commitment that says: “I will not give up no matter what happens or how bad life may be. I will hold on because I promised and because I believe the Lord has something in store for me.”
4. That sort of gritty, stubborn faith produces genuine spiritual maturity.
5. And when our trials have finished their work in us, we will not lack anything the Lord wants us to have - nothing will be left out; nothing will be left behind.
6. But one of the dangers we face when going through trials is that we will try to short-circuit the process by trying to escape the hardship and pain prematurely.
7. Eugene Peterson (The Message) addresses that problem in his paraphrase of verse 4: “Don’t try to get out of anything prematurely! Let it do its work so you become mature and well-developed, not deficient in any way.”
8. That’s good advice; but it’s not always easy to follow.
L. Many of us are familiar with the story of Elisabeth Elliot.
1. She and her husband Jim joined a group of missionaries reaching out to the Auca Indians of Ecuador.
2. After several promising attempts at first contact, a team of five missionaries flew to a jungle landing strip, hoping to establish friendly relations.
3. It was not to be - Jim and his four co-workers were speared to death by the Indians.
4. Years later Elisabeth married Addison Leitch, former president of Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, but he contracted cancer not long after their marriage and died slowly and painfully.
5. What was Elisabeth Elliot’s perspective on these things? “The experiences of my life are not such that I could infer from them that God is good, gracious and merciful necessarily. To have one husband murdered and another one disintegrate body, soul and spirit through cancer, is not what you would call a proof of the love of God. In fact, there are many times when it looks like just the opposite. But my belief in the love of God is not by inference or instinct. It is by faith. To apprehend God’s sovereignty working in that love is – we must say it – the last and highest victory of the faith that overcomes the world.”
6. James would say “Amen” to that.
M. When trials come (and they will come to all of us eventually), there is something we can’t know and there is something we can know.
1. We can’t always know why things happen the way they do.
a. No matter how hard we try to figure things out, there will always be many mysteries in life.
b. The greater the tragedy, the greater the mystery, and God doesn’t often explain himself – just ask Job about his experience.
c. As we go through life, we can look back and see many blanks that we wish God would fill in for us, but most of the time we will carry those unfilled blanks with us all the way to heaven.
2. But what we can know is that when hard times come, we can know that God is at work in our trials for our benefit and for his glory.
a. To say that is to say nothing more than the words of Romans 8:28.
b. For the children of God, “all things” do indeed “work together for good.”
c. Sometimes we will see it clearly, but often we will simply have to take it by faith.
d. But it is true whether we can see it or not.
N. The Christian life is not an easy life and any suggestions to the contrary are false.
1. There is an abundant life to be had, and there is spiritual victory, and there is joy in the Lord and the filling of the Spirit, but those things don’t come in spite of our trials.
2. Most often they come through, and with, and alongside our trials.
3. In various ways, we will all struggle every day as we make our earthly pilgrimage.
4. And for the most part, we can’t choose our trials, nor can we avoid many of them.
5. But we can choose how we respond to them – this is the part that is up to us.
6. It is our faith and our perspective that makes all the difference.
7. God does not intend to destroy us by the trials He allows to come our way.
8. Those things that are now so painful will one day be seen as benefits to our spiritual growth.
9. They are not meant to defeat us, but to be the means to a greater spiritual victory.
11. Therefore, we should not complain when hard times come, but we should rejoice if we believe what God has said, because every trial is another step on the stairway that leads from immaturity to maturity, and from earth to heaven.
12. May God help us to persevere in the midst of our trials, so that our trials become our triumphs.
Resources:
• Handbook for Hard Times, Sermon by Ray Prichard, Keepbelieving.com
• Rubel Shelly, What Christian Living Is All About (20th Century Christian)
• Sermon Series by John Huffman, Jr., St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church, Newport Beach, CA
• Warren Wiersbe, The Bible Exposition Commentary, Victor Books
• The NIV Application Commentary: James, by David Nystrom, Zondervan, 1997.
