In one of his books, James Emery White tells of the Russian-American comic, Yakov Smirnoff’s, initial response to the incredible variety of instant products available in American grocery stores. He said, "On my first shopping trip, I saw powdered milk--you just add water, and you get milk. Then I saw powdered orange juice--you just add water, and you get orange juice. And then I saw baby powder, and I thought to my self, what a country!"
Wouldn’t it be great if conception and childbirth were that easy? Maybe not. Wouldn’t it be great to just add water to our spiritual births and voila instant spiritual maturity! However, it isn’t that easy, is it?
The spiritual growth and maturity that we have heard from the pages of James the past two months comes from a long-term dedicated commitment to cooperate with the Holy Spirit to grow out of spiritual infancy into mature spiritual adulthood.
Two weeks ago, I concluded with a question, ‘What kind of a Christian do you think you would be called at the end of your life?’ and I shared from L. Durham’s sermon, ‘What Punctuation Mark Best Describes Your Life?’ five types of Christians. They were (Overhead 1):
A QUESTION MARK Christian
A PERIOD Christian
A HYPHENATED Christian
A COMMA Christian,
Or an EXCLAMATION POINT Christian
I want us to keep that question in mind today as we conclude our series in the book of James. Pastor Travis Moore’s sermon theme of ‘Show Me Your Faith’ from his sermon ‘Jet Tour through James’ has served us as a thematic guide in our walk through this important book. Today, as the bulletin indicates, the challenge and encouragement to us is to Show me your faith… by your spiritual maturity.
Pastor Jim Mooney, in a sermon entitled, ‘Marks of a Mature Person’ has echoed several of the same themes that we have heard presented over the past four sermons and, when it comes to this segment of James, he makes an important observation: (Overhead 2)
A MATURE PERSON IS PATIENT AND PRAYERFUL
He says, ‘[James is] saying, ‘Be patient and be prayerful.’ He gives the illustration of the farmer. If anybody has to have patience, it’s a farmer.
He does a lot of waiting. He plants a seed, waits, prays, hopes, expects ... he waits. There are no overnight crops. Just like a farmer has to wait, sometimes we have to wait.
Mooney goes on to say, ‘We have to wait on God in answer to prayer. We have to wait on God for a miracle. We have to wait on God to work in our lives. We have to wait. Patience is a mark of maturity. The only way you learn patience is by waiting.’
He concludes with, ‘We must be patient and prayerful toward one another. My children are finally learning the difference between "No" and "Not yet". For a long time they thought that "not yet" meant "we’re not going to get to do it". They thought it meant No -- it just means Not yet. Many times God will say to you, "Not yet." He doesn’t mean "No". He doesn’t mean He’s not going to answer your prayer. He just saying, you’ve got to wait, I want you to develop, to grow.’
Easier said than done, right?
I believe, and you have heard me say in the past, God wants to help us develop patience because it is a critical characteristic of spiritual maturity.
I also believe that as we review the Fruits of the Spirit in Galatians 5:22 and 23, the placement of ‘patience’ (which is one of the fruits) is very important to notice. ‘But when the Holy Spirit controls our lives,’ writes Paul, ‘he will produce this kind of fruit in us: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.’
I would suggest to us this morning that when we allow the Spirit to build love, joy, and peace into our character and lives that patience becomes more of a reality in us. Now by love, joy, and peace, I mean God’s love, God’s joy, and God’s peace.
God’s love, Paul reminds us in I Corinthians 13, is ‘patient.’ God’s joy comes out of heart full of God’s love because the joy of God is rooted in the character of God and not the circumstances of life. ‘The joy of Lord,’ we have sung, ‘is my strength.’
Then there is God’s peace. It is a peace rooted in the character and nature of God. It is peace that ‘passes all understanding.’ It is a peace that transcends circumstances and brings a steadiness to our hearts and souls that stabilizes us in the midst of our storms.
I recall the time when my father suddenly died of probably a second heart attack. It came at the end of a week when my supervisor fired me from my part-time job for ‘lack of loyalty.’
Actually, he tried to fire me and after I spoke with his supervisor’s supervisor, I found out that he was demoted the day before he started firing people. So I still had a job and as I was dealing one of my greatest fears, being fired, I got the call from my mom that dad had passed.
God’s peace was present with me in the midst of my grief and fear. He helped me through that period for while my dad went to be with the Lord, I worked at that job for another year before I was permanently laid off.
This created a great deal of fear in me because I thought, ‘now what?’ However, the very next day after I was laid off, the church from where I came from to here, called and asked if I would be interested in a position. God’s peace invaded my heart and I knew that I was going to be okay.
A patient person, when you stop to think about it, is loving, joyful, and peaceful. Take away any one of these three characteristics and patience takes a holiday.
Then there is the issue of prayer as part of spiritual maturity.
Martin Luther once wrote, “If I should neglect prayer but a single day, I should lose a great deal of the fire of faith.”
John Bunyan said, ‘He who runs from God in the morning will scarcely find Him the rest of the day.’
Prayer is power and a mature believer understands that power is necessary to live for God. In fact, a mature believer gives clear evidence of faith in what George Muller calls ‘the spirit of prayer.’
When asked how much time he spent in prayer he replied, “Hours every day. But I live in the spirit of prayer. I pray as I walk and when I lie down and when I arise. And the answers are always coming.”
James reminds us in verse 16, ‘The prayer of a righteous person has great power and wonderful results.’ He then goes on to remind his audience of Elijah’s prayer that caused the rain to stop for three years!
‘Now,’ we might say today, ‘I wish that I could have that kind of prayer power.’ Well, we can! God wants us to pray with power but we can’t, to extend Smirnoff’s humorous insight, ‘buy prayer powder and just add water.’ Those that we consider the ‘great pray-ers’ did not get that way overnight.
But, the power of prayer is still at work in the world and a reminder of a recent time in our history highlights the power of prayer to work in a terrible and desperate situation.
It was the fall, I believe of 2002 or 2003 and our nation held its breath as a string of random shootings in the Washington DC area took place. Eventually the shooters were caught. But do you know the story behind their capture? Prayer was involved in it!
Dennis Selfridge quotes from the Presidential Prayer Team newsletter of the prayers of a team of 50 praying truck drivers including one named Ron Lantz as follows:
‘50 Christian truckers got together to pray that somehow the sniper terrorizing the Washington, DC area would be caught. Ron Lantz would be retiring as a driver in a few days and didn’t even live in the area, but he felt sure that God would answer their prayers. In fact, he
told the others there that God was going to use him to catch the sniper.
A few days later, he was listening to the radio as he was driving again through the region and felt compelled to pull off the highway to a rest stop. It was just a couple of miles from where the prayer meeting had
taken place. As he pulled in, he was shocked to see a car similar to what was being described on the radio right there before his eyes.
Carefully trying to read the license plate, a chill went up his back as the numbers matched. He quickly called 911 and remained there for what he said were the longest 15 minutes of his life until the police arrived. He even pulled his truck across the exit, there would now be no
escape for these elusive murderers. The rest is now history-the snipers were taken into custody without incident.’
A couple of things stand out to me about this story. (Overhead 3)
Ron had the faith to believe that the sniper would be caught. His statement believing that God was going to use him was not some brash and egotistic statement. It came from the confident belief that God would deal with the situation and that the sniper would be found.
This story also demonstrates the connection between faith and action, something that James has made clear. We see it in Ron’s acting on a compelling feeling to stop at the very rest area that the snipers were located.
Perhaps one of the reasons that the power of prayer in our lives seems to stumble is that our fear takes over at a critical time. Maybe the Lord is calling us to take a new job, but the fear of change and the unknown stops us from stepping out in faith to seek new employment. Maybe there is a relationship that we want to repair but fear keeps us from attempting to repair the relationship because we fear that we will be misinterpreted or our attempts will be rebuffed.
Ron faced his fears and in spite of his fear, acted on what he saw and knew, as he checked the plate, called 9-1-1, and then placed his truck in a blocking fashion. Would you and I have done that?
The spiritual mature persons understands the origins of fear – from the Evil One himself. For if Satan can get us to step back from stepping out in faith, fear continues to be used against us. And we become miserable.
I recall the fear and confusion in those days after my first termination and I remember Susan telling me that I could do something about it or let it go. Well I decided to express my feelings about the situation and I did so in spite of my fears.
And when I finally lost my job, I also had to work through my fears of the future for God was in that whole process and as I look back, I can see how God was at work.
I encourage you to continue to read the book of James throughout your lifetime. It is a challenging book that throws no punches.
However, if we can get beyond the sharp statements and see the heart and love a pastor who wants his congregation to thrive and grow as maturing believers has for them, we too, will experience the greater life that God has for us.
I began this series with a statement, “Show me what you’ve got!” I conclude this series with this statement, “Show the world what you’ve got because of the Spirit and love of God working in your life.” Amen.
Stories and illustrations used in the sermon are taken from www.sermoncentral.com.
The overheads from this sermon (on PowerPoint) are available from me. Please e-mail me at pastorjim46755@yahoo.com and ask for 082805svgs)
