Profiting From Trials In Our Lives

Profiting from trials in our lives

James chapter 1:2 & selected verses from James

Good Morning church

Please turn to the New Testament book of James Chapter 1 and we will begin by reading just verse 2 and then some other selected verses from James.

James 1:2 Read slowly

You listen on TV and read things written on the internet and you quickly see that many people profit on the backs of someone else’s troubles and trials.

Ambulance chasers so to speak that because of someone else’s misery will make a profit.

Revolutionary, Greatest Ever!

Wild claims that their product is the best, their ways of doing things is the best…the product is new and improved…capable of changing our lives forever if we would just buy.

For a few dollars a week…you can have whiter teeth, cleaner clothes, glamorous hair, better tasting foods.

Politicians kissing babies and promising the moon and never getting their ideas off the ground.

You get the point… talk is cheap.

If you do not do what you say or the product does not do what you promise, then they are empty words with no meaning.

One commentary went as far to state that if we are not careful that even Christians sharing and living out their faith can counterfeit the gospel by a contrasting life.

Jesus is the answer! Believe in God! Follow me to church.

All these thoughts on bumper stickers mean nothing if you are not living the life that you are claiming.

What happens if you are following the person with those bumper stickers on the car and you see them doing things that contradict the saying they ride along with?

James the half brother of Jesus confronts this head on!

It is not enough to talk about the Christian faith…he says we have to live it.

James chapter 2:14 says “What does it profit, my brother, if someone says he has faith but does not have works? Can faith save him? The proof of reality of our faith is a changed life!

Don’t tell me how much you love Jesus show me!

Don’t tell me how much you love God’s people show me!

Don’t tell me you want to see people come to know Jesus show me!

What does it profit brother? He is talking to the church here not the unsaved and ones that do not know Jesus as Lord.

Our text looks at some general characteristics of the Christian life.

Blueprint of James-

Right relationship with the Lord

Genuine faith that pleases God

Wisdom that comes from God

This will be a quest of character as we learn from scripture how we should act in trials and persecution.

Quest for character is a search.

The world searches for stuff and material things, godly people search ways to please the Lord with their lives.

Character is not made in a crisis, it is what is revealed in a crisis.

Character is what we are made of.

Look to the one on your left and say “I am the best”, now look to your right and say “you are right”

There is your ego boost for the day- now let’s look at what James wants us to learn!

Points of interest to see this morning so that you are not acting like the early church that confessed Jesus is Lord and then did not act like it when they going through some of their trails

profiting from trials

loving God under trials

Qualities needed in trials

Profiting from the trials in our lives

making what we go through account for something in our lives

(2) “Count it all joy when you fall into various trials”

No one except someone filled with the Spirit of the living God is able to say that you have joy when you are going though trials and troubles in your life.

Ever since the martyr of Steven (Acts 7) the church has come under persecution for their faith. The early church scatters and evangelism explodes but so does the persecution of the people spreading His word.

From day one there has always been a cost for following Jesus.

James does not tell us we might face trails, he says that we will.

You can expect it …when you face trials.

He says that you will and he says that you can profit from the trials that are in your life.

You would have to be pretending to be happy when these trials and hardships are going on in your life and you run around with a big smile on your face-don’t pretend to be happy.

That would be a little sadistic. The point is not to pretend to be happy, it is to have a positive outlook or attitude when you go through them because of what trials can produce in your life.