James

Joy is a Choice

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Count it all joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance. James 1:2-3 NIV

Who doesn’t want joy? From a thousand book titles to the theme of a million Christmas cards, the word joy beckons us towards this seemingly elusive feeling. But the Bible’s concept of joy, is not a feeling that comes and goes in our lives, but a command to embrace just as we embrace our children, on both their good days and bad. But the Bible doesn’t ask us to blindly jump up and down when things go awry. Today’s verse gives us tells us that we can rejoice because trial teach us perseverance. I am reminded of when, as a teenager, I worked in a factory that producing copper tubing. When the tubing first arrived, it came in 5-inch diameter, thick-walled tubes, each one being almost 20 feet in length. Our job was to take those rough tubes and extrude them into much smaller precisely manufactured pieces. But first, the copper had to be annealed. Annealing is a process of rapidly heating the copper in a furnace and then immersing it in cold water. Without annealing, the copper remained hard and impossible for us to work with. But once the annealing was completed, the tubes were softened, so we could they could be extruded into the various sizes our customers needed.

Trials are what God uses to anneal our character. Before facing trials, most of us are too overconfident and proud of our own abilities for God to use us to serve others. But I have found that He is an expert at using circumstances to heat up my world, and then just as things seem unbearably hot, He turns things around plunges me into cold water. When the shock of these changes wears off and I turn to God for help, I discover that though my situation has not altered, somehow, miraculously, God has changed my own heart. The desires, dreams and goals I held so tightly to earlier now have been replaced by His and a peace, greater than I can understand. Then I realize that God has got me right where I belong, and a joy, that no one can take away settles in my soul.

Spiritual Bug Squashing

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For if anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he is like a man who looks intently at his natural face in a mirror. For he looks at himself and goes away and at once forgets what he was like. James 1:23-24 ESV

A few weeks ago I shared how on the farm I needed a flashlight to find my way out to the barn and how that is like God’s word being a lamp for our path. But sometimes God’s word also shows us some things on the inside of us that really aren’t so great. That reminds me of a recent incident coming into the bathroom in the morning and switching on the light. Suddenly I saw perched on the lip of our brand new sink, the biggest ugliest palmetto bug ever! It didn’t take more than a few seconds for me to usher our uninvited guest into eternity and thankfully though I looked high and low he hadn’t brought along any friends or relatives! Now you would think it pretty strange if I had simply switched off the light and gone back to bed. You would probably say, “That’s disgusting! You’ve got to kill that critter!” But I could reply. “Yeah but it’s so much easier to just go back to sleep.”

Now that’s a funny story and even if I thought going back to bed was an option, my wife would never let me get away with it. So let’s ask ourselves today, how often do we wake up in the morning, read our Bible and decide that flicking off the light seems easier than dealing with the issues it reveals? Now I admit that, the spiritual solutions to straightening out relationships, telling someone we’re sorry or paying back an overdue loan from a friend are all much more painful than getting rid of a palmetto bug. But James encourages us in the following verse that if we take action, God has a special blessing in store. Jesus doesn’t just leave us on our own to do all the spiritual bug squashing . Instead He comes along side with his Holy Spirit to show us what to do next. We must never forget to be thankful for the blood of Jesus that forgives our past sins. But we must also remember that God wants to shine His word in our hearts, so that as we walk up His pathway we can live a life for Him with the light on, both on the inside and out!

But the one who looks into the perfect law, the law of liberty, and perseveres, being no hearer who forgets but a doer who acts, he will be blessed in his doing. James 1:25