James – .this.liminal.state.

(Most of my posts are simply the notes that I use when I preach with minimal editing afterward. In most cases, the notes alone may leave holes that I flesh out in the message. Make sure you stream or download the sermon to get more than the notes offer.) james recap (link to audio file for streaming or free download) Here we are on our last week of studying the book of James. We finished up the textual study last week with the last few verses, and this week we are going to recap the entire book. I hope that the …

James 5-13-20 (audio file)   Open your Bibles please to James Chapter 5. We are going to be finishing the final verses of James today. Next week we will be doing a summary of the book, reminding us of the things that we have learned as we have studied this book. And so you can be looking ahead, we will be taking a week to look at some lessons from the book of Nehemiah on vision. Then a few weeks to prepare to celebrate Easter. After which I will be preaching through our statement of faith.   Last week we learned …

James 5-7-12 (audio file) Open your Bibles to the book of James. We are reading again from chapter 5. this time we will be looking at verses 7-12. Last week we looked at a startling verse aimed at the rich. those who have hoarded their wealth and possessions, those who have gained it dishonestly, and those who have used it selfishly are all to weep and howl, for the Lord sees all of that as evidence against them, and that all of our hearts will be judged by the evidence that is before the judge. This week we have a bit …

James 4-11-17 (audio file) Here we are again in James. Today we are reading more from Chapter 4. I am actually including part of our text from last week because we didn’t really address it, and it flows into our passage for this week. If you weren’t here last week what you missed was us addressing James speaking to us about the root cause of quarrels and fights. He said it was our passions inside of us, passions the want to elevate ourselves and put ourselves on the throne of our hearts, which is an inversion of the created order, …

James 4-1-12 2 (audio File)   This is, believe it or not, the eighth message in our series of James. We stared it 12 weeks ago however, so it has seemed longer that we have been in it. So, just to bring you up to speed, James is a leader in the church of Jerusalem, he is the brother of Jesus, and he introduces himself as a servant of Christ, more specifically a bond servant of Christ. We established in the first week of this series that we need to have our identity in Christ if we are going to be …

James 3:13-18 Where is Your Wisdom From? (audio file) Well, if you were here last week, you know that we got back into our study of James. We looked at the passage that addresses our tongue and how our words carry a great deal of influence, that our predisposition is to use our words to inflict pain because of our sinful nature. That when we become a Christian, our speech should reflect the change that has taken place in our hearts. When you have Christ in your heart, your speech will be transformed, as your heart is transformed by Christ. …

James 2:1-13 “Dont Be Partial” (audio file) Fourth week of James. Last week we looked at a passage that dealt with how we receive the Word of God. As I have said from the beginning, the things that James points out for us are not things that will make us more Holy, but he wants to draw out for us symptoms of a deeper problem. You see, just as in our time, there were people in James’ day that wrongly assumed that “belief” in Christ was enough for them to be saved. They looked at the good news as something to …