Speak No Evil; James

May the mumbling commence!

Speak no evil.  It is a concise statement, but one difficult to live by.  Yet it is what we are called to do.  Read from James chapter four (NRSV):

Do not speak evil against one another, brothers and sisters. Whoever speaks evil against another or judges another, speaks evil against the law and judges the law; but if you judge the law, you are not a doer of the law but a judge.  There is one lawgiver and judge who is able to save and to destroy. So who, then, are you to judge your neighbor? (Verses 11-12)

Do not speak evil of your brothers and sisters – nor your neighbor.  That is hard.  We know well our brothers and sisters and neighbors.  We know the dirt on them.  It is hard to refrain from harping on them. 

It can seem to make us feel better.  It can seem to make us look better.

But not in the eyes of the Lord!  Our Creator sees what division it causes and it grieves Him.

Speak evil of someone else.  Judge them.  Do so at the peril of judging the very Law of God. 

James calls us to spend less time using the Law to judge and more time using the Law to guide our attitudes and thoughts and behaviors.  And we often fall well short on the ideal of the Law.  We explored that idea yesterday.

So, indeed, who are we to judge our neighbor?  We, too, need the mercy of the Lord.  Why not pass along that mercy to those in our debt?

Only the Lord can rightly judge.  God help us all.

Enough mumbling for now…

Peace Out

All or Nothing; James

May the mumbling commence!

With the Law of the Lord, it is all or nothing.  Therefore, we should live in the attitude of mercy over and against the attitude of judgment.  Read from James chapter two (NIV):

For whoever keeps the whole law and yet stumbles at just one point is guilty of breaking all of it.  For he who said, "Do not commit adultery," also said, "Do not murder." If you do not commit adultery but do commit murder, you have become a lawbreaker. 

Speak and act as those who are going to be judged by the law that gives freedom, because judgment without mercy will be shown to anyone who has not been merciful. Mercy triumphs over judgment! (Verses 10-13)

The Law of the Lord reflects His entire being.  If we break one of those Laws, we destroy the reflection that we are of that image.  That is a scary thought!

Thank God for mercy!  Mercy is what we are to remember when we speak and act.  Mercy allow freedom in our lives.

Be merciful and see mercy triumph over judgment!

Enough mumbling for now…

Peace Out

Do Not Be Deceived; James

May the mumbling commence!

There are many things to divide our attention.  At times, every section of our lives suffers because of our divided attention.  Who is to blame?  Who is to blame for this temptation to spread ourselves so thin?

Do not blame it on our Creator.  Be very careful not to.  Read from James chapter one (NASB):

Let no one say when he is tempted, "I am being tempted by God"; for God cannot be tempted by evil, and He Himself does not tempt anyone.  But each one is tempted when he is carried away and enticed by his own lust. 

Then when lust has conceived, it gives birth to sin; and when sin is accomplished, it brings forth death.  Do not be deceived, my beloved brethren. (Verses 13-16)

God neither tempts us nor does God seek to divide us.  God calls us together to worship Him.  Any other thought is only a deception.  Do not be deceived.

Our attentions and devotion are divided by our own desires and lusts.  We work hard to fill our desires and lusts – whether those desires are to be self-serving or to be people pleasers.  This type and attitude of hard work distracts us from the one thing that we need the most.

We need to be in healthy relationship with our Creator.  We need to be in healthy relationship with the creation… and that includes our brothers and sister, our neighbors.

Let us not follow our various lusts to their ultimate conclusion… which is sin… which lead to death.  Let us choose life instead.

Enough mumbling for now…

Peace Out

God's Bottom Line; James

May the mumbling commence!

Most of us would know what is meant by the bottom line.  It all comes down to money.  Nothing else matters.  Everything is fair game if it will improve my wealth.

God has a different bottom line.  It all comes down to relationship.  Everything else is secondary.  Read from James chapter five (NJB):

Well now, you rich! Lament, weep for the miseries that are coming to you.  Your wealth is rotting, your clothes are all moth-eaten.  All your gold and your silver are corroding away, and the same corrosion will be a witness against you and eat into your body. It is like a fire which you have stored up for the final days. 

Can you hear crying out against you the wages which you kept back from the laborers mowing your fields? The cries of the reapers have reached the ears of the Lord Sabaoth.  On earth you have had a life of comfort and luxury; in the time of slaughter you went on eating to your heart's content.  It was you who condemned the upright and killed them; they offered you no resistance. (5:1-6)

The bottom line in the United States is a cancer.  It eats away at our bodies.  It devours relationships.  It eventually will bring judgment on us.

The message is clear – think about those you relate with on a daily basis.  Think about the people that you work with.  Think about the people in your family.  Think about the people that you play with.  Think about the people you pray with.

Think and care for them as well or better than you think about and care for yourself.  Your prosperity and security and happiness are intertwined with the prosperity and security and happiness of all of humanity.

Let us give God’s bottom line a try.  Let’s jettison the “business model” for our church bodies.  Let’s trade on the basis of relationship.  Let’s try, with the help of the guiding Holy Spirit, to make relationships right with God and all of creation.

Enough mumbling for now…

Peace Out

Be Careful How You Plan; James

May the mumbling commence!

You can depend on God.  If you seek to depend on anyone or anything else, then your chances of being disappointed rise dramatically.  So be careful how you plan.  Make sure your plans always keep God in their focus.  Read from James chapter four (NLT):

Look here, you people who say, "Today or tomorrow we are going to a certain town and will stay there a year. We will do business there and make a profit."  How do you know what will happen tomorrow? For your life is like the morning fog – it's here a little while, then it's gone. 

What you ought to say is, "If the Lord wants us to, we will live and do this or that."  Otherwise you will be boasting about your own plans, and all such boasting is evil. 

Remember, it is sin to know what you ought to do and then not do it. (Verses 13-17)

It is far too easy to get caught up in our plans for the future.  We may even think that we plan with God in mind.  But if we do not take the time and effort to listen to the Spirit of God speaking to us, then we may not have such a good idea of what God wants us to do.  And we can get very far off the track (which is a narrow one, by the way).

Once we find out what God wants us to do, we cannot stop there.  We must do it.  Clear your planner or you calendar.  God has His best in mind for you.  So do it.  Anything less is settling for less than who God created you to be.  Anything less ends in evil.

Enough mumbling for now…

Peace Out

A Key to Deepening Community; James

May the mumbling commence!

Want to know a key to deepening community?  The community that prays together stays together.  Be open.  Be honest.  The synergy between you (all) and God will help miracles to happen.  Read from James chapter five (Peterson’s The Message paraphrase):

Are you hurting?  Pray.  Do you feel great?  Sing.  Are you sick?  Call the church leaders together to pray and anoint you with oil in the name of the Master.  Believing-prayer will heal you, and Jesus will put you on your feet.  And if you’ve sinned, you’ll be forgiven – healed inside and out.

Make this your common practice: Confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you can live together whole and healed.  The prayer of a person living right with God is something powerful to be reckoned with.  Elijah, for instance, human just like us, prayed hard that it wouldn’t rain, and it didn’t – not a drop for three and a half years.  Then he prayed that it would rain, and it did.  The showers came and everything started to grow again.

My dear friends, if you know people who have wandered off from God’s truth, don’t write them off.  Go after them.  Get them back and you will have rescued precious lives from destruction and prevented an epidemic of wandering away from God.  (Verses 13-20)

Give full expression to your hurts and glories and sicknesses.  You will make yourself vulnerable in doing this, but you will also open the door to a deeper level of community.  With the grace of God, this level of God-like community will bring healing both inside and out. 

The world will see individuals and a community whole and healed.  What a witness to the power and love and mercy and grace of God!

Together, we will find the God-groove.  Then the things that we ask for would be in the keeping of the Way of Jesus.  We can be confident that we will get what we ask for in those cases.

And, when things go wrong (which they will), know that you are to pursue those who are wandering from the God-groove.  Go get them.  Get them back.  Precious lives will be saved.

This kind of rich communal prayer will make for an ever-deepening community, where belonging is no longer a question.

May it be so!  Amen.

Enough mumbling for now…

Peace Out

Conflict Resolution; James

May the mumbling commence!

All of us like to be well and whole.  Peace is a wonderful place to be.  But how do we get there when our lives seem to be nothing but a string of conflicts?  Read from James chapter four (NRSV):

Those conflicts and disputes among you, where do they come from? Do they not come from your cravings that are at war within you?  You want something and do not have it; so you commit murder. And you covet something and cannot obtain it; so you engage in disputes and conflicts. You do not have, because you do not ask.  You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, in order to spend what you get on your pleasures.  Adulterers! Do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God? Therefore whoever wishes to be a friend of the world becomes an enemy of God. (Verses 1-4)

If we allow our appetites and cravings reign, there will be no peace.  They only know how to ask for more and more.  Their intent is to satisfy themselves and worry little or not at all about others.  Soon nothing else will matter other than satisfying our appetites and cravings.

What happens when two different people’s appetites conflict?  Sometimes we covet what another person has.  You want it but do not have it.  Eventually, if left unchecked, our appetites will stop at nothing to satisfy themselves.  Conflict and disputes will be the order of the day.

And if conflicts and disputes will not get what we want, then we will up the ante.  We will be willing to overlook damage done to others… even so far as counting their lives as forfeit.

You may stop and think that we don’t do this.  But you’re wrong.  In this country, we have been accustomed to low prices on products and service.  Those low prices come at the cost of refusing to offer a living wage to an employee.  Those low prices come at the cost of sub-standard health care insurance.  Those low prices… well, someone else is taking the proverbial short end of the stick.

It is no wonder that conflict and disputes in our world are many and manifold.  Until we bridle our appetites, the peace and wholeness and wellness of all creatures in this world will be impossible to attain.  And that, my brothers and sisters is enmity with God.

Help us, O Lord.  Help us to know what to ask for and why to ask for it.  We greatly desire that peace.  Help us to be willing to pay the price for peace – a price that never should include violence of any sort: physical, mental, verbal or spiritual.

Enough mumbling for now…

Peace Out