Trial Response - James 1:2-4
You ever had one of those
days? You know, a Monday? You get out of bed and make your way into the
bathroom, stumping your toes on the leg of the footboard on the way. Reaching for your toothbrush holder, you
misjudge and bump it instead of picking it up, causing your toothbrush to fall
out. The toothbrush bounces off the side
of the sink and into the toilet because you left the lid open. The smoke alarm goes off thanks to the
smoldering toast your forgot about because you were changing clothes because
you were unaware of the hairline crack in your favorite coffee mug until your
first sip left a streak down your white dress shirt. As you head out the door to work, you
remember you forgot to get gas the night before, so you are figuring a quick
stop to get enough gas to get you to work and back, and as you unlock the door
you notice the rear tire on your side is flat, and you can see the screw
sticking out the edge between the bottom and sidewall of the tire. After enduring an unforgiving lecture from
your boss for arriving at work fifteen minutes late, you begin printing out the
report for your lunchtime meeting, only to have the copier jam every fifth page
as you print out 20 copies of your 15 page report. After watching the rain fall for the last two
hours and wondering if it will stop before you get off work, you remember you never
closed where you vented the sunroof when you went across town for that lunch
meeting. On the way home, sitting in
your water laden driver’s seat with the dampness soaking into your clothes, you
get a text reminding you that you are supposed to stop on the way home for
dinner with your future in-laws, begging you not to be late. The battery on your phone dying before you
can call and explain your situation. As
you crawl into bed that night, you are never so glad to lay your head down at
the end of a day that would make “Murphy’s Law” look like an optimistic
statement.
The description of that
day may be a little over the top.
However, we have all, at some point in our lives, had those days where
it seemed like if anything could go wrong, it did. I’m not sure how we came to associate those
kind of days with “Mondays,” unless that it was because it came out of a day
and time when most work weeks were Monday to Friday and workers had just
finished a relaxing weekend of family and worship time.
How do we usually respond
to those “Mondays”? Some of us dread
them. Some of us become depressed when
we know they are coming or encounter them.
Some of us respond like Garfield and others in the comic strip with, “I
hate Mondays.” Some of us do anything we
can to avoid them.
The question is, “How
does God’s Word suggest we are to deal with Mondays?” The Letter of James gives us an answer. No, James doesn’t say, “When you face
Mondays….” In fact neither Monday nor
any of the other days of the week as we call them ever appear in the
Scriptures. However, if Monday
represents the day when we imagine anything going wrong, if Monday represents
of day of trials and troubles that weigh us down, then we find that James does
address it.
The truth of the matter
is that James says a whole lot to us about trials in just these three verses.
First, like Mondays,
trials are going to come. They are not
something we can avoid or ignore. We
cannot pull a Garfield and pull the cover over our heads and pretend that
Monday is not happening. James says,
“whenever you face trials.” They are
going to happen. Somewhere along the
line Christians have gotten the idea that because we have a relationship with
Christ we are not going to have to endure trials and tribulations, that somehow
God is going to protect us from having to face them or is going to sweep us
away from here before we encounter any true troubles. God’s Word makes it clear that is not the
case. Jesus says, “In the world you face
persecution.”[i] He also says, “…they will arrest you and
persecute you…You will be betrayed even by parents and brothers, by relatives
and friends; and they will put some of you to death.”[ii] Paul says:
Five times I have received from the Jews the forty lashes
minus one. Three times I was beaten with rods. Once I received a stoning. Three
times I was shipwrecked; for a night and a day I was adrift at sea; on frequent
journeys, in danger from rivers, danger from bandits, danger from my own
people, danger from Gentiles, danger in the city, danger in the wilderness,
danger at sea, danger from false brothers and sisters; in toil and hardship,
through many a sleepless night, hungry and thirsty, often without food, cold
and naked. And, besides other things, I am under daily pressure because of my
anxiety for all the churches.[iii]
If what Paul encountered
was escaping trial and tribulations, I don’t want to know what trials and
tribulations look like.
Secondly, James knows it
is a given that we will face trials and tribulations so he tries to tell us how
we are to respond to them. James says
our trial response should “Joy.”
James says, “My brothers
and sisters, whenever you face trials of any kind, consider it nothing but
joy….” James tells us we are not
supposed to face our trials with anger, hatred, avoidance, dread, or
depression, we are supposed to respond with joy.
Joy. Joy?
Joy. We are supposed to respond
to the trials we face with joy
James says that we are to
respond with joy to any type of trial we face…whether it be a trials of
persecution or hardship, trials of sickness, trials of temptation, trials of
poverty, trials of any sort.
Why? Because James understands our trials to be a
means of testing our faith, and James understands that when our faith is
tested, the endurance of our faith increases.
In this way James is echoing Paul’s words to the church in Rome:
“we…boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and
endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not
disappointment us.”[iv]
James and Paul both know
that the more we endure, the stronger we get.
We can see that in so many ways.
As I am working on this
sermon, Joshua is playing a racing video game.
He battles his way to third.
Rather than give up because he didn’t finish first, he plays again and
again, eventually finishing second, and then he continues to race that same
race, building up skills to tackle that track, until he comes out on top.
A friend and colleague of
mine, Adam Seate at St. Luke in Goldsboro, is preparing to run in the New York
Marathon. He prepares his body for that
endurance run. He doesn’t do it by
running a mile and then quitting. He
doesn’t do it by stopping before he starts hurting. He doesn’t do it by avoiding running altogether
because he knows the soreness will come.
He spends weeks and months preparing.
Pushing his body to the limits.
As he puts his body through repeated trials, he builds up endurance,
enabling him to tackle the full 26.2 miles in less than a month.
Think of battling an
illness. When we battle a particular
illness, our bodies produce antibodies to fight off that illness. Once we are well, samples of those antibodies
remain in our system to fight off that particular strain of sickness were we to
encounter it again.
Consider an
addict—whether it be drugs, tobacco, alcohol, eating, shopping—each day we face
the temptation to give in. When we face
that temptation head on, fight through the temptation, and find ourselves, one
day at a time, coming out clean, we realize God has given us the strength to
get through one more day, and He will be there to give us strength for the
next.
James, and Paul, tell us as
we encounter the trials of life, whether it be troubles with our health,
troubles with our jobs, troubles in our families, whether we face temptations
to give in to sin, or whether we are persecuted for what we believe with folks
making fun of us or ridiculing us for what we believe or we have our lives or
livelihood threatened for our faith, when we come out on the other side of the
situation and find God’s faithfulness has given us the strength to endure or
overcome, our faith is strengthened, our hope is built up, and we come out
stronger.
Mondays will come. We will survive. We will lay our head down at night. That way when the next Monday comes around,
rather than pull the cover over our heads, we can smile and say “bring it on,”
because we know God will give us the strength to endure it, maturing our faith, as we walk closer with
Christ, realizing that He always walks close to us.
In the Name of the Father
and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit…Amen.
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