Encounter the Truth

Guest (Male): James says when it comes to trials, the illness, the time of fear, the loss of a loved one, the career setback, the financial crisis, the relational breakdown, he says, make that decision to identify and count such experiences as joy.

Welcome to Encounter the Truth with Jonathan Griffiths. And Jonathan, hold up for a second. You just said the hard things of life, the financial instability, the crisis, the breakdown of a relationship. Maybe somebody listening today just had a spouse say, "I'm out," and you're saying, "Wait a minute, I'm supposed to count these trials as joy?"

Jonathan Griffiths: It's such a surprising thing, isn't it? And on first reading it, it's difficult to make sense of it, I think, when we read this in the Bible, when we hear these words. But as we follow on the logic of James and we follow the thread of what he's saying, he's saying that we can make that kind of mental and emotional accounting decision to count trials as joy because for the Christian, we know that trials are achieving something. And he wants to open up that truth for us and invite us into an understanding of how that can be.

Guest (Male): All right, so help me understand this here. I get bad news, how do I attribute that, account that as something to be joyful about?

Jonathan Griffiths: Well, James wants us to see that in the midst of these trials, in and through these trials, actually, the Lord will work and does work in the hearts of his people to test our faith, and that's an uncomfortable thing, but to produce steadfastness that will enable us to mature in our faith and reach a point even that he calls completeness. And that's something that if we belong to Jesus Christ, we we want to reach, even if we know that it's going to involve pain and challenge to get there.

But to enter into a deeper understanding of that, we're going to have to explore a little bit more what James has to say to us in this opening chapter.

Guest (Male): Well, let's do that. Grab a Bible, join us in James chapter one, looking at the first 11 verses as we begin a message called, "How to Become Steadfast and Wise." Here is Jonathan.

Jonathan Griffiths: With the rise of online retailing and in particular online bookstores, one treasure I fear we may lose over time is the treasure of the great bookstore. There are few pleasures in life greater than the pleasures of becoming lost in the depths of a really good bookstore. A well-stocked, diverse bookstore of real quality, preferably scattered with comfortable chairs around the place, ideally served by a good coffee shop inside, you know the kind.

I think my favorite bookstore in all the world is Blackwell's bookstore in the city of Oxford in England. Blackwell's has a has a fairly modest, I mean nice, but not not particularly noteworthy storefront. But as you enter in, the storefront gives way to an immense treasure trove within. It really is wonderful. Stretching far further back than you might imagine, two levels of basement below, if I remember rightly, with a theology section right at the very bottom, two further levels upstairs, a nice coffee shop too. It's not heaven, of course, but it's one of the better places to be found on Earth. And in a rainy day in Oxford, it is the place to be.

Now, in any good bookstore, you will find the full range of titles. You will have the works of high thought, the books of philosophy. You will have the stories of our culture, the works of narrative and storytelling. You will have the books that set out the history of our world. You'll have works of art and poetry that show beauty and call forth emotion.

And somewhere, just somewhere, you will find the really practical books too. The the how-to, do-it-yourself manuals, how to build a fence or wire a light fixture or change the oil in your car. The idiot's guide to whatever it is you need a guide for. Any real bookstore needs a good selection of those somewhere.

Given to us as a single volume, the Bible itself is a wonderfully diverse collection of books, 66 books of a wide variety of kinds, all bound together as God's gift to us. Some books of the Bible relate God's works through history. Some teach truth through poetry. Some are more directly doctrinal, spelling out theological truths in more propositional terms, and some are just very, very practical, the how-to guides.

In the Old Testament, you have a book like Proverbs, telling us simply and directly how to live as the people of God within this world. Now, within the New Testament collection, James stands out for us as the book of great practicality. Perhaps more than any other New Testament letter, James sets out for us the how-to of the Christian life. He gets into the nuts and bolts of what it means to be a Christian believer, to follow Jesus in this world, and to do so with sincerity and integrity and consistency.

James has the highest concentration of imperatives, of calls to action, of any Bible book. There are 50 of them to be found in the 108 verses of this book. In a very real sense, here is the New Testament's practical manual for how to live the Christian life.

Now, we don't know a great deal about the story, the situation or the background of this particular book. The writer introduces himself as James, a servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ. It's most likely, most people agree that it was written by James, the brother of Jesus, who came to be leader of the Jerusalem church. James addresses his letter to the 12 tribes in the dispersion, you'll notice there. That's a very interesting way to begin. It could be as most think that he's writing to a group of Jewish believers, hence the 12 tribes focus. Jewish believers who've been scattered for one reason or another beyond their homeland of Palestine.

He he could be speaking more broadly to a mixed group of believers, Jew and Gentile together, who are scattered throughout the world, but who are known as the children of God, the family of God. In any case, we could study that for a time, but in in either case, he emphasizes a key truth about their situation. He emphasizes the fact that these believers are away from home. They are dispersed, living out there in the world, scattered, isolated, displaced, probably feeling pretty vulnerable.

As we will see as we go on in this letter, even in our passage today, these believers are under pressure as they live out their faith in the world. Suffering and trials and mistreatment are part of their experience. And as they live scattered in the world away from their spiritual homeland, under pressure from those around them, here is what James is concerned about them spiritually. Here is his concern for them. He wants to ensure that they will be, whatever their circumstance, living out their faith energetically, consistently, actively.

He calls them in verse 22, in in perhaps what's the most famous call of the letter, that sort of sums up the heart of it, he says, "Be doers of the word and not hearers only." But he sees that this isn't happening consistently. He actually rebukes them very strongly for their worldliness. In chapter 4 and verse 22, he speaks in the strongest possible terms. He says, "You adulterous people, do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God?"

Scattered throughout the world, conscious of being away from their spiritual homeland, surrounded by those who don't know the Savior, facing pressure, even opposition, walking through trial, being tempted to worldliness, struggling to live out the faith that they believe. That's the story. That's the background. And as I study this letter and I consider some of those dynamics, you know, a thought occurs to me, and I wonder if it's occurred to you too.

It occurs to me that this is a very contemporary, very relevant letter for us today. A letter that speaks to you and that speaks to me in our present situation. And if James has some practical instruction for us, some guidance on how to live as the people of God in such a situation, well, I am all ears. He's got my attention because I need all the help that I can get. And if you're anything like me, I guess you need that help too.

Navigating life in a complex world, when trials come along, where we walk by faith and not by sight, where we face hard decisions and situations of grief and anguish and pain and strain, where we will face opposition from the world around us for our commitment to Christ, where we live with that tension of being away from our spiritual homeland, our eternal home, in the presence of God. Navigating this life as the people of God, we need help. And never more do we need help than in those situations when we face particular trials, acute difficulties, times of suffering, times of loss. And for those times, James has wisdom for us, wisdom from above.

When we encounter times of difficulty and trial, he tells us first of all, we are to count it all joy.

Guest (Male): You're listening to Encounter the Truth with Jonathan Griffiths, and a message called, "How to Become Steadfast and Wise." Now, we have to pause here, but I hope you'll stay with us. We'll get back to the message in just a moment.

Well, this message has been one of the most listened to of the past year. And we've taken this and the other top nine and we've put them together in a series called, "Listener Favorites," which is currently airing on the radio. Some of the other topics we're addressing in this series, how we can have confidence in trials, the cost of self-reliance, and what does enduring faith look like just to name a few. If you're interested in finding out more about this series, or listening to it online, come to our website, encounterthetruth.org.

While you're there, you're also going to see the study guide we put together that will go along with this series, helping you dig a little bit deeper and getting even a little bit more out of this content. The study guide is free, and you're going to find that at the website, encounterthetruth.org. Well, let's get back to James chapter one, looking at the first 11 verses. Again, here is Jonathan.

Jonathan Griffiths: James has wisdom for us, wisdom from above. When we encounter times of difficulty and trial, he tells us first of all, we are to count it all joy. When we face trials, count it all joy. That's his first instruction. Notice it with me, verse two. "Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds."

When a finance manager, an accounts manager, in a business or a large organization goes through the accounts at year end, when an auditor works through the books to prepare the audited report, sometimes there can be a stray item in the accounts, an unfamiliar or an unexpected line, an item that needs to be identified, explained, and then put in the right column. A piece of income or a liability of some kind. What what is this thing? Is it an asset? What column does it belong in? Should it be colored red or or black? We've got to do some work here to find out.

There will come into our lives from time to time situations and experiences that arrive to us as a surprise, even as a shock. They come as something unexpected and frankly quite unwelcome. And when we take stock of our lives and evaluate what's going on, when we stand back and do the accounting, we need to know how it is we're going to make sense of those experiences, how to file them, how to process them, where to put them and what color to assign to them.

And James says, when it comes to trials, to the hard things that stretch you and test you and cause you pain and bring you suffering and grief, the illness, the time of fear, the loss of a loved one, the career setback, the financial crisis, the relational breakdown, he says, "That experience, that chapter in your life, take that thing. And as you do your personal accounting, place that experience not where you might be inclined to place it, in the loss column. Don't place it in the misery column. Don't put it in the column of irredeemability. No, place it in another column. A column called joy. Decide, resolve, make that decision to identify and count such experiences as joy."

Now, that may not sound very realistic. It certainly doesn't sound very easy. But we need to recognize that James isn't saying that we should play a little mental game with ourselves and pretend that these miserable experiences are something that they're not. Pretend that we're happy when in fact we're sad and sad for good reason. Pretend that pain isn't really painful or that loss isn't really loss.

That's not what he's saying. No, joy, we need to recognize, joy is not the same as happiness. It is a deeper thing. It's being satisfied in our deepest spirit because we know and trust the Lord and we have our ultimate delight and our ultimate confidence in him and him alone. And James is saying that the child of God, the follower of Jesus Christ, can and should reckon these experiences, calculate and identify them, count them as joy. And we should do that for a concrete and a specific reason.

A reason he gives us, follow the logic here with me, "Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds, for because you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness."

If you're a parent, you will know that instinct to try and protect your children from hard and painful experiences. You yearn to do that. You would love for them not to experience anything of pain and suffering in this world. Every parent has that instinct. Of course, we do. But at the same time, we know as parents that if we try and kind of wrap our kids up in cotton wool and shield them from every difficulty in life and every possibility of disappointment or loss or sadness or pain. We know that as soon as they leave our home and leave the shelter of our protection, they will be completely incapable of enduring the harsh realities of life in a wider world.

It's it's a bad parenting strategy. We know this. It's a bad parenting strategy to try and insulate our kids from every challenge, every difficulty, every discomfort in life. What we actually need to do is to try as best we're able to equip them to face reality and to endure difficulty. Since we know full well that they won't escape difficulty in this life, we know the best gift we can give them is the tools to enable them to endure, even to thrive. If they leave home in the end with steadfastness, we've given them something of lasting value.

Now, what does our Heavenly Father desire and purpose for us? A life of ease? An escape from difficulty, an avoidance of suffering? We might assume so. But no, in his sovereignty, in his goodness, in his wisdom. That's not how he arranges the circumstances of our lives. What he actually does for us is to arrange and use the real life circumstances that we do face out there in a very broken world, a world where pain and suffering are never in short supply. He arranges and uses those circumstances for the purpose of the testing of our faith.

And when faith is tested, when faith is put under strain, like a muscle lifting a heavy weight, it's not only shown to be true and capable and real, it actually grows in strength under strain. This testing of faith produces steadfastness. It generates endurance. That's another way to translate that same word. An ability to endure and to persevere.

Now, of course, it's not like we have much choice in the matter when we face trial, when we go through testing, when we are called to walk through suffering and difficulty and grief. Nonetheless, James says to us, "Don't short circuit the process. Don't try and run from it. Don't lose patience. You might want to drop the weight because it's too much to bear. It seems too much to bear. But hold it there for a little bit," verse four, "And let steadfastness have its full effect, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing."

For the unbeliever, for the world out there, there is such a thing as meaningless suffering, as empty trial, as purposeless tragedy. That's that's the worst thing about suffering in the world out there. For the unbeliever, there can be no confidence that it means anything or is accomplishing anything. And maybe for some here you feel that emptiness, that lostness, that hopelessness. You're you're you're looking into a dark abyss of loss and suffering. And it's so sobering and you don't know what to do with it.

Well, if that's where you are and that's your situation today, let me say as simply and as clearly as I can, it is a sign, my friend, that you need the Lord Jesus. It is a sign that you need to find hope in him because there is no hope in suffering apart from him. But for the believer, James is telling us, and this is very profound, and it's a huge insight that has the power to transform the experience of trial for us. He's telling us that within the plan of God for his children, trials and difficulties, sufferings and sadnesses, they are purposeful and they are actually heading somewhere.

For the believer, there's no such thing as a senseless tragedy, as meaningless pain, as empty loss. There is no such thing because we are able to have the confidence that in God's design, these trials, painful as they may be, excruciating as they will be in some cases, we have the confidence of faith that tells us that these trials are nonetheless purposeful, even useful within the plan of God.

Now, it's very interesting to me that James insists that the believers know this already. It took me a while to notice this in studying the text. Maybe you saw it already, but it's very interesting. Beginning of verse three, he says, "For you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness." The believers already know this, James is confident. And in a sense, when we think about it, you know, this is Christianity 101. If God is God, we know that he must be at work in trial, in every circumstance of our lives. It only stands to reason that if he is in charge and he is God and has good plans for us, he is able to use all things to achieve his plans.

We know this, but we need to be reminded of it. We need to be assured of it regularly. Now, all these things, they are purposeful. Trials produce steadfastness and the goal is spiritual completeness, verse four. "And let steadfastness have its full effect that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing." To be perfect and complete speaks of reaching a goal, reaching a destination. You think perhaps follow me in this if you can, think of a car on the assembly line in in the factory.

From from the base of the frame to the structure being built, to the panels going on, to the paint being applied, to the seats being bolted down, to the panels going on, to the transmission and engine being fitted, to the electronics, the controls, the wires, the tubes, the final touches of trim and chrome, and then the car rolling off the line gleaming and finished, a complete product ready for the dealership floor. You and I, we are works in progress.

There's still a fair amount of rough material there, raw material. The maturity, the holiness, the conformity to the likeness of Jesus. These all need to be added, shaped, molded, perfected. We don't roll off the line fully until we reach heaven, until glory. But all the while as we travel through this life, there is work happening. We are progressing further on down the line a little bit further each day.

Now, in the car plant, if you've ever seen one or visited one, much of the work is done by robots these days. It's very fascinating. It's extraordinary to watch the process. In our case, no robots involved, but so much of the work is done so often by trial and by difficulty. Those are some of the mechanisms that God uses. That's how the edges of sin and immaturity are often knocked off. It's how the shape of character is so often rounded. It's how the frame of our faith is strengthened and reinforced for the road ahead.

And James says to us, "Let steadfastness have its full effect." That is, be patiently trusting as the process rolls forward. Don't try and jump off the assembly line and and and run for the door. Have confidence, the quiet confidence that God is shaping you, moving you forward, making you to be the person he created you to be. See, that's what God does. That's how he uses the various trials that his people will face. And so says James, when you encounter trial, do that counter-intuitive, strange seeming thing. Do that seemingly impossible thing. Count it all joy.

Guest (Male): Jonathan Griffiths here in Encounter the Truth and part of a message called, "How to Become Steadfast and Wise." Now, we have to pause here, but we'll continue on our next broadcast, so I hope you make it a point to join us.

By the way, if you ever miss a program, come and listen online at encounterthetruth.org. Well, Encounter the Truth is a listener-supported ministry. We're able to be on the station, make the podcast and the app available because of your generosity. And as you give a gift of any amount this month, we want to send you a book entitled, "The Final Lap," written by John Wyatt. And Jonathan, I have a friend who uh likes to say, you know, what you read isn't necessarily as important as who you read. So that kind of begs the question for me then, who is John Wyatt?

Jonathan Griffiths: Yeah, John Wyatt is a medical doctor who's a leading Christian ethicist in the UK. And John's made a wonderful contribution to thinking about practical Christian living and significant choices we make in Christian discipleship. I've used John's resources over the years when I've had opportunity to teach Christian ethics at different times, I've relied on John's thinking a huge amount. But just recently, he's been working on the whole area of aging and retirement and dependency and the final years of life, and how we think about that as Christians and how we steward that time well as believers. I had an opportunity to speak alongside John at a convention in the UK, the Keswick Convention, not so long ago, and John's seminars on aging and retirement and ill health and dependency in older age were were just gold and people appreciated them so much. So, I think this particular resource that we're making available this month will be a tremendous help to many people.

Guest (Male): It is called "The Final Lap," and it's our thank you gift to you as you financially support Encounter the Truth this month. You can call and give a gift over the phone. Our number is 1-833-99Truth. That's 1-833-998-7884. Or go online to encounterthetruth.org. For Jonathan Griffiths, I'm Steve Hiller. Thanks for listening, and I hope you'll join us next time.