Getting Into James, So God's Maturity Gets Into You

In August, the elders will preach from the Epistle of James during our Sunday worship services. James is a short epistle, and yet it has a higher percentage of imperatives (biblical commands) than any other book of the Bible. So, if you crave a practical sermon series, James might be a book for you. At the same time, if you struggle with not doing what you know you should as a follower of Christ, James is a book for you, too. How can it be both a call to action and a comfort when we fail? Context helps us see this reality.

As a brief background, James was written to believing Jews who were scattered when persecution of the early church intensified. (Read Acts 11:19–30 for historical context.) James, although a half-brother of Christ and a leader in the church in Jerusalem, in humility refers to himself as a servant of Christ. The other James mentioned throughout the gospels was James, the son of Zebedee and brother of John. This James was put to death by Herod Agrippa around 44 A.D. (Acts 12:2) as part of the persecution that caused Jewish believers to be scattered throughout Palestine and Syria.

For the book of James, then, it is more than a topical book with a series of disconnected commands; James is deeply theological. The overarching theme that binds James together is a consistent, undivided commitment to God in Christ. This concept of spiritual wholeness functions as the lens through which each chapter’s practical instructions gain coherence. As we will see, all the practical instruction is aimed towards an undivided heart in the life of the believer.

James is writing to believers facing persecution to encourage them to persevere in their faith because of the finished work of Christ. The book is not a series of commands calling Christians to “do more better.” Rather, it is a call to repentance and to look to Jesus’s perfect life and atoning death for his justification and to resolve, by the power of the Spirit, to walk in obedience.

An undivided heart results in spiritual integrity. This unity, the lack of being double-minded, emerges as the ultimate outcome of perseverance in trials, believers who are “mature and complete, not lacking anything.” The Greek word teleios (often translated “perfect”) encompasses entirety, completeness, and maturity, with these latter concepts understood fundamentally as completeness. Rather than sinless perfection, the complete person makes progress in all areas without exception.

From this foundation, James develops his practical exhortations. Living an undivided life means living with integrity, which means ensuring your desires, words, and actions align with an uncompromising dedication to God. Any departure from this consistency reveals a lack of the faith necessary to live with wholehearted devotion to God.

This unifying thread helps us see how each instruction addresses a different arena where believers either fragment their allegiance or integrate it. James wants you to become a well-rounded, complete Christian who lacks nothing, not perfect in the sense of sinlessness, but unified in the sense of moving toward maturity across all dimensions of life. In the first chapter, James introduces the areas of life that must be undivided. In the subsequent chapters, he develops further these themes that together point to the theological import of the book. Christians must be complete or mature in living an undivided life of total surrender to our Lord Jesus Christ.

As you read James and sit under the preaching of this epistle, lets pray that God will give our church a renewed sense of both the depth of our own sinfulness and the sufficiency of Jesus to cover our sin. May the Spirit of God take the biblical text and impress it upon our hearts, conforming us in greater measure to the image of Christ while also causing us to groan for the Lord’s return and the final restoration of all things.

For His glory and your joy,

Pastor Rod