Patient in Suffering (Pt.1)

(Part 1)

“Dear brothers and sisters,  be patient as you wait for the Lord’s return. Consider the farmers who patiently wait for the rains in the fall and in the spring. They eagerly look for the valuable harvest to ripen. You, too, must be patient. Take courage, for the coming of the Lord is near. Don’t grumble about each other, brothers and sisters, or you will be judged. For look—the Judge is standing at the door! For examples of patience in suffering, dear brothers and sisters, look at the prophets who spoke in the name of the Lord. We give great honor to those who endure under suffering. For instance, you know about Job, a man of great endurance. You can see how the Lord was kind to him at the end, for the Lord is full of tenderness and mercy. But most of all, my brothers and sisters, never take an oath, by heaven or earth or anything else. Just say a simple yes or no, so that you will not sin and be condemned.”-James 5:7-12

Waiting! Does waiting weary you? It does me sometimes. I am not going to lie, I am not very good at waiting. If I pull up on a drive thru at a restaurant and there are more than three cars in line…I just pull off. When I am ready to go and my wife and the girls are still getting ready, I pace around the house like a nervous nelly until they are ready to go. When I am at the doctor’s office and my appointment is at 2 p.m. and it’s already 20 minutes pass that time, I get a little irritable. I guess that is why this passage is so difficult for me. To be quite honest, I struggle to see the spiritual significance of having to wait. 

Funny thing is the Bible is packed with stories of people having to wait. Time and time again from captivity to exile, to simply waiting on the Messiah to come; waiting emerges as a key theme throughout the Bible. The reality is that each of us spend significant seasons of our lives waiting for something: waiting to get out of school, waiting on job offers, waiting on test results, waiting to close on your first home, waiting on a dying loved one to pass or waiting on a child to be born. Whether we like it to or not, waiting shapes us. God uses that time to work on our inner man. 

Consider the farmer. James uses a farmer waiting patiently on the rain to come as an example of how to conduct ourselves as we wait:

“Dear brothers and sisters,  be patient as you wait for the Lord’s return. Consider the farmers who patiently wait for the rains in the fall and in the spring. They eagerly look for the valuable harvest to ripen. You, too, must be patient. Take courage, for the coming of the Lord is near.”-James 5:5-8

Something to keep in mind as we consider this passage is a thought I read in a commentary:  “If the rain doesn’t fall, the crops don’t grow. Rain becomes a matter of life and death. Without the rain the farmer and his family may not have a source of income. Without the rain, the farmer has no guaranteed way of keeping his family alive. And yet James says, the farmer waits patiently”. 

Farmers know it’s a process and don’t expect a harvest in two minutes. It takes a lot of faith to bury your future in the dirt and trust God for a harvest that you cannot see. Then have to wait through a process of growth to reach it’s fullest potential.

How patient would you be in that situation? Patience would not be my immediate response to those circumstances. How many of you would become frantic, try to control something out of your control-by worrying, and perhaps take your anxiety out on those around you. Waiting does not always bring out the best in us.

Pastor Scott Burr

Dayspring Community Church

Stop emboldening your mistress (Pt.2)

Part 2 

“Do you think the Scriptures have no meaning? They say that God is passionate that the spirit he has placed within us should be faithful to him. And he gives grace generously. As the Scriptures say, “God opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble.” So humble yourselves before God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you. Come close to God, and God will come close to you. Wash your hands, you sinners; purify your hearts, for your loyalty is divided between God and the world. Let there be tears for what you have done. Let there be sorrow and deep grief. Let there be sadness instead of laughter, and gloom instead of joy. Humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will lift you up in honor.”-James 4:5-10

God is not interested in divided loyalty. He is filled with jealousy for us. We are not just a good friend, we are in covenant with Him. Being a friend of God was an Old Testament idea, we have moved out of the friend zone and are now espoused to Him. He expects us to see worldliness just as He does; as an enemy of our relationship with Him. 

So how do we correct divided loyalty? We need to deal with our pride. Pride is at the heart of every sin. It is a deep satisfaction with ourselves that causes us to choose to make certain that our needs are met before any other needs are considered. It causes us to see lack in a relationship that we are established in and look to another to fill that gap. The answer to pride, however, is humility. It is esteeming others better than ourselves and considering the needs of others along with our own. 

We also correct divided loyalty by resisting the devil. We stop flirting with his ideas and notions. We stop entertaining his advances. Too often we wrongly convince ourselves that we are in control and attempt to manage our involvement in the world, believing that we can keep ourselves from crossing the line between sin and holiness, when in reality we have already compromised our faith by believing that Satan can be tamed like a lion in  a cage. We don’t resist him and so in kind he does not flee from us, but remains near to us waiting on an opportune time to test us. 

To correct divided loyalty we have to come close to God! We must spend time with Him and not with our mistress in worldly pursuits. When we draw near to Him, He promises to draw near to us. We cannot pursue two things at once. We can either pursue Him or we can pursue the things of this world. 

We must stop the love affair that we are having with this world both physically and emotionally. James said that we need to wash our hands and purify our hearts. We must wash our hands of the relationship we have nurtured with this world, because each time you participate in worldly things you embolden your mistress. The world will never believe that you are serious about being faithful to God, when you keep showing her attention and spend time pursuing her. 

We need to weep and repent over what we have done. Let there be sorrow and deep grief. We need to be grieved by it or we will never truly be free from it. If we don’t see it the way God sees it, we will entertain it again. If we do not see it as an enemy, we will leave ourselves open for another affair. 

We can be a friend of this world, but when we do we position ourselves to be an enemy of God. We need to deal with our divided loyalty. We need to deal with your pride. We need to stop entertaining the devil’s advances. We need to spend more time with God and less time with this world. We need to repent and weep over some things we’ve been doing that have emboldened worldliness!

Pastor Scott Burr

Dayspring Community Church

Stop emboldening your mistress! (Pt.1)

Part 1

“What is causing the quarrels and fights among you? Don’t they come from the evil desires at war within you? You want what you don’t have, so you scheme and kill to get it. You are jealous of what others have, but you can’t get it, so you fight and wage war to take it away from them. Yet you don’t have what you want because you don’t ask God for it. And even when you ask, you don’t get it because your motives are all wrong—you want only what will give you pleasure.”-James 4:1-3

As I was studying James this I week, I was reminded that life is about two paths. There are always two choices, two directions, two options that we can choose that determine our destiny in life. Over the past couple of weeks we have talked about the contrasts between earthly wisdom and heavenly wisdom, however throughout the Bible we see this concept of two play out in many ways: light vs. darkness, life vs. death, sowing vs. reaping, the narrow road vs. the broad road, spirit vs. flesh, and found vs. lost. 

Each of these represent an on ramp onto a path that has a very specific destination-heaven or hell. Which path we are on is based on the decisions that we make. Decisions that draw us near to God or that separate us from Him. 

What James discovered and so eloquently penned for us is that the greatest obstacle to us having a vibrant, intimate, meaningful relationship with God is ourself. There is in each one of us a desire to know God that is tempted by the intense desire to please ourselves. This pursuit of wealth, pleasure, and personal gratification is what we commonly referred to as worldliness. James has a lot to say about embracing worldly things: 

“You adulterers! Don’t you realize that friendship with the world makes you an enemy of God? I say it again: If you want to be a friend of the world, you make yourself an enemy of God.”-James 4:4 

Adultery? Spiritual adultery, as mentioned in this passage, is when a person breaks their vows to love and serve God and follow idols instead. To have an affair with worldliness is akin to having a mistress that estranges us from God (our first love). Do you see two paths emerging once again: spouse and mistress? God is jealous for you! He wants our undivided loyalty and faithfulness and regardless of how many times that we confess to love God, when we pursue worldliness we are communicating a completely different story. We are communicating a love of self and worldly pursuits. 

“Do you think the Scriptures have no meaning? They say that God is passionate that the spirit he has placed within us should be faithful to him.”-James 4:5 

James declares that you can choose to be friends with the world, but the consequence of that decision is that you become and enemy of God. Too many of us today want to be both friends with God and friends with this world. That is why God uses a marriage relationship to make this analogy. When a mistress/lover is introduced into a marriage relationship, that individual is poised to destroy a covenant established by God. They have become an enemy of your marriage, your spouse, and you. That is a friendship that cannot be sustained or maintained. No right minded individual is going to say that you can remain friends with your mistress and remain in right relationship with me. Yet, each time we dabble in the things of this world, we embolden our mistress. As long as you continue to show her attention, she lives unconvinced that she is no longer important to you. 

That is precisely what God is shouting from the rooftops. You cannot remain in a relationship with this world and remain in a right relationship with Him. Many have convinced themselves that friendship with both is possible. Why? Because they do not see themselves in covenant with God. They see ourselves as friends with God and it makes no sense to them that they have to reject worldly things. They believe we can be friends with both. However, God is not interested in divided loyalty. 

Pastor Scott Burr

Dayspring Community Church