Tested: The Faith That Proves Genuine

James 1:12 – 18

 

How many of us, especially when we’re young, think we know it all? I thought I knew it all for sure, I definitely thought I knew more than my dad, especially when it came to farming. Never mind his LIFETIME of farming experience to the tiny peanut of understanding I had, I clearly knew better than he did.

 

There was one instance that came to mind this week. I began doing tractor field work on my own around the age of 12. I used to ride on the armrest of the field tractor while my dad did whatever work. Those were much simpler days. Anyway, one day he stopped by the house while discing a field to make a phone call and left me on the tractor to wait. After what felt like forever, which was probably only five or ten minutes, I just put the tractor in gear and went to work. I’d seen him do it a thousand times before and figured I could do it.

 

Turns out I could indeed do it, and do it well. He finally came out of the house and saw me discing and just stood there and watched me for a few passes before flagging me down. I thought he was going to be burning mad, but instead he told me to keep going because he had other things to do.

 

Fast-forward probably 6 years or so and I’m 18, doing the majority of the physical part of farming our 116 acres. Like all dairies, we had a lagoon and we used that manure water to blend with clean canal water to irrigate, it was great fertilizer. Unlike most dairies that had modernized with age, ours did NOT have a manure separator in our system, so there was a tremendous amount of solids in our lagoon.

 

Those solids would flow out into the pipeline and then the field when we irrigated, and as the corn grew it helped hold the solids back near the pipeline. I’m talking about 50 yards or so away from the pipeline would literally rise a few feet each summer from the solids. Now here comes the wisdom of my father.

 

My dad would warn me not to get the tractor too close to those solids because they were deceptively soft. Yeah, sure dad. I wasn’t about to leave that much field untouched. Que me burying the tractor in the field.

It was a mess. I needed to make that long shameful walk back to the dairy to grab the front end loader, some chain, and some help to get that thing unstuck. And then listen to my dad tell me he told me so. What I had was wrong understanding of wisdom.

 

And that can be said about most of us as we go and grow through life. I thought wisdom was knowledge, I trusted in myself, and I failed to recognize that someone else was better suited to gift me wisdom.

 

The guiding principle of the entire first chapter of James is the right understanding of wisdom. That includes understanding what wisdom leads to and understanding the character and the absolute sovereignty of the one who gives wisdom. Let’s read God’s Word together, James 1:12 – 18.

 

James continues talking about trials in our passage today. Clearly persevering and growing in the steadfastness of faith was important James. The early church in the 1^st century A.D. underwent a lot of trials and suffering. Most of this was from local unbelievers and civil authorities, state sponsored Roman persecution came later.

 

But that doesn’t change the fact that real trials, challenges, and sufferings were then and still are today not just a part of life, but an integral part of testing the authenticity of and maturing Christian faith.

 

• Patient endurance results in God’s approval.

 

James gives us a beatitude in v.12. Beatitudes reflect a person’s right relationship to God. Think of Jesus’ beatitudes from His Sermon on the Mount. Blessed are those who… they will receive/inherit/etc.  Because of the faithfulness of the believer under trial, James declares that such a person is “blessed.”

 

Being faithful to God has a reward in heaven, plain and simple. For James, he calls it the crown of life. But how does the believer endure, how does he remain steadfast? I talked about it in my first sermon from James, by asking God for wisdom.

 

Wisdom from God has been requested and given. Where wisdom is truly received, believers endure testing until the test is finished. They are blessed because they have the living hope of salvation in Christ.

The crown of life, eternal life, is promised by God to those who love Him. Right understanding of wisdom mans putting the promise of God ahead of the worries of this life and receiving assurance of the life to come beyond death.

 

Right understanding about wise action in the face of trials is blessedness. Anything can be endured with this wisdom because the reward of eternal life has been secured for the believer by God through Jesus Christ on the cross.

 

This endurance, this persevering through trials that produces steadfastness in faith, results in approval. The phrase “when he has stood the test” is literally in Greek “having been approved.” When we talk about seeking approval from God and not from those around us, this is what it really means. Persevering in faith through trials, not the work of our hands, results in God’s approval.

 

God, who infinitely wiser than any of us, sees it fit to use trials to produce believers who stand their ground, who remain faithful to Him, through the toughest of trials through a devout life shaped by the Word of God. The test is over when this present life is over.

 

And understand this, approval doesn’t mean you lived a perfect life, where you always endured without fault, as if sinlessness were expected. If we were even capable of a sinless life, then we wouldn’t need Jesus. Rather, James is saying that approval acknowledges a faith that perseveres in the love of God, who promises life.

 

God demanded perfection, humanity couldn’t deliver. So God sent Jesus, the only one to ever and will ever walk this earth and live a perfect, sinless life. For the rest of us, we’re expected to try out of love for God. This love for God is an obedient love. Obedience out of love is the nature of a right relationship with God.

 

What we’ve seen so far in James is that the poor endure the suffering of their poverty; the rich endure the temptation to trust in their wealth rather than God; and everyone is tempted and suffers trials of some kind. These tests are done at the end of life with the eternal reward waiting for those who endure, but in the meantime, everyone is to pursue genuine love for God that is the mark of a true and genuine faith.

 

• Evil desire and temptation come from within.

 

Trials are by nature hard, and naturally those experiencing trials find themselves asking why they are going through them. In the OT and in Jesus’ day the common belief was if you were facing trials then you must’ve sinned and are being punished. Just go read the book of Job, his friends had excellent wisdom about why he was suffering, ha!

 

What James has in view here is the faith of the doubter in the face of trials. Like Job’s friends, this person’s inability to comprehend the wisdom of God leads him to view trials as provoking him to sin, so he sees trials as evil.

 

What that person has failed to understand is the truth about himself. The lack of wisdom and of undivided trust in God leads to an awfully distorted view of one’s relationship with God. Trials are not for the bad of God’s chosen people, but for their good.

 

James strongly denies that God is the origin of temptation. Notice he doesn’t deny that God is the origin of trials, but he denies that God is the source of temptation. Trials and temptations are not the same and it is definitely an error to think of any testing as a temptation to sin. The purpose of testing is to prove faith genuine and strengthen it, not to cause believers to sin. God doesn’t tempt us.

 

God does allow and even sends trials to refine our faith. Job 42:11 says this about everyone who knew him before his troubles, “They comforted and consoled him over all the trouble the Lord had brought on him.” Admitting that God is sovereign over all includes admitting that He is sovereign over the bad as much as the good.

 

But remember that Job didn’t sin through his troubles. He could have, albeit wrongly, felt justified in some sort of sin in response to his troubles, but he didn’t sin, other than eventually complain to God which God rebukes him for and Job repents of. Temptation is from elsewhere.

 

James here gives one of the most penetrating discussions on the nature of temptation here. Temptation to sin is solely the department of evil forces and the devil, and in this case here in James the believer himself is the source of temptation. There is already something within every person from where temptation can surface.

Just comprehending this is difficult for the believer who lacks wisdom, who doesn’t have a right understanding of wisdom. We like to think of temptation as an external problem, but the reality is that temptation is an internal issue.

 

I just finished reading last week The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis. As renowned and revered Narnia is, his Christian writing is amazing. The whole book is a collection of fictional letters written from a demon called Screwtape who is an administrator in Hell to his nephew Wormwood who is a novice tempter right of school.

 

In chapter 4, Screwtape writes, “It is funny how mortals always picture us as putting things into their minds: in reality our best work is done by keeping things out.”

 

Satan doesn’t tempt us with random temptations, no, no. We all have our own things that tempt us, our own chinks in the armor if you will, and Satan just exploits them. Satan can’t create anything, he doesn’t have that power, only God does. But Satan can and does exploit our weaknesses to tempt us to sin and tries to keep out all that is of God.

 

That doesn’t change the fact that James makes clear here in vv.14-15. We are our own cause of temptation, not something outside us, devil or human. We might expect the “devil, like a roaring lion” to be dragging off the unguarded believer into sin, but it is the believer who drags himself off.

 

I came across a quote from the renowned American evangelist from the 1800’s, D.L. Moody. He sums up so simply what James is saying here, he said, “I have never met a man who has given me as much trouble as myself.” We are indeed our own worst enemies.

 

But James has an answer for this. In v.16 he says, “Do not be deceived, my beloved brothers.” The complexity of temptation and sin in the Christian life requires this warning against self-deception.

 

If the great temptation of the sinner is unbelief (what worse sin could there be?), then the great temptation of the believer is misbelief (getting it wrong). Trials are not temptations to sin because the temptation to sin is not from God.

 

The believer may have a very basic faith in Christ and yet pick up some false teachings about the life of faith. Some in James’ original audience had wrongly adopted the idea that God is the cause of temptation, but Scripture is clear about this, in no scenario can a role be assigned to God in relation to evil, temptation, and sin other than overcoming it.

 

James’ call here is to develop whole-hearted trust in God. Believers must be on their guard against self-deception. Believers should accept trials from God; He has every right to test them.

 

• God is the source of faith that endures through trials and overcomes temptation.

 

God has every right to test the faith He’s imparted on every believer. He has every right because He is the creator of the universe and everything and everyone in it. James calls God the Father of lights, or heavenly lights in other translations, because He is the originator and ruler of all things.

 

But He also has every right to test believer’s faith because He is the source of that faith. Everything with God as its source is good. God is not involved in the sin we commit when we’re tempted, our sin is rebellion against God. God is the source of good in our lives.

 

He is the source of the good fight within us that resists temptation, that recognizes what the law of Christ shows us about ourselves, and that strengthens our resolve to pursue the works that belong to faith. The gifts of God are good because they never foster evil desire or sin. The gifts of God are perfect because they are the fulfillment of His will for His people.

 

Because God is Father and Creator and the giver of every good and perfect gift that means that what James is saying also applies more broadly to the world. Everything good, whether naturally or from good motives, comes from the goodness of God because as Father and Creator God generates goodness in all His works.

 

God is faithful; He does not change. The illustration that James uses is a solid one. Unlike the sun, the moon, and the stars and the light that shines from them, God doesn’t change. There is no variation or shadow from God. God’s light shines consistently, faithfully.

Our human desire and temptation gives birth to sin, and sin when it fully grows sin brings forth death. God does not cause temptation; He brings forth life. The contrast could not be more stark, in contrast to death birthed by sin, life is produced by God. Of Gods good and perfect gifts from above, the new life he creates is the greatest.

 

And this life is entirely of His own will. He desired to create life, and then He desires to redeem it and create a new life within us, by the word of truth. That word of truth is the gospel of Jesus Christ. Because God has given you a new life in Christ, you can have the wisdom to know the truth, endure trials, defeat temptation, and overcome sin.

 

The word of truth is the instrument by which God implants new life in the believer. That word of truth stands in strong contrast to the self-deception of evil desire and the sin it produces. Those God saves through faith in Jesus Christ ask God and receive the wisdom to endure their trials, to resist their temptations, and overcome sin.

 

The Word of truth by which believers are born again from above produces a harvest that God had intended from the very beginning, from the moment of his first creating. The same word of truth that brought forth the first creation also brings about the regeneration of mankind and ultimately all of creation is made new.

 

What God brings about in salvation was contained in the original purpose of creation. In the OT the “firstfruits,” including those of humans were offered to God in thanksgiving and became His special possession. In the NT it can apply to the redeemed of the Lord, both now and in the end times. The character of God is revealed in his redemption of humanity through the cross of Jesus Christ.

 

You are that special possession; you are a kind of firstfruits as James puts it. You are the redeemed. You can endure trials of various kinds. You can overcome temptation and defeat sin. You have all the wisdom you need for this life available to you, and God is faithful to give it to you if you ask in faith. The Word of Truth lives in you, and you can live because of it.

 

Let’s pray.