Jim Class - Part 3

For those of you that don't know me, my name is Jason Sailing and I'll be your instructor for this evening. You know, I had uh no idea when I retired that uh I would become a gym class instructor. You know, pastor's not here tonight, but uh I do want to take the opportunity to just say thanks to him um for trusting both God and me with the opportunity to have this somewhat unexpected career opportunity. Um truly humbled and uh honored by the opportunity to serve in this great church, you know, especially in the shadow of so many great leaders. I hope I can live up to those um giants before me at some point in my life. Um also have to say thanks to my wife Beth um for being so supportive of this whole career change idea. You know, when I first mentioned it at the end of last year, um I was thinking about retiring from Caterpillar after 25 years and at that point there was no clear path of what was next and she was very supportive of, you know, whatever came next even, you know, if that meant selling our house and moving into an RV down by the lake next to the Elkins.

So, uh thanks, babe. I appreciate your support in this effort. Let's get started. You know, I hope you've been been enjoying this series. I know I have. Um and like Josh mentioned last week, there were some images that came to my mind when pastor first asked me about participating in this series and uh you know, I kind of looked back and one of the first images that I saw was us standing up, getting out in the aisles and you know, doing a little calisthenics, and jumping jacks, or some, you know, toe touches, but uh Sorry, then I remembered um you know, a liability lawsuit for broken hips, and pulled backs is probably not a good thing in your first month, so we'll forego that. But uh the second image that came into my mind was some of my gym teachers, you know, way back in the day when I went to school.

Um and we went to a private school. Um it was in our church, and it was pretty much self-contained, and it was medium-sized. It wasn't small, but um we didn't really didn't have what you would call trained phys ed sort of teachers. You know, it was basically just um whatever teacher drew the short straw that particular day, or that particular week, and so they were the ones that had to take us outside to, you know, play kickball, or basketball, or whatever the sport was, you know, while the girls sat on the swings and watched us. So, um it was more like extended recess than it was actually gym period. But I do have this one vivid memory uh in my mind of a teacher named Sister Margie from middle school. And she was in no way in any resemblance an athlete.

You know, in fact, she was probably more of a frail, nerdy type profile. Um but for whatever reason, I can remember a few occasions where she drew the short straw, and she was our PE instructor for that particular day. And uh I guess for whatever reason, she thought we needed to be whipped into shape, and so she would line us all up out there on the parking lot, you know, getting on each of the lines, all nice and formal. Um and then she would have us do those, you know, toe touches, or deep knee bends, or you know, whatever it was. And for whatever reason, when I think back on that, um it kind of it's kind of like one of those silent movies. It plays back with those herky-jerky motions, and and that's the way it plays back in the reel in my mind is uh maybe because it was so long ago.

It was close to the silent period, but uh I'm I'm not quite that old. But when we actually uh grew up a little bit and we graduated high school, all of the fun and games ended at that point. You know, that's when they split up the boys and girls. They don't want those adolescents together, you know, in physical ed sort of classes. And that's when we got Brother Steve Rasco as our phys ed teacher. Yeah, unfortunately, Brother Steve passed away too early in life, but in his prime, Brother Steve was an athlete. And he didn't play around. He had us doing serious exercises, you know, like push-ups and sit-ups and pull-ups. And then there was the dreaded squat thrust. What is that? For you kids, it's called a burpee. So, um we had to do that. Those were the worst.

And then to make it even worse, especially after doing squat thrust, he would make us run. And I can remember five laps around our church or our school campus was a mile. And we would often, you know, run that regularly. But if Brother Rasco was in a bad mood, you know, or somebody made him mad, then he would add on the perimeter of the driveway, which is about 200 more yards and another, you know, 100 yards this way and another 200 more yards to come back, and then go around all the way the building again. And so, those are the memories that I have of gym class. And um fortunately, our school was small enough we didn't have a gym until after I graduated. So, I never had to climb the rope, thankfully. Um as part of any good workout routine, uh you need to master the basics of the foundational exercises before you continue to add on anything else new to your routine.

And so, this is the third period of gym class for us tonight. But before we move on, I want to recap the last two lessons to make sure that we got what we needed to out of those sessions. You know, I feel like James is like brother Steve. He realizes that we're not little kids anymore. And he starts the five-lap sprint right out of the gate. Because in verse one of chapter one, he talks a little bit about very briefly. He just says, "To the 12 tribes scattered abroad, greetings." And that's it. There's no "How you doing?" There's no "I miss you guys." There's no "Hope to see you soon." It just goes to verse two, and James is not playing around. There's no light stretches. There's no warm-up period. He just starts the five-lap sprint right out of the gate.

Because in verse two, he says, "Brethren, count it all joy when you fall into various trials." You know, that's good old brother James, the straightforward gym teacher that we all love. Not pulling any punches. So, for his lesson, Pastor invented a new word, and that was ungetthroughable. Because sometimes those trials and those struggles that we face feel exactly that way. We don't know if we're going to be able to get through them. And if you've lived any amount of life, um I'm sure you've been there at a point where you had a trial or you had a circumstance where you felt like you would not make it through. But Pastor challenges us to strengthen and and understand our expand our perspective on how to view trials. Number one, he said, "Trials reveal our character."

It's a stress test that reveals the state of our heart. And it shows us if there's any areas that we have places that we need to continue to work out. Number two, he said trials can make you stronger. They are tests that produce patience. And without the struggle, which is the pain, you would not get the benefit of the lesson, which is the gain. And that was his subtitle of no pain, no gain. He said God is more concerned about our character than our circumstances. And that typically the formation of people comes more from suffering than from our successes. Number three, he said trials draw us closer to God. He used the example of the blind man and then the uh disciples asking, "Well, who sinned in that man's life?" And Jesus said, "No one sin- sinned.

It's for the glory of God." And sometimes we don't understand our trials, but we have to trust that it will bring the glory of God through our trials. And finally, to wrap it up, Pastor said trials don't have the last word in the Christian's life because we have Jesus. And we have the ultimate finish line for our trials. We have the hope of glory. James doesn't say that our situation would be perfect, but he said instead, "You will be perfect because of your trials." And Pastor reminded us that our heart and our eternity are at stake. Then we move into week two. And Josh Campbell did a fabulous job of being our gym instructor that week, last week. And his subtitle was about slowing down and training our ears. His key verse was focused on being swift to hear and slow to speak and slow to wrath.

Um he led us through some mental exercises. And uh we did some reps, and he challenged our listening skills. Who had your hand up after he told you to put it down twice? Yeah. Some of us weren't listening too good. Rep number one that he talked about was being swift to hear, and that's listening to others, and he asked us to imagine a person in our life that's hard to listen to, and if what would happen if we actually slowed down enough and listened to that person, what would we find out? What would I be afraid of that I have to admit or I have to change if I actually heard that person? Rep number two, he talked about being slow to wrath and listening to ourselves and understanding our emotions. What makes me angry recently, and underneath that anger, what am I actually feeling?

And then rep number three, he talked about engrafting the word of God into our lives. He talked about the parable of the sower and clearing the ground of our heart so that we can be able to hear the concept of what God is trying to speak into our lives. And he asked us the question of what is God what has God been trying to tell me that I've been too loud or too busy or too angry to hear. I love the video that Josh talked or showed about the from the Bible Project. It talked about the Shema. We're familiar with that concept, and it's actually found in Deuteronomy Deuteronomy 6:4-5, and it says, "Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one Lord. And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might."

And this is the foundational principle that the Israelites passed down from generation to generation. And it's also going to play a pivotal role in our conversation or our gym class tonight. You see, the Shema, the Hear, O Israel, uh it's not just about hearing. The video explained that it also is about paying attention. And it's also about taking action on what you have heard because in Hebrew, there is only one word, Shema, for all of those concepts. Hear, pay attention, focus, and take action on what you've heard. Luke chapter 11 and verse 28 says, "Hear the word of the Lord and keep it." So, when the Bible says, "Hear the word of the Lord," it not only means listen, but it also means pay attention, and then do something with what you've heard.

The concept of Shema plays into some of the verses that followed right after the text that Josh used for his main text. And it's a very familiar refrain uh in James's book. And it says not only to be hearers of the word, but to be doers of the word. All right. Let's get started with week three. Our theme this week is weak to strong. And we're going to read our our first theme verse. And that is James 1 and 27, and it says, "Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this: to visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from the world." James. James, James, James, come on, man. Are you kidding me right now, Jimmy? You can't just drop that one sentence right there, that bombshell right there, and walk away.

James, are you really, really, really telling me that God sees pure religion, and it can be summed up in just 17 words? There's been thousands of years of intellectuals debating scripture. There's been millions of words that have been written in books and commentaries. And after centuries of war there's been centuries of war that have been fought and bloodshed in the name of religion. So really James, you're just going to summarize the essence of all religion down to visiting the fatherless and widows and keeping oneself unspotted from the world. After reading this, I had to stick take a step back and do rep number three from Josh's exercise last week. I had to sit still and listen quietly and actually hear what God was trying to say. And so as I pondered this bombshell bombshell revelation, I thought, well, maybe I'll see if another translation has something more to say.

So I went to the more liberal translation of the NLT to see what it had to say. And guess what? It says, pure and genuine religion in the sight of God the Father means caring for orphans and widows in their distress and refusing to let the world corrupt you. And so as I quietly reflected on this, when I really listened closely to James and the two-part refrain that I began to hear in James' voice the echo of Jesus' voice, his brother's voice was echoing in this scripture. As Jesus responded to the Pharisees when he said that the greatest commandment was, "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and with all thy soul and with all thy mind." This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it. "Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.

On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets. Suddenly it begins to make sense. You know, James is like that kid on the playground that calls the bluff. You know, you got a bunch of 7 8 9 year olds standing around on the playground kind of blustering back and forth about, you know, who's the fastest or who's the strongest or I can beat you up. And then James is the kid that says, "Oh, yeah? Prove it." So, he is the one that forces you to take action. And in typical James fashion, he gets straight to the point and he says, "So, you think you're religious? Prove it." He says, "Show me your actions and show me that they prove you love your neighbor as yourself and that you love God with all your heart. Then you can tell me that you understand the purest form of religion."

So, boom. There it is. That's the entire moral of my lesson tonight. James is a man after my own heart, short and sweet. But, um I'd be happy to dismiss and say a prayer, but uh it's 7:20 and um since this my first official teaching, I think as a paid employee, I'm I'm not sure pastor would be happy with me just letting you go at this point in time. So, um let's continue a little bit further and see what else James might have to say as we dive deeper um into this work out tonight and see if there's anything else that might strengthen our faith in what James has to say. And so, in doing so, we're going to read the next set of verses in James chapter 2. You know, now granted in in James' mind when he wrote this text, there was no chapter break.

You know, that happened later when they were putting the Bible and the canonization together. So, in his mind it's really just a continuation of his thoughts about pure religion. And he starts on some practical examples to check and see if you really are loving your neighbor as yourself. And so, from the New King James Version, let's read. It says, "My brethren, do not hold the faith of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Lord of glory, with partiality. For if there should come unto your assembly a man with gold rings, fine apparel, and there should come also come in a poor man in filthy clothes, and you pay attention to the one wearing the fine clothes, and you say to him, "You sit here in a good place." And you say to the poor man, "You stand there or sit here on the at my footstool."

"Have you not shown partiality among yourselves, and become judges with evil thoughts? Listen, my beloved brethren, has God not chosen the poor of this world to be rich in faith, and heirs of the kingdom which he promised to those who love him? But you have dishonored the poor man. Do not the rich oppress you and drag you into the courts? Do they not blaspheme the name the noble name by which you are called? If you really fulfill the the royal law according to the scripture, you shall love your neighbor as yourself. You do well." So, during my brief 3 months of retirement from January to March, um before starting at the church in early April, I began reading some of the books in the UPCI ministers training curriculum. And by the way, that retirement thing was kind of nice.

I might try it again officially someday, so I hope to do that at some point in my near future. But when I was reading these books, this guy named David K. Bernard, uh wrote a book called Understanding God's Word, and apparently he's pretty smart, and he recommends that one of the things that you do when you're looking into a passage is to actually study the original context of the passage and what the author's intent was um behind the original uh message to the original audience. And so, with that in mind, I started asking myself several questions. Um and that led me down this kind of tangential rabbit hole, and so we're going to go down that for a few minutes, and we'll eventually come back, and hopefully we'll make some sense out of some of the things that we talk about.

Some of the questions I asked was, "When was the book of James written? Who was James talking to in these scriptures? Why were the Jewish people dispersed at this particular time? Who controlled the region at the time of James? Why did he feel it was necessary to address the care of widows and fatherless? And were there cultural attitudes in the Jewish church at the time where favoritism was a problem? Why did the typical What did the typical assembly look like? And why were synagogues used instead of the temple? Who would have been considered a rich person in those days? Um kind of tangential to those questions in my mind, Beth and I over the last uh probably year or so, our you know, viewing habits for entertainment have really shifted. Um we've been focused more on docu-series sort of things and subjects that are related to things like, you know, ancient Egypt or Roman civilizations, um or even biblical events.

They actually show a few of those on TV nowadays, and they're pretty interesting to follow. But at the same time, so all of that was going on, and I also actually finished up reading the bush book of Exodus um and it talking about of course Egypt and Pharaoh and the people of Israel exiting the Egyptian land at that point in time. And so all of these thoughts and these questions I started looking up different facts and dates and putting them together and you know getting all these things together about you when did the kingdom of Israel come into place and different things and so I put all these things down on the paper and I was like well I wonder if AI could build me a presentation to kind of show some of this stuff. And so I got all the information together and I went to my handy dandy AI companion on my desktop and I asked it to to pull up a timeline or build a presentation for me and I gave it just a few parameters you know of these things that I was looking for.

And in about 3 minutes it came back with this very impressive 13 page slideshow. And to my astonishment it actually had lots of information that I had been thinking about and I didn't really tell it I was thinking about it but it also has some really good facts that also bolstered the thought about what I wanted to talk about. And I told Beth about it. I was I was truly amazed. I've done some things with AI and spreadsheets and and stuff but it was just kind of astonishing at the level of both the facts that it gave me and the presentation quality of that presentation. And so I had intended to show that to you guys but um there's a story about battling with AI in the Bible and uh after it only taken two or three minutes for me to create or for it to create this presentation, then I spent the next two, three, I don't know, maybe four hours trying to figure out why it wouldn't save from that little pretty image on the screen to the somewhere on my desktop as a PowerPoint where I could actually use it.

And so, um I lost the first battle with the king of AI. And um like Joshua, I had to go and find out apparently what my secret sin was that was keeping me from being successful. And um I know my good Apple friends will probably tell me that it has something to do with Windows or Android or something like that, but uh finally, finally, I I just ended up resorting to taking screenshots and then dropping it into PowerPoint. And then continue to bring it up here and give it to Jeff and say, "Hey, let's look at this." Unfortunately, it was nice and pretty, but even on that huge screen up there, the text was too small. And so, instead of getting 13 slides of beautiful presentation material, you're only going to get three. But I did use AI, so I won the second battle of AI.

And I had to give Jeff credit for that joke because he brought it up. So, AI is something that you can be productive with. So, sister Chastity, if you want to bring up that first slide, we'll talk about some of these facts that are um part of other context of what James is talking about um in this particular chapter. And you can see, I believe in this first slide, it's talking about the biblical timeline of the nation of Israel. And you can see where, you know, in about 1400 BCE, Joshua leads the 7-year conquest um um, that we're just talking about going in to the Canaan land. And then in about 1200 BC, the Israelites began to control Canaan land and Israel, uh, became into existence around 1000 BCE is when David had the unified monarchy, uh, after he defeated the Canaanites and the Philistines.

And then we know that the, uh, nation of Israel split around 930, um, after Solomon's death and then Israel began to lose control of the northern kingdom in about 720 to the Assyrians. And then in 856, 86 586, uh, Babylonians and King Nebuchadnezzar, they conquered the southern kingdom and that's when the first temple, Solomon's temple, was lost and destroyed. And then around 430 4 430 BCE, the end of the Old Testament is when, you know, that's when the end of the Old Testament, um, winds down and we do see that some of the exiles that had been taken off in the captivity began to come back and we see that the the temple is rebuilt and the walls are starting to be rebuilt around this 430 BCE period. If we go to slide two, we have about 400 years of this inter difficult word to say, intertestamental, mental, uh, time period, uh, between the Old Testament and New Testament.

And it's in this period where both the Greeks and the Romans conquer the nation or the land, um, that had once been Israel. And in that time period, you know, 332, uh, BC is when Alexander the Great conquered Judea and he made it part of the Hellenistic world. And in that world is where the Greek language and philosophy and culture, um, from the Greek world began to influence the Judaism, um, of what is the land of Israel. And then briefly around 143, there was a independent rule again by Jewish rule, and that's when we get the development of the Pharisees and the Sadducees, the sects that are born, um, from those two groups. And then in about 63 BCE is when the Romans come in and take over, um, in the land of of Judea, and they turn it into a Roman state.

And that gets us to all of that build up to get us to the time period where James is beginning to come into the picture. You know, somewhere between 6 and 4 BCE is when, uh, they project that Jesus was born and then around 30 uh, common era, CE, is the day of Pentecost. The Book of James itself was actually written, or somewhere there's, you know, debate about when it was written, uh, somewhere around 44 to 49 CE. And contrary to where it's actually at in the physical canonization of the Bible, you know, it's book 20 out of 27 in the in the New Testament, but it's in actually probably the earliest book of the New Testament, and it was even written before the Gospels and before the Book of Acts. So, James is writing to the very earliest of the Jewish church.

Finally in 70 CE, the Jewish rebellion tries to take, you know, some control back from the Romans, and Titus, uh, the from the Romans destroys Jerusalem, and he destroys the second temple, and he ends the sovereign rule of the Jewish rule until what we know in 1948. And then finally in in 132, um, there's even more rebellion and even more persecution from Romans and that's when the Jews are spread out what they call the diaspora, which is, you know, spread out even further into the Mediterranean area. Um so, why do I why am I telling you all of this? Uh if we go to the final slide, we'll see some of the reasons is that um it was God's divine preparation for the spread of the gospel. The rule of Judea by these outside countries caused the dispersion of the Jews and the Jewish culture across the Mediterranean landscape.

The Greek rule brought Koine Greek, which was the common language of the working man. So, it was not just an elite language. It was a widespread communication that anybody uh in the region could use. That language was used for the translation of the Old Testament um into you know, from uh Hebrew and into Greek so that even more people could understand it and it was also the language that was used for the writing of the New Testament. There began to be concepts like Greek philosophy and these concepts of logos and virtue and the soul and that provided the vocabulary for what could then be the the language that was used in the writing of the New Testament. Um these Jewish communities well, the Roman roads that were built during the Roman period and the sea routes and what's called the Pax Romana, which is about 200 years of peace that the Romans brought uh to that period of time, it enabled rapid missionary tran- travel for the early church.

And since the Jewish communities have been scattered and the resulting regional synagogues created um a ready-made audience for the gospel. And I believe on this side sorry. Um that's the previous slide you saw uh what a synagogue looked like on the inside. You saw the people sitting, you know, around the edges and the what they would call the pulpit or the speaking platform was more in the center and there were probably stone steps or stone seats going up. And so that's where James is talking about is that in those synagogues, if you were a favored person, then you probably got put on the top step. So you could see over everybody else's heads or, you know, if you were a poor person or if you were an orphan or a widow, then you were probably asked to stand in the back or sit on the floor.

And that's the things that James is, you know, speaking to in those verses that we just read. But the persecution and the Roman opposition, it forced the Christians to really be able to articulate their beliefs and develop the structure and then they emerged stronger. And so these events that happened over hundreds of years were actually orchestrated by God to bring about the revival that we see in the church first church. You know, it's kind of ironic that all of these empires and that all of these conquering nations, they inadvertently or maybe divinely prepared the world for the message that would transform it. So returning back out of the rabbit hole and back into gym class, let's review this supporting data that James gave us in what we read in in chapter two and see how it supports what we talked about in in chapter 1 verse 27 and see how it punctuates the previous two-part refrain that we had heard from James and how he used this to gently guide the first Christian first-century Christians back to the foundational principles of the royal law and pure religion.

So James is telling us that you know, the question is is is is he really telling us that we should be spending all of our time building orphanages or building assisted senior living communities. Not necessarily, no. But those groups of that day, they were the most relevant to the Jewish community that were helping to bring the focus onto the broader concept that James was trying to focus them onto. And that is that God is no respecter of persons. And in fact, in his DNA, it's probably more bent to people that are on the fringes of society. The nature of God is to include marginalized people. And include them into the community of faith. And they are actually the subject of God's protection. Uh there were way too many verses to pull them out and and provide supporting evidence, so I just did a summary.

And it said that there are 81 times where widows are mentioned in the Bible, 55 times in the Old Testament, and 26 in the New Testament. Orphans and fatherless, they're mentioned over 40 times. In Deuteronomy 16, Moses is relaying the instructions of God to the people. Uh he's talking about what to do during the times of the feast, the Passover, the weeks, and the booths booth feasts. And he says in verses 11 and 14, and he says it repeatedly, twice. He says the same exact thing, and he says, "Celebrate with your sons and your daughters and your man servants and your maid servants and the priests, but then he also includes the strangers, the fatherless, and the widows that are among you." Today, our society is riddled with single motherhood and fatherless children.

They're either from an emotionally absent parents or they're from the ravaging effects of the breakdown of the traditional family model. So, along with these traditional definitions that James mentioned back in his day, I believe that it is the 21st century's church church's responsibility to care for those widows and follow fatherless that are in their distress in our time period. You see, the Jews had this custom or this um it was more of a a heritage than similarly today in the US, we're more individualistic. That's not the way the Jews were. They were more of a communal community. They had more words like we than words like I. Um and so, their version of what a community looked like versus our western concept of individualism was much different.

I think the core principle that James was trying to drive home for Israel was to remember was that their heritage of being a communal based society and that they provided for and protected the needy and other marginalized groups. You know, I think maybe James might have been beginning to notice some of the downward spiral since the Romans had come in, since the Greeks had come in, that maybe the Jews were losing some of that communal sort of um mentality that they were accustomed to. And then what he saw was more of this Western world rugged individualism. If that's what we want to call it in an optimistic light, and maybe we should more appropriately, we should call it self-centered narcissism that we see in today's world in our vernacular.

So, what James is describing in his people looking to take advantage of relationships that interest them or might somehow advantage them. This transition from verse 1:27 into chapter 2, I looked at two different versions and some, you know, how some versions of apps of Bibles they'll give you kind of title headings or or section headings. And in one of them, it said chapter 2, Book of James, one app said, "Beware of favoritism." And the other one in typical James fashion just said the sin of partiality. And so, partiality is looking for opportunities to associate with a preferred group and to avoid contact with a less desirable group. James is reminding his audience that uh God himself chooses, based on the text that we read, God himself chooses the weak to be strong.

He chooses to favor the poor to become the rich in faith. And they are the heirs of the kingdom. So, it's probably wise for us Christians then to exercise good judgment and to strive to avoid the sin of partiality. In the English language, there's three other words that are closely associated with favoritism or partiality. And those words are bias, discrimination, and prejudice. And these words are very popular and they're very politically charged in our culture today. They say that there's two things that a preacher shouldn't talk about. One of them is politics and the other is money. And uh on a few occasions I have actually talked to you guys about money. But uh I'm not going to touch politics. I was born at night but not last night, so.

I will say though that many of the ideologies and the agendas and the initiatives that are driving the rhetoric of the hot buttons of our issues of today, they're creating fatigue in a generation of young people that are beginning to look for something real. They're tired of being pawns in someone else's political political schemes. Especially those that manipulate them based on race or sexuality or gender or any other social injustice. I believe we're about to be in the greatest awakening period of people seeing the real truth. It's not a truth that changes at the whim of a political party or a biased media media viewpoint or a billionaire activist manipulation. The one thing that we as the church of God must make sure that we don't allow is our frustrations with the current political climate to ever create a bias or partiality within us that would keep us from sharing the gospel and showing the love of God to someone from any other race, any other ethnicity, or any other religious culture.

Just like in the times of the first century church, God is using this cultural and political infrastructure, and you might even say chaos, to bring the American church into contact with a larger sphere of influence than we've ever had. And we must be ready. Galatians chapter 6 and verse 2 says, "Bear ye one another's burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ." This is the same royal law that James is referring to, and one of our unconscious biases that we may have as modern Christians that we need to be aware of is not necessarily preferring to seek relationships with rich or powerful people that we could benefit from or directly, you know, get something positive from. But I think maybe our biases have shifted towards our own self over connecting with others.

You know, this world since COVID and post-2020, it seems like Christians, we often prefer isolation with our own agendas and with our own schedules as more of an inclusive and rather than being a more inclusive and supportive communal family unit, and actually sharing one another's burdens. As Pastor mentioned recently, this is all well um recently, this is well as other societal trends finds both Christians and unchurched people in some of the the lonely and most depressive depressive states in any recent time in history. And so I wonder if James were alive today, would he be so straightforward and to the point with us? And then would he call it sin once again? And would he echo the words of his brother Jesus one more time to remind us to love God with all of our hearts and to love our neighbors as ourself.

There you have it. That's gym class session three. You know, I figured if 17 words were good enough for James, then there's no need for me to belabor the point anymore. It's just a simple reminder that if we love God with all of our heart, we will obviously not do things that will cause us to be spotted by the world. But we should also take actions towards others that will provide the evidence of our love for God. Let's stand. God, we thank you tonight for this reminder from James that the basis of your relationship with mankind is love. You created us to have a relationship based on free will love. And when sin fractured that relationship, you made a way of restoration because you so loved the world. And you desired an eternal lifetime of relationship with all humanity.

Not just the religious, not just the rich, not just a single ethnicity. God help us to never allow the culture attitudes of our generation to create partiality within us. That would keep us from fulfilling your royal law. Let us practice pure religion that we may exercise and experience the greatest outpouring of the Holy Spirit that this world has ever seen. Let us be prepared, God. You're bringing things into focus for the church. Help us to be prepared to show your love. Thank you for joining us tonight. I hope this is uh been beneficial to you. Maybe a good workout of the mind or the heart, but uh you can be dismissed.