Midtown Presbyterian Church

The Great Con | God Is Indifferent - James 1:5-12 - Clint Leavitt

Sermon Resources:

“Wisdom is that quality of heart and mind which is needed for the right conduct of life.” -Fenton Hort
“Cynicism creates a numbness toward life. Cynicism begins with a wry assurance that everyone has an angle. Behind every silver lining is a cloud. The cynic is always observing, critiquing, but never engaging, loving, and hoping. To be cynical is to be distant. While offering a false intimacy of being "in the know," cynicism actually destroys intimacy. It leads to bitterness that can deaden and even destroy the spirit.” -Paul E. Miller, "A Praying Life: Connecting With God In A Distracting World"

Duration:: 36m
Broadcast on:: 01 Jul 2024
Audio Format:: mp3

[MUSIC PLAYING] You're listening to a sermon from Midtown Presbyterian Church in Phoenix, Arizona. If you'd like to learn more about Midtown and its ministry, please visit us at midtownprez.org, or follow us on Instagram or Facebook. Our Friends of the Year is 1999 in Phoenix, Arizona. And it's a monumental moment on the pages of history. First, Y2K is approaching. And everyone is losing their minds. But not just that. The Nintendo 64 has taken over the lives of everyone between age 5 and 15 at this point. They're throwing banana shells and turtle shells at one another on racetracks all the time. But most importantly, in 1999, it's the year the Backstreet Boys proclaim to the world they want it that way. [LAUGHTER] Tell me why, right? Just the world has never been the same since 1999. And in the middle of that monumental time, there's a five-year-old boy named Clint. Clint is living his best life. He's killing it in kindergarten half days, hearing stories sitting on those little foam mats. Remember those foam mats used to sit on? I play tee ball. I'd slide headfirst into home plate every time, no matter if the plate was close. Because you've got to get your jersey dirty. You've got to slide into home plate, even at the cost of the tee sometimes. But one morning, Clint awoke in the middle of the night, in the middle of this monumental time in his life, to an utterly devastating sight. I came to consciousness following a dream, and I flicker my eyes open to the shadowy darkness, and noticed that I was in a place that I'd never seen before. I'd gone to sleep a few hours earlier in my usual comfortable bed, but now dread filled my heart. This place wasn't my home. And I realized I must have been kidnapped. Someone took me. And so I'm freaking out. And then, as I'm making my scan around the room, I feel my heart sink through my feet because some figure, some person, is standing only a few feet away, seemingly staring maniacally at me. A thin and lanky outline of a body is topped by what looks to be the shape of a hat. And now I'm mentally reckoning with what the heck I should do. Do I cower in my bed and wait for someone to come rescue me? Do I yell for help? Do I rush the figure and try to fight my way out? Moments pass as I wrestle with my options, and I finally work up the courage. I decide I'm going to rush that, dude, over there. And so I work up the courage in my heart, and I sprint for my bed as quickly as possible faster than I had ever left a tee ball batter's box. I grab the figure, and my hands wrap around hats. Hats. My work, my hand up to the top. And I realize there's one hat at the top. I was seeing a hat rack, not a person. And so I back my way back to my bed. I sit down and lay back down. I'm like, what the heck is going on? And then I start to think, well, what if this actually is my room? And I move my body back to the other side of my bed, and I lay down, and everything looks the same. It was my room the whole time. I was just somehow had moved myself in the middle of the night to lay on the wrong side of the bed. There was no pillow, there were no sheets, there were no blankets, because I'd kicked them all off. All I had to do was shift my perspective. I was having trouble navigating the dark, and all I had to do was change the lens through which I saw my room. I need to be reoriented in the darkness. And as humorous as that moment is in my life, I think it illustrates something important about all of our lives. Friends, sometimes we can be looking right at something. Situation can experience a dark room, but we can fail to see the truth in the middle of it. Sometimes our understanding of perspective is just flat out wrong, even though we're looking at the same thing. Maybe we're looking in the wrong places. Maybe we're noticing the wrong things. We're putting clues together that aren't actually there. Maybe we can believe that the hat rack is a kidnapper in the middle of our dark rooms. Maybe in the middle of our trials and troubles, we can believe a con or a lie about what's true, about God, about ourselves, about the world. And those cons, those lies we believe in real life beyond just a hat rack in the corner of my room when I was a kid, those things actually change our lives. They aren't inconsequential. They shape how we show up in the world. A wrong belief in the middle of a trial or suffering can lead to speech or behavior that is painful or destructive to us or others. In fact, that's often how anxieties or fears or insecurities or sins begin in us. They start with a misunderstanding of truth or reality. And then we live out of that misunderstanding, which means being a healthy person, being a whole person, looks like consistently reorienting ourselves towards what is true in the middle of our dark rooms. This is what the Bible refers to as wisdom. Wisdom is the ability to discern what is true or right or lasting and the capacity to turn that knowledge into practical decisions and actions in the world. Wisdom in the Bible is eminently practical. It's about how we live well in the middle of trials and pains and suffering. I like how Anglican theologian Fenton Hort put it back in the 19th century. He said wisdom is that quality of heart and mind, which is needed for the right conduct in life. And that theme of wisdom, the idea of wisdom, isn't when we spend a lot of time talking about here on Sunday mornings, but it's a consistent theme throughout all of the scriptures. For instance, wisdom. It's a main character in the poetic book of Proverbs. Wisdom in that book is depicted as a wise and shrewd woman, which makes a lot of sense, right? Ladies and they're like, yep, yep. Obviously, it's a woman. Lady wisdom, she keeps showing up over and over and reminds people of the lies that they tend to believe. The lies that guide their way through the world. And then she reminds them of the truths that they need to believe in order to navigate trials and pain and hardship rightly. Wisdom is also mentioned as a primary trait of Jesus himself. It's what enabled Jesus to navigate his life and his death and his resurrection and become a vehicle of life and flourishing to the world. Wisdom is what did that for him. There's a couple different shout outs to this in the Gospels. For instance, in Luke 2, as Jesus is growing older, developing into his ministry, Luke says that Jesus increased in wisdom and in stature and in divine and human favor. And later on in his ministry, Matthew shouts this out. Matthew 13, people were marveling in his teaching and miracles, and this is what they said about him. He came to his hometown, began to teach the people in their synagogue so that they were astounded and said, where did this man get this wisdom in these deeds of power? And then even after Jesus rose from the grave, Paul refers to Jesus as divine wisdom incarnate. He says this, "For Jews ask for signs, Greeks desire wisdom, "we proclaim Christ crucified, "a stumbling block to the Jews and foolishness "to the Gentiles, but to those who are called, "both Jews and Greeks, Christ, the power of God "and the wisdom of God." According to the Scriptures, wisdom is the foundational trait that enables us to live well, to become full and free Christ-like people. And James, right away in his letter, picks up on this view of wisdom in the first chapter. Last week, we intro'd the person of James in the first few verses that he gives us here. He starts off his letter by talking about the inevitability of trials and suffering and pain. We're gonna go through those things, all of us. But those things do not necessarily mean that we can't navigate them well. He says there's a way to navigate those things with wisdom that produces joy and maturity in us. Trials can furnish the qualities that we lack that can make us complete people. But the truth is that trials and suffering don't automatically do that. Sometimes trials and sufferings make us better. Sometimes they make us bitter. We all know this. We know people who have navigated very similar situations and have come out on the other side as radically different people. And what James seems to think, in line with the rest of the Bible, in line with Jesus himself, is that the main way that trials and sufferings can shape us into people of maturity is when we navigate them with wisdom. When we approach them with wisdom, what makes them bearable or not bearable and what allows them to mature us or not mature us is whether we receive them with wisdom and endure them with wisdom. Navigating pain well in our lives means becoming people who know the truth of God in the very center of our beings. And then who embody that truth practically in every part of our life. That's what wisdom looks like. And that isn't easy to do. Because the lies, the cons, the hat racks that are faking us out, those things surround us. They're loud and pervasive. The dark rooms we wake up in can be utterly disorienting, sometimes. And so James, in this letter, after telling people that if you navigate suffering, it will produce completeness and maturity. He says, here's how wisdom can look. He actually gives these people a couple examples of what it looks like to navigate hard things with wisdom. And he's addressing a primary lie that people tend to believe in the middle of the trials. They're dark rooms here. The primary lie or con he's concerned with here is indifference, indifference. In a couple of different ways. First, he's talking about the indifference that we can tend to have towards God. We can believe that God maybe isn't relevant to our day today. But on the flip side, we can also, when we go through suffering, think that God might be indifferent to us. And so that twofold con of indifference is what James seems to be exposing here. His words show us how to refute that con and live with wisdom in the middle of it. So friends, if you have a Bible, open it with me. That's the book of James. This is near the backs of your New Testament. If you're flipping there, we're going to be in James, chapter 1, starting in verse 5, and then reading all the way to verse 12. James 1, starting in verse 5 to verse 12. If you don't have a Bible, by the way, that's OK. The words meet behind me on the screen so you can follow along there. James 1, starting in verse 5. If any of you is lacking in wisdom, ask God who gives to all generously and ungrudgingly, and it will be given, you. But ask in faith, never doubting. For the one who doubts is like a wave of the sea driven and tossed by the wind. For the doubter, being double-minded and unstable in every way must not expect to receive anything from the Lord. Let the believer who is lowly, boast in being raised up, and the rich in being brought low, because the rich will disappear like a flower in the field. For the sun rises with its scorching heat and withers the field. Its flower falls and its beauty perishes. It is the same with the rich. In the midst of a busy life, they will wither away. Blessed is anyone who endures temptation. Such a one has stood the test and will receive the crown of life that the Lord has promised to those who love him. This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God. Fears back, I was walking through a mall near Emily and I's home. The malls were this ancient place where the god of consumption was worshipped. You guys remember those things back in the day. Shiny floors, many different colors of clothes, cinnabon, shacks, cinnabon fans in the room. Come on, that's the only reason I would ever go to a mall. But this time, I was there and I was stopping by the Hallmark store, which was out of a brand, off-brand for me. But I was there shopping for my grandma, who I felt like Hallmark. That was kind of her lane. So I step into Hallmark, looking at some of the cards there, and one card stuck out to me that has struck me ever since. It's been in my brain ever since I saw it. The card said this on the cover. I love Jesus, but I drink a little. I love Jesus, but I drink a little. Now, to be clear, I'm all for a good drink. There's nothing wrong inherently with a good drink. I think it's something we probably should be wise and cautious about. There's nothing wrong with a good drink. But there is a subtle assumption underneath what that card is saying. Whoever wrote that and whoever might buy that is saying this. Yes, I have faith, but I still pretty much do what I want to do. Yes, I have faith, but I'm kind of in control here. I drink a little. It's a terrific statement of indifference. It's a way of saying that Jesus doesn't really make a difference in my life or in the world. Maybe he doesn't care that much. I'm not buying behavior. Maybe I can just sort of pick and choose where to fit him into my life when it's convenient. Maybe the pain I go through is something that Jesus is indifferent to altogether. In many ways, that sort of indifference, it's the perfect expression of faith as it's often embodied in the US. We are people who often live with spiritual split personalities. On the one hand, we say we believe in things like faith and prayer and God. We say those are important to us, but our lives, our habits, our behaviors, are deeply held beliefs. They illustrate that we're actually indifferent to God or that we think God might be indifferent to us. As an example of this, we're people who say we believe that God is generous, as James says in this passage. God is loving towards us. But then in our prayers, we doubt whether God is really listening. We doubt whether God is actually there at all. And then we hedge our bets when we pray, or we stop praying altogether. We're people who say we believe in a God of forgiveness and grace and love of enemy, but then we keep grudges. We live with bitterness and anger that we hold on to for years. We're people who say that loving God and loving others is a top priority in our lives. But then our time and our money and our actions really illustrate that we have other priorities. We fit God in when it makes sense. We're people who say that we trust God is redeeming and restoring all things in Christ. But then at the first sign of trial or trouble, we blame God. We lash out at God. We claim that God is indifferent to us. This sort of two-sided dynamic, it's what James means in this passage when he uses the phrase double-minded in verse 7. He's pointing out that there is a heart posture of doubt and disbelief, a posture that says God is indifferent in the middle of our trials, in the middle of the hard things we go through. And that posture makes us utterly unable, James says, to receive God's wisdom and stability in the middle of the trials, because it cuts us off from God. Now, quick note about what he means about doubt and disbelief here, because it's important to note what he is saying and isn't saying. He isn't saying that scattered intellectual doubts should never arise in our minds, that we have to be perfectly faithful in everything. We have to trust that God can do everything whenever we want all the time. Doubt is at central part of the Gospels. There are people who follow Jesus who have doubts all over the place, and Jesus regularly meets them in those scattered doubts. Remember the man whose son was possessed and needed healing. He said to Jesus, I believe, help my unbelief. He's recognizing that he has these doubts. I believe in you, Jesus. There's just parts of me that make this difficult to end Jesus meets him, or the disciples themselves. It says, at the resurrection, they're looking at Jesus. It says they worship, but some doubt it. And Jesus still showed up to them. He met them. The text says he comes to them. Thomas, who doubted the resurrection. Reasonably so, a man rising from the dead. Jesus meets him. Even look at James himself, right? We talked about James's story last week. James doubted whether Jesus was the Lord early on in his life. And over time, Jesus met him, and met him. And eventually, in his resurrected body, met him. James was a doubter who became a person of faith. So James himself, he's not saying that little bouts with doubt, little challenges will prevent us from ever seeing God. In fact, those doubts throughout the scriptures often lead to deeper faith, to deeper encounters with Jesus. James is saying that what we need to avoid is having a split personality of our soul. There's a Greek scholar named Douglas Mu, who I think brings this out really well in this text. He says that there's a nuance to this word double-minded here. The word that James is using seems to be a mashing together of what we would potentially understand as double-sold. That the deepest part of you is somehow split. It's not that you want Jesus, and you trust in Jesus-- now, faith in Jesus, and there's some doubts that creep in. It's saying that in the fundamental parts of who you are, is an inconsistency. You say you love Jesus, but really deeply down. You don't. It's a sort of person who says one thing, but whose behaviors and actions and beliefs constantly betray their own claims about what they believe. They lack commitment. They lack consistency in following Jesus. The point is not that a life of following Jesus will never be without doubt. The point is, what is the general consistency and direction that I am heading? How am I posturing myself towards Jesus? Do I go to Jesus even in my doubt? And James is saying that that mode of living, living double-sold, living double-minded, is unwise. We will never become people of wisdom. We'll never become people who can live well through the middle of our trials and sufferings when we're double-sold, when we're split in that way. And so that naturally leads all of us to the question, how do we unwork that dynamic? If we find it ourselves, a double-mindedness, a double-sold-ness, how do we unwork that in our lives? How can we become people who consistently show up as people of stability and peace in the middle of our pain? And there's two things. I think James tells us here in this passage. He gives an example that I think illustrates these two things, so just two points. Two points in the sermon today. It's great. That's what you guys think. There's more coming. The two points. Spot the con and shift our lens. We need to spot the con and shift our lens. First, we need to spot the con. The con that God is indifferent or that we can be indifferent to God. That's something that our culture actually often feeds us. That doesn't just come out of nowhere from our hearts or minds. That's something that our culture is constantly telling us that God isn't indifferent to you. That God's word doesn't really matter. That God's law doesn't really matter. That God's way of being in the world, the way he made you doesn't really matter. You can kind of live indifferent to God because God isn't different to you. There's messaging that we get all the time. So what I want to do, I want to look at a couple of different messages that make up this con because I think it's hard to believe conceptually. But when we apply it through these lenses, I think we see that our culture is constantly telling us. And I would imagine people in this room have been negatively affected by these communications of God's indifference in one way or another. So there's three different parts to this con I want to explore. The first is the notion of technological indifference. One of the main reasons people in our culture have difficulty wisely navigating trial and suffering is because we believe in science and technology can do things that it can't do for us, that science and technology have claimed to provide more than they can offer. We live in an air that says we are in charge. We can be indifference to God because we are capable of bringing healing through our trials and sufferings by all our fancy devices, by all our brilliant plans. Our culture tells us we can overcome our problems if we just put our heads together, embrace the right method, embrace the right practice. And so when something goes wrong in our lives, in our world, in our hearts, in our minds, we think, well, the right method can fix it. The right self-help book can fix it. The right government official can fix it. The right doctor can fix it. The right therapist can fix it. The right education can fix it. And to be clear, all those things, great things. I'm not saying get rid of those things. I'm glad that we don't die of dysentery on the Oregon Trail anymore. It's a good thing, right? But none of them have the capacity to fix or solve or resolve all of our trials and sufferings. None of them do. In the moment we believe they can, the moment we assume that we can be indifferent towards God because we can fix all our problems ourselves, that's the moment that we will be most bent out of shape when we go through trials. Because we will expect things to be fixed by our methods, and we will lose our minds when they aren't. We will lose our minds when politicians don't fix things in the way we want them to. Anybody watch the debate on Thursday? The debate? Just a new splash, a little spark-notes version for you. Neither man is the solution to our sufferings. It became abundantly clear to anyone who watched that. If you want to talk more about that, join the after party. We'll talk about that during the week. But we do this sort of thing all the time. We assume that the medical procedure or the educational experience or the technological advancement will resolve things for us, and they don't. You guys, all the medicine in the world, all the technology in the world, all the educational world, none of it has decreased the death rate. You know what the death rate is? One per person. One death per person. That's how it's always been. Our technological indifference to God has not created a society of people who navigate trials with wisdom. It's created a society of people who are constantly disappointed by the failures of the things we've come up with to solve our problems. There was a quote I heard from someone recently who affirms this kind of human self-sufficiency and control over the world. They said, it used to be that we prayed for rain, but now we build reservoirs. I was like, that's interesting. That's true. We do build reservoirs, but anyone who lives in Phoenix also knows we still pray for rain. We build the thing, but we still need to pray for rain. We're not in control. Indifference to God does not help us in our trials. That's a con. But it's not just our over-reliance on technological means. It's not just technological indifference. It's also that we've forgotten something fundamental about our identity, because we live in a culture that has sinned forgetful indifference. Here's what I mean. Throughout history, most cultures have generally believed that humans have got something wrong with them. There's something off, some sort of moral calamity in us. And Christianity has claimed this from the outset. Jesus, when he showed up on the scene, he proclaimed that humans have incredible worth, incredible capacity for good. They have inherent dignity and value in the eyes of God eternally. But Jesus also had the sobering view that within every human, there is some deeply embedded problem that needs to be changed. And much of the brokenness and harm and pain we see out there in the world can be traced right back to our hearts. We are all holy, and we are all haunted. We are all given a selfishness and bent inward on ourselves. And we're living in a world of trial and pain that is an extension of that condition in us. And that means that for Christians throughout the centuries, trial and pain and suffering is something to be expected. We should anticipate that in a world where we aren't quite the way we ought to be. But our modern world has given up that notion of that condition. There's a psychiatrist named Carl Menager, who wrote extensively about this back in the middle of 20th century. In the '70s, he wrote a book called Whatever Became of Sin. And his primary premise in the book is that modern society has taken away a moral model for seeing the world and has replaced it with a medical model. So for instance, we are people who will carry around deep bitterness and anger in our hearts. But rather than saying we have a problem with bitterness or anger that we need to resolve, we say that we are hurting because of the people who cause that bitterness and anger in us. We point the blame outside of ourselves. We do not address what's going on in us. We've shifted the problem from in here to out there. There's a New York Times article that I think brought this up. I mentioned this a few weeks back. But I think it's worth re-mentioning here. The article was titled, What Brand Is Your Therapist? And in it, they interview some therapists about how the framework through which modern therapy is now practiced and advertised is much different than it was originally. So they interview a woman named Casey Trufo, who's a marriage and family therapist, a licensed professional counselor. She leads an organization called the Therapist Leadership Institute, somebody who has a lot of eyes on a lot of therapeutic practices in the US. And she mentioned this shift in therapy. She said this, today I see fewer and fewer people coming in and saying, I want to change. What I see now is people coming to therapy because they want someone else or something else to change. I'm great. The problem is out there. And it's becoming so prominent now that she says, in most marketing materials for therapy, she's seen a shift. They used to market, I treat people with depression and anxiety. But now they market, are you having trouble with difficult people in your life? See the shift there in our culture. Now to be clear, there are problems out there in the world, for sure. There are people who do bad things. There are people who have affected us. All of us carry that. We should be able to acknowledge that. But the same insecurities and the same brokenness and the same hardship out there runs right through our own hearts. That's all in here, too. And for the Christian, one primary way that Christians have navigated trials and sufferings for centuries is acknowledging the truth that I need to change and that there's only one person in the world I can change. It's me. I have habits, ways of showing up in the world that in some way miss the mark of being truly human. And when I invite Christ into those, when I allow Christ to work in those, he can transform those parts of me and make me into a person more like him. But when we buy into our modern notion that there's nothing wrong in here, what we're really saying is that God is indifference to my thoughts and my behaviors. I can live how I want, I can pursue my desires, and God should just really accept them as they are 'cause that's how he made me anyway. They don't really matter. And life in that sort of world quickly becomes a pursuit of what I want. And I assume that things will go well for me when I pursue what I want. And if something doesn't go well, it's on someone else out there, they need to change. So I can live how I want. Friends, if we don't think we need to change our behaviors and habits and views, we'll always see them as right or good, and every trial that will come up will turn us into blaming sorts of people. We'll turn us into people who point the finger out there, will turn us into people that become cynical and paralyzed because we can't address what's going on in here. That's the third part of this con of indifference. It's cynicism in our culture, cynical indifference. The genziers in the millennials in the room know what I'm talking about. This is our specialty. We are cynical people. Because of all the pain and trial we see in our lives and world, we start to assume that God must be indifferent to us or the world. The embedded assumption is that if God is around and loves us, that things will go well for us. That's the assumption that we have. And the fact that things don't always go well means that God must be indifferent. In that perspective, eventually it makes us utterly cynical. The cynic, this is the trap of cynicism. I say it as a recovering cynic all the time. The trap of the cynic is that we sound smart. We sound like we have insider knowledge. We sound like we have things figured out. But the perspective of the cynic lacks wisdom. Because it doesn't actually provide a way through trials and sufferings. Great, you think God isn't different. That's awesome, but you still got to deal with the crap. You still got to deal with what's gone wrong. You still got to deal with the pain. And cynicism doesn't give us anything to do to deal with the pain. We can get rid of God all we want. The pain's still there. The hardship's still there. Cynic only ever tears down. It never builds anew. And that approach, if left long enough, will ultimately always be defeated by trials and pain, eventually. Cynics always become perpetual blamers. They medicate or they none to try to ignore the thing. They only see and speak about the negative. They constantly complain. They're unable to find peace in life. Cynical belief in the indifference of God only ever leads to destruction. There's a great author named Paul Miller who talks about this in his book, A Praying Life. He says, " Cynicism creates a numbness towards life." Cynicism begins with a rye assurance that everyone has an angle. Behind every silver lining is a cloud. The cynic is always observing, critiquing, but never engaging, loving, hoping. To be cynical is to be distant. While offering a false intimacy of being in the know, cynicism actually destroys intimacy. It leads to bitterness that can even deaden and destroy the spirit. Friends believing that we can be indifferent to God and solve our own problems is a con. It will only ever lead us to tragic disappointment. Believing that the problem is only ever out there and never in here is a con. Indifference to God's morality is a con. And believing God is indifferent to us in our trials is a con. It's cynicism masquerading as intelligence and deadening our souls. What we need is a truth, a wisdom that enables us to navigate trials and suffering well. It's not indifference of God and indifference towards God. What James gives us is something much different. He's saying here that in the moments that feel like God is most indifferent-- those are actually the times when God is most at work-- we just need to be able to shift our lens. We need to be able to move from the wrong side of the bed to the right side of the bed, to see the room clearly. And he gives us one example in how we can do this. An example in which most people would think God is clearly indifferent in this situation. He says this, "Let the believer who is lowly, boast in being raised up, and the rich in being brought low, because the rich will disappear like a flower in the field. For the sun rises with its scorching heat and withers the field. Its flower falls and its beauty perishes. It is the same with the rich. In the midst of a busy life, they will wither away." So just looking at this data from the wrong side of the bed, the cynical side of the bed, we would say that from the perspective of the poor, God is clearly indifferent. We are tempted to believe that God is indifferent to them because they, in the eyes of the world, are insignificant and suffering. And then from the perspective of the rich, they could be tempted to feel that God is indifferent towards them because they can kind of do whatever they want and things go well. Their actions don't actually matter all that much. So either God is approving of them or God doesn't really care about what they do. And so they can live with, "I don't need God or God doesn't judge me because look at all of my actions. Look at all the great things that happen to me." But James says that both of those lenses, both of those ways of seeing the situation are wrong, he gives him a way to respond to that con, to wisdom, he says, "First, to the poor believer, you can take pride in your exalted status as one seated forever with Christ. You are not less than. You are eternally cherished. You are eternally elevated in Jesus, you matter." And the early church practiced this. The poor mattered in the church in a way that they never mattered in any other social situation. In the early church, there were no distinctions in value based on worldly category. So that means a slave could be a minister and a leader and a wealthy aristocrat would be the one sitting and learning and confessing to that slave. That was unheard of in the ancient world. There was never anything like this that all people regardless of what the world says about them have equal dignity and worth, that they are all elevated in Christ. The church has always been the kingdom outpost where what is true about people eternally is true about them in our midst. And that's not just in the church, that extends out from the church. When the poor enter the church and have that message internalized, that wisdom, that way of seeing internalized, then they go out into the world recognizing their eternal significance regardless of their economic state. Every word, every action, every prayer, every breath is given by God and is used by God in his kingdom regardless of your economic status. And no one in the world could ever take that away. Your skills, your time, your lives, they are utterly valuable and they can navigate trials and pain differently because of it. There was a 16th century Latin scholar named Meritus. He was a brilliant, brilliant Latin scholar, but he lived much of his life as a poor and wandering outcast all across Italy. And at one point he fell deathly sick. And so he was taken to a very cheap hospital where doctors would work to care for the poor, where the poor and destitute were kept. And the doctors there looked upon Meritus in his condition. And then they briefly spoke together in Latin, which at that time was the language of the educated, not the language of the poor. They spoke in Latin because they knew all the poor people there could not understand them. They didn't know that this poor man was a Latin scholar. And these doctors, in a few short words, explain to one another that it would be impruded and unwise to expend energy on this man. It's just not worth it. He's too poor. Even if we give him good life, he's not going to have a good life after this. It's worthless in some way or another. And upon hearing them, Meritus, he sits up in his bed. He looks in the eyes. And he says, call no person worthless for whom Christ died. Call no person worthless for whom Christ died. That's what James is saying here. No matter what the world says about you, no matter your economic state, you are eternally valuable. And you can take pride in what Christ has done, how Christ has lifted you up. When trials and sufferings come your way, remember that the God of the universe, who has all power, has dignified you, has died for you so that you could be eternally rich. That's the wisdom we need. That's how we shift our lens. But it's not just for the poor that he tells to shift their lens here. He also speaks to the rich. He says to the rich believer, that's the person who might be tempted to believe too highly of themselves. Believe that the world holds them in high esteem, and therefore that gives them value. And James here says, take pride and security not in your money or social position, because those things are dooms too fade away. If you place too much stock in those, if you place your identity in those, if you start to view yourself as too elevated because of those, it will destroy you. And he uses a powerful image that will make sense to us, Phoenicians, who live in a desert here. He's speaking to people who are also familiar with the desert. He uses the image of a scorching desert wind that comes through and can destroy anything in its path. He's saying that our material wealth and riches become like this, something that gets destroyed at a moment's notice. We can lose it all because of one economic downturn. One hot summer breeze, one bad decision, one job loss, is like that moment where you step-- you know when you step in your car and it's been outside for like a total of six minutes and you feel like you're dying in Phoenix? That's what happens. That's what our wealth is like. It's this fickle thing that can go away at a moment's notice. And James' point is this, to the rich, if life is so uncertain and we are so vulnerable, we are only ever wise if we trust in things we can't lose. And so the rich, he says, take pride in your humble status, the fact that you are not validated by anything in the world but are validated by a criminal on a cross. Validated by the one who went low, the one who was despised and rejected, the one who made himself poor, so that all could be rich. And when they do that, when they recognize that pride in their humiliation, they will become people who are utterly unattached to their wealth, who can give it away because they know it's not their status, who aren't constantly anxious about losing things because they know their identity isn't placed in them. James' wisdom reminds both the poor and the wealthy when trial comes, shift your lens. Move your head to the right side of the bed. Don't buy into the con that God is indifferent. Live instead in the wisdom of who Christ is and what Christ has done for you. For the Christian, their struggle is only ever the way to glory. In the end, the struggle actually becomes the glory. That's why at the end here in verse 12, he says that when we do this, we will receive the crown of life. He's using the image of a like a laurel leaf head covering that athletes would wear when they'd win. The crown signified a victory that was born precisely of struggle. When you wore that, it was a sign that you had struggled and endured and persevered and you had now won. You had victory. You guys, the victory, we are longing for in our lives. A victory of wisdom that navigates trials well. A victory of maturity and completeness as whole people. It's available to us. We just need the wisdom of Christ to guide us. And if we ever forget that's true, if the creeping con of God's indifference starts to infringe upon our hearts and minds again, there was one place we can look to remember that this is true now and into eternity, the cross. It was at the cross where for every person who washed it, it looked like God was utterly indifferent. An innocent man being destroyed on a Roman torture machine. That looks like God's indifference. Jesus felt God's indifference. He said, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Everything that the world would say is God's most indifferent moment. And Christians say it is when God was most actively present. It is when God worked and moved in the middle of the time that seemed the hardest, in the middle of the trial, and the suffering God shows up. And it's that cross that is God's ultimate victory and the resurrection that follows it. It was Christ's crown of thorns that became the glorious crown of life for Him and all people. God was not indifferent in that moment. God entered in. God went low. God moved. And God reshaped that trial and that suffering to produce eternal good out of it for all people. Friends, that's the upside down wisdom of Christ's kingdom. That is what we need to shift our lens to in trials and sufferings. That's what we need in our dark rooms. We need the truth to press in when cons seem to envelop us. We need the cross. And the cross, friends, is where we end every service today, the cross and the resurrection. Christ is here. So turn to Him. Let Him uncover your eyes to see. Let Him unblock your ears to hear. Let Him melt your icy heart so that you might know Him anew. That's what He wants to do, friends, for every one of us. Trust Him in your dark room. Let's pray. Let's pray. [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING]