Practical Christianity, James 1:16-18

Continuing our look into the Epistle from James, Pastor Derek teaches us that "To avoid deception in our trials, we need to affirm by faith God’s perfect goodness".


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Transcript

Practical Christianity, James 1:16-18

Intro- It’s very easy to be deceived about who someone is. Consider Shelby Sampson, a who back on December 5, 2016 experienced an awful first date when her date decided to rob a bank and use her as his unwilling getaway driver. Sampson went out on a first date with Christopher Castillo, and as they were riding in the car together, Castillo asked her to stop at a car near the bank and left the vehicle for a few minutes. He then came back sweating and carrying a hat, wearing sunglasses with a gun and cash on him.

Castillo told her to speed off, which she did, but when she saw the police lights she quickly stopped and exited the vehicle. Both parties were arrested, and Sampson was initially charged as an accessory, but charges were later dropped when authorities straightened out the story. In explaining his motive for heisting the bank for $1000, Castillo told the DA’s office that he was ‘really hurting’ and needed the money.

Bridge- While it’s easy to be deceived about who other people are, it’s also easy to be confused about who God is. The Bible is preeminently a book about God. It teaches us who God is and what He is like, and through the Bible we have everything that we need to know about how to be made right with God and how to live for Christ. The Bible teaches us unambiguously about a perfect God who is perfect in all His ways (Ps. 18:30).

While that sounds straightforward, we would have to admit that it’s not always easy to understand what God is doing. Because we fall into trials of various kinds, it’s easy to become confused about who God is. Because things break, things go wrong, relationships get damaged, our bodies fail, and we deal with expected and unexpected losses, we are prone to become deceived about the God we love.

Probably the most common thing we question about God is His goodness. If God is good, why do bad things happen to His children? We wonder, “If God is good and powerful, why did he allow me to go through this terrible tragedy?” The insinuation from the evil one becomes, “Either God is not very good, or He is not able to stop your trials.” This struggle is not new, God’s people have long wondered the same thing (Ps. 73:10-12).

James’ audience was facing a similar temptation. James was writing to a group of Jewish Christians, who have been scattered because of the persecution that broke out in Jerusalem (Acts 8:1). In fleeing for their lives, they were displaced from their homes, communities, and jobs. They have fallen into all kinds of painful and confusing trials.

Like a skilled pastor, James has been teaching us how to endure through our trials. He taught us that we can have joy in our trials, not because trials are fun, but because God is using them to mature us in Christ (2-4). He challenged us to earnestly seek God for wisdom, so that we can best live for God in our trials (5-8). He also explained that when we experience temptations in our trials, we must recognize that they come from within, and never from God (13-15). Now he explains what God actually does give us. Rather than harming us with temptation, God is the source of everything good in our lives.

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Everything that comes from God is good, and so, when we face various trials, we can trust our good heavenly Father. Here we learn that...To avoid deception in our trials, we need to affirm by faith God’s perfect goodness.

The possibility for deception is so strong that James emphatically wrote, Do not be deceived, my beloved brothers. (1:16) It could also be translated stronger, “Stop being deceived!” Deceived is the Greek word “planao,” which means to wander. In the ancient world they used planao to describe luminaries, such as shooting stars, that appeared to being wandering off course. James would later use the word to describe believers who have wandered from the truth of the gospel (5:19). To be deceived means to wander, like a shooting star, away from the biblical truth about God. What is the deception? Well, it reaches back to vv.13-15, where the deception is to blame God for our temptations and relatedly, as he explains in vv.16-18, to be deceived about the goodness of God.

And so, we must make sure that we are not wandering off course in our understanding of God. The reason for this is simple. You can’t live for God properly unless you properly understand who He is. If we are deceived about who God is, it will affect our intimacy with Him, our attitude towards Him, and it will cripple our obedience to Him. As A.W. Tozer explains in The Knowledge of the Holy, “For this reason the gravest question before the Church is always God Himself, and the most portentous fact about any man is not what he at a given time may say or do, but what he in his deep heart conceives God to be like. We tend by a secret law of the soul to move toward our mental image of God. This is true not only of the individual Christian, but of the company of Christians that composes the Church. Always the most revealing thing about the Church is her idea of God.”

Now, to combat our deception about God, James lays out three essential aspects of God’s goodness. First...

To say that God is good is to say a lot about God. Older theologians tended to categorize God’s attributes into two- His goodness and His

greatness. Scripturally, God’s goodness includes His infinite love and faithfulness. For the LORD is good; his steadfast love endures forever, and his faithfulness to all generations. (Ps. 100:5). God’s goodness also includes His rich mercy, His amazing grace, His kindness, patience and benevolence to His creatures (Ps. 25:8; 86:5; 145:9). In the ultimate sense, God alone is good (Mk. 10:17-18). As Thomas Manton wrote, “God is originally good, good of Himself, which nothing else is: for all creatures are good only by participating and communication from God. He is essentially good; not only good, but goodness itself; the creature’s good is a superadded quality, in God it is His essence. He is infinitely good; the creature’s good is but an eye drop, but in God there is an infinite ocean or gathering together of good. He is eternally and immutably good, for He cannot be less God than he is; as there can be no addition made to Him, so no subtraction from Him.”

Because God is originally, essentially, and infinitely good, everything that comes from God is good. James expresses God’s comprehensive goodness by repeating the word “every.” Every means all inclusive, consummate, and without exception. And he uses two

different Greek words for gifts. “Dosis”, refers to the act of giving, and “dorema,” which

We avoid deception in our trials by affirming that God is

comprehensive in His goodness (17a).

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refers to the object that is given. This means that God not only gives good gifts, He gives those gifts in perfect ways. God’s gifts are sufficient, lacking nothing, they are beneficial, complete. Every breath, every ray of sunlight, every sustaining moment of life that God gives us are gifts of His goodness (Acts 14:17).

In order to affirm God’s comprehensive goodness, we need to expand our definition of goodness to match God’s definition of goodness. By returning to the word “perfect,” James is connecting us back to vv.2-4. His point is, trials are a part of God’s good gifts to us. They are good because through them, God is testing our faith and He is maturing us in Christ (2-4; 12). God’s definition of good includes that which makes us more like Jesus, and unless we hold to this definition by faith, we may miss out on some of the good that God is seeking to accomplish through our trials (Ro. 5:3-5). We are not thankful for pain, but for what it produces.

We also need to understand that God is consistent in His goodness. We avoid deception As fallen human

beings, we are prone to be fickle and inconsistent in our goodness. One minute we are full of goodness and then for no apparent reason we can be awful to others, even those that we love. How do we know this is not the case with God?

The reason we can affirm God’s perfect goodness is because God is unchanging in His nature. Good is not just something that God perfectly does, good is something that God perfectly is (Ps. 119:68). His perfect good gifts spring from His perfect unchanging nature(Mal. 3:6). God is not becoming a better God. He is not changing for the better or for the worse. Nor are we helping God to make up for any deficiencies, as if God were lonely or unfulfilled. God is in need of nothing, He is perfect in all His ways, and He is unchanging in His goodness because He is unchanging in His being.

To explain this, James calls God the Father of Lights. Lights refers to luminaries in the sky, and especially the sun. God is the Father of lights because He brought them into being. When James says that with the Father of lights, “there is no variation or shadow due to change,” he is drawing a contrast with the sun. The sun is always shining, it is one of the great constants of our world. But even though this is true, we don’t always experience sunshine in the same way. There is variation and shadow shifting. This happens at night, when it rains, or when it’s cloudy, and with the changing of seasons. As constant as the sun is, it’s goodness to us is blocked by other elements.

Unlike our experience with the sun, with the Father of lights, “there is no variation or shadow due to change.” Even though we may experience dark nights, cloudy days or changing seasons, God’s goodness is always shining forth. It is always coming down from above. God’s goodness to us is constant and consistent. He is always good. His goodness never varies in intensity. Our good Father cannot change in His essential goodness to us. His nature and His purpose towards His children are steady and unchanging. R Kent Hughes writes, “The good news today and for all eternity is this: God

in our trials by affirming that God is consistent in His goodness (17b).

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is infinitely good. He has never had and will never have more goodness than he has now. He is unchangeably good. He stands like an eternal sun in a cloudless sky, radiating unbroken goodness upon us. God will always- eternally be good to us.”

Finally,

James lands with one of the greatest personal illustrations of God’s goodness, His sovereign choice to grant spiritual life. “Brought us forth” is birth language, and it means as the NIV translates it, to “give us birth.” Out of His goodness, God makes dead people alive (Eph. 2:1-5). To be saved means to have new spiritual life, to be brought out of death and made spiritually alive, all through the gracious goodness of God.

And this supernatural life flows out of God’s sovereign choice. It is, “of His own will.” Just as human birth is the result of the decision and actions of the parents (correct?), so supernatural birth is the result of the decision and action of God the Father. Scripture is unambiguous about this. (Jn. 1:12-13, Titus 3:5). Alistair Begg says, “New birth is something God chose to do, unpressured by our helplessness, unimpressed by our supposed goodness; he acted in accordance with his free, uncompelled, sovereign will.”

How does this happen? Not in a vacuum, but through the word of truth, the life-giving message of the gospel. When the gospel is proclaimed, God uses it to bring people to spiritual life. Why would God be so gracious? Obviously to demonstrate His goodness, but more so, that He would have a people who are set apart to Him. First fruits were the first and best part of Israel’s harvest that belonged to God. It was dedicated to God. Through the new birth, God has set apart a people for Himself. The people that God “brings forth” are His special possession who are set apart for His special usage.

To avoid deception in our trials, we need to affirm by faith God’s perfect goodness.

Action points:

If God has made you spiritually alive, live for God alone.
If God has made you spiritually alive, share the gospel with others.
If God has made you spiritually alive, affirm God’s perfect goodness.
If you are outside of Christ, hear the good news and believe upon Christ.

we avoid deception in our trials by affirming that God is sovereign in His

goodness (18).

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