Finding Joy in God’s Unanticipated Plans

Now, we enter into the study of a New Testament book this morning, a verse-by-verse study of a book that, uh, written by a man.

God used a man to write this book that if I were to hand him a script of his life and say, "Hey, go, go ahead and edit this out," he would have plenty of things that, uh, he would want to edit out.

I mean, just assuming in the illustration, for illustration's sake, he would look back and think, "Wow, um, there's a lot of things that I, I wish I could go back and change." Uh, this particular author of this New Testament book, believe it or not, looks at his pre-Christian days, and I can only imagine what it would feel like to think that you, believe it or not, grew up with the Messiah in your household.

And, um, the Bible's really clear about this.

You didn't believe his claims.

Now, you lived with him.

I mean, this is the one in whose mouth there was no deceit.

Now, I know it's hard to live with a, a brother who doesn't do anything wrong, but, uh, this was the one who at age 12 is sitting around with the, uh, top scholars in the temple, and, uh, he's holding his own there, and he, he's theologically, uh, just as, as brilliant as anyone.

He's, he does the right thing all the time, and he claims to be the Messiah.

He comes out in his earthly ministry, and not only are you against him, you're known and on record as calling him crazy.

Not only that, the Gospels record that you went out to stop him from doing his ministry.

I'll bet that if you think back on it, with every advantage, you had a front row seat to watching the Messiah live his life.

You were in and out of the story in terms of his earthly ministry when he ramped up doing miracles, and you rejected him? I mean, how many passages do we have about, uh, you know, the prophet has no honor in his hometown and how his hometown synagogue ran him out of, of, of the synagogue? I mean, this, this is a, a terrible thought that you did not support the Messiah, and he was your own half-brother.

And then he writes a letter to a group of people.

If I handed them the red pen, I'd say, "Anything you'd want to change about your life?" Well, this is a group of, uh, Jewish Christians who had been driven out of Israel, their homeland, and, uh, man, they'd want to go back and change that for sure.

They had left their farms and their homes and their extended families.

They'd lost their jobs.

They were scattered all over the Roman Empire, and, uh, they're now being addressed in this book of James as being poor, struggling, sick and suffering, persecuted.

Yeah, there's plenty of things they'd like to change.

And yet this book starts with a theme that is, um, an amazing challenge for people that, uh, if you want to think about reasonably wanting to change your life or your past, there's plenty that I think we'd all want to say, "Yeah, of course you'd want to change it." And yet here's the writer telling them to think in a way that, um, is joyful.

Matter of fact, he says you should be joyful and consider your mindset to be joyful no matter what your trials are.

In both verses, and we're only gonna look at two this morning, as he introduces himself and the audience that he's addressing, in both verses we have the, uh, the command to be joyful.

One is camouflaged in verse one, and one is very explicit in verse two, and that's all we're gonna have time for this morning as we introduce a six-part series looking at really what is how we're supposed to handle all the parts of our lives that we would never choose if we had the opportunity to choose.

Now, of course, you have no opportunity to choose those things.

Certainly everything that's in the can already, so to speak, it's already been done.