Lake Community Church, Alexandria MN

Life is filled with tough decisions that require wisdom.  Do I take the job in another state?  Should we be involved in sports as a family?  How should I discipline my kids?  How should we prepare for retirement?  What should we do with our time now that we are retired?  What college should I go to?  All of these decisions require us to use wisdom to discern what is best.  However, how do we use the wisdom that comes from God rather than “wisdom” that comes from earthly sources?

When we live our lives wisely, there is no guarantee that everything will turn out the way that we want it to.  Wisdom comes from God.  When we walk through life using heavenly wisdom, we get the opportunity to live in accordance with His desires.

Words are POWERFUL!  Words have led to the rise and fall of nations.  Words of encouragement or good news can lift up our spirits while negative words and bad news can cast us into the depths of despair.  Many times, we use words carelessly and without thought.  What if we treated words as if they had great power?  What we say does have great power and we need to be careful about what comes out of our mouths.

On average, a person says over 7,000 words in any given day.  This means on any given day, we each have the incredible ability to create amazing good or disastrous destruction.  According to James, our tongue can “set the whole course of his life on fire.”

When we use the word faith, we might think differently about what it means.  I have faith that the winter is going to continue for the next 6 weeks.  I have faith that the Minnesota Wild hockey team will make the playoffs.  I have faith that my car will start when I turn the key.  James is going to show “faith” in a different light.  Faith is KNOWN by our DEEDS.  We know that we have faith when we put our trust in something.  You can see a person’s faith by how that faith effects their interactions with others.  

This week, James is going to hit the crescendo of the first two chapters in the book of James as we talk about how our faith should and does affect our everyday lives.

Prejudice and discrimination have caused so much heartache in our country and in our society over the years. However, this is not a new problem, it has been going on for decades. In the church, we are one in the Lord and have the opportunity to unite around the amazing work of Jesus Christ on the cross. In James chapter 2, we see how scripture addresses favoritism and discrimination in the early church. I think you will be surprised to hear how applying the solutions to these can be simple and refreshing.