People who don’t like the book of James (Martin Luther was one of them – he called it ‘an epistle of straw’) probably because it reads like an instruction book for living for Jesus rather than a weighty, meaty discourse on salvation such as Romans. But that’s what’s so great about the Bible – God’s complete word to us. James is writing at the birth of the church and his book is a manual for early church living.  He’s writing to scattered Jewish believers whose situations were very different and yet united by their heritage and their new discovery: Jesus. The Church is emerging and it needs some basics and some encouragement. I enjoy the simplicity of the sentences in chapter 4. Lots of command words, very clear, nothing to argue with here!

As a child growing up in the C of E in the early 70s we said ‘Come close to God and He will come close to you’ (4:8a) as part of the service every Sunday morning.  How is your ‘coming close’ just now? It takes that faith from Him, placed in your heart and ACTIVE. It takes trust that He is absolutely just there, sitting beside you and yet ALSO in the heavenly places – and you just know He is there – your heart might soften or simply be still.

That knowledge, that inner knowing has enabled our brothers and sisters to face firing squads and lions, to watch their children murdered, to go out again and again to those that are lost and desperate across the world (I think of one of our friends sharing Jesus in camps on the Mexican border just now), and also for some of us simply to get out of bed in the morning. We might not be in immediate physical danger today: in our everyday, He draws near – wait for Him.

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Action:

Listen again to ‘O Sacred King’ by Matt Redman

Prayer:

Pray that as you, “Come near to God and he will come near to you.”