08/30/2026
Sermon Rough Draft August 30, 2026
Father in Heaven,
Your compassion and grace are the reason for our hope. Remind us that our future is not secured by our efforts, but by Christ and His finished work. In Him, we are accepted and favored. We stand before You as children adopted and brought near.
You commanded Your people to set aside a day for rest so they would remember that You are their Provider. Give us that same faith today. Guard us from treating rest merely as preparation for another week of work. Teach us to trust You rather than believing everything depends upon us.
Thank You for bringing us together as the body of Christ, where You renew us through singing Your praises, hearing Your Word, and fellowshipping together.
But do not let our rest end when this service ends. Keep our hearts turned toward You throughout this day. Teach us to lay down our work and worries, trusting You with tomorrow.
Unless You build the house, we labor in vain. So today we rest in Your goodness, knowing that You are our strength and Provider.
Let us taste and see that You are good.
Melinda believed in Jesus.
At least, that’s what she would have told you. She had prayed the prayer years ago, been baptized, and considered herself a Christian.
Melinda also had a list. Not an actual list, but expectations.
She wanted a comfortable retirement, a nicer house, healthy children, grandchildren who behaved themselves, and enough money that she never had to worry. She prayed about those things often.
“Lord, please give me this.”
“Lord, please fix that.”
In Melinda’s mind, these were good prayers.
She loved the idea of salvation. Forgiveness sounded wonderful. Heaven sounded even better. But she had never really considered what it meant to belong to Christ.
If you would please, let’s open our Bibles this morning to the book of James chapter one. James is an enormously practical book, filled with insights on how to live the Christian life. Because of that, it's tempting to breeze past our text today and get into the meat of the letter. But to do that we would miss something incredibly deep and profound about our salvation. Let’s take a look.
Our text today is James chapter one verse one. Look on as I read please, James, a bond-servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ, To the twelve tribes who are dispersed abroad: Greetings.
Again, the temptation is to breeze by this verse. Yes, it's written by James and to the twelve tribes. Now let’s talk about trials. But to do this would be to miss some important insights that impact how we are to see the rest of the letter.
The first question we need to ask is, “Who is James?” One possibility is that this is James the brother of John, whom Jesus referred to as the Sons of Thunder. That nickname increases our curiosity. What kind of letter would a Son of Thunder write? There’s also James the son of Alphaeus one of the twelve disciples who is referred to as James the Less. Not quite as captivating as a son of thunder. Finally, there is James the brother of Christ. There are other possibilities because James was a popular name, but these are the three that are most often mentioned.
Most scholars do not give James the Less much thought as the author of this letter because he doesn’t identify himself as an Apostle in the letter. Also, the earliest church fathers and historians didn’t attribute it to him either.
Most scholars also do not attribute this letter to James, the brother of John mainly because he was put to death by Herod in 44 AD and many scholars consider this letter written after that time.
The earliest church fathers considered the author of the letter as James the brother of Christ. This James went on to become a major leader in the Jerusalem church. The Apostle Paul refers to him as one of the pillars in the book of Galatians. It makes sense that a major leader would be writing to Christians and that his letter would be received and given such weight.
But more than being a leader, we want to focus on James being the brother of Christ. Why wouldn’t he mention that? Think about it. We live in a world where we are told it's not what you know, it's who you know. We all want to know somebody on the inside. Somebody with connections and James is the half-brother of Jesus Christ. Surely that has to count for something. Yet, when James introduces himself it's as a bond servant of Christ. It's not even the bond servant. James presents himself as a bond servant, just one of many.
Maybe James is trying to make up for his treatment of Jesus when they were younger. In the book of John chapter seven verse five we read, For not even His brothers were believing in Him. We’re told that Jesus’ brothers mocked Him about being the Messiah. But after the resurrection, Paul tells us in First Corinthians chapter fifteen that Jesus appeared to James. James became a believer. Obviously, he must feel bad for doubting Jesus. Maybe calling himself a bondservant is James’ way of showing how sorry he is. The text doesn’t say specifically, but I don’t think so. Instead, I think there is something more significant.
When James calls himself a slave of God and of Christ he is making a statement about his identity. Whatever else slavery meant in the first century, one thing was unmistakable: a slave belonged to someone else. His life was not his own. The master’s will was the focus 24/7/365. There were no off hours, weekends or vacations. The significance of the way James introduces himself is that in no way does he try to gain anything from being Jesus’ brother and instead presents himself as belonging to Jesus with Jesus’ will as his own. That's what a slave was.
But it still seems at least awkward that James would identify himself as a slave of Jesus Christ. Have any of us identified ourselves as slaves? Even among fellow Christians do we identify ourselves as a slave? And it is here that I believe the gain from our text is found. James has been so impacted through salvation that he has come to the place where he realizes there is nothing more to gain than to belong to Christ and to do His will. Being the brother of Jesus or even the leader of the church gains him nothing more than simply being a slave to Christ and doing His will.
That is the statement James is making to his reader who he identifies as the twelve tribes who are dispersed. The twelve tribes is a reference back to the twelve sons of Jacob who grew into the nation of Israel and the covenant people of God. These are Christians who were living outside the land of Israel in large part because of the persecution they were encountering from the leadership in Jerusalem. In the book of Acts in chapter eleven verse nineteen we read, So then those who were scattered because of the persecution that occurred in connection with Stephen made their way to Phoenicia and Cyprus and Antioch… There is debate as to whether James is writing to the Jewish Christians or to all Christians and I don’t know. There are good arguments on both sides, but one thing I do know is that James is reaching out to Christians who are living among the wider world and seem to be confused.
As we said last week, James’ readers have come to understand that their acceptance before God and favor from God are not dependent upon their good works. It's all grace. But they seem to think that this then means that their works don’t matter. James readers don’t seem to be taking this to the extreme of indulging what we consider sin. It would be better to understand that James’ readers are living good churchgoing lives and as long as they aren’t pursuing “sin” that’s what matters. But James is writing to help them see that more than life of avoiding sin, the Christian seeks to live for Christ. This is why it's so significant that James doesn’t introduce himself as the brother of Christ or one of the pillars of the church.
So what’s the takeaway to all this? Let’s ask a question: What does it mean to be saved? Not how we are saved, but what’s supposed to happen in a person’s life as a result of being saved? In our text today, James identifies himself as being wholly focused on Jesus. We should understand that this isn’t a duty. This is James’ delight. Salvation has so changed James that he has lost any sense of himself apart from embracing Christ. This is what salvation does. We are born again as a new creation. THe bible describes it as the transformation of a caterpillar to a butterfly. The caterpillar is not somehow cleaned up and improved, but wholly changed in a way that the old ways don’t work any more. Can you imagine a butterfly trying to live as a caterpillar? It's a new way of living.
The challenge for us is to let go of our old ways. Not just the cussing and drinking and womanizing, but the very focus of our lives. Let me ask you this, do you think James, as a bond servant of Christ, missed church often? Was too busy for prayer and the word? Do you think James lacked money to put in the offering or do you think he did without so he could?
The difficulty here is that these can be “have tos” and we do them out of guilt. The Christian life is one of sacrifice and duty so that we can go to heaven when we die. As a result, we tend to give to God “enough” while looking outside of Him for life. Our text today is a challenge to that kind of view. Our text today is about a word we don’t hear much anymore: surrender. Salvation is about surrendering to Jesus. Not as a payback for salvation or as a means of staying saved. It's about seeing that there is a better way to live. The world doesn’t understand it and there is a part of each of us that doesn’t understand it either. It looks like loss. Become a slave? But James reminds us this is where life is found. This is what God is offering and this is what we are looking for. But we’re not going to find God “enough.” It's about giving God all. It's about dying to self that more of Christ fits into our life. Let’s pray that God would grant us faith and courage to take that step.
In conclusion, let’s find out what happened to Melinda, One afternoon, Melinda was sitting at the kitchen table with her granddaughter, Amber. Amber was reading her Bible when she suddenly looked up.
“Grandma, can I ask you something?”
“Sure.”
“Why would anyone want to be a slave?”
Melinda smiled. “What makes you ask that?”
“James calls himself a bond-servant of Jesus. Isn't that just another word for slave? Why would he want to be that?”
Melinda started to answer, but stopped. She honestly didn’t know why anyone would say that.
The question stayed with her over the next couple of weeks. The more she thought about it, the more uncomfortable it became. Slowly, Melinda began to realize that being a slave of Christ meant living for Jesus rather than living for herself.
And she had never really done that.
One night, Melinda finally prayed a prayer she had never prayed before.
“Lord, I’ve spent years asking You to give me what I want. I don’t just want You to bless my life. I want my life to belong to You. Show me what that means.”
Father, more of what we desire is found in You, but we keep looking to elsewhere. Help us surrender our will to Yours. Help us let go of trying to make life work and trust in You instead. Help us to die to self to know more of the life You have to give.
