A Grumbling Grumble, James 5:9

1. Read James 5:7-11. What does it mean to be patient with ourselves and others, especially when we feel like things aren't progressing as we want?
2. Reflect on a recent time when it was particularly difficult to have patience towards someone. What is going on in your heart when your patience runs thin?
3. In what ways can grumbling and impatience affect our relationships with others?
4. How can you ensure that your speech is uplifting rather than critical? What practical steps can you take to change your words?
5. We're all at different places in our walk with Jesus. How can acknowledging this help you to be more patient or supportive with others?

**Prayer + Practice: **

Practicing Patience and Encouragement

**Objective: **To develop patience and recognize growth in yourself and others, fostering a spirit of encouragement and understanding.

Steps:

1. Daily Reflection:

At the end of each day, take a few minutes to reflect on your interactions with others. Write down any moments where you felt impatient or judgmental. Consider what triggered these feelings and how you might respond differently in the future.

2. Identify Growth:

Reflect on your own personal growth. Write down any small victories or steps you took towards becoming more patient or understanding. This could be as simple as holding back a negative comment or taking a moment to listen more intently to someone.

3. Encourage Others:

Think of at least one person in your life who is making an effort to grow or change. Write a note of encouragement for them, acknowledging their progress. If possible, share this encouragement with them directly, either in person or through a message.

4. Prayer and Meditation:

Spend a few moments in prayer or meditation, asking God for the strength to be patient and the wisdom to see others as he sees them. Pray for those you find difficult to be patient with, asking for a heart of understanding and grace.

5. Weekly Review:

At the end of each week, review your journal entries. Look for patterns in your behavior and thoughts. Celebrate the progress you’ve made and identify areas where you still need to grow. Ask God for help in the coming week to improve your patience and understanding.

Good morning.

Yeah. So we are studying the book of James. If you're a guest with us, we're really glad you're here. Whatever brought you here, whatever's on your mind, whatever you're thinking.

We're really glad that you're here. We're in the final chapter of James, and James has circled back to topic that he started with, and that is the whole idea of trials and suffering and how to endure those and the need for patience in those. And it turns out it's an absolute requirement for dealing well with here at the end of the book, at the beginning of the book, just various trials. It could be anything. And the end of the book here, he brings up four of those.

And we've decided to sort of sit in each one, you know, and kind of look at them closely. One of them has to do with just life itself, which we looked at last week. And then there's people and that we'll look at this week. And then there's obedience. How do you obey God and live the life he wants you to live?

And the pain that comes from that. And then there's pain and horrible loss, and Job becomes the illustration of that. So how do you deal with these things and then become everything God wants us to become in the process of dealing with that? So last week we learned from the farmer that it takes a great deal of hard work and investment. This is life itself.

It's a great picture of our own selves. There's a lot of hard work, a lot of investment, There's a lot of waiting. But you get a harvest at the end, and that's what you need to survive. That's what the farmer needed to survive. That's what we need to survive.

There's a lot of things God wants us to have in this life that he is not going to give to us fast.

They just require time. And that's why patience is the developing quality in a person's life. Life, according to James. So you remember, he said, here, let's see, which one is this? Let's go here.

You know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness, and the steadfastness has to have an effect. So whatever this idea of patience is, which is built into this endurance idea of steadfastness, it's got to have an effect. And the effect is to do something inside of us, to perfect and complete us. It's not going to happen without that. So it's an absolute requirement for what God's trying to do in our lives.

And we see that at the end of this paragraph when we get down there, we see that Job is an illustration of the fact that it works, that patience does actually develop the qualities God wants us to have. So that's why Job's at the end of this, because he's an illustration that the process God has us going through is actually working. So all of the development inside of us and our destiny is all determined by what God is doing in us. All of this. So if your joy and we all succumb to this, but if our joy and our happiness and our well being is based on everything going our way, then we're going to be fragile and we're going to be anxious and we're always going to be on the brink of despair.

We live in a culture that is absolutely. That the farmer had an advantage over us because it was his reality every day. He wasn't going to get his harvest until summer. And he knew that. And so he knew what he would have to do until then, the role that God would have to play in it and what he would have to do.

We don't have that advantage. In fact, we live in that respect very disadvantagedly in our culture.

There's a couple of great books on this. Analog Christian is one book digital Liturgies. Both of these I read toward like the middle of last year and both of them speak to this whole issue of how do you deal with a digital culture? And you and I have now digital habits. They call them digital liturgies that you are a part of every day and so they become part of your life and they shape how you think and feel.

And then as fast paced digital technological world we've developed very self centered qualities. We have developed an inattentiveness, we have developed impatience, anger and anxiety and all of those. And we have opportunity everywhere to live those out.

So in his one of the I like for today for us it would be an analog Christian versus a farmer. We would have to stay analog, which is sort of a slower process. And you have to engage in things that are, that take more time and are more valuable and you got to be willing to do it. And you just can't be frustrated all the time that it's not working immediately. So that's what it means to be analog.

And that is certainly true with life.

And it's now we're going to see it's very, very true with each other and with people. So a significant part of our lives is dealing with people. And so how do people develop and how do people develop us? That's part of this process. Because whatever God's doing with these struggles, we're supposed to be developing.

And so life helps develop us and people help develop us. And this is a major theme in James and one of the ways that you express your sort of impatience. We saw it with the farmer, how you do it in life. We're just always disgruntled about the fact that life isn't working fast enough for us or going the way we want. But with people, it's expressed very much according to James, by what we say.

And he's going to revisit that theme again. It seems like we've talked a lot about it, but what we're saying to people and what we're saying about people is how we reveal our impatience with each other. So, like in this digital world, this is an easy illustration of the digital liturgies that you and I are a part of. Make it very easy for us to have petty controversies everywhere you turn and to engage in those, to express outrage all the time, to engage in battles. We destroy people.

That's the language we use in the digital world. And the, the vehicle, the vehicle itself helps inflate your self opinion, and that also incites anger and argument. And so it's very easy to see how we do not live in an agricultural society. And it's hurting us in lots of ways. There's.

We get to verse nine. So you remember at the end of verse eight, says, you need to be patient. Remember, like the farmer, you need to be patient. And then he goes right into. And there's no connecting point.

He just goes right into this as if he's shifting gears, but he's on the same topic. Do not grumble against one another, brothers, so that you may not be judged. Behold, the judge is standing at the door. This is our verse for today.

Here's what impatience with people looks like. It looks like grumbling, and it's something God takes pretty seriously, as you'll see.

So you have this. There's no way. You read this text and you go, all right, this is the strongest language of judgment, maybe in the book, but certainly in this paragraph. And how you speak and judgment are tied together throughout the whole book. And so you wonder, you can't help but wonder, is this worth the strongest kind of judgment?

God standing at the door.

What is grumbling? Now? We're going to look at judgment a little bit more later, so bear with me on that for the meantime. You're saying, whatever this is, whatever this grumble is. It's.

It must be pretty bad. So what is it? Well, Jesus, five times in the New Testament, it's always in the context of adversity, which is what James is talking about. When pressures hit you, when people pressures hit you, and you take them out on other people. And it.

And it. It sort of takes the form of. Of grumbling. So this is relational adversity, which we all have at various levels. But grumble, the word grumble, just, if you say it enough, and I've said it so many times to myself this week, that what it is, it's like a groan.

That's kind of how it's used a lot, and a sigh. So it's a verbal expression, obviously, and there's a wide range of. Of how you would express this verbally, but it definitely reflects impatience. And I think we would all agree we need patience. We each need it not to be patient.

We need people to be patient with us. Anybody in here would say, hey, I really appreciate if you'd speed up your opinion of me. Would you just speed up your opinion of me and not slow down and really think and love on me? Would you just quickly judge me and execute me? I don't think any of us want that.

And so James is saying that we need to be. So we need to not. We need not be grumbling with one another. And here's the language. Look at the language.

There's a little preposition right here that suggests opposition. You are. You're just hurting one another. And so that whatever this grumble is, we are viewing other people very oppositionally in a way that is hurtful to them. Okay.

And just attracts God's judgment on us for doing it. It's the. I've been. I was trying to meditate on what this feels like. This, the grumbling is because somehow people block something we want, like people are blocking something we're after.

And so we got to go against them. And whatever it is, whatever that is, somehow I'm not getting what I want. And so you get some kind of response from me. People don't live up to your standard or your expectation. This is that world, and it creates this opposition.

And the way we handle that opposition with one another, and it seems to be really fast. We get there really fast these days. Sort of amounts to this whole idea of grumbling, and we're just not patient with each other. So. And when you're not patient with each other, you just will violate all kind of relational and communal values and Virtues because you didn't get what you want.

So we could be scornful, negative, we could be judgmental or fault finding, or you're griping or you're gossiping or you're complaining. These are all the words that sort of grumble just sounds like rumbling to me. And it's just a inner churning that just pours out these verbal expressions that are, that in the language of this text, attack people. And so it's pretty significant.

And I think we got to ask, why does it. It feels like God's listening at the door. That's, that's the image you have here. It's like God is standing at the door and he's going like this, sort of listening in on. And you imagine, can you imagine if God is standing at the door of all of our lives, what in the heck he hears, oh, my Lord, I can't even imagine.

And so the word grumble has this sounds like it comes from a deep place. It sounds like it comes from a dark place. It's much more than a word, you know, that you might say that you might say, oh, that was just. I didn't mean it, I said it. No, no, it's not a surface y thing comes from it.

It springs from something that you are, which obviously God sees and he hears. And I know it would be easier if God, if Paul or James here would have said, you know, I can see God standing at the door if, you know, I punch somebody in the face or if I, you know, rammed into you with my car or damaged your property, you know, I took action against you, you might say, well, sure, I would expect God to be really upset and standing at the door if I smack somebody.

This is just grumbling, just grumbling.

Listen to something CS Lewis said. I'm going to read a little bit from him today. He says people often think of Christian morality as a kind of bargain in which God says, you know, if you keep a lot of my rules, I'll reward you, but if you. And if you don't, I'll do the other thing. I do not think this is the best way of looking at it.

I would much rather say that every time you make a choice, you're turning the central part of you, the part of you that chooses into something a little different from what it was before.

And taking your life as a whole, with all your innumerable choices all your lifelong, you are slowly turning into this central thing, either into a heavenly creature or into a hellish creature, either into a creature that is in harmony with God or with and with other creatures and with itself. Or else one that is in a state of war and hatred with God and with its fellow creatures and with its to be the one kind of creature is heaven, that is, it is joy and peace and knowledge and power. To be the other means madness and horror and idiocy and rage and impotence and eternal loneliness. And each of us at each moment is progressing to one state or the other. One of the things I think we're trying to get communicate in this paragraph, and we'll see it more and more as we go, is that God's trying to turn you into something.

And he knows you are turning into something. And if he doesn't come in and help you become what he wants you to become, you are going to turn into something eternally. That is horrible. And so I think it's really hard for us to remember that heaven and hell are determined in daily interactions, like how we treat people. Just our daily interactions, not just the big decisions that you have to make.

Not that you either committed a really big sin this week or you avoided a big sin this week. And you think I'm safe? No, our daily interactions are what are daily turning us into. And grumbling is one of those things. And God's standing at the door because he knows it.

God knows what you're becoming and he knows it's the most mundane interactions. Everyday choices, attitudes and actions, your pettiness, our jealousy, our self pity, insecurity, harshness. These are all heaven and hell interactions. So if you're upset a lot, you always feel mistreated and overlooked. You're always disappointed or insensitive.

Tim Keller is the one that put the thought in my head that grumbling is like a seed that's toxic and it's shaping you, and God knows it's shaping you. And that's why Keller said something that really got me thinking as it relates to judgment. And that is God's judgment is organic, not mechanical. When he first said that, I go, I don't know what you mean. And I've had to reflect on it.

And I'm going back and forth with a lot of thoughts. What he actually said about that was that God's judgment, God's not just standing at the door looking for things to pounce on you. He's actually most concerned about the things that shape you into somebody. And he knows that little thing inside of you is going to turn you into something. And that's why.

That's what he means by Organic. He knows what. What that thing is doing inside of you. And so his judgment is concerning those things. I thought that was really a good thought.

Now, let me read something to you. Because in The Great Divorce, C.S. lewis deals with this specifically, grumbling. So you remember what the Great Divorce is about.

You have this bus ride from hell to heaven, and the people on the bus are ghosts, because that's who's in hell. They're not substantial, so they're mist. They're like smoky. You can still make them out in form so that you can see facial expressions, but you can see right through them, too, because they're nothing of substance. They've become nothing of substance.

And so the people in heaven are solid people. They're real. They've grounded. They've become everything God wanted them to become. That's sort of the destiny here.

It's a beautiful image. And so the ghosts have become the thing that they did in their life. So every ghost that you encounter personally in the book gives you a description of how that quality turns you into that. And that alone at the end. It's a masterful work.

Anyway, CS Lewis is having a discussion with the guide, who's guiding this whole process and taking CS Lewis and helping him see all that's going on. And C.S. lewis, they have this conversation about, hey, C.S. lewis says, well, why don't we just go down to hell and bring everybody. Let's just go into that bus and just bring people into heaven.

Doesn't that sound like the right thing to do here? And the guide tells him, people have turned into something that refuses to want heaven. They don't want to be there. It's too much for them. It's too real for them.

Them, they can't handle it. And so they've become incapable of taking their minds off of themselves, even for a moment. So that's why they. You can't do that. Can't drag people into heaven.

These people all head back to the bus once they realize it's not what they want. And there's some descriptions in here that are the most marvelous thing you'll ever read, but I want you to see this. So they're having this conversation about, why don't we just go get them? And then. And they're interrupted by a voice.

They hear a voice. And I want to read it to you because I think you'll like it. Can you handle it? You ready? All right.

So at this moment, I'm going to read it to you like we were reading in a library, reading Thing. It's so good. Okay, so listen to what he says. And you just got to listen. All right.

At this moment, we were suddenly interrupted by the thin voice of a ghost talking at enormous speed. Looking behind us, we saw a creature was addressing one of the solid people and was doing so too busily to notice us. Every now and then the solid tried to get in a word, but without success. The ghost talk was like this. This is what they were saying.

Oh, my dear, I've had such a dreadful time. I don't know how I'm ever going to get out of here. I was coming with Eleanor Stone, and we arranged the whole thing and we were going to be together and meet at Saint Street. And I made it perfectly plain because I knew that what she was like. And I told her once, I told her a hundred times, I would not meet with her outside that dreadful Marjorie Banks woman's house.

Not ever would I go there, not after the way she treated me. That was one of the most dreadful things that happened to me. I'm dying to tell you, because I'm sure you'll see that I acted rightly. Now, wait a moment, dear. I've told you.

I tried living with her when I first came here, and it was all fixed up. She was to do the cooking and I was to clean up the house after that. And I did think I was going to be comfortable after all that I'd been through. She turned out to have changed. It seems absolutely selfish and not a particular sympathy for anyone but herself.

And as I once said to her, I do think I'm entitled to a little consideration because at least you. At least lived out of your time. You lived out your time on the earth, but not me, of course, you're not forgetting I was murdered. This is how she died, by the way. I was murdered.

Simply murdered, dear. That mean that man should never have operated, I ought to believe, or be alive today. And they simply starved me in that dreadful nursing home, and no one ever came near me. The shrill of the monotonous wine.

CS Lewis looks at the guide and he says, or the guide says to him, what's troubling you? I'm troubled, sir, because this unhappy gal, this creature, doesn't seem to be the sort of soul that ought to be even in danger of damnation. Why is she in hell?

She doesn't seem wicked to me. She just seems silly and garrulous. Just an old woman who's got into the habit of grumbling and feels that a little kindness and a rest and Maybe some change would do her all right.

The guide says to her that is what she once was. That is maybe what she could be. If so, she could be cured. But the whole question is whether now she's become a grumbler. I said, wait a minute, she's definitely a grumble grumbler.

The question is whether she is a grumbler or has now become a grumble.

And then this, the guide says to him, this is the difficulty of understanding hell.

You think about all your life experiences and it begins with a little grumbling mood and you yourself kind of distinct from it, perhaps criticizing it. You don't like that about yourself and yourself in a dark hour, may will that mood embrace it? Maybe you just embrace it and you can't repent and you can't come out of it again. But there may come a day when you can do that no longer. And then there will be no you left to criticize the mood.

You don't even enjoy grumbling anymore, but just the grumble itself going on forever like a machine. You just become a grumble. You don't enjoy it anymore, but you can't help yourself. It's just self centeredness. You see that, that is definitely the message of James.

And I think that if you were God and you looked at somebody who was grumbling and you said, I know what they could turn into.

So I'm standing at the door now, that might give you a little window into why grumbling and why James has such a heart for the things that we say to one another. Now the time that I have left, I thought I would do something else with you to help you with this because I, you know, I'd like to be better. How many of you would say in light of that whole picture, you know, you grumble, let me see. Is anybody okay? Just want to make sure we're all that.

I wasn't just talking to Steve down here. Just want to make sure I wasn't just talking to Steve.

How do we become more patient with people? What is one of the key factors in becoming less judgmental, easier on each other?

So just reflecting on that a little bit and trying to think about how it is that we change, how long it takes to change. Because I think one of the reasons we need to have patience with each other's and God's trying to tell you, hey, Pete, it takes me a long time to change your heart, so could you be patient with me while I'm being patient with other people? That is one of the things that has really helped me understand how to be patient with other people. Not always do it, but at least understand it.

So In Mere Christianity, C.S. lewis talks about this a great deal. Now.

The world looks at the church and says, how come they don't grow faster? How come there's so many hypocrites in there? How come they all claim to be Christians and they do all these horrible things, and yet you and I are in the church looking at each other saying the same thing. So how do we solve this? What is one way to solve this?

Well, there's a couple ways. A couple things we have to think about.

First of all, we need to understand what the church is and who comes in here and how God gets us in here and how there's some initial changes that happen in our life when we meet Christ. But we still struggle with a lot of things, and this is very misunderstood. We have ingrained habits that we have to get over. We have wild experiences. We have wounds from our experiences.

We have lots of failures that personally we hate about ourselves. So all these things have to be overcome. These are all the things God's trying to transform in us. And so CS Lewis, in Mere Christianity, talks about this a lot. When you consider some people's lives, you're like, it's a miracle.

They even darkened the door of a church. You know what I mean? You know, people like that, I don't think they'll ever go, oh, man, okay. And then you have the people. You would look at their life and you would say, man, they should be much further along, right?

You look at his life and you go, oh, my gosh, did you see where he came from? Do you see how many psychological things you see the baggage he carries or that she carries? Oh, my goodness gracious. It's a miracle that they're anywhere to want anything to do with God. Then you look at some people and you go, look at your upbringing.

You should be angelic.

You should be angelic. You should be floating around the church compared to some of the other people's lives in here. You feel that difference. So what are we doing with each other here?

Often it's the ones who are the worst who find God and then darken the door of a church and they come in and they're struggling. And so C.S. lewis says, you shouldn't be surprised to find among you people who are still nasty.

All right? And then his point is, for those of you who think there's certain kind of goodness you've already achieved, some conduct has come fairly easy to you. Like, you marvel at people who don't have social, who are socially awkward.

Don't they even know to ask a question? Don't they even know how to be nice? Because you're a nice person. You've been a nice person for a good portion of your life, and it's. You're like, you're a little nicer.

You're a little less needy than other people. People like you a little bit more because of it. You're socially appropriate in certain ways, and you look at these other people who are not nearly as far along as you or have certain issues that you don't have. And CS Lewis says, I want to say two things. There should be an encouragement here and there should be a warning here.

For those of you who are pretty decent, you be careful that you don't think that decency is just a natural kind of decency or that you don't feel the need to really be much better in life. It's a warning to those of us who are a lot farther along, maybe morally, maybe culturally, maybe socially, maybe relationally, than other people are. Because it's very easy to think you're good enough now. And the warning to you is you have not. And this is the point of what James is trying to say.

You have not even come close to everything God wants you to be. Yet you might be better than other people in some ways, you might be further along than other people. Nobody in this room, no matter who's, the farthest along. And I would imagine if you lined us all up, God would look at us and say, there's one person in this room who wins. Who's winning.

I wonder who that would be.

Who wouldn't be me? But think about it. And God would say, yeah, you're all in line. You all need to be where I want you to be. None of you are ultimately where I want you to be yet.

Which means the warning to the person who's pretty good needs to be really careful. He still has a long way to go. So what about these other people? Here's what C.S. lewis says in Mere Christianity, and it is worth hearing.

But if you are a poor creature poisoned by a wretched upbringing in some house full of vulgar jealousies and senseless quarrels, saddled by no choice of your own with some loathsome sexual perversion, nagging day in and day out with an inferiority complex that makes you snap at your best friends, don't despair. This is the encouragement for the other guy in the room who's not at the front of the line. God knows all about it. You are one of the poor folks. He's blessed.

He knows what a wretched machine you are trying to drive. Keep on, do what you can. One day, a great word. One day, perhaps in another world, perhaps far sooner than that, he will fling it on the scrap heap and give you a new one. And then you may astonish us all, not least yourself, for you have learned driving in a hard school.

Some of the last will be first, and some of the first will be last. That's the encouragement to the guy in here who's been sober two weeks and the warning to those of us who've never had an alcohol problem. You feel me? A guy without the alcohol problem has a long way to go.

The guy that's been sober two weeks, God loves us. Seeing every step of progress.

C.S. lewis says this. God is easy to please, but he's hard to satisfy. So let me tell you what that means. Anything you do today, the smallest thing you do, and maybe coming to church, and I don't know if you realize this, there's some people in here.

It took far more to get here this morning than it took you. You've been going to church all your life. You're the nice guy. You be in the front of the line. Who loves church?

Me. All right. You be that guy. All right. Then there's a guy in here that goes, geez, this place is killing me.

And you drag your fanny in. Here you go. They sang too much. He quoted C.S. lewis too much.

Dang. I'll be back next week. I'll have to drag myself in here to listen to that guy. Okay? Every step you take, God is pleased with.

You went to that AA meeting this week. You went every day. Every little step you took, God's pleased with it, but he's very hard to satisfy, which means you still have a long way to go. And he is not satisfied until you're all the way there.

That's why God's relentless. Everything you do, you just. You. You. You did this this week because you're going to shut your mouth.

You didn't say that thing. You knew you didn't say it. God would be like, good for you. But you still got a long way to go. He's happy with every step we take.

Some of you used to cuss every other word. Now it's only about every other paragraph. And it's like, well, dang, good for you. If I'd have known you in your early days, right? You say, well, I Just grew up with a clean mouth.

I just don't say those words. So somebody says dirty words and you're just Mr. Clean Word.

You got no tolerance for the guy that's struggling to get that language out of his mouth. Right. We just don't know everybody's story in here.

So CS Lewis says, okay, so for you nice people, for those of you who are on the road and you feel like, oh, my gosh, I'm never gonna make it, God says, be encouraged, be encouraged. Every step you take, I'm loving it. And one of these days, you'll get there. I'll get you there. And to the nice person, you gotta be really careful.

Listen to this. The niceness. Wholesome, integrated personality. That's an excellent thing. We certainly need more people like that.

But we must. This is great. Listen, we must not suppose that even if we succeeded in making everyone nice, that we would have saved their souls.

A world of nice people, content with their own niceness, looking no further, turned away from God, would be just as desperately in need of salvation as a miserable world and might even be more difficult to save. Isn't that true? Isn't it the nice among us that are the hardest to save because they're the most confident in their niceness, they're impressed with their niceness. See, that's what creates the opposition. You know, one of the worst things about being somebody who's impatient with other people is how highly you must be thinking of yourself.

And that arrogance, that undertoned arrogance, is what God despises.

And then he writes this, for mere improvement is not redemption, though redemption always improves people, even here and now, and will, in the end, improve them to a degree we cannot imagine. And now listen to this, because I think it's the heartbeat of everything we're saying here. God became man to turn creatures into sons, not simply to produce better men of the old kind, but to produce a new kind of man. It's not like teaching a horse to jump better and better, but like turning a horse into a winged creature. Of course, once it has got its wings, it will soar over fences which it could never have jumped over and thus beat the natural horse at its own game.

But there may be a period while the wings are just beginning to grow when it cannot do so. And at that stage, the lumps on the shoulders, no one could tell by looking at them that they are going to be wings. May even give it an awkward appearance.

I don't know. I just love that. I love looking at each other and saying I know we're not all we should be now. One of these days we're going to be really beautiful and God's going to turn us something into really great. And he's so committed to that, you know, that he.

That he puts things in our way. And one of the things.

It's really hard to be what God wants you to be. And it's really hard to become the thing that he wants us to become. And that's why we have to bear with one another.

So the gospel helps us, I think, be less judgmental of where people are and less content with how far we've come. Do you see that?

That's. I'm less content with where I'm at always, never content with where I'm at and always very or less judgmental to people who aren't where they should be yet.

And here's how he ends this paragraph.

What can we ever really know of other people's souls? What their temptations are or what their opportunities or their struggles? One soul in the whole creation you do know and is the only one whose fate is placed in your hands. If there's a God, you are in a sense, alone with Him. You cannot put him off with speculations about your next door neighbors or memories or what you've read in books.

This is so good. What will all that chatter and hearsay count when the anesthetic fog we call nature or the real world fades away and the presence in which you have always stood becomes palpable and immediate? Non. Avoid. There's no way to.

No better way to explain that verse than what he just said right there. One of these days, think about this. This is just a great picture. One of these days, the fog, the anesthetic fog of everything we've believed about other people. Man, look at that.

Man, look at that. Look, look. That whole anesthetic fog is going to give way and we will meet face to face with the person we've been traveling with our whole lives.

He's going to open that door. When he opens that door, I'll be standing in front of him. And there's not a thing I've ever thought about anyone else that would matter more than who I am and who. Who I'm becoming.

And that's what James, I think, is getting across here.

All those thoughts will go away. And it won't be your assessment of others, but it will be his face to face view of you.

But it is so much easier for me to be impatient with you and judgmental of you. All the Way, all the way down the road. Because it keeps me from seeing all the things that I'm not. And that's why I think James is talking about it. So you got people in your life, all of us, and we have to be patient with each other.

And if you're married or you have kids, how fast do you want your kids to become what they want, what they should be? You're going to have to give it a lot of time in case your kids aren't there yet. And I don't care how old they are, or your spouse, who knows better than you that your spouse isn't far along as you'd like them to be. How are we being patient with each other? How are we going to survive if we're not?

And when you are impatient with people in this process, you betray your understanding of God's grace and the way he works in people. So when was the last time you said to someone, you've come such a long way, I really see God changing you?

Listen, that's a great gift to give somebody. No, we're not there yet. And I think the other question I would ask is for those of you who should be further along, in what ways in our lives should we be much further along? But we've been loafing.

That's the warning. Are you good enough? You ever have that feeling? You don't even know, maybe subconscious, you just think, I think I'm nice enough. I think I'm good enough.

I don't have to be perfect, do I? And then you go, there's no growth edge in your life at all. You have no growth edge in your life.

You have not taken advantage of any of the spiritual opportunities. And let me tell you, they're all over the place these days for you to take another step in your growth, but you're just content.

That's a problem, too.

So this is what the gospel is, and I'll close with this. Here's the encouragement and the warning. Really, the warning is you think you're good enough, and the gospel tells you you're not.

The encouragement is you think you'll never be good enough, and the gospel tells you you will be. That's the gospel. It's all inclusive. It's not exclusive in this sense. The good and the bad all have somewhere to go and somewhere to be.

And the gospel offers the opportunity. So I don't know which one you are, but there's an encouragement in the warning. The gospel will not tolerate any of those ideas.

That's worth pondering. When we. We think about how we treat people, Lord, I just pray for this room. And there is a real sense that can come on those of us who are farther along for whatever reasons, or feel farther along than others.

And there'd be real temptation to stop there.

That would be wrong.

Then there are those of us in this room, Lord, that it seems like every good thing we do takes every ounce of energy we could muster. And I know you love that. You love it. But those folks feel like they're never going to make it. And you promise in your word, stay at it.

Be patient. I will turn you into what I've always intended you to be. Encourage us with that point. Make us patient with one another. In Jesus name, amen.