“The one who lives with integrity will be helped,
but one who distorts right and wrong will suddenly fall.”
– Proverbs 28:18

Increasingly we live in a truth-optional culture. It seems that truth is quickly thrown overboard to advance nearly every cause on almost every side of every issue. If truth is inconvenient or facts don’t fit the preferred narrative, they’re ignored. Lies are simply made larger and louder. The end apparently justifies the means and power and victory seem to be our highest goals.

At the same time, right is increasingly called wrong, wrong is increasingly declared to be right, evil is celebrated and good is castigated. Good is bad, bad is good. This is the world in which we live today.

As Christians, we must NEVER participate in any of this! It doesn’t matter the goals we could accomplish if we participated. It doesn’t matter the consequences of refusing to participate. As servants of the God who cannot lie, we must live with integrity, confident in God’s help, even if the rest of the world goes against us. Our integrity can never be stolen from us, but we can very easily surrender it. We must not speak lies, share lies, repost lies, shade truth, tweet or retweet false information, or support those who do. We must be intentional and diligent in checking anything we pass along to make sure we don’t foolishly surrender our integrity and Christian witness.

Likewise, there’s only one source and standard of right and wrong and it doesn’t change. God’s Word, the Bible, must be our source of right and wrong. We must never celebrate or participate in the ongoing distortion of right and wrong. We’ll likely pay a near-term price for that, possibly quite severe. We’ll certainly be unpopular, considered backward, primitive, and cruel. Nonetheless, to do otherwise guarantees a sudden and eternal fall one day. Great will be our ruin if we twist the truth and switch right and wrong!

“Behold, we consider those blessed who remained steadfast. You have heard of the steadfastness of Job, and you have seen the purpose of the Lord, how the Lord is compassionate and merciful.” – James 5:11

As a church we’ve spent a good deal of time considering the steadfastness of Job. There is great blessing in steadfastness! When we stay the course, faithfully following God wherever He leads, despite long periods of suffering, loneliness, anxiety, and fear, God blesses and rewards that. God honors our worship, prayer, service, and evangelism during hard seasons.

As we all know, God doesn’t move on our schedule. He moves on His own perfect timetable that works everything together for good. We must never give up hope, for we know that God will triumph, reward, and bless in the end. During long, dark, and difficult times we are strengthened by the knowledge that God knows and sees everything that we do for Him. He is most glorified when His people remain faithful for as many months, years, decades, or centuries as it takes to accomplish His will.

So be patient this winter. Be steadfast. Sing and praise and pray, even when you don’t feel like it. Worship God whether you feel like it or you don’t. Serve and share Christ even when you hurt and know that an eternity spent with our compassionate and merciful Lord lies before you in Christ!

“Instead you ought to say, ‘If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that.’” – James 4:15

We’ve all been vividly reminded of how little control we actually have over the world and even over our lives! There is actually wonderful blessing in this. It’s so easy, as followers of Jesus, to accidentally live lives that are virtually indistinguishable from those of atheists. We make our plans, pursue our dreams, and build our empires, as if we were in complete control. If we pray about them at all, our prayers mainly ask God to bless whatever we’ve already decided to do.

2020 has been a clear reminder that God is in charge. He’s the leader. We’re the followers. Nothing about this year has taken Him by surprise. He’s filled this year with Kingdom opportunities to serve and glorify Him if we’re willing to make His plans and priorities more important than ours. Thus, we’re slowly being forced to learn to begin our grand plans with, “If the Lord wills…”

This is a great first step toward really submitting our plans, dreams, and goals to those of God and to really living a life of adventure that follows God rather than running ahead of Him. We’re learning, painfully, to be more flexible and sensitive to the leading of the Holy Spirit. We’re learning to hold onto our plans loosely and our Lord tightly. We’re learning not to take many things for granted, but instead to treasure our God Who is our ever present help. What a wonderful and unexpected blessing of a year like no other!

“But no human being can tame the tongue. It is a restless evil, full of deadly poison. With it we bless our Lord and Father, and with it we curse people who are made in the likeness of God. From the same mouth come blessing and cursing. My brothers, these things ought not to be so.” – James 3:8-10

The tongue is truly a restless evil! The evidence of this is everywhere in our social media, news outlets, and even casual conversations. We see it in our leaders, in our movements, and in the breaking down of our civil culture. From the sound and fury, it would appear that the United States has divided into two groups that each sincerely desires for the other group to be swallowed by the earth. That isn’t sustainable! Our political discourse has moved from principled disagreement to absolute negation of those on the other side as unacceptably monstrous. This path leads to utter destruction as the deadly poison of millions of tongues spreads and destroys this nation.

As Christians we can’t be responsible for anyone else’s tongue, but we must be responsible for our own! A Christian cannot be cursing, denigrating, dehumanizing, or insulting another human. Period. Ever. We simply can’t. We must never sink to that level, because when we speak we represent Jesus Christ! If you’re praising God on Sunday, you better not be cursing people on Monday!

We must learn to live by the Holy Spirit and let Him teach us how to disagree with a person, policy, party, or position without attacking that person as a human being. We must discipline ourselves in the Spirit to reject and resist false or sinful perspectives without speaking evil ourselves. In the power of the Spirit, we must learn not to respond to the poisonous words of others with poisonous words of our own. As Christians, we need to speak words of life and renewal, even as we firmly and boldly proclaim the truth of the Gospel and the goodness of God’s design for human flourishing.

“What good is it, my brothers, if someone says he has faith but does not have works? Can that faith save him?” – James 2:14

We are saved from our sins by God’s grace through faith in Jesus Christ alone. For this we give thanks! Indeed, our hearts should overflow with gratitude at this wonderful news that we don’t need to earn our salvation by good works. This is profoundly good news, because we could never possibly earn fellowship with the perfect and holy God of the universe by good works since He is perfect and we aren’t!

HOWEVER…any faith in Christ that is sufficient to save us will reveal itself by the fruit of a changed and changing heart. It will become clear to us by new and holy desires (for worship, for the Word, for the church) and new love for God and His people. Saving faith will also be revealed by good works – acts of love and charity toward those in need. Though we’ll never be perfect, if we’ve truly embraced Jesus Christ as Lord of our life, then we’ll begin to invest our time, energy, and financial resources in doing the work of God’s Kingdom.

Jesus was abundantly clear that the visible fruit of our lives reveals our inner spiritual condition. If the fruit is good and we’re doing good works in increasing number, then we can be confident in our faith. If our fruit is bad and there’s little evidence of a renewed heart, we should reflect and pray about our faith, asking God to help us understand this disconnect.

We aren’t meant to live in great uncertainty about our salvation. Nonetheless, Scripture is clear that there are certain marks of saving faith in our life that if we aren’t seeing, we should return to the cross and make sure we’ve truly given our heart to King Jesus.