All Saints Church

Radical Love And Care

James emphasizes that true service involves both words and actions, suggesting that the Bible calls for more than just verbal commitment. If we focus solely on the spiritual needs and neglect the material needs of others, we may be missing the essence of Christ's teachings. Highlighting the deliberate act of choosing the poor, James underscores the proactive nature of service, urging Christ followers to prioritize caring for those in need rather than waiting for their struggles to affect our own lives.
Read James 2:5-17

The Bible As A Guide

There are many things in the Bible that people will say, “I don’t like that, it offends me. I will believe the things I like and reject the things I want to reject.”
If you have a view of a Bible like that, how can God ever contradict you and challenge you. How can it humble you? If you have a God that never contradicts you, challenges you, or irritates you: you don’t have a living God. You’ve got a designer God, not the real God. If you can’t humbly accept it, you will struggle with a relationship with God.
Read James 1:19-21

Re:birth

We all are aware that life can be difficult, it is inevitable because it's life. We all have experienced how difficult life can be. James is saying be strong and deal with it. The truth is, some people get wise and tender and others get bitter and broken.
James encourages us to meet these problems with faith, wisdom and self-control. It’s inevitable that people will ask this question, “where do you get the strength to do this? Where do you get the resources?”
The average person wants to face it and turn the tide and be better, but how? In these verses we see where we get the strength to do this. We are going to see that you can’t just suck it up or screw it up. We need something to help us face life. There is a motivation and a power you can have by following Jesus.
Read James 1:16-18

Slow Down

As the scriptures come alive in you, they become food and air, no longer a book of instructions. The same force that planted new life in you asks you to keep coming back to it.
Now you have the potential to be a very different person; you are liberated! Listen to what the scriptures tell you. They will free you completely!
How do we approach it? James says, we must receive it and obey it.
James gives us an amazingly profound, wise insight into why many of us find that the Bible doesn’t liberate us.
Read: James 1:19-25

Temptation

James will show us that God tests us, but he never tempts us. He may give us a circumstance but if that leads us to sin it’s not God who is tempting us, because every test is a temptation. What we are learning here are several things about temptation and how sin works in our lives. To say that sin is not something that is relevant to talk about would be very naïve. The only way to break the hold of whatever is in your soul is to show it an object of deeper affection…the only way through is to fall in love with Jesus!
Read James 1:9-15

A Bigger Picture Part 2

James says, when you get into trials and suffering the main thing you need is wisdom. How are you going to get it? The first thing to ask: “do I have the wisdom to handle anything life gives me?”
Wisdom is required because we do not always know how to persevere, nor do we find the will to rejoice in what the future holds while enduring suffering and trials. Wisdom must come from God. It is not automatic, it must be something we ask for.
Read: James 1:5-8

A Bigger Picture

The book of James is like some of the wisdom literature in the OT (Proverbs, Ecclesiastes) and it is like a continuation of the sermon on the mount that Jesus gave when he was alive. Wisdom literature is where you take the principles and apply them to see how they work out in real life situations. James takes the gospel of Jesus and asks, “how should we live this out?”
James helps us learn to “count it all joy” when we encounter trouble and suffering. When we learn how to handle trouble, we will find the joy James is promising.
Read James 1:1-4

Going Home

The Christmas story is about being homeless, in exile, rejected, and marginalized. We have sentimentalized and sanitized the Christmas story: Baby Jesus, furry animals, shining star. That is not the story. The story is quite brutal. It tells how God, in Christ, lost his home so we could be home with Him.
Read Isaiah 35:1-10

The Spirit Of Christmas

The spirit of Christmas is so much more than how we experience it today. Jesus isn’t just human, he isn’t just divine. He is both: God and man. That means he isn’t just a prophet or sage to tell you how to find God. He is God come to find you.
 
Christianity is a religion of grace and mercy. It deals with the selfishness, ambition, and sin in our own heart and lovingly makes us aware of it. It brings us to repentance and confession and gives us hope for a life that is now and a life that is to come. This is a faith for everybody. This is the spirit of Christmas
Read Isaiah 11:1-10

Light In The Darkness

This is a very famous passage in the book Isaiah. This really gives us a powerful understanding of the meaning of Christmas from the perspective of the first Testament. Tim Keller says it like this, ‘this is telling us that Christmas means an unexpected, ultimate light through the God-man which can only be received by grace.’
This passage tells us a couple things about the mystery of God in Christmas. I say mystery, because there is so much underlying the Christmas story that we don’t see, haven’t heard, or quite frankly, ignore. We see the wrapping paper and the bow. This event, the arrival of the light into the darkness was startling, mind-blowing, and quite literally took the world by surprise.
Read: Isaiah 9:1-7