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Sep 09, 2018

Everyday faith grows in winter

Everyday faith grows in winter

Passage: James 1:1-8

Speaker: Patrick Lafferty

Series: Everyday Faith: A study in the book of James

Every life is in some measure lived by faith--placing our trust, our hope, our aspirations on notions whose full reality we can only see through a glass darkly. Faith is therefore an everyday thing. What then does it look like to live an everyday faith in Jesus as Lord? The letter from James to scattered communities who had struggles both from within them and from outside them offers direct but reassuring guidance.

Worship Order

Call To Worship: from Psalm 27
Old Testament Reading: Deuteronomy 6:4-9
New Testament Reading: 1 John 4:13-19
Sermon Title: Everyday faith grows in winter
Central Text: James 1:1-8, 12
Response: From the Heidelberg Catechism, Lord’s Day 9
Benediction: Romans 15:13

09.09.18 Sermon Notes

Related Scriptures:

  • 1 Kings 18:17-21
  • Psalm 27
  • Psalm 88
  • Proverbs 3:5,6
  • Matthew 7:7-11
  • Mark 9:14-29
  • Romans 5:6-8
  • Jude 20-22
  • 1 Peter 1:6,7
  • 1 John 4:13-19
  • Revelation 2:8-11

Discussion Questions & Applications:

  1. What is faith? What does it mean to have it or to lose it? How would you describe it from what you know of it from Scripture?
  2. How have the challenges you’ve had to faith injured it? Or how have they enabled it to become more “steadfast”? If you’ve had both experiences, what made the difference between them?
  3. What does it mean to doubt? How is that different from unbelief? Would you reason that James is shaming people for their doubting, or warning them of what they lose out on if they persist in it? How does Jesus respond to the different people who express some version of hesitation in trusting Him?
  4. How in this passage might we understand faith and love to be related? What does it mean to have love for Him (v .12) in whom we have faith? What do we love Him for if our faith is in Him? How does His love change the way you at least think about what challenges your trust in Him?
  5. What challenge to believing in God’s goodness are you presently facing? How does this passage guide you in how to wrestle with that challenge to good effect?

Quotes

 

  • Before I became a Christian I do not think I fully realized that one’s own life, after conversion, would inevitably consist in doing most of the same things one had been doing before, one hopes, in a new spirit, but still the same things.  C.S. Lewis
  • The most reliable thing on earth is sorrow / And the most enduring—the Almighty Word.  Anna Akhmatova
  • I believe that the question of faith—which is ultimately separable from the question of “religion”—is the single most important question that any person asks in and of her life, and that every life is an answer to this question, whether she has addressed it consciously or not. Christian Wiman
  • Be careful. Be certain that your expressions of regret about your inability to rest in God do not have a tinge of self-satisfaction, even self-exaltation to them, that your complaints about your anxieties are not merely a manifestation of your dependence on them. There is nothing more difficult to outgrow than anxieties that have become useful to us, whether as explanations for a life that never quite finds its true force or direction, or as fuel for ambition, or as a kind of reflexive secular religion that, paradoxically, unites us with others in a shared sense of complete isolation: you feel at home in the world only by never feeling at home in the world. Christian Wiman
  • . . . Whole years I lost in the kingdom
    Of mine own skull
    With my scepter the remote

    I sat enthroned in a La-Z-Boy
    Watching dramas I controlled
    Only the volume on

    I was a poor death’s head then
    In my hook-rug empire
    With snowflakes of paper

    My favorite button is power
    -     “Lord, I Was Faithless” – Mary Karr
  • Everything difficult indicates something more than our theory of life yet embraces. . . . But there is a reality of being in which all things are easy and plain—oneness, that is, with the Lord of Life; to pray for this is the first thing.  George MacDonald, “The Word of Jesus on Prayer”
  • Clarity is the last thing you are clinging to and must let go of. . . . I have never had clarity; what I have always had is trust.  So I will pray that you trust God. Mother Teresa
  • “Would you agree that we must be willing to thank God for every trial of our faith, no matter how severe, for the greater strength it produces?” “I’m perfectly willing to say it, but I’m continually unable to do it.” “There’s the Rub.” At Home in Mitford
  • It is not the strength of your faith but the object of your faith that actually saves you. Strong faith in a weak branch is fatally inferior to weak faith in a small branch. Tim Keller
  • Faith … is the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted, in spite of your changing moods.  C.S. Lewis

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