dual personalities

In my daily Bible reading, I am in the epistle of James. It is pretty great, so I thought I would just share chapter 4 with you. It seems very timely.

What causes quarrels and what causes fights among you? Is it not this, that your passions are at war within you? ² You desire and do not have, so you murder. You covet and cannot obtain, so you fight and quarrel. You do not have, because you do not ask. ³ You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, to spend it on your passions. ⁴ You adulterous people! Do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God? Therefore whoever wishes to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God. ⁵ Or do you suppose it is to no purpose that the Scripture says, “He yearns jealously over the spirit that he has made to dwell in us”? ⁶ But he gives more grace. Therefore it says, “God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble.” ⁷ Submit yourselves therefore to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you. ⁸ Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you. Cleanse your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded. ⁹ Be wretched and mourn and weep. Let your laughter be turned to mourning and your joy to gloom. ¹⁰ Humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will exalt you.

¹¹ Do not speak evil against one another, brothers. The one who speaks against a brother or judges his brother, speaks evil against the law and judges the law. But if you judge the law, you are not a doer of the law but a judge. ¹² There is only one lawgiver and judge, he who is able to save and to destroy. But who are you to judge your neighbor?

¹³ Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go into such and such a town and spend a year there and trade and make a profit”— ¹⁴ yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes. ¹⁵ Instead you ought to say, “If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that.” ¹⁶ As it is, you boast in your arrogance. All such boasting is evil. ¹⁷ So whoever knows the right thing to do and fails to do it, for him it is sin.

James, you recall, was the half-brother of Jesus. He became a leader in the Jerusalem church. I’m sorry to say I was not acquainted with James until I was well into middle age. But better late than never. Mark 3:21 tells us that Jesus’ brothers (James, Joses, Jude, and Simon) thought he was out of his mind. John 7:3-5 tells us that Jesus’ brothers mocked him and didn’t believe in him. This rings true to anyone who grew up with siblings. But all that changed for James after he witnessed the resurrected Christ (1 Corinthians 15:7). James was martyred for his beliefs around 62 A.D. Eusebius says he was beaten to death with a club after being thrown from the temple parapet; Hegesippus also records that he was thrown from the pinnacle of the temple.

Today I have my last womens’ bible study gathering of the term (Exodus) and also my last community group study of 1 Corinthians! Onward and upward! As Charles Spurgeon said, “Nobody ever outgrows Scripture; the book widens and deepens with our years.”