Welcome to the Mariners Church Life Group leader podcast. This weekly conversation is designed to equip and resource youth to build a healthy life group community that studies God's word, practices spiritual rhythms, and changes the world together. Alright, leaders, thanks for joining us on this special episode. This is our series overview of our upcoming series, James.
Faith, that works. As always for our series overviews joined by our senior pastor Eric Iger. What's happening Eric? Thanks for having me.
I was a little nervous that you were going to leave me out for this one for some reason, but I'm honored to still be included in this. We wouldn't imagine doing this without you. No way. We're excited to jump into this one together as we look at this profound book of James.
I thought it would be great to use our time today. I mean, this is an eight week teaching series. I'm really going, first by first, throughout all the chapters of James. It's going to lead us all the way through the Christmas season.
Not through it, too. That's right. That's a big difference. We're not going James all the way through Christmas.
We're going James all the way through November, and then we'll have a three week Christmas series. In your hand right now, you're just thumbing through the series magazine in incredible. I mean, 43 of our volunteers led this, put this together, put a great resource. You know, when I'm looking at this, I am sad sometimes that people wouldn't pick up on this.
I would pick up on this if our graphic artist had explained this to me, but I'm looking at the graphic for our study in the book of James. It's also the graphic of the cover of the magazine that you'll be given. It also has all your life group, leader material in that. And JT, I don't even know if you know this, but see James, all how it's every letter in James on the magazine is a different font.
Different typography, yeah. Yeah. And the part behind it was that God's word is for every culture and every generation. Oh, okay.
So these are different generations of fonts. Essentially, that God's word is for every, isn't that cool? Yeah, yeah. And then the dark is actually, this is actually James.
Like, this is actually the writing of the book. So cool. Do we know it's not the entire book, probably on the front and the back. No, not the entire book.
It's a similar to how we did with Jude when we walked through Jude. Yeah. That's awesome. Obviously, we left the teaching with God's word through all of our sermon series.
I think, yeah, there's a particular, you've talked about this with our team. We love teaching through every sermon series. I love what you often say is sometimes people ask you, what's your favorite sermon series in your response to something to the effect of whatever one is in front of you right now? I don't stop preparing until I feel like this sermon is going to be the most important sermon I ever preach.
And if it's my last sermon I ever preach, will God be pleased with me? And will I, will I, I poured everything I had out for his glory? Because a day is coming, I don't know when that day is. I think I actually will preach my last sermon at some point.
And I want that sermon to have been in my heart, my gut. This was the most important thing to say. So I, that's how I feel like every sermon with every sermon within a series. Right, beautiful.
And I love, in the series magazine, as we have in all our series magazines, I think it's page 19 or so, if you have it in front of you for listening right now. If you're driving, don't do that now. But it gives us an overview of the context of the book of James. That's right.
Maybe we could start there a little bit just about who was James, why, why did the purpose of his letter, what was the context around that? Half-brother of Jesus. And we say half-brother of Jesus, we're saying this because we know that Jesus did not have an earthly father, an earthly adopted father in Joseph. That he was born of a virgin.
James not born of a virgin, you know, because he had an earthly father and his mother Mary. So we say half-brother of Jesus. And he opens the book calling himself a servant of the Lord Jesus Christ. So think about this.
What would you have to do for your sibling to call themselves? Do you have siblings to come to? I have a younger brother. Yeah.
There's no way in the world. He's saying that he's my servant, no way ever. So what's amazing is that James, the reason he says that is because he actually is convinced that Jesus is alive. That the guy I shared a room with when we were seven, that I played ball with in the backyard, that I thought was just a boy just like me.
This is not only a person. This is God. He walked out of the tomb. God really did come here.
In fact, there's a whole lot of reasons that people point to the resurrection of Jesus from the dead. The half-brother of Jesus calling Jesus God and declaring himself in writing to be a servant of Jesus. To me, it's really strong evidence that Jesus walked out of that tomb. And not just in his declaration, but in his life, too.
I mean, James has marted for his faith. Right. Right. And then this thing that his half-brother is God.
Yeah. So that's he wrote it, James. So that says a lot. And then you also see a lot in the very beginning.
He writes to the scattered tribes. So the scattered tribes, these are Jewish people who become Christian. And so when he calls them the tribes, there's a nod back to the 12 tribes of Israel, yet they've been scattered because of the Christian faith. And when we read a letter, we have to remember that the letter was written.
It wasn't written to us. It's for us. It's God's word is for us. But it's originally written to this group of people.
And we find a lot of similarities with these people because we are also the scattered tribes. We're not many of us who are listening are likely Jewish, but we've been grafted into the nation of Israel, meaning that we are now God's chosen people. We belong to him. And we've been scattered all throughout the world.
So it was written to the scattered tribes initially because they had been scattered because of persecution. So what the enemies of the cross or the enemies of these people thought was going to hurt them, scatter them, actually only cause the faith to spread. Because as they were scattered, the faith scattered with them, the faith spread. So James writes to a group of people who are wondering, how do we live in this world, a world that doesn't necessarily like us or some people hate us?
How do I navigate the trial that I'm in? Is this my faith? I mean, Jesus has been resurrected from the dead lesson 20 years ago when they get this letter. I believe in Jesus.
I've bowed before Jesus, but how does my faith impact? How I talk to people? How I treat people? How I think about God's will for my life?
How does it impact the way I handle the vulnerable people in the community around me? And so James writes this very practical, nitty, gritty, street level book. The reality is that you could say change the world because these early Christians took these words and started to live this way. And here we are 2000 plus years later on the other side of the world listening to a podcast because we've had our lives changed by this gospel.
But we heard about this gospel because these early Christians who were scattered because of their faith lived out these words of James and the faith spread. Beautiful. So it's really, it's really awesome. We get to still read this letter.
Yeah, that's right. And it's some people's favorite letter. It was some maybe church historians. I can say it was not their favorite letter, but it was a letter that was there not contested, but it was canonical.
But reformers like Martin Luther, what did he call it? The straw letter. The straw letter. So Martin Luther who go there, I guess.
You heard me quote Luther, Martin Luther, Martin Luther King Jr. Not that one. Different one. You know, centuries later, it would be the Martin Luther King Jr.
Martin Luther started the Protestant Reformation and he just really emphasized we are his not because of our works, but because of the work of Jesus and the cross. We all now are priests. We all can enter into the presence of God. We can all read the scripture and the main ethic of the Christian life is repentance, but he was huge on grace.
It's all about grace. So he reads James and he wrestled that James felt so much about what you do. Actions. And again, it's very practical.
And he wrestled with it because he loved the book of Romans so much. He became Christian reading Romans chapter 1 verse 17. The righteous will live by faith. And he finds the book of James to be so works oriented.
So he called it a straw pistol, but he'd still believe it was God's word and in the book in the Bible, but he just wrestled with it. And you know, he wrongly wrestled with it because yes, we are saved by grace. How do we live now that we've been saved? So you're a scattered Christian.
How do you now live? And that's the book of James. I will say that the people who love the book of James, I'll probably poke fun of people in the series. It's an, I mean, every book I'm preaching is my favorite book in that moment, but it's so wild to me how many people say the book of James is my favorite book.
Yeah. You asked that in front of our staff. And much more so to you. If you did.
If you did. My hand was like a seven. Yeah, six or seven. Yeah.
And I'm thinking the people who raised their hand, they probably played sports in high school and liked it when their coach screamed at that. Hey, DK's hand was up. My coach, if my coach streams to me, he's my coach loves me because James is intense. Yeah, it is.
I mean, the reason I do think people love the book of James is because it, it, you can read it and you know exactly what he's saying. Right. It's not one of the, like the book of Hebrews, for example, so glorious and awesome. But there's some chapters you have to really wait.
What is it? Living way, open curtain body, sacrificial offering, you know, offering, you have to go back and understand some old testament passages to understand Hebrews. That's not the case with James. You can, you can read James and know exactly what James is saying.
Super readable, practical. But you also know exactly what he's saying. And sometimes he is in our grill saying, come on, come on, you know, even scattered, I know even scattered, but this is how we live now. This is how we live.
So it's kind of like a, I have a basketball coach who said, don't, don't worry if I'm, if I'm yelling at you, worry when I stop yelling at you. I had, I had one of those. Because what you're saying is if I stop yelling because I gave up on you and if I'm still in your face, it's because I believe in you. And if you read James that way, then you don't get offended.
You're like, no, James believes in me. James believes. James believes. Yeah.
I can live this out. I should live this out. I must live this out. But when I think I was being positioned by those who say, this is what it means.
Like you have to have to, in the church was using that. For indulgences and work bays and everything else. If you use the book of James as, Hey, do these things so God will love you, you're, you're misreading it. You have to read it as, Hey, because God has loved you and because you've received his love, here's how you now live.
That's right. There's a lot of parallels in it. Do you talk about it being kind of the genre of a wisdom literature. Yeah.
There's some callbacks to Proverbs, like a through line of the Sermon on the Mount and he calls back to some of those statements within the book to just as long as a thought on the Sermon on the Mount. put it take for you to believe that your half-brother was a son of God. And then a quote from him. Resurrection.
Non-stop in the letter you write. Yeah, it's awesome. Yeah. So eight weeks.
We're not going to walk through. Yeah. Wait, why don't you just maybe punch in a few? I think you want to highlight.
We've got some incredible things that are happening. You're probably talking about them. See, good. We've got a root celebration happening in you too.
This is a series. So week one, it's a very famous text about the, hey, welcome trials. People don't love the text because, I mean, I don't want more trials in my life. But you do see why trials are actually good.
We'll have extended prayer for people at our services on that first week just because of the weightiness of the subsequent trials. Then weeks two and three, we're going to be talking about seek the good, which is our outreach campaign. We do it every fall to seek the good of our cities, in which, as you know, we're in seven, about to be nine, different cities throughout Southern California. And we want to seek the good of those cities.
So I'm hoping, life, your bleeder, that you will get your group plugged into serving in our cities. But week two, we're going to talk about being a doer of the word and week three, about having mercy towards others and those come all the way straight from the text. Then week four, if I have faith, it definitely shows up in the fruit in my life. Week five, that's a rooted week celebration, which should be super fun.
And then that's an I believe weekend along out when we have week five. Week five, a rooted celebration. It's going to be an amazing weekend. And it's the all man.
It's the passage about it's about your tongue. And hey, no man, contain the tongue. But what comes out of your mouth really reflects what's going on in your heart, which is why we can call people to receive a new heart from Jesus. And we move on to your relationship with the world, your relationship with God's will, living well.
And that's the end of the book. There you go. And then we turn the corner towards the Christmas. And then it becomes Christmas.
I mean, the book James has five chapters. So obviously, if you hit the book in eight weeks, you do have to some weeks or a bit shorter, week seven, it's only four verses. And then some, like, 10 minutes on is 18 verses. But that's the whole section.
I mean, all 18 verses are about the time. So we're moving through the book. Honestly, it's a simple read, but not an easy read. Because you have to ask yourself, how am I going to apply this in my life?
But you do understand what James is teaching? Totally. He's making it really clear. It's a simple read and add.
It's a challenging read. It's got to be corresponding action to that. That's what we're inviting the whole of our church to seek a good 11. We're calling out.
Life group serving my group meets this Sunday. We're going to be looking at life group leaders. You should know. You do know we're to find all the life group serve opportunities that there's going to be many more that are added during the season.
So even from this week, have the diligence sit down. Look at it. Where are we going to go? We love.
We encourage groups to serve all together. It's a great thing that groups are together. So our hope is when we're planning that with all of our outreach ministries, we have 10,000 people from our church in the season. And so many opportunities for you to serve, you want to have that experience with your group.
And it's going to fit so well with Walk into the Blue James. That's right. Awesome. So we can't wait to see how guys going to use this series to really give us a right size inventory.
It's a bit of an assessment when we're being called into things. And then a corresponding action to that. It's not to try to get to earn something, but it shows our lives. We have corresponding gospel action.
So can't wait for it. We're going to jump into it together. It's a great man. All right.
Thanks for your time. Yeah. Leaders. Thank you guys.
Men and women. Appreciate you. That's it. All right, guys.
We'll catch you on here next week as we begin week one of our series of James, How to Fate that Works.