God is a Good Father
Pray for: Offering, Musical Worship, Burdens on Hearts, Sheron, Randall, Anita, Message
Failure to recognize source of gifts.
Children failing to recognize gifts from parents.
There is a large market in psychological counseling for teaching people to blame their parents for all of their problems.
Link: So it often is with our relationship with God. God gives good things, but we fail to recognize the truth and misuse them.
Text: James 1:12-18
The Point: God is a good Father, Who gives good things to us. But we, like disobedient children, turn the good things into sin.
Verse 12-15 – On Trials and Temptation
If you didn’t know, the Greek word for trial and temptation is the same. Both are πειράζω. This causes problems for our understanding, because we tend to think that if it’s the same word, then it should be translated the same way every time. Well, cool can mean a lot of things. Temperature and all those other meanings.
If a fellow decides to go without a shirt during the middle of the winter, he will most certainly be very cool, but that’s not cool at all, if you catch my meaning. It’s important in life to have the right attitude, but one should never have an attitude toward others. Don’t talk back to your parents or you’ll be disciplined, but if you don’t talk back to your parents you’ll be disciplined.
You might not get all of those right away.
But, I think you get the point. It’s context. Put the same word in different contexts and it means different things.
Even so, God does test us, but He doesn’t tempt us.
And the different context is the source. Temptation comes from within, from one’s own desires. But tests come from the Father of lights, who only sends good things and intends to give the crown of life to those who persevere.
It has everything to do with one’s perspective and intention for the situation. See, we humans are sinful. We know full well and wish it were not so that our desires are at odds within us. We desire to do good, and yet, we also find that we desire to do evil too. So when we encounter a situation, we are often tempted. We encounter a situation and we see and desire evil, and so we are tempted.
But we are tempted by our own desires, our own inner conflict, and our own sin nature!
But it must be remembered that God is not like us. God cannot be tempted by evil and God does not tempt anyone to evil. God does not have a sin nature. He doesn’t have a sinful perspective, intention, or desires. So, when God sends a situation into our life the intention is for good. And that we should choose the good, rather than the evil.
The hard truth of it is, God sends good and we turn it into evil.
The language in this passage brings to mind the situation in the Garden of Eden. I suspect James was thinking of the Garden of Eden as he wrote these words.
In the Garden of Eden you have a trial and a test. And on one hand you have life and the other hand you have death. God put two very special trees into the Garden of Eden: the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil and the Tree of Life. And God commanded Adam not to eat from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.
Now, whatever God’s intention was in putting the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil there, the intention was not that we should actually eat from it. Lots of books have been written on the subject, wondering why God put it there, and I don’t presume to have solved the mystery, but I subscribe to that God wanted us to choose Him as our God and to obey Him of our own free will. He wanted us to move from a robotic obedience to a much more high and lovely willful obedience. And if we had passed the test, we would be enjoying a confirmed and willful love relationship with God.
But that is not what happened and it is not God’s fault that it is not what happened, and it was not God who tempted us. The man and the woman, of their own desire, of their own will, and with a little help from the universes first sinner, they choose to sin. They saw the situation, they evaluated it, they desired, they took, they ate, and so death entered into the world.
Was the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil a bad thing? This might surprise you, but no, it was not. God does not create bad things and put bad things into our life. The Tree wasn’t bad. What we did with it was bad.
Hear me out on these next points, but money is not evil. It’s the love of money that is evil. Alcohol is not evil – it helps treat infection and clean things. But what we do with alcohol is evil. Electricity is not evil, but what we do with it can be. Nuclear power, not evil, but can be used for great evil. Do not blame your stuff for the evil things you do with it, and above all, do not blame God.
The reason we are tempted and the reason we sin is not because of the stuff that God has made or any malicious and sinful intention of God. The problem, is us. We are the problem.
Link: But the good news is that this is not a hopeless situation. In Christ, we have the capacity to recognize the truth behind the situation and the good gifts and the purpose of the good gifts. Therefore, James says…
Verses 16-17 – On the Source of Good
Several things to note here.
As has already been said, God is a good Father, Who gives us good and perfect gifts.
This truth is important to hold in mind, because it is very common that we forget it. Has someone ever sinned against you and you then blamed it on God? Like, you go to work, one of your co-workers or your boss says something ungodly to you, and then you go “why did you make me go through that, God?”
Remember: every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change. And God cannot be tempted with evil, and he himself tempts no one.
Now, it’s true, God did know that was going to happen and God did allow it to happen. But He did not direct that individual to sin against you because He does not tempt people, can do no wrong, and sends good things. So don’t blame God for your coworker’s sins.
And also, have you yourself ever sinned and then gotten angry with God about it? Like, work has been very hard lately, and so you grumble at and are rude to your family about it, then you feel bad about how you sinned against your family, and so you blame God saying “God, if work wasn’t so hard then I wouldn’t have sinned like that. Why are you making this so hard on me?”
No, no, no. Each person is tempted when he is lured and enticed by his own desire. Maybe God gave you extra work because He saw that you would need the money in the near future? Or as an opportunity to grow in patience and endurance? Or because one of your unsaved co-workers is having a life crisis and you interacting for them might just be the thing that God uses to open their hearts to the Gospel? It was you that turned that situation into a sin against your family, not God.
So we should not blame God for our temptations.
Another truth we get from these verses is about the benevolence and goodness of God. God is a good God who gives good and perfect gifts. Unfortunately, sometimes we mistake the source of the good gifts we receive in our life. Sometimes even we esteem the gift more than we esteem the giver.
*go back to earlier illustration of a child enjoying the toy more than their parents*
We should not be deceived into thinking that good gifts just pop into thin air. They come from someone. And we shouldn’t be deceived into thinking that we acquired them for ourselves. They are gifts of grace whose source is God.
Therefore, we should cultivate hearts of thankfulness to God for His good and perfect gifts.
I have an interesting story about this point in my sermon. Actually, while I was developing it on Thursday, Leah came into the office and we got to talking, mostly about preparation for VBS. At some point during the convo she said a statement to me that she had heard. It fits really well with James 1:17.
Here’s the quote “Imagine if tomorrow morning you woke up with everything that you had thanked God for today. Some of us would wake up with nothing.” X2
She said this to me and then I went back to writing my sermon and said “Wow! That fits perfectly.” And so, I decided I had better thank God for the quote, because the timing seemed to obviously come from Him.
You know, we are so blessed that God’s benevolence and gracious gifts are not dependent upon our thankfulness, or I dare say most or all of us would have died a long time ago. Your food, water, the air you breathe, your sight, intellect… everything. We are creatures wholly dependent upon God and should cultivate attitudes of gratefulness.
And honestly, an attitude of gratefulness and thanksgiving is so much more satisfying than an attitude of entitlement. You know how gratefulness and thankfulness feel. They feel great. Entitlement is a bitter feeling. Maybe you get more stuff from having an entitled attitude toward life, but it doesn’t lead to the joyful feeling that thankfulness does.
I want to point out one final point in verse 18.
Verse 18
Verse 18 parallels verse 15 and we can see a comparison and contrast with sin and with God.
The phrases “brings forth” and “brought us forth” are the same word in Greek and they speak of child birth.
So, in verse 15 the imagery is that of our evil desires conceiving sin inside of us, which we eventually give birth to. And then sin matures and gives birth to death. Our sinful desires lead to sin and death.
But God is a Father in a very special way to believers. In fact, while some teach that God is the Father of everyone, Scripture teaches that those who do not have faith in God have Satan as their father. But God is Father to believers and He brings us to new life by the word of truth. Through the power of the Gospel and belief in it, he brings us forth. Alive and a kind of firstfruit – the best fruit.
That sounds a whole lot more lovely and appealing than giving birth to death.