The Lord's Brother

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Alright, well, we'll get started.
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How about we start with a word of prayer? Father, I thank You for the opportunity to be here this morning.
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I thank You for these men and for the ministry here of Set Free.
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I thank You for Pastor Mark and his leadership and for all those who have come around him to support him and encourage him, his wife, his friends, and other ministers here.
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And I pray for each one of these men, Lord, as we begin today a new study of the Bible, as we look to the book of James as a book of wisdom.
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I know that this is an important moment in the life of every person here because we're opening the very Word of God and we're hearing the very Word of God.
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And so, Lord, I pray that You would, by Your mercy, give me grace to teach, that You would fill me with Your Holy Spirit and fill my mouth with truth.
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And, Lord, I pray, as I always do, that You would keep me from error.
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For, Lord, I am a fallible man, and I am capable of preaching that which is untrue because of my own biases, because of my own wicked heart.
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But, Lord, I pray that You would sanctify me for this moment, that You would keep me from error, first for the sake of these men.
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These men are valuable.
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These men are made in the image of God, and they're important, and teaching them the Word of God is important.
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And, Lord, I wouldn't want to teach them anything false.
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And, Father, I pray that You would also keep me from error for the sake of my own conscience.
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I pray that You would keep me from error because, Lord, I don't want to bring shame upon You.
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So, Father, I pray all of this in Jesus' name and for His sake.
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Amen.
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Now, I should have asked before I got started, but does anybody know where the dry erase marker is? Do you mind grabbing it for me? I like to write as I teach, and I'm going to be throwing some things up on the board today.
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If you have your Bibles, open up to the book of James.
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One of them might not work good, so...
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That's fine.
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We'll work it out.
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Yeah, it looks like they're both about the same.
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Yeah, they're both pretty sharp, so...
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That's okay.
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If you're new to studying the Bible and you don't know where James is, it's close to the back of the New Testament.
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When you're going through the New Testament, if you come to Hebrews, which is a little bit of a bigger book, it'll be right after the book of Hebrews.
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And we're going to begin this day...
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I was asking Pastor Mark because there are several things that I would have liked to have taught, and my wife and I prayed about it and tried to kind of decide.
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And I decided on the book of James because the book of James is very much like the Proverbs of the New Testament.
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So that's why we're doing this.
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This book speaks wisdom into the life of God's people, and it confronts us with some very difficult truths.
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In fact, it confronts us with questions that we have to answer.
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We have to ensure that we don't allow our theological positions to outrun what the Bible says.
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Because sometimes we might have a position that we hold, and the Bible challenges us, and rather than dealing with what the Bible says, we just keep holding our position no matter what.
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We sort of just dig our heels in and we say, I'm going to believe it no matter what the Bible says.
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And we can't do that.
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We have to let the Bible change us.
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How many of you are familiar with Martin Luther? Not Martin Luther King, and though he was an important civil rights leader in the 60's, back in the 1500's there was a man by the name of Martin Luther.
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He was a German monk.
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And Martin Luther was instrumental in bringing about the Reformation of the church.
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Up until that time, the Western church was basically oversaw and led by the Roman Catholic church.
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The Roman Catholic church was the church, and it was headed by the Pope, and there was a lot of controversy, there was a lot of conspiracy, there was a lot of sin in the church.
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And one of the things that was happening was that the church was selling something called indulgences.
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An indulgence was a letter from the Pope which essentially was purchased for the forgiveness of sins.
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So if you were a person who was a sinful person, which we all are, and you knew you needed your sin forgiven, which we all do, you would go and you would purchase an indulgence letter, and the Pope would give you that indulgence, and then that indulgence you would receive forgiveness.
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There was even one man who was, I call him the used car salesman of the ancient world.
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He would go from town to town selling these letters, and he was raising money for St.
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Peter's Basilica.
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It's a big, huge church over in Rome.
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And he would go from town to town, and he would sell these letters, and not only would he sell the letters for your sin to be forgiven, but if you had somebody who had died, and they were in purgatory, it would buy their way out of purgatory.
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And his quote, and it rhymed in German as well as it rhymes in English, he said, When a coin in the coffer rings, a soul from purgatory springs.
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How many of you, whose mother is burning in the fires of purgatory, would not for a piece of silver purchase her release? Well, everybody come and empty their pockets, because they had this wrong understanding of salvation.
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They had a wrong understanding of the afterlife.
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Purgatory is not a thing, but they believed that it was because of the false teaching that had arisen in the church in the ancient world.
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It had become very popular in the Middle Ages.
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Theology had gone down because of things that had taken precedence, such as dealing with the Black Plague and all those things that happened in the Middle Ages.
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A lot of scholarship and things had gone down, and so there was great ignorance among the people.
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And so it was easy to manipulate the ignorant, and to take from them and bilk from them their money.
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And that's what happened.
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So along comes Martin Luther.
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This man, Martin Luther, and he wrote a list of grievances against the teachings of Rome, and those grievances were called the 95 Theses.
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It is October 31, 1517.
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Martin Luther published the 95 Theses.
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Now some people believe that he nailed those Theses to the church door at Wittenberg, which was the castle church where he was working as the minister.
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And they believe he nailed the letter to the door, 95 statements of grievance, 95 statements of argument that he was giving against the indulgences.
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Recent historians argue that he didn't nail them, but he actually published them and mailed them out to all the different places to start the debate.
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Whether they were mailed or nailed, it started a fight.
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Very quickly he was condemned by the Roman Catholic Church.
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He was put under a papal sanction.
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Later he was brought before the Diet of Worms, which is like a trial, and during the trial at the Diet of Worms he said unless he was convinced of Scripture and sound reason, he would not and could not recant of what he had taught.
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Martin Luther is one of my heroes of the faith, and I tell you all of this about him because the article that Luther said, the Gospel either stands or falls on one article, and it is this, that we are justified before God by faith alone.
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Justification is by faith alone.
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In Latin it was a phrase sola fide.
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And sola fide is shorthand for justification by faith alone.
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So, we come back to our study of the book of James, and if you've never studied James before, it's a tremendous book.
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As I said, it's a book of wisdom, but it does have some challenging phrases.
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And there's a phrase in James that actually talks about works as a part of justification.
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And we're going to get there.
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It might take us a year to get there, because it's way over in chapter 2, and this morning I'm going to look at verse 1.
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But my point is this.
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Martin Luther looked at James, and he looked at his theology, and he said James doesn't really line up with my theology.
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It does, but he didn't understand how.
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He said it didn't really line up with my theology.
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You know what? I think the book of James should be here.
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Yeah, he called it the epistle of straw, meaning that it really wasn't as firm, it wasn't as strong as the rest.
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It really didn't belong in the body of the text.
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That's an issue right there, because Martin Luther was allowing his theological paradigm to cause him to have a lens through which he was interpreting the Scripture, rather than letting the Scripture influence his theology.
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Now thankfully, he never removed it.
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There have been some Catholics who have argued that James actually was removed by Luther.
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Not true.
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And later he would reconcile, as I hope to do with you all, reconcile James' statement on justification with Paul's statement, which clearly is this, that we are saved by grace through faith and not of ourselves.
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That's Ephesians 2.
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And so there's going to be reconciliation there.
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And there was reconciliation finally in the mind of Martin Luther.
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But the point of the story, the point of me beginning with this is to simply say, when we come to the text, we have to first be honest with the text.
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Our goal is something called exegesis.
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And I don't know, again, I hear amen, so I'm assuming that you guys might know what this means.
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And I hate that this pillar is here, because some of you can't see, but I'm going to be using this board because it helps me keep my thoughts together.
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Exegesis is when we go to the text, we are pulling out of the text what it's saying and what it means, rather than reading into the text something that it doesn't mean or something we want it to mean.
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For instance, maybe I'm a person who really likes to lust.
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And so I go to the passage in Matthew 5 where Jesus said, He who looks at a woman with lust in his heart is committed adultery.
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Right? And I say, well, you know what? Lust, in Jesus' day, doesn't mean what it meant today.
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It's not the same.
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Or, Jesus wasn't talking to me.
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He was only talking to them.
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In fact, I've heard people make the argument that the Sermon on the Mount isn't for us.
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It was only for the Jews.
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So when Jesus said, If you look with lust, you've committed adultery in your heart, that's not for you.
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That's only for the Jews.
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Matthew is written to the Jews, as we talked about a minute ago.
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And all the Sermon on the Mount is an explanation of Jewish history and Jewish law.
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And so that didn't have anything to do with Gentile Christians.
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That was just for the Jews.
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Now that's ridiculous.
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But all the acrobatics we do to try to make the Bible fit us.
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We contort like one of those gymnasts on TV that can flip over backwards and bridge themselves in half.
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We contort every which way to make the Bible fit us rather than conforming ourselves to what the Bible says.
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And so our goal is exegesis.
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The opposite of this is what? Eisegesis.
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Eisegesis means to read into it.
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It's two prefixes.
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E-X and E-I.
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E-X means out of, like your exit.
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Right? If you think of an exit to go out.
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So this is reading out, taking out of the text.
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E-I.
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And it's eisegesis or eisegesis depending on how you...
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If you think of the number eight, E-I-G-H-T is A.
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So it's actually pronounced eisegesis.
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So eisegesis is to read into.
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So I'm going to take my biases and read them into the text.
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I'm going to take my theology and read it into the text.
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I'm going to take my ideas and read them into the text.
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And that is a no-no.
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We're going to try not to do that.
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We're going to try to always stick with exegesis rather.
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And the way that we do that is we come to the text in a way that is very important.
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It is called tabula rasa.
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How many of you have ever heard the phrase tabula rasa? You have? That's exactly right.
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Tabula rasa means to be a blank tablet or a blank slate.
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When we come to the text, we don't take our ideas and read them in, but we come as if it were like a blank slate and let them write themselves on our heart.
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We come open to the Scripture to let it change us rather than us change it.
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Yes, sir? Isn't there another one? Narcissus? Narcissus is a...
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That's a modern...
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That's not an old term.
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That's a new term.
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It's based on narcissism, which means everything's about me.
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You ever met a narcissist? I'll introduce you to some.
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I know a few.
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And narcissists think everything's about them.
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So every time they read the Bible, they try to read themselves into the text.
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That's bad, too.
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Every passage of the Bible has an application to you, but not every passage of the Bible is about you.
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And so people mess that up a lot of times.
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That's narcissism.
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All right, so we're going to read the text.
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We're going to read just verse 1.
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And we'll see if we can get through verse 1 today.
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It says, James, a servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ, to the twelve tribes in the dispersion, greetings.
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All right, so that's it.
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That's as far as we're going to go today.
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He begins in our next study next week.
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He's going to begin with the admonitions of wisdom about counting joy, our trials, and being understanding of where God has us in life and those things.
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But we're going to begin today just by looking at verse 1.
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And this is, you know, I haven't done a Bible study.
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I've only done one sermon here.
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So when I do Bible study, I do use the original language a lot.
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I brought my Greek text today to point out a few things to you.
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This is in no way to try to speak above you.
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And if in any way, if I'm offending you, I'm not trying to do that.
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What I do try to do, though, is I try to encourage people to think upward, to raise the bar.
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You know, if the bar is always down here, we're never going to get any higher.
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It helps draw out what it really means.
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Yeah, absolutely.
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The original language.
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The Bible was written in two primary languages.
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The Bible was written in Hebrew in the Old Testament, Greek in the New Testament.
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And I don't know how much study you guys have done of the history of the text of the Bible.
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One of my favorite things to teach on is church history and the history of the biblical text.
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Primarily the history of the New Testament text.
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The New Testament text has a very important, very long, powerful history that people need to understand.
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I think a lot of people believe the Bible, they don't even know where it came from.
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A lot of people say, well, yeah, I believe the Bible, but they don't even know how they got it.
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You understand the Bible is not a book.
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The Bible is 66 individual books written over a period of about 1,500 years, written by about 40 different authors, written in two primary languages with a little bit of Aramaic mixed in.
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So this book is a tomb of wisdom and literature that came to us over a period of 1,500 years.
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It's not written by one person.
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It's not written in one time period.
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It's not even written in one genre of literature.
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It's written in all kinds of things from the historical narrative to poetry to apocalyptic literature and all kinds of other things as such.
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So when we look at the Bible, we're looking at a great and long piece of literature and understanding the type of literature you're reading is important when you're understanding how to study a book.
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Let me ask you a question, and you may or may not know.
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What type of literature does James come to us in? What is the form of literature which is used in the book of James? Yes.
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It is wisdom literature, and that's true.
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You're talking about like a letter? A letter, yeah.
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So the first thing, it is an epistle.
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It is an epistle.
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You know what an epistle is? That's the wife of an apostle.
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Nah.
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No, it's not that.
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It's a bad joke.
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An epistle means letter.
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It is a letter.
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That is why it starts with the word greeting.
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Right? The same way you might write your letter.
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Normally we sign our name at the end of a letter.
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Right? Normally we'd say to whom it may concern, body, body, body, and then in Christ, Keith, or whatever, however we sign the end.
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Well, in the ancient world, in this particular time when letters were written, the name, what's that? At the beginning of the letter, we had the name identifying the authority of the letter, who it's coming from.
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The authority comes from the word what? Author.
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The author of the letter.
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It's identifying the authority, who it came from.
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And so in Paul's letters, it says, Paul, a servant of Jesus Christ, or Paul, an apostle of Jesus Christ.
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It always begins with that.
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And Paul's letters, if you notice, are typically written to individual churches.
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So you have Paul to the church at Ephesus, Paul to the church at Philippi, Paul to the church at Corinth, or whatever, whatever.
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Right? Or Paul to Timothy, my son in the faith.
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Or to Titus.
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Right? So you have Paul's letters which are geographically distinct for this group.
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But then, after the book of Hebrews, and by the way, we don't know who wrote Hebrews.
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Hebrews may have been written by Paul, but I don't think so.
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I tend to hold possibly a Lukan, meaning Luke as the author of Hebrews, possibly, or even maybe Barnabas or Silas.
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There's options there to say who was it.
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I believe he was associated with the apostle Paul.
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Luke was very much associated with Paul.
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Barnabas, Silas also.
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So we have different people that could have written Hebrews.
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It's definitely a Paul line.
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It has a Paul feel.
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But there's a place in it in chapter 2 of Hebrews that says specifically that I got this information second hand.
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Paul would never say that because he got his information directly from Christ.
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So I say I don't think it was Paul.
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I think it was written by an associate of Paul.
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So Hebrews, though, begins what we call the Catholic epistles.
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The Catholic epistles.
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Now you might say, oh wait, pastor, you don't make me nervous now.
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You didn't say...
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That's right.
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Universal means universal.
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Right? From the time that you get to Hebrews, James, 1 and 2 Peter, 1, 2, 3 John, you have what are known as the Catholic or the universal epistles.
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These aren't written to one church.
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These are written to all the churches.
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In fact, if you look here at verse 1, it says to the twelve tribes in the dispersion.
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Hold your finger there and turn one book over to the book of 1 Peter.
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Starts almost exactly the same way except for Peter rather than James is the focus.
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And it says Peter, an apostle of Jesus Christ to those who are elect exiles of the what? Of the dispersion, right? So you had the audience being identified here.
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First the audience is identified in James as those, the twelve tribes in the dispersion.
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And then Peter recognizes the elect of the dispersion.
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So what's the dispersion? The dispersion, I believe, references specifically the Jewish community that had been driven out of Jerusalem and had been scattered out into the known world.
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You have from Israel, you go up into what is modern day Turkey which would have been called Asia Minor at the time all the way over to Macedonia and Greece even into Rome.
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So they had been dispersed out into the ancient world and so he's identifying this letter as not being identified as a letter that's for a one specific group or a one specific person but this letter is universal.
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It's Catholic in nature.
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This is for everybody.
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This is for all the Christians who were throughout the ancient world.
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And so therein is our audience but now we have to talk about our author.
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Who is James? Half-brother of Jesus.
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Now have you guys done this study before? You guys, personally? Okay.
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Well, good.
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That's an important thing to know.
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Yes, sir.
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This book of James is the half-brother of Jesus.
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Yes, sir.
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In fact, I'm going to show you why I believe that and I'm going to take you through why I believe this is the half-brother of Jesus.
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And by the way, why do we call him half-brother? He's got a different daddy.
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Yes, right.
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He's got a different daddy.
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Jesus had a father in heaven and God the Father impregnated the Virgin Mary by the Holy Spirit overshadowing her and she became pregnant with Jesus.
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She was a virgin.
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Now the Roman Catholic Church and by the way, when I say Catholic I mean universal but when I say Roman Catholic I'm speaking specifically of Roman Catholicism.
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And if you come out of a Roman Catholic background I'd love to talk to you sometime.
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I as a Reformed theologian I'm going to be mentioning certain things that are distinctives between Reformed theology and Roman Catholic theology because there was big divergence.
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And one of the big divergences was on the subject of Mary.
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How many of you have ever seen Roman Catholics pray to Mary? If you see the Pope the latest Pope Michael the Archangel Well they pray to all the saints.
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They pray to angels.
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And in fact I remember going to a Catholic funeral where they said don't pray for this person anymore pray to them.
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What are you talking about? That sounds a little crazy.
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But the praying to the saints the saint of saints in the Roman Catholic Church the high most matriarch of the Roman Catholic Church is Mary.
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And Mary.
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Virgin Mary.
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And Mary is considered to be a perpetual virgin in Roman Catholicism.
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Meaning that she was a virgin throughout her life.
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And so how many of you have ever heard the term Immaculate Conception? Most people think that the Immaculate Conception refers to Jesus being conceived of the Holy Spirit.
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That is not what the Immaculate Conception is.
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The Immaculate Conception is the Roman Catholic teaching that Mary was kept from sin in her conception.
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The belief is that Mary was conceived without sin so that she could be the sinless bearer of the Son of God.
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And so there is a belief among Roman Catholics that Mary herself is sinless and a perpetual virgin.
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Yes sir.
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Doesn't it mention like don't people believe that the sin gene is passed through the males.
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And that's why Paul said Mary had to be born of a virgin.
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That is an inference from Scripture that I do agree with.
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I agree that that's why Jesus was born of a virgin and not of a union of man and woman.
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So that he would be perfect and he would not carry the Adamic nature.
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Jesus is called the last Adam.
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So Jesus is in the same way as Adam was born without a sin nature or created.
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Adam wasn't born but he was created without a sin nature.
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Jesus is born without a sin nature.
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Jesus is perfect through and through.
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Never sinned in thought, word or deed.
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And so yes, that's an inference.
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The text never says that but we're inferring it based on the fact that Jesus was born of a virgin.
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There was no man involved and we know he was without sin so the assumption is something from the man is what passes on the gene.
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And it's always called the seed of Adam and that's another point of the man.
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Yes sir? You know, you think if she was sinless? Well that's a good point because it's not in the text.
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In fact, the text, she says, she calls God her savior and that's an important part.
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She says that in the prayer whenever she's seen by the angel in Luke chapter, it's either one or two, I have to look back, but it says, she glorifies in God her savior.
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Sinless people don't need a savior.
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So there are some little key points where the fact that she was a sinner is brought out.
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Yes sir? Is that in the Magnificat? Yes, yes sir.
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Absolutely.
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When she's praying and she references God her savior.
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Is it the same prayer that Hannah prayed? Yeah, exactly.
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So we have this woman Mary who is considered by the Roman Catholic Church to be sinless and to be a perpetual virgin but the Bible indicates that Jesus had brothers and sisters.
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So here's how, remember I talked about gymnastics earlier? We call them hermeneutical gymnastics where somebody has a theology and they have to fit it into the text.
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Well, the theology is Mary is sinless and she's a virgin forever.
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So we get to a text, everybody turn to Mark 6 and I'll show you very specifically where it talks about Jesus' brother.
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Actually, quickly go to Mark 2 first and when you get there go to I'm sorry, Mark 3 verse 20.
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This is Jesus beginning His earthly ministry.
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Alright, Mark 3 verse 20 it says, Then He went home, that's Jesus, and the crowd gathered again so that they could not even eat.
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And when His family heard it, they went out to seize Him for they were saying He is out of His mind.
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Now that doesn't say who His family was.
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But later on, we go down to verse 31, it says, And His mother and His brothers, that's His family, came and standing outside they sent to Him and called Him.
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So right there it tells us in the text Jesus had a mother and brothers.
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And the mother, of course, we know is Mary.
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But the idea is that He would have had brothers as well.
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As again, I said there's hermeneutical gymnastics.
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Here's what the Roman Catholics say.
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Joseph had another wife.
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Yeah, the argument is Joseph had another wife and this is where Jesus' brothers come.
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It's not documented.
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It's one of those I don't have an answer so I'll pick this.
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You know, we're going to...
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Yeah, and so the argument is Joseph had another wife.
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And I'm not arguing that.
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I'm saying that's their argument.
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And that's where the brother comes from.
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But the key though is found in chapter 6.
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I want to bring you over to chapter 6 because again...
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And by the way, at this point Jesus' family, they're not believers.
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Now Mary believed, but the brothers, they don't believe.
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They think...
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Yeah, and that's where I'm getting to.
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The brothers of Jesus, they think He's out of His mind.
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This guy is saying He's the Son of God.
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I grew up with this guy.
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You know, we played whatever Jewish children in the first century played.
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We played together.
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And He was always perfect.
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Can you mention there being a little bit of strife there too? Like, why does my brother got to be the king? I think it's possible.
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Why wasn't it me? Yeah, I think there's...
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Pride and all that.
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There's certain things we can infer and I think that's possibly an inference there.
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There's...
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There's a rivalry.
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Yeah, yeah.
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You're not brothers all the time.
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Yeah.
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Really? Well, that's...
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In chapter 6, in chapter 6, verse 3, the question...
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Jesus is being rejected.
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And here's the question that comes up.
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Is not this the carpenter? So it tells us Jesus was a carpenter.
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The Son of Mary? Notice it doesn't say the Son of Mary and Joseph.
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It's not because of the virgin birth.
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At this point, I believe Joseph is dead.
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Because Joseph is not mentioned after the scene where Jesus is 12 years old in the temple.
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Joseph is not mentioned again.
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And the inference is that He probably has died at this point.
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So you've got...
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And this is why I remember when Jesus was on the cross, He looked down at John and He said, Son, behold your mother.
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Mother, behold your son.
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What was the necessity of that? The reasoning is because in the ancient world, if a mother, if it was ancient, old or woman, she had to have somebody take care of her.
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And so Jesus is passing on the responsibility that He had as the oldest son to His most trusted apostle, John, who's there at the foot of the cross with Him.
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And the one that He loved.
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Right? It's called, John is the beloved disciple.
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And He said, Mother, behold your son.
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Son, behold your mother.
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So the idea is, at this point, Joseph is gone.
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He is dead.
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And so they're saying, is this not the carpenter? Is this not the son of Mary? And, going on, it says, the brother of James.
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And Joseph, and Judas and Simon.
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Jesus had four brothers.
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And are not His sisters here with us.
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So not only did He have four brothers that are named, He has unnamed sisters as well.
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I don't believe Mary was a perpetual virgin.
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I believe she was a good mother who had many children as was the proper thing to do in the ancient world.
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Go ahead.
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Do you think that's who John was writing to in 2 John? Because I know it's the elect lady.
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I tend to think the elect lady may be a reference to the church.
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But that's, you know, I've taught through 2 John and I know there are different views.
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There's either a lady in the church specific, it could be Mary, it could be, as I said, the church itself is called the bride of Christ and we are considered the elect.
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Yes sir, I'm sorry.
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Would have been Judas.
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Judas would be Jude.
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Yeah, because he's the half-brother of Jesus too, right? You're talking about the one who wrote Jude? Yeah, Judas and Jude are similar.
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In fact, we're just going to talk about names in a minute because James isn't even James, I apologize y'all.
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The name James is not his name.
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But I'm going to show you why in a minute.
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But that's a good question because often times we get confused about that.
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Somebody have a question over here? Yeah, I just have a question.
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And I understand the study of the Bible digging in and studying different things, but when there's not a solid answer, you know, because every different church has different beliefs and different opinions, doesn't sometimes that start some confusion? It can.
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It can.
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I mean, we get confused.
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Often times churches are divided over what we call secondary matters.
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Like I have brothers in the Presbyterian church who I love and we divide over the issue of baptism because I believe a person should be a believer before he gets baptized.
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But my Presbyterian brothers believe that they can baptize their infants because they're part of the family of God.
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Just for me, in my thinking, if the Bible doesn't speak and it doesn't have a clear answer, to be personal, I wouldn't give my opinion because I wouldn't want to lead people astray.
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Am I doing it? Okay, I didn't know if I...
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No, I just wondered why we tend to try to dig in a little further than what He already presents to us.
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Oh, I see what you're saying.
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I see what you're saying.
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In this particular text, my point is to simply identify who James is.
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So I'm saying Jesus had a brother named James.
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That's proof from the text.
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The issue about Mary, the question though, is whether or not James was Jesus' full brother or his half brother.
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Obviously not his full brother because his daddy is God.
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His half brother at most.
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But those who would say he was the son of Joseph but not Mary would mean he was his step brother.
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So that's sort of where I'm going is just identifying who he is.
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I believe James is the half brother of Jesus.
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I believe he was fully the son of Mary and the son of Joseph, which would have made him Jesus' half brother.
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And that's why I'm taking this outline the way that I am.
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Now, something to consider at this point is that when we go to the book of James you'll notice in the very first verse there it does not say James, the brother of Jesus or James, the half brother of Jesus.
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Right? And so, why not? We'll get there in a minute because that really is the crux of the lesson and I'm running out of time but the crux of the lesson is what he does identify himself as.
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But I want to just make a point.
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There are more than one James in the Bible.
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Right? There's actually three prominent Jameses that are brought up in the Bible.
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We have James, yep, James, what we would call James the greater and James the less.
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In fact, the Bible identifies him as that.
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The Greek word is mikros where we get the word micro or something like that.
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Mikros is his nickname.
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He is the less, the lesser of the two James.
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Now, I don't know that he was ever called that in life but he was called that in the Bible.
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The Bible says you've got James the brother of John and the three men who spent all their time with Jesus, the most was Peter, James, and John.
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That James was very important in the life of Christ.
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He was the brother of John, the beloved disciple.
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He was with Jesus on the Mount of Transfiguration.
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We call him James the greater.
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Turn to Acts chapter 12.
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Real quick, just turn to Acts 12.
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I want to show you something.
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I know it's a long Bible study going back and forth but this is important because this is how we tie all these things together.
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Acts chapter 12 and look at verse 1.
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It says, About that time King Herod the king laid violent hands on some who belonged to the church.
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This is when the church is beginning to be persecuted in Jerusalem.
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He killed James the brother of John with a sword.
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Alright, so, very early in church history, James the greater is dead.
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He is not then a person who could have written the book of James because his death comes before the book of James was written.
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So what I'm doing is I'm going by process of elimination, right? We've got James the greater.
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Did he write the book of James? No, he did.
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Alright? James the less.
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Did he write the book of James? There's argument.
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But then we have the third James which is James the brother of Jesus.
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James the brother, right? Alright.
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Here's the key.
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Yeah, who said that? Yes, because stay in chapter 12 of Acts and go down.
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If you go down in chapter 12 to verse 17, it says, But motioning them with his hand to be silent, he described to them how the Lord had brought him out of prison and he said, Tell these things to James and to the brothers.
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Then he departed and went to another place.
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This is Peter speaking.
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Peter had been in prison.
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He got out of prison and now he says, Tell James and I'm out.
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Well, it ain't the James that got killed.
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Ain't nobody going to the graveyard and saying, Hey, James.
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It ain't him.
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This is a different James.
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You say, well, who is this? Who is the James that's here? Is this James the less? Is this the Micros? Is this that guy? I don't believe so.
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James the less is only mentioned four times in the Bible that we know of for sure.
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And it's the four times that the list of the apostles are given.
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The twelve apostles.
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Right? That's the only time we ever see him mentioned specifically.
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In fact, of the twelve apostles, the three that we know the most about are Peter, James and John.
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Right? Then we have Andrew, the brother of Peter.
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And we have a couple of the others that Matthew and Philip and so.
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And we see very little snapshots of their life.
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But some of these men, all that we know about them is they walk with Jesus.
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That's part of the twelve disciples.
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That's what we know about them.
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And that's about all we know about James the less.
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Now there's church tradition that says he went and started a church and that he, I believe, was in Syria.
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And he went and he was stoned to death for his faith.
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The church tradition says all twelve disciples gave their life for the gospel.
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And that he was there at the resurrection of Jesus.
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And there is a place in 1 Corinthians 15 that says James was the first person to see Jesus alive.
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Yeah.
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And so the question is which James is that? Is that James the greater? James the lesser? Or was it James' brother? So we don't know because it just says James.
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So we don't know for certain.
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And who is the one in verse 17 there? That is Jesus' brother.
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Okay.
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Yeah, I believe that that's Jesus' brother.
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And here's why.
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If we go through the Bible and we see the references to the Jerusalem church, James, the brother of Jesus, is seen as an elder or pastor in the Jerusalem church.
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Turn over to chapter 15 and we'll see this.
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In chapter 15, I'm running out of time, guys.
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I'm sorry.
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I'm going quick.
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Yeah, Acts 15.
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Huh? We can go as long as we want? Okay.
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Alright.
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I don't want to keep you guys from anything.
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In Acts 15, we have what's called the Jerusalem council.
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This is the first time the church meets together in council to discuss an issue of theology.
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And the theology was this.
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Should a Christian have to be circumcised to be a Christian? Because a non-Jewish person isn't circumcised, should they have to get circumcised to be a Christian? Paul is saying no.
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Some of the Judaizers are saying yes.
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So they bring it to the church in Jerusalem and they all come together.
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Even Peter, who the Roman Catholics would say is the pope.
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Even he's there.
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And he's making pronouncements.
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But the voice of authority comes in verse 13.
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Acts 15, verse 13.
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Let me find my place here.
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It says in verse 12, all the assembly fell silent.
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They listened to Barnabas and Paul as they related what signs and wonders God had done through them among the Gentiles.
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And after they finished speaking, James replied, Brothers, listen to me.
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And he goes on to give his judgment.
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He speaks as a man who has within the church a voice of leadership and a voice of authority.
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This is James, the brother of Jesus, speaking with that authority.
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Now, one other place before we go back to James is in Galatians 1.
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If you'll turn over to Galatians 1.
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Where are we at here? Galatians 1, verse 9.
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I'm in the wrong passage.
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I'm sorry.
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I'm sorry.
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I looked at the wrong place.
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I got it written down wrong.
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I'm sorry.
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Is it 19? Is that what it is? Thank you.
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Yes, verse 19.
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Yep, 119.
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But I saw none of the other apostles except James, the Lord's brother.
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Now it's interesting at this part that James is identified as an apostle.
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As he said, I saw none of the other apostles except James, identifying him as an apostle.
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And you say, now wait a minute.
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Was James one of the twelve? No.
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And this is important because Barnabas is also called an apostle, but he wasn't a part of the twelve.
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Apostle means one who is sent.
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Yes, sir? Yeah, because he was sent from God.
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So that term has its distinct meaning among the twelve.
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The apostolic twelve.
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And then Paul says he was an apostle born out of time.
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And then there are these other men who are called sent ones.
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Some pastors today like to be called apostles.
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I don't like that term used today because I don't want to ever be confused with the twelve.
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But in the first century, there was a sense in which persons sent out by the church were called apostles.
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Yes, sir? Aside from the twelve, there was a lot more people who met that criteria.
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They saw Jesus from the beginning, saw his resurrection.
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Yeah, 1 Corinthians 15.
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500 people.
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Absolutely.
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Yes, sir? Yeah, that's what I'm saying.
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It means one sent.
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It's a sent one.
41:30
And so that title can have various nuances of meaning.
41:34
Yes, sir? I also heard it said that the apostles...
41:39
Yeah, absolutely.
41:40
There's the St.
41:41
Thomas Church.
41:42
That is...
41:43
It's an Eastern Orthodox church now.
41:46
But it was...
41:47
He went east.
41:48
Thomas went east.
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I believe James the Less went east.
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And so, yes.
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You'll find in history churches that were essentially established by apostles.
41:58
And some of them carry his name.
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The St.
41:59
Thomas Church.
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I forget.
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It's called the Thomasian Church, I think.
42:03
But that's one specifically that they did.
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Yes, sir? Wasn't Jesus what now? Well, yeah.
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He was prophet, priest, king, apostle.
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He was everything.
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Absolutely.
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Absolutely.
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Jesus is all in all.
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So, my point in establishing who wrote the book of James is to say, one, it can't be James the Greater.
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Two, I don't think it was James the Lesser because of the preponderance of evidence towards James the Brother.
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James the Brother is identified as a second type of apostle.
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One who had seen Jesus from the beginning, had seen His resurrection.
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He has grown to prominence in the church as pastor, leader of the church of Jerusalem.
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He speaks out at the council of Jerusalem in Acts 15.
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And here, when Paul is coming to Jerusalem to meet with the apostles, he makes note that I met with James the Brother of Jesus.
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I believe all of that is evidence that the book of James was written by the Brother of Jesus.
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And what does that matter? What does that matter? Well, it matters because when we go back to James, and we get back to James 1, James identifies himself as James, a servant of God and of Christ.
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And so, someone might ask the question, why? Why not say James, Jesus' brother? Yes, sir.
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Absolutely.
43:48
Absolutely.
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And I would go further.
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I would agree with that 100%.
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That is true.
44:09
Absolutely.
44:10
I'm not disagreeing at all.
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Go ahead, sir.
44:16
That's kind of where I was going.
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He's exalting Christ.
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In Romans 1, they were saying, I follow Paul, all that.
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Stop all that.
44:30
What if Jesus baptized people? Well, I was baptized by Jesus.
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That type of thing.
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I think that that's what James is doing right there.
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Hey, look.
44:40
This whole thing is about pointing to Jesus, not me.
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Absolutely.
44:44
And that's why the title of today, if you want to give it a title at all, the title is this, the most important title that any man can hold is that of bond-servant of Christ.
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And that's what I'm trying to get to.
45:00
Bond-servant of Christ.
45:02
That's what that word servant, the word there in the Greek, is doulos.
45:06
Doulos means, it literally means slave.
45:08
Oftentimes, we think of slave in a negative sense because of the history of our land and slavery and things like that.
45:14
But in this context, it is one who has given himself to his master.
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Given himself to his Savior, his leader.
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He has bowed the knee.
45:25
You know the Bible says that everyone will bow the knee to Christ at the end.
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It says at the end of the age, every atheist you've ever seen cuss God out.
45:35
Every person you've ever seen come on television and say there is no God.
45:38
Jane Fonda, who stood on the beach and said, I am God, I am God, I am God, and all of us were going, no, you're not.
45:44
No, you're not.
45:45
No, you're not.
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Even her is going to, at the end of the age, bow the knee to the Lordship of Jesus Christ.
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For every knee shall bow and every tongue will confess.
45:58
The bondservant? It's a person who has given themselves.
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The Greek is doulos.
46:10
Oh, the title is the greatest title a man can have is servant.
46:14
That's the title of today's lesson.
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Is the greatest title you can have.
46:19
Now some of you guys, I don't know your histories and maybe one day we'll have a chance to talk.
46:24
Maybe you have at some point been titled as manager.
46:28
Maybe sometime you've been titled as owner.
46:31
Maybe you've been titled as husband, father, whatever.
46:34
And you take great pride in those titles.
46:37
And it's not bad to say I'm thankful that God let me be a father and so I carry that title.
46:43
Or I'm thankful that God let me do this and I carry that title.
46:46
But the most important title any man can have, even the brother of Jesus Christ who could have said, I'm Jesus' brother.
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His most concerning title to him was that of servant.
46:57
Yes sir? I don't believe that tongue speaking is for today.
47:04
I believe that it was an apostolic gift given in the first century to confirm the writing of Scripture.
47:10
Miracles throughout the Bible are always associated with God giving revelation.
47:18
And because I don't believe God's giving revelation today, I believe that the canon is closed.
47:22
I don't believe there's any more books in the Bible that are going to come.
47:24
I get that from Hebrews which says God spoke in times past in various ways to the prophets and our fathers.
47:30
But he speaks now through his son Jesus Christ.
47:32
Revelation says don't add anything to this book and it was the last book written.
47:35
I tend to think that's a closing of the canon.
47:38
So I don't believe that tongues is for today.
47:39
That is a conversation that could lead to some controversy and I don't want to.
47:43
But personally, our church doesn't practice the gift of tongues in the assembly.
47:48
One reason being that you have to have interpreters.
48:01
People play the tongue and people interpret.
48:04
I guess the apostles...
48:06
Well, 1 Corinthians 14 says if you do not have an interpreter keep your mouth shut.
48:09
Do it in private also.
48:10
Yeah, yeah.
48:12
What about snake handling on Pentecostal? I don't even believe that's the right understanding of Mark 16.
48:18
I don't even believe that's the right understanding of Mark 16.
48:21
Mark 16 is a long historical...
48:25
There's a lot to do with Mark 16.
48:27
Two things I want to share with you before we go.
48:29
One, the most important thing today is guys, the most important thing you can be in life is not a rich man.
48:34
The most important thing you can be in life is not a father or husband.
48:37
The most important thing you can be in life is not a business owner or a manager or anything else.
48:41
The most important thing you can be in life is a servant of Jesus Christ.
48:43
And everything else will flow out of that.
48:46
If you do become a manager, if you do become an owner, if you do become an entrepreneur, if you do become a father, if you do become anything in life, if you do any of those things, and all of you have the potential to do any of those things, if you do any of those things, the most important thing in your life should always be first, I'm a servant of Christ.
49:01
After that, everything else.
49:04
Seek ye first the Kingdom of God.
49:05
I was listening to a sermon by Paul Washer recently and he said, What does the world need from me? What does your mom, what does your co-worker, what does your kid need from you? And it's more Christ-likeness.
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That's right, that's right.
49:22
That is the first and foremost thing anyone would ever need from us.
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It ain't our financial providing abilities as much as, you know what I mean, like all that's going to come from Christ-likeness.
49:33
That's right.
49:33
And it flows out of that.
49:35
It flows out of being a servant of Christ.
49:36
If you're a servant of Christ, you'll be a better employee.
49:38
If you're a servant of Christ, you'll be a better husband.
49:40
You'll be a better owner.
49:41
You'll be better at everything.
49:42
Because you'll see everything you do in light of His glory.
49:46
I do it all for the glory of God.
49:48
Martin Luther said this.
49:49
He said, A Christian shoemaker does not do his duty by putting crosses on his shoes.
49:57
But a Christian shoemaker does his duty by making good shoes.
50:02
Because he goes every day and he makes shoes to the glory of God.
50:06
Everything he does is to the glory of God.
50:08
He's a servant of Christ first.
50:10
And everything he does is for the servant of Christ.
50:12
I want to share two things with you and we'll be done because I do have to close up.
50:16
One thing.
50:17
The book of James.
50:18
We call it James.
50:19
But in the Greek, it's Jacob.
50:21
Amen.
50:22
The word Jacobos is the Greek.
50:26
Why is it James? Because it was Latinized in the fourth century when the Bible was primarily in Greek and Hebrew.
50:32
It became Latinized in the fourth century under Jerome.
50:35
And from that point on, a lot of the names that we see in Scripture were changed and different.
50:40
So now like Jesus, we call Jesus.
50:43
That's actually a Germanic change.
50:47
Jacobus became James in Latin.
50:50
So if later, if I might show you some of the Greek, you'll see the name and it won't look like James because it's not.
50:56
It would have been closer to Jacob from the Old Testament.
50:59
So that's one.
51:01
And two, James was written probably, and I say probably because I don't know for certain, but James is written probably one of the earliest of the epistles.
51:14
Somewhere between 45 and 50.
51:18
And why does that matter? Because books like Romans and more theologically deep books like Romans and the rest, they will come later, mid-50s, right? Late 50s.
51:33
So James is writing to the church, and when he's dealing with things like justification by faith, he's dealing with it in a much different context than Paul will deal with it later when he's dealing with a church that's trying to get salvation by works.
51:48
And Paul says it's not of works.
51:52
James is addressing people, yeah, who would say I can believe and it don't change me.
51:59
If you think you can believe and it doesn't change you, then you don't know what believe is.
52:04
Absolutely.
52:05
Alright, gentlemen, next week we'll start at verse 2.
52:07
We'll start going down the text and try to gain some of the wisdom from this important book.
52:11
Can we pray? Father, thank You for this study.
52:14
I pray that it's been, one, educational, but also, Lord, encouraging.
52:19
Father, may we be like James in the sense that we wouldn't try to find any other title that was more important than the title of doulos, servant, bondservant of Jesus Christ.
52:29
May we all seek to serve Him and it's in His name we pray.
52:33
Amen.