Nobody walks alone

Reference

James 5:19-20

Welcome. Like Randy said, my name's Jacob. I'm the senior associate pastor here on staff, and I get to conclude the book of James this morning.
I can't believe Trevor's letting me do this. He plowed through James for, you know, months and months, and I get a finally, you know, get the big conclusion there. So honored to do that. Hey, before we get started, though, a quick announcement from Trevor. He said the battle against biblical illiteracy continues this week.
If you're reading with us, we'll be continuing in Genesis 13, and we'll be going to 18 a chapter a day. Genesis 13 to Genesis 18. Also it is who is your one Sunday. We highlight next steps from time to time. And this one particularly is one of my favorite.
We have these invitation stations that are out in the lobby. Encourage you to get those cards. It is a great way to just always be ready. I always like to keep a couple of those in my wallet just in case you're, you know, the line at the store and you stripe a conversation. And you know, you can invite people all day to church and they're not going to remember the time or the name of the church, but you never know if they have that little card.
I like to leave it, you know, when you're getting your food at a fast food drive through, you can leave with them, so forth, so on. So it's a really great way to kind of partner with God and ask God, hey, who are you going to put in my life today? And it's just a good way to be ready with those. So you can grab those on your way out this morning. I like to call that just great commission living.
Just constantly trying to be aware of God, who you putting in my life today? Because it might be for 30 seconds or it might be, hey, you know what? This person's gonna go, we're gonna, we're gonna walk together for a little while. You just never know. So it's always good to be ready.
So like I said, we find ourselves this morning concluding the letter of James. And for the first 106 verses, James has been building up to these final two sentences, right? This is it. This is the biggest finale, the big finish. And to set it up, I wanted to start with a little time of confession.
If I. If you were to walk into my house right now and you were to go to my laundry room and open up my dryer, which I am 80% sure is probably running a load as we speak. We have four kids. Three of those are boys and they teenagers and they can burn through some clothes. And you were to go in there, you would witness a modern miracle in physics.
Not only has that dryer, which I actually affectionately call the eighth wonder of the world because it has been running non stop for 20 years. I promise you, this is the greatest appliance I have ever seen in my life. But I can also take a pair of saws and I can put it in this dryer and I can dry those socks and come back and only find one remaining sock. And I have no idea where it goes. Is there something behind the Lint trap.
Do they migrate? Does someone come and steal them? Because they're messing with me for the last 20 years. This dryer is incredible. And yet I never see anyone in my house standing over the laundry basket and weeping over this missing sock.
They may be weeping over something else as they're doing laundry, but it is not because of the missing sock. We tend to just shrug, go to Costco and buy us a new pack of socks. You know, losing track of things in life is remarkably easy, isn't it? A sock here, the glasses on top of your head, your car keys in the refrigerator. Don't judge, because it happens.
Especially if you don't want to forget your leftovers at work. And then you can't find your car keys when you get into your car. Where did I put those? Am I right? And sometimes we lose track of things that actually matter.
And, you know, no one wakes up on a Tuesday morning, stretches and says, you know, today's the day I intentionally drift away from God, man, today's the day I'm going to let my prayer life dry up like stale old toast. I'm going to stop paying attention to my soul. Today's the day that happens. But when it comes to things that actually matter, it happens more incrementally, doesn't it? It's like a little distraction here, a packed soccer schedule there.
Life gets loud, right? Work gets heavy, the kids need shoes. Dinner is a box of Mac and cheese over the kitchen sink because you're in a hurry, because you're late for practice. And suddenly you realize that you haven't talked to God about anything significant in the last three months outside of God, help me find that missing shin guard. And then Sunday rolls around and your spiritual fuel gauge has been blinking on empty for a month, and you feel that little whisper of guilt, man, I should be doing more.
You know, I should be. I should know more. I used to care more what happened to me. And instead of leaning into God, and instead of leaning into God's community, we tend to back away. It's like we're ashamed, right?
Like we feel a little out of practice, a little rusty, like we've missed too many episodes of that show and we try to watch it again and we're just totally lost and we hope that nobody noticed. And here's the wild, beautiful breath of fresh air truth that we find at the very end of James. James doesn't close his letter with a Bible pop quiz, and he doesn't pull out a clipboard and grade our church attendance. He doesn't check to see if you've memorized Leviticus. He doesn't sign.
Xoxo. Love, James. Right? He doesn't even mic drop. Good luck, guys.
Good luck figuring all this out. Instead, he looks right at us in these two final verses, right into our messy and chaotic and beautiful and exhausted lives. And he talks about family. Not like just a family, but a real church family. Because people matter, right?
Souls matter. Drifting is important. It matters. And I really think to understand the weight of these final two sentences is to remember who James was writing to way back at James 1:1. Anyone remember that sermon?
Yeah, me either. I had to look it up. This letter was originally written to. It says, the 12 tribes scattered among the nations which are Jewish Christian believers, scattered due to persecution. And I want you to think of James as a pastor writing this big, open, circular letter that's circulating among God's people all over the map who are trying to figure out how to follow Jesus while life threw absolute chaos their way.
I'm assuming we can relate to everything I've said up into this point. Listen. Now, James closes this letter. He says, my dear brothers and sisters, my family, if someone among you wanders away from the truth and is brought back, you can be sure that whoever brings the sinner back from wandering will save that person from death and bring about the forgiveness of many sins. James is basically saying, hey, in a church, nobody should walk alone.
And if you've drifted or if you feel far off or if you start thinking that you're too messy or too busy to be welcomed back, I want you to listen very carefully and hear that. Because the heartbeat of God and the heartbeat of a real church family is not a bouncer checking your credentials at the door. It is a rescue mission driven by fierce, unrelenting grace. You know, at Great Commission Church, we talk a whole lot about wanting people to feel loved, challenged, needed and known. What we mean by that when we say that is that we want you to find people to walk with you, right?
We want you to find people that will love you right in the middle of that minivan mess that you're going through, who will challenge you to take one more step closer to God than you wouldn't have taken otherwise. We want you to walk with someone who will remind you that you are needed even with your crazy schedule. We'll make it work, Right? Your real life perspectives. Because the body of Christ isn't a row of silent spectators.
It is a circle of people locking arms. You participated in that picture at the Lord's supper. We came around Lord's supper. We locked arms and we said, hey, for Jesus Christ, we're doing this. The death of Jesus.
We're going to remind ourselves about this. And so Jesus looks at this overworked, underpaid employee. He looks at the tired mom who one more grocery bag drop from a complete meltdown. He looks at the guy who can't make ends meet, but man, he sure is trying. He looks at the teenager who keeps trying but keeps failing.
And he says this. He says, you are worthy of tracking down. You are worth rescuing. So let's dive into the text verse by verse, and finish the book of James together. There's the intro.
Let me pray for you. Father, we thank you that you're a God who loves the 99 and you chase after the 1. We ask you today that if anyone here has a spiritual fuel gauge that just feels empty for who has drifted without even realizing it, that you would meet them right now where they are with your relentless grace, and that you give them the courage to be a church family that loves well, that reaches out and brings people back home. In Jesus name, amen.
All right, point number one. Are you just tired or are you drifting? I call this the undercurrent. James says, if anyone among you wonders from the truth, and we noticed this word wanders, right? He didn't say rebels.
He didn't say storms off from the truth, but wonders because wondering is slow, right? Drifting is slow. You've heard of the frog that if you put it in a pot of water, if the water is boiling, that he'll jump straight out. But if you put the frog in cold water, he hangs out a little while you slowly crank up the temperature and he ends up boiling to death. And you think, that's silly.
That's. You know, I would never do that. I'm not that dumb. But it is easy to wonder, y'. All.
It's easy to drift because it's slow. Listen, as you can relate to this, and I'll prove my point real quick. You know it's true because you probably experience this just about every day of your life. So you wake up, you check the weather on your phone, and next thing you know, you've spent four hours watching videos of people power washing their driveways. Like, how in the world does that happen?
You didn't mean to, right? You just started with, I'm going to check my email real quick. And next thing you know, you're watching strangers organize their pantry. Like, why is this so interesting and satisfying? By the Way Hebrews says it like this.
So we must listen very carefully to the truth we have heard, or we may drift away from it. Very similar to what James is saying here. See, no one wakes up one morning planning to walk away from God. It starts with small compromises, right? Your prayer, they kind of fade.
The gathering of the saints feels unoptional. Convictions soften, habits change. James has spent his entire letter, all 106 verses, naming those quiet drifts, warning us of those quiet drifts, from favoritism to careless words to jealousy, putting yourself ahead of others, misuse of money, prayerlessness. And he walks us through all of these ways that we're prone to wonder. James has spent his entire letter talking about these ordinary sins.
These, okay, we're okay with those type of sins. And that slowly pull us off course. And this is not something that happens outside of the church, just outside of the church. James is assuming that this is happening inside of the church. He says if anyone among you, which means this isn't about strangers.
This is about family. It's about the people sitting next to you, right? And drifting believers don't usually announce it. This isn't something we see in the bulletin very often, is it? They honestly might not even know it.
And they start wondering because it's a blind spot. Typically they just start showing up less. They grow quiet, they pull back, they start missing a small group or two. They attend church three times a month and then two times, and then they only come when they're served, when they're serving. And this is one of the important reasons we do small group attendance.
This is one of the important reasons why we have this team central where we ask everyone, hey, check in, right? Check in to the computers. Why we fill out those cards every single week that are in your seats. And it's to help us safeguard the family so we can see the warning signs that you might not see yet. You know, one of my buddies, Jason Miller, was at the beach with his family a couple of seasons ago.
I believe he was playing in the ocean with his kids, where we all want to be right now in the middle of July, end of July. And he's having this great time, floating up and down with his kid, no cares in the world, just enjoying life, enjoying vacation. And he hears this quiet yell in the distance. And he kind of comes to and looks around and he realizes that that crowd of people yelling at them was to come back because he's drifted too far off into the ocean. And he was shocked at how far he had gotten.
And so he grabs his kids up and he starts swimming. And he quickly realizes that he's not moving towards the shore, he's actually moving farther away from the shore. And the crowd that gathered, that began to warn him started locking arms and making this chain to grab him up and to rescue him and to bring him back to shore because they were in a rip current, which quietly grabbed them and began slowly pulling them offshore. And they took their focus off the all important shore and they began to get farther away from people. You see how this applies?
There was no dramatic wave. There was no obvious warning, just a steady, unseen pull until someone else realized it and warned him and rescued them. See, the dangerous thing about a rip current isn't that it isn't that you're moving, it's that you actually think you're standing still. That's the dangerous part of it. But you aren't.
You're either rowing towards the shore of truth, or the current is taking you out to the depths of death. And that's the danger of drift. It relocates you slowly. You think you're floating, you think you're fine. You don't realize how far you've moved until you're suddenly in serious trouble and you don't know how to get back.
And that's exactly what James is talking about. Spiritual drift works the same exact way. No explosion, no announcement, just a quiet undercurrent pulling you farther from the truth than you ever meant to go. So the first question is gentle but honest. Have you moved away from God?
Even if no one else knows it yet, here's number two. Who in your life has permission to pull you back to shore? I call this the community. Jesus continues, whoever brings the sinner back from wondering. James assumes that this bringing back doesn't just happen alone.
He says someone turns him back, right? He doesn't say an argument will turn him back. Or, I know, you should shame him. That'll change his direction. Or, hey, the social pressures will get to him and he'll come back.
It's someone. It's a person, right? It's a brother or sister in Christ, a friend who cares enough to step in. Now, this happened to me. This has happened to me a couple times.
And I'll share the story with you guys.
I'm sure it's happened more. But these are just the two that happen to pop into my mind. One is a little lighter, but still, the destination would have been not good. So my buddy Taylor Moody, who lives in the same area of town as me, he pulled me Aside, actually a couple months ago. And he said this, he said, you know, I drive by you all the time, but you never seemed away.
And I thought, man, I'm sorry about that. You know, you got a new car, man. I just, you know, I don't recognize it yet. He. He stopped me.
He's like, no, no, no, it's because you're doing this. You're on your phone. I was like, oh. I was like, really? I was like, are you sure about that?
He's like, yeah, man. And so I'm like, I'm pretty good about that. I try to keep that in check. And he said, yeah. So I started kind of paying attention a little closer.
And sure enough, as soon as I hit center hill road, boom. Like a habit, I'm like, holy smokes, he's right. Swerving around probably. But here's the thing. Here's what I want you to.
Taylor is my buddy, right? He is invested in my life. We've done some life together. We borrow power tools from each other. He's in my small group.
And so he. He has put some deposits into my life that he can say some things that a lot of people just aren't able to say to me, right? He can pull me aside and correct me. I'm saying, alright, brother, I'm all ears. What you got?
Okay, notice, I'll take. Correction accepted. You know, the other time, it was a little more serious. This happened to me probably six or eight years ago. I'm afraid to say the middle one there, one of our elders scheduled this meeting.
Hey, I want to meet with you. I got some things that I really need to talk to you about. I said, okay, great, let's meet tomorrow morning. And here's what happened. He started telling me about something in my life that he felt.
He's like, look, I. If you keep going down this path, I think that this could really hurt your testimony as one of the leaders of the church. If you keep drifting in that direction, I'll tell you that that's painful, right? It was basically about how I was managing my house. A parenting thing, just a big blind spot for me at that time.
But I took that correction and I started actually apologizing to him. Not for like messing up in this area, but I started apologizing. Say, man, I'm so sorry that I had to put you in this awkward situation, but thank you so much for loving me and drawing this to my attention. It was a blind spot for me, but you know, this person had invested in me, right? We've done some life together.
We were part of. We're part of a community that made some deposits so they can correct me with zero pushback. All right, I hear you, brother. Let me see what I can do here. James is envisioning this community that refuses to abandon people to drift.
Here's what I want you to do. Everyone hold your hands out. I know. I hate audience participation, too, but go ahead and do this. I got the mic, so I get to do this.
James is placing this responsibility of bringing a wanderer back squarely in the hands of ordinary believers. You remember last week, week's sermon, the extraordinary ordinary believers? It's you. And the church is meant to live in this constant state of readiness to restore wondering people. Not criticize them, but restore them.
And this responsibility is in your hands. So now grab it. We're done with that. That wasn't too bad, was it? I wanted a visual action, tactile thing to help us remember that this is your job, your responsibility.
Because when I drift, I need a believer bold enough to come to me. Or if my kids drift, I need a believer bold enough to come to them and say, you know what? This is on me. I got to make sure that they come back to the right path. This is a selfish sermon.
I need help protecting my family. Family. And you do, too. I bet. Galatians 6:1 says this, and it sounds a lot like James here.
I think they cheated off of each other's paper. Dear brothers and sisters, if another believer is overcome by sin, you who are godly, don't get caught up on godly. He's talking about. You should gently and humbly help that person back onto the right path. And be careful not to fall into the same temptation yourself.
One has to have more influence over the other. Ecclesiastes reminds us, two are better than one. For if they fall, one will lift up his companion. But woe to him who is alone when he falls. Woe to him who walks alone.
Number three. Do you see where this quiet current leads? The destination. All right, let's get nerdy for a second. Anyone else like to geek out on the Bible a little bit?
All right, we'll buckle up. In this letter, James is utilizing a technique called inclusio, or an envelope structure. Maybe you've heard it like that in biblical literature. An inclusio occurs when the author repeats the same theme at the very beginning and at the very end of the book. It's like a book ending, and it acts as this structural frame, signaling to the reader that everything in between should be understood through the lens of those two points.
You got me. So James uses the word death to bookend his letter. Nothing is more serious than death. Listen to this. James 1, verse 15, he starts with this sin, when it is full grown, brings forth death.
And so James, at the very beginning, he defines the trajectory of sin which leads to death. And now at the very end, verse 20, he ends with will save a soul from death. And so he defines the purpose of his letter is to save a soul from that very death that he started talking about. And when an author uses inclusio bookending, they are inviting the reader to see the entire content of the middle as the solution to the problem defined at the beginning. Everything James writes about in the middle, avoiding favoritism, controlling the tongue, not hoarding wealth, enduring suffering, is presented as the practical applicable way to steer clear of the death that he describes.
At the start, he was giving us a Runway. And it turns his instruction from just a list of rules. It's so easy to see James is just a list of rules. And it turns into this coherent path to life. And this entire letter is a rescue mission, rescuing people from death.
And here's the big idea is that the letter isn't just about being a better person. That's not the goal. It's about a rescue operation. And James is saying, look, I've told you how to live. Now, church, go make sure that everyone gets to enjoy this life.
James loves his readers not to say it plainly, that drift has a destination. This isn't condemnation, it's compassion. And James is here waving his arms at the very end, saying, please don't. Don't keep walking toward something that destroys you. He says, please don't let your people walk towards the things that destroy them.
You're going too far in the ocean. Come back to safety. So what kind of death are we talking about here? There's two thoughts. One, is it spiritual death, meaning the drifter is proving that they were never saved and are lost and need to be saved?
Or is it physical death, you know, the lethal consequences of unrepentant sin within the believing community? And here's what that looks like. Think of Ananias and Sapphira, who sold a piece of land but secretly kept a portion of their profits themselves while publicly claiming that they were giving the entire amount. Now, the sin was not that they kept part of the money. Peter explicitly notes that the land and the money, it was theirs to do it as they pleased.
But the hypocrisy and the deception and the public lie directed to the Holy Spirit, that was the sin. And they both dropped dead on the spot.
Or the Corinthian Church. In 1 Corinthians 11:30, it talks about these ceremonial meals which would include the Lord's Supper. Wealthy members were gorging themselves on these meals, drinking, getting drunk off off the communion wine and all, while these poor members, who couldn't arrive early because of work, went hungry. So partaking in the Lord's Supper in an unworthy manner resulted in death. And in both cases, they were meant either to preserve the purity of the church at a very pivotal historical moment, or to shock believers back into self examination and Holy Spirit.
And so is James talking about physical death or spiritual death? And the answer is probably, probably. You see, God is intimately active in his church. And persistent unrepentant sin, especially sin that damages the unity and the integrity of the body of Christ, has very serious real world consequences. And so whether James has physical or spiritual rescue in mind, the stakes are clear, aren't they?
Sin left unchecked leads to destruction, and intervention brings life.
But here's the point. Some may need salvation, others may need to be reminded of their salvation. But God preserves his people in part through his people. Finally, number four, we'll finish up here. Is Jesus bigger than your mess?
I call this the rescue last part of James will save his soul from death and will cover a multitude of sins.
As James points out, helping someone who is wandering, helping them back onto the right path, saves them from death and covers a mountain of mistakes. Let's get nerdy again, if you don't mind. I think the guys will groove on this one. The concept of covering sin goes all the way back to the Old Testament when Noah built the ark he builds above which you can't get much more manly than building a boat. That's just cool.
And God tells him you need to cover it in pitch in like tar, right? You need a waterproof. You're going to be out there for a while, it's going to be rough. And if anyone who has painted a piece of raw wood, you know that wood starts licking up the paint. You can see the wood grain.
You got to put a few coats on, unless you're kilting it until finally you can no longer see the original wood. Covered the wood. And now listen to this. The Hebrew word for pitch or the tar that they were using to cover that wood on the ark is connected to the word Kimpur or Yom Kippur, the day of atonement in A sense the ark was atonement covered and it was used on the boat that was to rescue God's people from the destruction and the wickedness that the human race has become. And as the boat floated and the death was on the sea, there was a covering on the ark.
The Old Testament uses this exact concept to describe how God handles our wrongs. He covers them completely, hiding them entirely from his sight, leaving nothing exposed. But to really understand this in New Testament language, we have to shift from thinking about tar on a boat to how we would use cover today. For example, if you're planning an expense going to be expensive, it's coming and you set aside enough money, here's what you say that'll cover it. And when the bill arrives, it gets paid full and you can move on with no debt.
In the same way, covering sin means a total, complete payment made through a sacrifice that only God can provide through Jesus Christ. And of course, if we choose not to accept that sacrifice, we're left to pay the price ourselves. Because the ultimate cost of sin is death. As we saw in James, you recall, sin when it's full grown brings forth death. No wonder there's so much joy in the church when a wandering brother or sister returns.
No wonder it's not a horrible moment, but a glorious moment. James is saying, no matter how far you've drifted, my grace is deeper. No matter how messy things get, God is able. And yes, Jesus is bigger than your mess. And so let's finish this way, the same way we started.
Here's my inclusio who is your one? Is it a wanderer? Maybe it's the co worker who used to talk about their faith and just kind of starts putting their headphones in, ignoring you, wants to sleep in on Sundays now. Maybe it's the family member who used to sit next to you at church, but after a season of pain or a slow drift, they stopped answering those text messages about church. Or maybe it's the burned out friend where life just got so loud that church just felt like a to do list that they couldn't do anymore.
Or maybe it's a fallen church member who made a mess, who made a bad choice, a broken relationship and they let the undercurrent of guilt pull them away from God and his people. Or maybe it's the person who's sitting right there, smiling in the lobby but completely isolated inside, wondering if anyone actually sees their pain. Or a fellow church member who has a blind spot in their life and it's going to cause them to slowly Wander off the path. Maybe you notice someone. Maybe you need to be that safe friend who says, hey, you know what?
You don't have to fake it here. Let's walk back together. Man, people struggle. You can struggle here. Maybe it's you.
Maybe you're the one who's began to drift and you just don't quite know what to do. James says, come on back. Hey, that's it. Let's pray. Prayer team, if you'd come forward to the front man, I want to encourage everyone.
It's such a relief to respond to hearing God's word through prayer. Either to pray for your one, to pray for yourself because you're starting to drift, or maybe if you don't know there's a blind spot in your life, ask them for God to reveal a blind spot. Or, hey, maybe there's something else going on in your life. We want to pray for you. We're doing great on time, so we are not in a hurry this morning.
Let me pray for you. Heavenly father, we lift up the ones that we carry in our hearts, the wanderers, the hurting and the distant. Father, I pray you'd soften their hearts, that you'd break through their noise and distractions and that you would give us the courage to be safe friends, to walk with them. For I pray for my ones, my neighbor Rick and my family who doesn't know you yet. God, would you give me favor for them so I can win them to the kingdom of God?
Lord, if there is anyone here today who's begun to drift meat with them today and encourage them, lift them up.
Our prayer teams want to seek you this morning. We love you. In Jesus name, amen. Go ahead and stand with me. You are dismissed.
May the Lord have favor on you.

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