One of the things that usually accompanies the stress of suffering is a willingness to be short, cross, or biting with the people around us. You’d think that when we were suffering it would be in our best interest to help each other and encourage one another, but sadly, this is often not the case....

What do you think James means by “establish your hearts”? One way to consider this this phrase would be “strengthen your hearts”. Does that help your understanding of what James might be trying to communicate? He is calling his people press into right living in the midst of trial....

We have already talked a bit about farmers in one of our devotionals from a few days ago, but James brings up the subject again in our verse for today. Farming is challenging work for a number of reasons. One of the biggest reasons is that it demands a high degree of patience. How do you feel about patience?...

Sometimes poor people have no one to defend them. They might not have many friends or if they do have friends those friend are poor too. Usually those who are poor don’t have anyone on their side who is powerful, with the exception of God. He is as powerful as it gets....

There was once a man who had everything. All of his needs were met and much more beyond. He has 12 cars. A house in Montana and Florida (who want to live in Montana in the winter?) and his very own private jet so that we could fly all over the world anytime he wanted to. He had jewelry so that everyone would see how wealthy he was by just looking at what hung around his ne...

Oftentimes in our world today, people with money mistreat those who don’t have as much money. It’s really a sad reality. But it happens all the time. As we have already seen, money and corrupt us with pride. We can be tempted to think that we are better than someone else because of our wealth. This is pure sin that James and rest of the Bible speak quite often about....

Do you know what a hearse is? A hearse is a special type of car that is used to carry a dead body that rests in a coffin. A hearse is usually used to transport a body from a funeral home to a place of burial, like a cemetery. Now how odd would you think it would be to see a UHaul trailer being filled with all the dead person’s stuff being pulled by a hearse? Wouldn’...

In our devotions for this week are we going to look at a section in the book of James where he speaks some hard words. His audience is a bit hard-hearted so oftentimes hard-hearted people hard words are necessary (think Jesus vs. the Pharisees)....

There are two main ways to think about sin. One is to think about sin as things we do. These are called sins of commission. We talk about “committing” a sin. You can hear the connection here with the word “commission”. To commit a sin is to do a sin of commission. For example, if you smack someone you would be committing the sin of disrespect. If you steal from som...

Do you know what the word “arrogant” means? Imagine someone who says, “I am the greatest! There is no one like me. I can do whatever I want, whenever I want. No one can stop me because I am so powerful.”...