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We have been writing here for the last few weeks about some of the everyday problems that we all deal with, prompted by the practical focus of James that we are studying together on Sunday mornings. One of the struggles that lies close to his concern with wealth is discontentment. Would you consider yourself to be a content? Are you satisfied with your life? It seems that so many of us never are. There is a little ditty attributed to…

By the waters of Babylon, there we sat down and wept, when we remembered Zion. On the willows there we hung up our lyres. For there our captors required of us songs, and our tormentors, mirth, saying, “Sing us one of the songs of Zion!” How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land? – Psalm 137:1-3 There are times when all of us are tempted to become discouraged. “Don’t lose your song” is, in a sense, something…

In looking at some of our everyday problems—inspired by our sermon series in James—last week, we considered anger; today, let’s think about the related problem of forgiveness. How do we move from one to the other? As we begin, I think it is worth nothing what forgiveness is not. It isn’t merely ignoring those who wrong us. That’s fine if it’s because the offender is ignorant of what they did, but not if it is because we hold them in…

As we will see in our sermon this morning, one of the great themes of the letter from James is dealing with trials we encounter in our lives as Christians. He will discuss that at length in various ways. But it seemed good to me, then, to think about trials from the slightly different perspective of our everyday problems as a sort of companion to the study here in this space. So let’s begin by thinking about something we all…