Chunks: The Letter of James

Episode 21: Quick to anger, slow to listen (part 3)

In this episode, I draw upon some of my own work as a minister and marriage educator to give you some simple, practical guidelines for learning to listen better.

Episode 22: Real righteousness

As we've seen, James 1:19-20 teaches that we should be quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to become angry. This episode examines the rest of what James says in these verses: that anger doesn't produce God's righteousness. We'll look at what James means by this, again linking his thought back to the teaching of Jesus.

Episode 23: Finding fruit

In the gospels, we see Jesus using horticultural metaphors (sowing seed, pruning grapevines) to speak of the Christian life. James does something similar in James 1:21, portraying the gospel as something planted deep within us. And as we'll see in this and future episodes, this becomes an important piece of James' teaching overall. If we have the gospel planted in us, shouldn't it bear appropriate fruit?

Episode 24: Gazing in a mirror

James 1:22-24 teaches that we must not only hear the gospel, but do what it says. He uses the metaphor of a mirror: don't we look in a mirror to see what we look like? What would be the point if we didn't do anything about what we see?

Episode 25: Law and freedom

Depending on our cultural values, we may find it awkward to hold the words "law" and "freedom" together. But in James 1:25, the apostle speaks of "the law of freedom" and links it to blessing. What does he mean? We'll explore this in this episode and the next.

Episode 26: Freedom isn’t free

In the previous episode, we discussed how the distinction between "freedom from" and "freedom to" might help us understand what James is teaching. In this episode, we link this back to what the apostle Paul teaches in the book of Romans, remembering that our freedom from sin came at a price.

Episode 27: Speaking the truth in love, not anger

We've already spent some time with James' teaching about being quick to listen and slow to speak. But the problem isn't just that we don't listen enough or speak too soon. The problem is that we don't control our tongues, and say things we shouldn't. As we'll see in this episode, James 1:26-27 teaches bluntly that people who think they're admirably religious but don't control what they say are just kidding themselves.

Episode 28: The things we do for status

Chapter 2 introduces one of the major concerns of the letter: in their pursuit of higher social status, Christians were mistreating each other. James 2:1-4 illustrates one particularly pernicious example of this: people fawned over the rich who visited the church but treated the poor with disrespect.

Episode 29: Inglorious glory

As we saw in the previous episode, Christians were showing favoritism toward the rich. In James 2:1, the apostle suggests that if people are doing that, they don't truly believe in "our glorious Lord Jesus Christ." But what does it mean to speak of a battered and crucified Savior as "glorious"?

Episode 30: Changing the way we see

In previous episodes, we've explored the unjust favoritism believers were showing toward the rich. James 2:5-7 unmasks the hypocrisy of this behavior, pushing believers to learn to see people as God sees them, instead of through the lenses of what our culture teaches about social status.