Can you imagine your diary/journal/blog entry (or some such) being read in the year 4026 and being read with enthusiasm and being a source of profound encouragement? Can you imagine people finding a publisher who immediately, because of word he’s heard on the street, says he’ll buy the script and print it. Can you imagine it selling a million copies and winning multiple awards? How would you react, excited, honored, surprised, shocked, possibly horrified?
I know what you’re thinking; that’ll never happen, that it would never happen. Those things were important to me at the time, but they weren’t anything anyone would need two thousand years later. That’s probably what all the Bible characters whose writings we have in our homes would have said, too.
Imagine, again, how lacking we’d be if none of Paul’s letters had survived to make it into our Bibles. Have you ever been blessed or encouraged or exhorted by any of them? Have you memorized one or two special ‘verses’? (On a side note, aren’t you grateful for the thousands if not millions of linguists and translators for their diligence and meticulous attention to detail, all of which has made our reading and finding easier? Or those who divided the writings into easy-to-find chapters and verses?)
Then there’s James, Jesus’ half-brother, who became the leading elder in the church in Jerusalem. He probably kept hearing stories of the ways the believers were being led astray and falling back into old patterns. He wrote to all the believers who were scattered ‘like seeds’ throughout the known world due to the persecution of Rome and the Jews. His desire was to encourage them to grow, to become holy by focusing on Jesus, by persevering, by controlling their tongues, by removing all traces of the world from their lives.
Are his 2000-year-old (translated) words of any importance today? Is fallen human nature any different today than when James wrote his letter? Can we benefit from his exhortations? Can we obey? This is where the ‘rubber meets the road,’ right? This is where I have to ask myself if I have to heed his instructions or if I can just sluff them off as ancient, and therefore of no further use. Am I convicted by the penetrating truth or am I off the hook? I know the answer. I think you do, too.
Don graduated from Regent University in 1988 and moved to France for seven years, coming back to the US briefly to marry Sue in 1990. The work in France included working in a Christian School and helping plant a church before returning in 1995. He’s been pastor of Peninsula Vineyard since 1999. He enjoys counseling, especially married couples, traveling back to France (with Sue), reading, doing Sudoku puzzles and sleuthing out good, dark chocolate. Don serves as the senior pastor of the Vineyard Church Peninsula, in Newport News, Virginia.