Justification by Faith: Romans 4 and James 2

00:00 - James Spencer (Host) We don't want to suggest that the suffering that we go through in our daily lives is inconsequential. I don't believe that's true, but I do believe that as we respond to God from within that suffering, that suffering can become redemptive. It can become a growing sort of suffering where we are strengthened through it in our faith. 00:19 - Speaker 2 (None) Welcome to PREPPED, the podcast that equips you to live out God's story, not the world's story. Hosted by James Spencer, phd, each episode bridges the gap between academic insights and everyday life, preparing you to understand the Word of God and put it into practice. Whether you're diving into biblical studies, looking for ministry guidance or aiming to deepen your faith, PREPPED empowers you to think biblically and theologically in a world that encourages you not to Ready to get PREPPED. Subscribe now and transform the way you bring God's story into the world. 00:52 - James Spencer (Host) Hey everyone, welcome back to this episode of PREPPED. I'm Dr James Spencer. The last time we explored the importance of resisting worldly wisdom and adopting a theological framework for decision-making, and today we're going to take that a little bit further and we're going to talk about the practical side of decision-making. How do we cultivate habits that help us hear God's voice and act on His will consistently? What does it look like for us to really respond to God from within the situations that we find ourselves on a daily basis? And making decisions for God's glory isn't just about those big, life-altering moments. It's about the small daily choices that shape our character, reflect our faith and align our lives with God's purposes. So in this episode we're going to cover why listening to God is foundational, why it's important what we're doing when we're listening to God, how obedience transforms us, how these simple acts of obedience tend to build on each other, almost like accruing interest in a bank account, compounding interest in a bank account. Practical habits to develop a God-centered decision-making rhythm. So what does it look like for us to live our lives in such a way that making decisions for God, making decisions in response to God, faithfully following him, becomes part of our just sort, of our general posture and our way of movement. We are coordinated with God in such a way that these movements become natural. They don't feel awkward anymore, they just feel like this is what I'm supposed to be doing. And then, finally, the fruit of consistency in responding to God. So I think we will start with the importance of listening to God, and listening to God is kind of one of those foundational things we talk about an awful lot, but I don't know that we really understand exactly what we're talking about. When we're talking about listening to God, when I talk about it, I'm not thinking of an audible voice that I hear in my head. I've never had that happen to me, and so when I think about it, I'm thinking about it in terms of that response to God. If you think about it, you know if you could see. You know, let's say you're watching this video, maybe you're just listening to the podcast, but let's say you hear someone coming up behind me. You see someone coming up behind me and I just keep talking. I don't see them. Maybe I don't notice them. I have the camera right in front of me and so I can't see behind me. Maybe there's somebody sneaking up on me right now and I just don't respond to them, and part of that is because I'm not paying any attention to my surroundings, I'm not noticing that they're there and so I really can't respond to them. If I don't see them and know that they're there, I don't understand that they are present with me. I can't do much about responding to them. And I think this is where listening really starts. 03:36 When we want to respond to God, we have to be able to be alert to his presence, we have to know he's there and I think intuitively or I will say not intuitively, I would say propositionally most of us actually believe that God is there. We believe that God is omnipresent or always present with us at all times. But that's different than saying God is actually present and I know it from more of a participatory perspective. In other words, he's with me, right next to me, and I am interacting with him in such a way. I am posturing myself and positioning myself next to him such that when he moves I can move, that I understand and I'm working sort of with God throughout my life and I understand how to put myself in a position that I'm noticing what he's doing and adopting a posture to allow him to use me and guide me through my life. And so I think, to respond to God we first have to hear him, and I would sort of extend that hearing aspect to sensing him. Hearing to me is a stand-in for the other senses as well. We have to know he's there. As a stand-in for the other senses as well, we have to know he's there. And so our noisy sort of fast-paced world really gets in the way sometimes of listening to God and often feels like it's a bit of a lost art. It can just get overwhelmed, overshadowed by some of the other things that we're doing. 05:01 But I think listening is super foundational because listening aligns us with God's will. I mean we see this throughout scripture God is going to speak to his people and those are the ones who listen to him, and they find themselves aligned then with his purposes. So if you think about something like Elijah in 1 Kings 19, after these dramatic displays of power, wind, earthquake and fire, god speaks in this gentle whisper, and Elijah's gotta have the ability to hear God's voice in that quiet moment and to understand that listening requires sometimes stillness and attentiveness. It doesn't always happen in the whirlwind, it doesn't always happen in the storm. And so I think in that story, what we're seeing is that Elijah is. 05:47 He's watching these storms roll by, he's seeing all of the craziness that's going on in Israel, and what God, I think, is trying to emphasize with Elijah in that moment is look, you've got to calm down. You're getting too consumed with all of the craziness that's happening within your nation. You're getting too consumed with the dangers that are confronting you, and within the midst of those dangers, you're not able to hear me, you're not listening. What you need is this calm space. What you need is you need to slow down and recognize that I'm actually here and that I'm guiding this whole process. And so there's this sense that we need to just align with God's will. We need to recognize that all of the things that we often worry about, the challenges that we face, none of those things are trivial. They're all very important and we should pay attention to them. 06:40 There's a sense in which, I think, you know, we don't want to suggest that the suffering that we go through in our daily lives is inconsequential. I don't believe that's true, but I do believe that, as we respond to God from within, that suffering, that suffering can become redemptive. It can become a growing sort of suffering where we are strengthened through it in our faith, growing sort of suffering where we are strengthened through it in our faith. And so we've got to have these moments where we think too often we tend to sort of boil these down and say, well, let's just have a quiet time in the morning. I'm not opposed to a quiet time in the morning, not at all but I think we have to have more than that. There has to be a calm within us, a peace within us, that there has to be a calm within us, a peace within us where we're standing back and we're watching the chaos around us and we're calm. There's this fantastic. 07:32 My son and I read this series of books, the Red Rising series, and the second book is called the Golden Sun, and this young warlord is coming and he's coming back to meet his mentor, uh, lorne Al Arcos. And uh, it's, it's in the middle of this big rainstorm. And the narrator writes from this, uh, this young warlord's perspective, darrow's perspective, and he says something like um, lorne Al Arcos is standing in the midst of the wind and the waves and he says he is, has is as he always taught me to be. He's standing out in the rain. He's wet but unimpressed with all of the chaos that's going on around him, and I love that picture. Wet yet unimpressed right, he's not outside of the storm, he's still getting wet, he's still you know, the wind's still blowing his hair, everything's still going on around him, but there is a calmness and a stoicism about this guy that is impressive. So he's wet, yet unimpressed with all the swirls that are going on about him. I just love that picture. 08:37 I think it's really helpful and I think that's what we're doing when we're listening to God. What we're doing is we're not trying to carve away and say I need to get away from all this chaos if I'm ever going to listen to God. That can be helpful. I don't want to discount that as a practical strategy. At the same time, we want to get to that point where we are wet yet unimpressed. We're wet but we're still. We're in the midst of the storm, but we're still calm because we're looking at God and we see what God is doing in this moment. We trust that God is doing something good for us in that moment and we're constantly listening for him and recognizing that, even if he takes us away in the midst of the storm today, it's gonna be all right because he has a purpose behind it. So listening aligns us with God's will. 09:26 I think also, listening does require some intentionality. I don't think it just happens. There are certainly times in scripture where God pushes people to listen to him when they're not listening. One of my favorite stories in the Old Testament is Balaam and his donkey, and you know, eventually it takes Balaam's donkey speaking up to get Balaam to listen to what's going on. And so we don't wanna be that. We wanna be listening more intentionally. We wanna be proactive about listening to God. We wanna be diving in and trying to figure out what it is that God is saying to us in these moments, really being attentive to what he's trying to teach us, as opposed to being just simply frustrated with what God is teaching us. 10:05 And so we see this in something like Deuteronomy 8.3,. Moses is going to remind the Israelites that, as God is leading through the desert, he's feeding the manna, he's sustaining them, he's making sure their clothes don't wear out, those kinds of things, and he's doing that to teach them that man does not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord and he's trying to assess and teach Israel to obey him, to just trust him. Just trust, don't do anything else, just trust me. But often Israel was found grumbling and frustrated. And so, as we go through these times in our lives where God is providing for us, but it's not as much as we think we deserve, or maybe not as much as we want, or we're a little uncomfortable or what have you, I think those are the times we need to listen harder, we need to really jump in and not jump to judgment, but to be slow, to speak quick, to listen slow, to anger. We need to try to understand what God is doing, how God is moving and what it looks like for us to plug in and glorify God in those moments. And so, if we find ourselves in those situations, some of the questions we can ask like you know, what am I most dependent on right? Am I more dependent on my own wisdom, my own physical you know the physical gifts that God gives me or am I dependent on God's voice, on God's word? Am I really taking pleasure in obeying God? Do I understand how to do that? I think those are really crucial questions that we think through this effective listening to God aspect. And then I would also say, just listening has to shape our response. Once we understand that God is in our midst, man, it should change the way we respond. 11:50 Yes, I've used this analogy. I think I used it maybe in the last episode. But you know, going out to the Grand Canyon with my family, you know, you see, honestly, I was driving out there and I was thinking to myself we're going to see a big hole, that's what we're doing. It's just going to be a big hole in the ground. How boring could this possibly be? I was absolutely wrong. I mean, it is an amazing sight, but once you get there, it's captivating in the sense that you're very well aware of what you're looking at. It's amazing to look at, but it's also extremely dangerous. And so, you know, I'm not letting my kids play hide and seek at the Grand Canyon, I'm not letting them play tag at the Grand Canyon Like that's crazy town. You know, one false move and you're over the side of that thing and you're not making it. 12:38 And so there is a sense in which what we do in the presence of God is conditioned by the presence of God. It's conditioned by our awe that we have of him, this sort of understanding of his majesty, of his greatness, that we're standing in front of him and we're saying to ourselves, oh my gosh, I can't believe I'm here. And then the other side of it, which is God, is also. This is very scary to be in the presence of God in this way. This has to create in me a definite sense of self-control. I have to defer to who God is. As I'm standing in his presence, I have to be careful what I do. It cultivates a focus. A real attention given cultivates a focus, a real attention given. And so I think listening also shapes our responses in that way. 13:28 Now, the second topic I wanted to talk about is really obedience as a pathway to transformation. And as much as listening is important, I think obedience is also crucial, and so the transformation from obedience really does come from the idea that obedience sort of builds on obedience. Obedience begins to shape our desires, and so I think initially sometimes we can think of it in terms of I've got to sort of work out my faith. Yes, that's true, I think. You know, I've heard people talk about that. That's partially some of the biblical language, but what I would encourage is a little reframing. 14:05 I really like the way Paul puts it in Romans 6, 4, where he talks about we have the opportunity, or that we might walk in newness of life, baptism, that we might be raised with him and that we might walk in newness of life. And this walking in newness of life is, in a very real sense, part of our salvation. If we think about salvation just in terms of being, you know, this moment of justification where Christ's righteousness covers us, that's certainly an aspect of salvation. But we're also saved from serving sin. We're also saved from serving the flesh, and so this is what Paul is talking about, I think, in Romans 6.4. He's going to go on to talk about being slaves to righteousness as opposed to being slaves to sin, and so we're free now to walk in a different way. And so, as we exhibit that freedom, as we really understand our salvation, I think obedience reflects our faith, in the sense that it reflects our understanding of what we've been freed from and so we've got to. 15:14 Obedience is this demonstration of our new life in Christ, and I think that's really crucial. But our obedience also shapes our desires. So obedience just isn't about doing what's right, it's about transforming what we want. You know, as we align our actions with God's will our hearts begin to reflect his priorities. Psalm 37 and 4 says take delight in the Lord and he will give you the desires of your heart. And this isn't a promise that God will fulfill every wish right, and I don't have a Lamborghini parked in the driveway, I don't have, you know, millions of dollars in my bank account. But it is a promise that our desires will align with his as we learn to delight in him. And the reality is that these earthly things that we want are they're not again. They're not trivial. It's not like it's bad to have them, but the reality is that our delight is to be in the Lord. Our delight is to serve him or to take pleasure in obedience. This is the meaning of the blessed man in Psalm 1, who loves the law of the Lord and meditates on it day and night. I believe it's the Net Bible that translates. It takes pleasure in obedience, and so it's going to shape our desires and then I think it's going to cultivate joy over time. 16:28 There's a unique joy that comes from obeying God. Jesus tells his disciples in John 15, 10 through 11, if you keep my commands, you will remain in my love. I have told you this so that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be complete, so that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be complete. And so there's a sense in which, as we follow God's will, as we focus ourselves on giving glory to him, pointing to the triune God and giving glory to the triune God and doing what he's told us to do, that we will find joy like we can't find anywhere else. Okay, so now let's pivot a little bit to the practical habits for God-centered decision-making. So how do we cultivate these habits that really help us consistently listen to and obey God? 17:11 I think it does involve, you know, sort of the what can become a trite sort of suggestion is daily prayer and scripture engagement. Now, I'll say this, I think a lot of times I just had recent conversations with some folks who I think are really sincerely trying to read the biblical text, sincerely attempting to understand it and sincerely attempting to interpret it well. Unfortunately, I think that they are getting caught in some fringe ideas about eschatology, about the timing of Christ's second coming, and that is then circling back on some of their practices storing up food, for instance, in a storage locker, because they think Christ is coming back in the very near future. I find that unfortunate. I find that unfortunate. And so when we think about scripture engagement, what we're really talking about is handling the word of God rightly, and I think that that means that we have to have this ongoing process of understanding it, not only as we study the text on our own, but as we study the text with others. 18:27 And so when I'm studying, when I'm doing my research, I don't usually just sit down and read my Bible by itself. I've made it a little bit more of a practice to say, okay, if I'm gonna read, if I'm really gonna study this chapter like right now I'm studying the book of Revelation if I'm really gonna study Revelation, I to do so at least with some commentaries and some articles around me. And so I'll spend days in one passage because I'll spend some of my quiet time reading through that passage. But then I'll also spend some of that quiet time reading through a commentary or reading through an article, and I think that's really crucial, because it isn't then just me studying that passage, reading it, and thinking that I'm getting's really crucial, because it isn't then just me studying that passage, reading it and thinking that I'm getting anything really out of it. I have to go deeper than that. I have to understand what other Christians, wise people who are studying this text in greater depth maybe than I ever have, what it is that they're saying. And so that's where it comes to not just studying the scriptures but really deeply meditating on them and trying to understand exactly what they mean, to the extent that that's possible. And then, as we pray, we need to be praying through that understanding. We need to pray that God is going to work this biblical passage out in our lives. 19:38 I mean one of the ones, and I've already mentioned it today in this video, but Psalm 1-1 is one that I pray through an awful lot. You know, I wrote a book called Christian Resistance how to Defy the World and Follow Christ and somebody one time asked me the question why do you have to have defy the world first? Why couldn't it be follow Christ and defy the world? And I said well, I was following the pattern of Psalm 1. Pattern of Psalm 1. 20:00 And in Psalm 1, the blessed man you know, avoids the you know, the mockers, the scoffers and the evil people who are plotting against God and seeking to go a different way before he is before. The Psalm at least says that he is meditating on God's word day and night and finding his pleasure in the law of the Lord, and so I pray through that Psalm a good bit. Lord, help me not to love wickedness. I think that's a struggle for everyone. How is it that we find pleasure in comfort and comfort that is inappropriate sometimes? How do we avoid being complacent? How do we avoid thinking that maybe we've done enough, that we've given God enough, when he really calls us to give all we are and have to him? And so I think praying through our understanding of these scriptures is really crucial, and I would encourage you to write some of those down. I personally find it helpful when I can write my prayers down, or at least jot some notes down, so that as I'm praying, I have some sort of an outline that I can follow, and I have. I don't follow that rigidly, I don't read it rigidly, but I do find it helpful to collect some of my thoughts so that I don't get lost in my own head. That may be helpful to you, but I think that's definitely a part of the rhythm that we need to establish if we're going to make practical, god-given decisions Now. 21:33 I think the other thing is just establishing these other rhythms of reflection in our lives. You know, there's something to it was an old practice and it's from, I believe, the Jesuit tradition, the examine, and it's just a set of prayerful reflections. You know, where did I see God at work today? Did my decision reflect his priorities? What could I do differently tomorrow? What do I need to repent of? How do I need to confess my sin here? And the examine is nothing magical, right? It's a set of questions that we can ask ourselves, that are really appropriate to ask ourselves. You know, we need to be looking back at our day and trying to find God in that day. Where did I miss God? Where did I start working apart from him? At what point did I really feel his presence and when did I feel like I had walked away from him and I was no longer responding to him? I think, as we reflect on our days, we can then start thinking back through. Okay, well, when I was feeling his presence here, I was doing this, I was really. I had done this right. 22:38 You know, whatever it is, there are going to be ways for us to make course corrections within our daily lives, and I just encourage you to take a second, reflect on how your day goes, how your week goes, and try to understand what factors are really getting in the way of you responding to God in the moment. And I think you know, finally you got to slow down. And I think you know, finally you got to slow down. We got to slow down and just discern what's going on. So many times, and I think this is a really crucial lesson to understand there are so many things in our world of efficiency that have made our lives busier rather than less busy, and so this push for productivity is crazy. I mean, I don't feel the urge Now on my phone. I've talked about this in previous episodes. I think of thinking Christian, but I'm not sure. 23:34 One of the things I've said is I usually keep my phone on silent all day, and the only buzzes that I get on my text messages that I know I need to look at are from my wife and my kids, and so they have their own buzz, and so if I feel my phone in my pocket buzzing my wife's buzz or my kid's buzz then I can pick it up and check it out at buzzing my wife's buds or my kids' buds, then I can pick it up and check it out. If not, I check my texts like get periodic intervals during the day. I don't have my phone out in front of me all the time. I do the same with emails, and part of it is just taking that control of realizing that there's no urgency, like people don't really expect you to text them back the very next second. Sometimes it's better, if you're getting a text or you're getting an email, to actually read it, think about it and give a reasonable response that you've thought through after some time. 24:32 And so this pace that we keep up on occasion, the expectations that we impose on ourselves or maybe that our culture imposes on us, those are not actually givens. These are not things that we have to do. These are things that we're deciding to do, and so we can decide not to do them. And I think that what we need to do is we need to say, okay, am I going so fast that I'm missing the presence of God in my life? And if so, I need to slow down. And maybe the better question is to ask how fast can I actually move and still keep the presence of God in my life. How fast can I move so that I can still respond to God in any given moment or any given situation? And if we're moving too fast for that, we need to slow down. I think the last thing I just wanna say is what do we get when we respond to God? We respond to God in any given situation. 25:29 I've been talking about this and it seems like an okay idea, but what do we really get out of it? And I think we get peace and uncertainty. I think we get clarity of purpose. I think we give a and uncertainty. I think we get clarity of purpose. I think we give a good testimony to others. I think we have a deeper relationship with God. And when we talk about that relationship with God, this is a big part of it, because we can think about a relationship with God and we start thinking about it in terms of our human relationships. Our human relationships are very important and they can show us to some degree, our relationship with God. I mean, paul even talks about in Ephesians 5 how the marriage, you know, the man and the woman in a marriage, reflect Christ and his church, and so it's not as if these human relationships don't matter. 26:14 But what I would just say is, sometimes we think of our relationship with God and we don't have a sense in which that relationship is one of someone who is to be fully loyal to one who deserves our full loyalty. We are to give all we are and have to the Lord. That's our job. That's what we're called to do. If we're not willing to do that, we've got some problems Because we're going to be in a wrong relationship with God. We're going to assume that he is our part-time sovereign, or maybe he's not our sovereign at all. When, in fact, when we proclaim Jesus as Lord, what we're saying is we're willing to give all we are and have to him. And so, as we begin to respond to God in the moment, what we have the opportunity to do is we have an opportunity to understand that responding to God in the moment is a reflection of the loyalty that we have for our sovereign God. And so, as we attend to his presence and we give him our attention, we are recognizing that God is infinitely more relevant than any other actor or factor we could ever pay attention to. 27:18 Now, listening and acting are really just inseparable in the Christian life and I think to make decisions for God's glory, we have to cultivate these habits of attentiveness, obedience and reflection, and those habits allow us to align our lives with God's will and experience the peace and purpose and joy that comes from walking in step with him. So this week I would encourage you to just take some practical steps. Spend some intentional time in prayer and scripture and reflection, reflect on some of those recent decisions you know. Seek out somebody who you can talk to if you need someone to process this with. Seek out a trusted mentor or a friend, and just be intentional about trying to see God in your life, to draw his presence into you and to recognize that he is actually here and that when we respond to him, we are pointing to and giving glory to God. We're actually fulfilling what we are supposed to do as humankind the chief end of man to understand God and enjoy him forever. And so, as we see God in our lives, we understand him, we understand that he is there, we're watching him move, we're understanding how he moves. That's a core piece of what it is. And as we obey and we learn to take pleasure and obedience, we're now enjoying God and we do that forever. 28:34 Hey, thanks for joining me on this episode of PREPPED. If this episode's encouraged you, if there's a friend or something like that, share it with them. Leave a review. Next time we're gonna discuss how cultivating spiritual disciplines can sustain us in the long journey of discipleship. But until then, feel free to like this video, subscribe to the channel, like us on social media all of those things kind of help us out here at the ministry. And until next episode, may our decisions reflect God's glory in every moment. Take care everybody. 29:04 - Speaker 2 (None) Thanks for tuning in to PREPPED. If today's episode helped you view the world through a God-centered lens, be sure to hit subscribe so you're always prepared for what comes next. Don't forget to rate and review us on your preferred podcast platform. Your feedback helps us reach more believers eager to live out God's story. Share this episode with a friend, family member or loved one, and together let's keep challenging the world's narratives. Until next time, stay grounded, stay inspired and continue living out God's plan. See you soon on our next episode of PREPPED.