The Letter of James

It is easy to be a Christian when the sun is shining. What do you do when it isn't? If your life begins to fall apart, perhaps fall apart in connection with your family, maybe it's your work, maybe it's your health, what do you do then? Now, as we've worked our way through this letter of James, we've seen that he's been helping us think this through. And today, in the final verses of his letter, he brings the various threads of his letter together to try to give us an answer of how do you keep going with Jesus when life feels like it's falling apart.

We're blessed in this church to have a great many people who work in the medical world. We have doctors, we have nurses, we have various other people who actually work in roles in the medical world, and that's a good thing, because when you become sick you need a doctor, assisted by a great many other medical staff who can help find out what is wrong and tell you what can be done to deal with your sickness.

Let me ask you a question: Do you need to be good in order to go to heaven? Do you have to do good works, good deeds, to get to heaven? That is a really important question, is it not? Because where you spend eternity really matters. This life we live in now is short; the most any of us will get is probably 100 years, relative to which eternity is a very, very long time. So where you get to spend eternity, well, there is no more important question for you than that.

Well, like almost every grown-up, I have forgotten almost everything they taught me when I studied for my GCSEs. However, when we did GCSE English, we had to read some novels of a 19th-century author called Thomas Hardy. Not to be confused with the present-day actor of the same name.