Chestnut Mountain Church

James doesn’t close his letter to believers with closing greetings or a prayer like other letters in the New Testament. Instead, he closes with a declarative letter. He is calling believers to a higher standard of living. James is teaching how to be made complete and whole. He is calling believers to a pathway of wholeness. There are four key points to obtain the pathway to whole

There is no secret recipe for how to avoid hardship or struggles in life. Tough times come not because God is mad or frustrated with us but because we experience tough times and heartaches in this life because we live in a broken world. However, James writes to believers about how to respond to tough seasons that are faced in life. As followers of Christ, we must respond to tough s

As we celebrate the resurrection of Jesus, we look at how the disciples of Jesus scattered at the moment of His arrest and crucifixion but then were called to gather back in Galilee to meet Jesus after the resurrection. While the disciples had declared that they would never leave Jesus, prophecy and Jesus’ words were fulfilled as the disciples’ circumstances of what they were w

As Palm Sunday is this start of Holy Week, it begins with the Triumphal Entry where the people went from being on top of the world that the King has arrived to making a turn when Good Friday gets here. The four gospels detail the account of Jesus’ Triumphal Entry into Jerusalem, and today, we focus on Luke’s account of Jesus’ entry. Through the obedience of the disciples and

In the first six verses of James 5, James is calling out the rich for taking advantage of the poor. It’s a call to us as believers to be open-handed with what God has given us. While God doesn’t need your money, God does, however, want your heart. If we will live fully surrendered to God’s vision, He will provide. God is not going to call us to do anything and not provide for

In James 4, James continues with reminding believers that life is fragile. We can make all the plans we want, and we can live like we are in control, but we don’t know because our life is short and fragile. While we want to control our lives, we need a life that says, “if the Lord wills,” because this statement declares God is in control, not us. We might not know what the fu

In James 4, James reminds believers of what it means to follow Jesus. When we declare Him as Savior, we also declare Him as Lord. Declaring Him as Lord means we surrender to His power, surrender to His authority, surrender to His influence, and submit to His commands. One of the commands we are to follow is to love one another. Because we are commanded to love one another, that mea

It’s frustrating when we are watching a movie or a show, and the audio and video don’t align together. Similarly, in James 4, James is writing with concern that what the believers are saying isn’t lining up with how they are living. As Christians, we have to ensure that what we are saying aligns with how we are living. Many times, it doesn’t because, even though our spirit

Wisdom is referenced all throughout Scripture, and James writes about two types of wisdom in James 3, false wisdom and true wisdom. It is tough to define wisdom, but you will know it when you see it. True wisdom is not strictly intellectual but is mostly behavioral. How do we discern false wisdom from true wisdom? Listen to this sermon about false wisdom versus true wisdom in the t

In James 3, James writes about controlling our tongue. James alludes that we all have struggles and our struggles all look different, but the one struggle we have in common is that we have all stumbled or will stumble by our tongue. Humans have the ability to tame every single animal on Earth, but we can’t tame our tongues. We learn through James’s letter that the tongue is pow