James focuses on not grumbling or judging. In effect, he’s saying, “Don’t take your frustration out on your innocent companions. Yes, times are hard. But when we succumb to rudeness towards our co-sufferers, we multiply our hardship by isolation.” There is an important message in this emphasis: being the victim of oppression does not excuse what we do to others. 

Passage – James 5:7-12
7 Be patient, therefore, brothers, until the coming of the Lord. See how the farmer waits for the precious fruit of the earth, being patient about it, until it receives the early and the late rains. 8 You also, be patient. Establish your hearts, for the coming of the Lord is at hand. 9 Do not grumble against one another, brothers, so that you may not be judged; behold, the Judge is standing at the door. 10 As an example of suffering and patience, brothers, take the prophets who spoke in the name of the Lord. 11 Behold, we consider those blessed who remained steadfast. You have heard of the steadfastness of Job, and you have seen the purpose of the Lord, how the Lord is compassionate and merciful.
12 But above all, my brothers, do not swear, either by heaven or by earth or by any other oath, but let your “yes” be yes and your “no” be no, so that you may not fall under condemnation.
Commentary
Think of a time when you were relationally hurt or emotionally upset. What was one of the hardest things for you to do? Chances are, “sit still” is near the top of the list. Being hurt and upset energizes us. We feel an innate need to move, to talk, to do something. We want things to be different, so anything other than prompt, decisive action feels like “doing nothing.”
Often, the result of hurt-fueled activity is to take the situation from bad to worse. We say things we haven’t thought through. We do things we regret. We blow up at people who had nothing to do with our hurt and then feel bad for hurting them.
Facing the challenges of post-hurt temptation is what this passage is all about. As we’ve seen, James’s readers had been hurt in many ways. In these verses, James turns his attention to helping his friends avoid the regret that comes from post-suffering temptations.
Patience Isn’t Passive (v. 7-8)
When James says, “therefore” in verse seven, he is referencing back to his pronouncement of God’s promised judgement on those who harmed his readers. We need to be careful not to read this passage like a generic pontification on the themes of patience, farming and suffering. James is not writing random proverbs about life; he is writing a letter to his friends.
As they heard of God’s judgement against their oppressors, their question had to be, “Okay, we’re glad God won’t overlook our oppression, but how are we to respond now?” James says, “Be patient (v. 7).” To which their inevitable reply would be, “How long should we be patient?” And James answers, “Until the coming of the Lord (v. 7).” Our response is to interpret this as a hyper-spiritual way of saying forever.
But it is a misperception of what it means to be patient that can make James’s response seem off-putting. If we mistake patience for passivity, it is as if James is saying, “Do nothing. Take it until Jesus returns.” We would be right to dislike this counsel.
To help us better understand what James means by “be patient,” consider the illustration he uses: a farmer patiently awaiting harvest. Anyone who knows a farmer knows that farmers are not passive. Famers plant, fertilize, weed, and tend to their crops. Farmers protect against insects and animals that would eat their crops. Farmers are highly active towards the things they can control.
But farmers are patient with regards to things they cannot control – the weather. A farmer cannot coerce the early rain to fall after the seeds are planted or the late rain that would optimize the yield. Patience towards the things that cannot be controlled is not passivity towards the things we can. Both healthy faith in God and good mental health require knowing the difference.
A fancy term for what James is describing in this passage is responsibility allocation: that is, accurately assigning responsibility for the various components of a situation to the right people.

Name and describe the situation that is distressing for you. In this passage, the situation is the pressure to produce a crop that will feed and provide for the farmer’s family.
Name the aspects of this situation that you can control. Obedience entails doing these things with a good attitude, like farmer planting and tending his crops.
Name the aspects of this situation that only other people can do.

If these people are cooperative, then trust gives them the freedom to fulfill their role.
If these people neglect or are manipulative with their responsibilities, then patience is waiting on God’s James 5:1-6 response to their actions.

Faith that honors God by actively obeying out of devotion to God, trusting good faith actors in our life, and being patient for God’s judgement against bad faith actors in our life.

Whether you’ve noticed it or not, these three notes (i.e., obedience, trust, and patience) are the melody of faith that have been playing throughout the book of James. James has cycled through these themes many times. We could summarize it this way:
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In mercy, God vents his just wrath on Christ as our substitute and does not give us what our sins deserve saying, “‘whosoever believes in Him shall not perish,’ for Christ perished in your place!” Though mercy is a gospel all by itself, worthy of the endless praises of men and angels, in Christ, God gives more grace saying, “whosever believes in him shall not perish, but have everlasting life!” You see, if mercy is not receiving what is deserved, then grace is receiving that which is undeserved. 

One day, during my senior year of high school, I noticed someone in the gym I’d never seen before. He was a juggernaut of a man I assumed to be a trainer, brought in to work with the football team. Turns out, he was brought in to work with the team but as the new quarterback. It was a 16-year-old named Timmy Tebow. Nobody knew him then, but we all know him now! We know him for championships, broken records, Heisman trophies, NFL highlight reels, and bestselling books.
But I think his greatest feat took place on January 8th, 2009, when he led the Gators to a championship victory with “John 3:16” written in silver sharpie on his eye blacks. He later told reporters that he chose John 3:16 because it was “the essence of our Christianity and the essence of our hope.” Astonishingly, 94 million people Googled “John 3:16” during the game and read the good news for themselves: “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.”
Luther agreed, hailing John 3:16 as “the Gospel in miniature,” and Spurgeon called it “the North Star of Scripture.” It’s one of the first verses we teach our children at the start of life and one to which we cling at life’s end. We see it everywhere from billboards to bumper-stickered tailgates and tattooed forearms. But frequent handling causes callouses. Perhaps, John 3:16 has become to you like the patinaed engagement ring with a dusty diamond, worn everyday but scarcely looked at. How beneficial then, to shine the gem and remind our forgetful hearts that God gave his Son for us because he loved us.
The God of Love “For God so loved the world…”
This good news wasn’t trumpeted by Jesus during a mountain-top sermon but late one night after Jerusalem’s Passover crowds had ceased, to a pharisee named Nicodemus. To Pharisees, God was chiefly a master who commands, an inspector who scans, a judge who renders a verdict, an executioner who punishes, not a Father who loves. But the love of God and the God of love was first and foremost in the heart of Jesus.
There are four Greek words translated as “love”: philia, the love of friends; storge, the love of family; and eros, the romantic love of a spouse. But here, Jesus chose the greatest, agape love to express God’s divine motivation in the salvation of sinners. The Bible says God’s agape love is: a sovereign love in which, “God predestined us for adoption to himself” before the foundation of the world (Ephesians 1:5); an unbreakable love which “neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation” can sever (Romans 8:38-39); a great love by which he “made us alive together with” Christ when we were dead in sin and trespasses (Ephesians 2:4); an infinite love whose breadth, length, height and depth surpass all knowledge (Ephesians 3:19); and an unconditional love shown in that “while we were enemies we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son” (Romans 5:10).
There are two tragic mistakes we make regarding God’s love. First, we misprioritize God’s love and see it as one grape in the cluster of his attributes, forgetting that “God is love” (1 John 4:8 & 16). Harry Ironside said, “[Love] is his very nature. We can say that God is gracious, but we cannot say that God is grace. We can say that God is compassionate but we cannot say that God is compassion. God is kind, but God is not kindness. But we can say, God is love.” Can you say that? Or have you exchanged the Bible’s God of love for the cold, grey deity of the pharisee? Yes, we must press on to know God’s eternal power, holiness, and justice but we must remember that it is only by God’s love that he is these things for us! God’s love is the bridge by which he comes to us to rescue us from our sins for himself.
We also misplace the love of God, putting love at the end of the salvation equation as a product; believing that Jesus bled and died for our sins to make God love us. But Christ puts God’s love at the beginning of the equation as the chief factor, saying, “For God so loved the world he sent his only begotten son.” That means the cross of Christ is not the place God started loving his people, but the ultimate sign of his love for them which had been burning in his breast for all eternity. “Love,” wrote Thomas Watson, “made Christ suffer for us, love was the chain that fastened him to the cross.” This love Spurgeon said, “flows from its own secret source in the eternal Deity, and it owes nothing to any earth-born rain or rivulet; it springs from beneath the everlasting throne, and fills itself full from the springs of the infinite. God loved because he would love.”
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Fight the good fight, but be cautious as you enter the fray. Be aware of what is wrong with the world, but do not let it consume you. Speak the truth, but do so in love.

We live in an age of innumerable errors. There are false religions, false views of man, false views of God, false views of salvation, false views of the nature of truth itself. There are false views of justice, false views of morality, false views of sexuality, false views of the end and telos of man. And that is not even opening the can of worms that is politics where we observe countless examples of governmental overreach and failures of magistrates to do their divinely appointed jobs. Human life is trodden over in the name of personal choice, evil is called good, and what some have termed a “soft totalitarianism” seems to be on the rise.
Suffice it to say, a lot of people are wrong about a lot of things.
In such an environment it is tempting for sound minded Christians to take hold of the battle standard and begin berating everything and anything that is in opposition to the truth. Social media and other online tools make such crusading easier than ever, gifting everyone a virtual stone to throw which we can chuck without the discomfort of looking into a living person’s eyes. Comment, correct, pile on, mock the evil–this is normative for Christian online discourse. And for in house discussions, or at least toward people who claim to adhere to the tenants of Christianity, we see no holding back as the accusations of “heresy” fall from the righteous.
Now I understand that there is precedent for boldness and even strong language in the Biblical and Protestant tradition. Our religion follows in the way of Elijah who taunted the prophets of Baal, of John the Baptist who condemned the promiscuity of an already unrighteous King, of Christ Jesus who called people vipers and children of Satan. Martin Luther spared no ounce of indignation when he wrote The Bondage of the Will to Erasmus or when he frequently likened the pope to the antichrist. In our day John Knox would be labeled a gross misogynist for his First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women and Samuel Rutherford would be seen as unduly divisive for writing against the Arminians and daring to be imprisoned over something so minute. Truth mattered to these Christians of the old school, and they saw it as something worth fighting and dying for. G. K. Chesterton, while often doctrinally deficient, nevertheless epitomized this same passion for truth: “No man ought to write at all, or even to speak at all, unless he thinks that he is in truth and the other man in error.” We belong to a combative religion that is called to contend for the faith once delivered to all the Saints and to protect the deposit entrusted to us.
Yet with all that stated and assented to, I was convicted by a letter by John Newton (the same author of Amazing Grace) about the dangers of controversy. I thought I would share some excerpts from “A Guide to Godly Disputation” though it is worth reading in full, multiple times (please do read it!). In it Newton provides counsel to someone who is publishing an article against an opposing viewpoint:
As to your opponent, I wish that before you set pen to paper against him, and during the whole time you are preparing your answer, you may commend him by earnest prayer to the Lord’s teaching and blessing. This practice will have a direct tendency to conciliate your heart to love and pity him; and such a disposition will have a good influence upon every page you write.
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