James 1:1

James 1:1 I, James, am a slave of God and the Master Jesus, writing to the twelve tribes scattered to Kingdom Come: Hello! Faith Under Pressure (The Message)

Having spent all that time yesterday looking at verse 2, I was drawn back to verse 1. Of course, if I had been doing this logically, one step at a time, in order and so on, then I would have actually read verse 1 properly and never have moved onto verse 2 yesterday! It is curious how you can literally skip verses in the bible and think you have read them when really, you haven't even noticed the words at all.

So, verse 1. James introduces himself in this verse, and we find out who he is writing to and who he is. So who is James? Well, there are apparently four candidates for this:

• James the Less, son of Alphaeus, one of the disciples (see Matthew 10:3);
• James the father of Judas (not Iscariot). Judas was one of the disciples and also known as Thaddeus (Matthew 10:3 and Luke 6:16);
• James the son of Zebedee, brother to John (both John and James were disciples, (see Matthew 4:21)); and
• James the oldest half brother of Jesus (Mark 6:3)

I've been reading about this and apparently, no one has seriously considered that it was either James the Less or James the father of Judas but I can't see why they never seriously considered it (and enquiring minds want to know!). James, the brother of John, was one of the earliest Christian martyrs after Stephen and was thought to have been killed in AD44, when there was a wave of persecution against the church by Herod Agrippa noted in Acts 12:1. Interesting to read that Herod Agrippa's sister was Herodias, the wife of Herod who was responsible for the death of John the Baptist (see Mark 6:17-28).

So the odds are that it was James, the brother of Jesus who initially rejected Jesus as the Messiah. I mean, you can understand that. After all, he grew up with Jesus, Jesus was his big brother, and you really don't expect your big brother to turn out to be the Messiah. You would have played with him, teased him, taken the mickey, tried to pull tricks on him, got angry with him, loved him, hated him, just as most siblings do to each other. So obviously, when someone comes along and says your brother is the Messiah, sent by God, how can you believe it?

James came to faith after the resurrection and became a leader of the early Church (Acts 12:17, 15:13, 21:18), one of the elders. It is thought he wrote this book to believers who were scattered after the persecution of the church in AD 44.

Depending upon which translation you use, he is either a slave or a servant or bond-servant of God. So exactly what is a bond servant? This is not just your common or garden servant, or slave. Oh no, this is someone who has been a slave and after their years of service are up, voluntarily stays with his master. Hebrew slaves could only serve for six years and had to be released in the seventh year. However, slaves could remain in servitude voluntarily , through love for their master. In this case, the master had to present them before God, take the slave to the door or doorpost and publicly pierce his ear with an awl (nice, eh?) and then the man would serve the master for life (see Exodus 21:2 -6).

So James is saying that he is a servant of God, someone who has decided voluntarily to spend the rest of his life serving God. This is not something you undertake lightly, a decision to be made when you have had one pint too many, when you feel obliged or want something in return. Slaves do not get anything in return. In fact, being a slave could be a really awful existence if you had a cruel master, so it is not a decision to rush into.

Yet James (and Paul, Peter, John and the other writers and disciples) gladly made this choice. What is it about God that makes people want to serve him, to follow His Son and makes other hate his very name, deny his existence, spend their lives trying to prove there is no God? If you don't know, then you don't know God, my God, the King of Kings, Lord of Lords, the Creator, the Father of all, the great I AM, Jehovah- Jirah, Jehovah-nisi, the Lord God Almighty. Take a look around you as God is all around, everywhere you look. He is in the love I see in my husband's eyes, in the hugs from my children. He is in the sound of the birds singing in the morning and in the rain that is falling outside as I type these words. He is in the sun, the moon, the stars, in the trees, the flowers, in the air that I breathe and He is in my heart. Do you know my God?

So James is a servant, a slave of God and is writing to those Jews who had been scattered during the persecution of the church. These believers were spread around the Roman world, in Rome, Alexandria, Cyprus, in Greece and Asia Minor. Depending upon where they lived, many would have been suffering persecution, so this letter was written to encourage them , to help them grow in their faith and to teach them.

But his letter is just as relevant today as it was when he wrote it 2,000 years ago. You only have to look around the world to realise that persecution of the church is still here. There have been more Christians martyred for their faith in the last century than on the whole 2,000 years since the death of Christ. In certain countries of the world (Eritrea is a prime example), to sing praise to Jesus is enough to get you thrown into prison. Look at India, where Christians have been burnt alive in their homes by mobs, or in Nigeria, where there were brutal killings earlier in the summer. Even in this country, there is persecution, Christianity is being sidelined and marginalised as people seek to be politically correct and to give rights to all faiths and all life styles.

So this letter is just as applicable to each one of us as it was to the persecuted church back in AD44. It was written by a man who knew what it was to deny Jesus was the Messiah, a man who had known him intimately, and a man who came to a strong faith after the death and resurrection of Jesus and who was one of the elders and leaders of the church in Jerusalem.

I love the way the Message translates this verse "hello faith under pressure"! If our faith is not under pressure in this day and age, then I don't know what it is. So take heart from reading this book, learn from what James has to say about living the Christian life, and let your faith be demonstrated by your works.