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Welcome to Day 2119 of\xa0 Wisdom-Trek, and thank you for joining me. This is Guthrie Chamberlain, Your Guide to Wisdom James \u2013 Wisdom is Faith in Action 1 \u2013 Who is James \u2013 Daily Wisdom Putnam Church Message \u2013 09/05/2021 JAMES: WISDOM IS FAITH IN ACTION \u2013 WHO IS JAMES? As mentioned last week, we are beginning a new series today on the Proverbs of the New Testament, better known as the book of James. This letter is chocked full of practical wisdom on how to live the life of a radical disciple, which we focused on during August. Today I want to provide a background of who James is, and why he is so uniquely fit to author the first book written in the New Testament. Since most of the lesson today sets the stage for our study through James, which may take many weeks to complete, we will only cover one verse today, James 1:1. Thus, this lesson will be somewhat academic in nature before we explore the depths of the wisdom found in James. James 1:1 (NIV) James, a servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ, To the twelve tribes scattered among the nations: Greetings. James 1:1 (NLT) This letter is from James, a slave of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ. I am writing to the \u201ctwelve tribes\u201d\u2014Jewish believers scattered abroad. We live in a world where politics rules the day. In this world, a person\u2019s public reputation too often drowns out the private reality. Who you know usually trumps what you know. Name-dropping often gets you farther than talent or skill. These cynical sayings not only apply to the political realm, where quid pro quo is the status quo. Unfortunately, the \u201cgood of boy\u201d system also tends to corrupt most areas of business, academia, entertainment\u2014and, yes, even the church. This is why the opening words of the book of James are so refreshing. Like a cool spring breeze blowing through a musty room, the unassuming nature of these first few words drives out arrogance, ego, and presumption. Written by a man who could have dropped the Name above all names, this simple, straightforward greeting sets the tone for a letter that assaults our natural human tendencies toward sin and selfishness with a radical message of authenticity and humility. That begs the question, which is today\u2019s message titled \u2018Who is James?\u2019 From the very first phrase, the name \u201cJames,\u201d this short letter presents us with a problem: Which \u201cJames\u201d wrote this letter? Unfortunately, his humble self-identification as \u201ca bond-servant (or slave) of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ\u201d (1:1) doesn\u2019t get us far. So, unless we were among those first recipients of the letter, we are left to some old-fashioned sleuthing to determine which James penned these words. If you run through the New Testament, you\u2019ll come across four men with this name. It\u2019s relatively easy to rule out a couple of these. First, James, the father of Judas (not Iscariot), never appears in the New Testament except in Luke 6:16. James, the son of Alphaeus, is probably the same as \u201cJames the Less.\u201d Although he is one of the Twelve, he disappears from the biblical account after the upper room experience on Pentecost (Acts 1:13). So these two can be safely dismissed as unlikely candidates for authorship. This leaves James, the son of Zebedee and brother of the apostle John, or James, the half-brother of Jesus. Though the first James, a \u201cSon of Thunder,\u201d played a significant leadership role in the infant church as one of Christ\u2019s inner three (Peter, James, and John), he was the first of the Twelve to suffer martyrdom under Herod Agrippa I. That occurred around ad 44 in persecution that resulted in further scattered the Jewish Christians throughout the Roman world (Acts 12:2). Shortly after this...