Ten Minute Bible Talks Devotional Bible Study - Is Deconstruction OK? | New Testament | James 1

Episode Date: February 9, 2023

Deconstruction is asking questions of God. Is this healthy or unhealthy? Is there a right way to do it? Is it ever okay to doubt God? In today's episode, Patrick discusses the outcomes of questioning God according to James 1. Your support makes TMBT possible. Ten Minute Bible Talks is a crowd-funded project. Join the TMBTeam to reach more people with the Bible. Give now. Join the TMBT community in reading the entire New Testament in one year. Get your FREE reading plan here. Like this content? Make sure to leave us a rating and share it with others, so others can find it too. Use #asktmbt to connect with us, ask questions, and suggest topics. We'd love to hear from you! To learn more, visit our website and follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter@TenMinuteBibleTalks. Don't forget to subscribe to the TMBT Newsletter here. Passages: James 1

Welcome to 10-minute Bible talks, where we connect the Bible to your life. In the time it takes to get to work. I'm Patrick Miller. Today we're beginning to go through the book of James. Now, a quick background on who James was. He was the half-brother of Jesus. But what makes him really interesting is we don't really hear much about him in the Gospels. We really begin to hear about James in the book of Acts.

You see, in the book of Acts, we begin to realize that he's become a leader in the church, especially the church in Jerusalem. In Acts 15, he's the one who makes the final. decision for the church about how Jews and Gentiles are going to worship alongside one another. But what makes James really interesting was he was incredibly devoted to his half-brother, Jesus. According to church tradition, he was often called camel knees, which kind of sounds like an insult, but I think it was actually a compliment because the idea was he spent so much time praying to his brother, Jesus, that he got calluses on his knees like a camel, so camel-nees. Now, that dedication to Jesus, it quite literally cost him everything.

Eventually, James was brought to the top of the temple and told to recant his faith in his brother Jesus, and he refused, and so he was pushed off the top of the temple, and that's how he died in a wave of persecution. In a strange way, his death recalls Satan's temptation to his brother. You might remember that Satan told Jesus, let me bring you to the top of the temple, but when you jump down, have the angels catch you, and Satan was trying to test him, but Jesus refuses. James didn't get that choice. He was brought to the top. He was thrown down and the angels didn't catch him.

He laid down his life to proclaim the good news of his brother's kingdom. Now, why I say all this is because James went through some kind of transformation. What little we know about Jesus' mother and his siblings we get in the Gospels. There's a story about Mary and Jesus' siblings, probably James being one of them, coming to Jesus one day when he's teaching these crowds of people and trying to take him away. They say that he's a madman. He's lost his mind. He's going crazy.

and they're just trying to take him home so they can help him be sane again. And that tells you something. James had a hard time believing that his brother was, who his brother said he was. Just stop and imagine if you were James. And the person that you grew up alongside is perfect, sinless, the incarnation of God. That was probably hard to see. You probably got into arguments. And I guess Jesus was right every time.

But even in your own self-righteousness, it would be hard to see, hard to acknowledge this person who you worked alongside, this person who you saw, get ready and eat and do work. that this person really was the incarnation of the living God. I think it's safe to say that before Jesus died, James didn't buy it. He thought his brother was probably a good guy, but he was misled. And I wonder what he thought about the crucifixion. He's not there in the narrative. He's not there when Jesus is crucified.

I wonder if he thought, well, my brother's finally getting what he deserves for all this crazy talk he's been doing his whole life. But something changed James. So he became radically committed to Jesus. something changed in James so that he had to completely deconstruct his view of who his brother was. He wasn't just his half-brother. He really was Jesus. What was that thing? Well, in 1st Corinthians 15, the Apostle Paul tells us that Jesus appeared to many people when he was resurrected. But one of the people Paul specifically names is James. I wish we had that conversation. What did Jesus say to James?

Did James repent on the spot and say, you were right all along? You are who you said you were. He had to deconstruct his whole view of who his brother was and reconstruct something new in its place that his half-brother really was the incarnate God, that his half-brother really was the king who brought the messianic kingdom that could give goodness and life and shalom and peace to all people and all lands. I just can't imagine having to do what James did. It was an act of deconstruction followed by an act of reconstruction, an act so formative that he was willing to die for it. If you're at all in tune with the quote-unquote Christian discourse out there, you've probably heard the phrase deconstruction. There's a lot of conversation happening around what is

deconstruction and what are people doing when they deconstruct? Maybe you've gone through a period of deconstruction yourself. Or maybe you know someone who's saying that they're deconstructing and you're trying to make sense of it. And to answer that question, we have to really ask what deconstruction is. My friend Ian Harbor has written a lot on this and I've benefited a lot from him. And he's that a lot of people, they view deconstruction as one of two things. Maybe more positively, they see it as just asking questions. These are people who say, look, you shouldn't deconstruct your way out of the faith, but you might have to ask some questions about the faith you grew up in and set aside some of the wrong beliefs that you were taught maybe as a child in your church.

You might have to reassess some of your values. On the other end, there are people who see deconstruction as apostasy. It's kind of a long word, but the basic idea is abandoning Jesus and abandoning the true teachings of Jesus. And so they see deconstruction as a process whereby someone abandons the faith. They leave Jesus behind. And if you take either of these perspectives that it's healthy question asking or really unhealthy question asking, you'll be led to believe that the proper response to deconstruction is, well, finding answers.

You ask a question, you find some answers. Or maybe it's apologetics, another big fancy word, but just a word for saying defending the faith. So if someone's deconstructing, you have to defend the faith with them, show them why the faith is right. But my friend Ian said, well, there might be some truth in either of those views. They really missed the point of what deconstruction is. Deconstruction is grief. Deconstruction is the dark night of the soul.

It's something that most Christians I know go through, but we don't talk a lot about it in evangelical circles. We like to talk about how Jesus is there to make us happy and make us fulfilled. And so we don't have a category for what happens when following Jesus leaves us dismayed. What happens when we're like Jacob and we're wrestling with God because we can't make sense of his commands. We can't make sense of who he is. We're asking fundamental questions. You see, that's a dark night of the soul. Mother Teresa, when she was in the process of being canonized as a saint, there were letters

released by her. And as people read them, they were shocked to discover this woman who committed her whole life to Jesus and to serving the most poor and the most needy and the most marginalized in India that she spent decades of her life feeling distant from God, feeling as though he was silent. Her dark night of the soul wasn't a night. it was years and years and years of distance between her and God. I wonder if today we might want to call that a form of deconstruction,

that point at which we're wrestling with the fundamentals of our relationship to who God is. You see, if you view deconstruction as a dark night of the soul, as a crisis of faith, as a process of grief, I think there's actually a lot of hope for you. Because the goal on the other side of that deconstruction is not leaving the faith behind. it's coming to a deeper faith in Jesus. And isn't that exactly what James did? Didn't he have to deconstruct his view of Jesus what he thought was true about Jesus and reconstruct something deeper and something new?

I say that because when he opens up his letter, he talks about the need for every person who has doubts and questions to seek God. He talks about how difficult things in our lives, they often create the circumstances in which we grow a character that's like God. Let me just read this passage at length because I find it so, encouraging. He says this in James 1, verse 2, consider it pure joy. Consider this joy. What he's meant to say does not sound very joyful. Consider it pure joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds. That trial might be persecution for you. It might be the tension that you

feel between your faith and the world around you that following Jesus seems to make you want to say or do things that the world says is unhealthy or repressive or oppressive. Or it might just be a sense of distance between you and your creator. He says, count it pure joy whenever you face trials of many kinds because you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance. Deconstruction is a time of testing. It's a time of wandering in the wilderness, wrestling with God. It's Abraham with his son. And God says, hey, the son, you've waited for Isaac. You've waited for him your whole life, but I want you to sacrifice him for me. And Abraham takes Isaac up to the altar to sacrifice him and the whole time he's being tested. God, this doesn't sound like you. God,

this isn't possibly what you want, but God was producing in him perseverance. And of course, in the end, it wasn't what God wanted. Verse four, let perseverance finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything. Now he goes on to talk about exactly what you might need in your moment of deconstruction, your dark night of the soul, in your crisis of faith, when you feel lost when you don't have answers, when you're wondering where God is and who he truly is. Check this out. Verse 5. If any of you lacks wisdom, man, I like wisdom. If any of you lacks wisdom, you should ask God, who gives generously to all without finding fault, and it will be given to you. But when you ask, you must believe and not doubt, because the one

who doubts is like a wave of the sea, blown and tossed by the wind. That person should not expect to receive anything from the Lord. Such a person is double-minded and unstable in all that they do. If you're going through a process of deconstruction, or if you know someone who's going through a process of deconstruction, don't do it apart from God. Don't do it away from his presence. He might feel distance. You might feel confused. But know this. If you ask him in faith and you trust him, he will give you wisdom. He'll provide answers to the questions. He'll reveal who he truly is. You don't have to worry. I love what James says when he says he does it without finding fault.

He's not judging you for asking the questions. He's not judging you for having your doubts. He's not judging you for this process. Instead, he doesn't find fault. Instead, he gives you the wisdom that you seek. See, I know people who've gone through processes of deconstruction, and they've left Jesus behind. And those people are like the double-minded and the unstable.

They never asked God for the wisdom they needed to make it through the journey. but I've also known people who have deconstructed and at some point they turned to God and they said God give me wisdom and God gave it to them. You can reconstruct your faith if you have questions. James had questions about his half brother Jesus and he found those answers when he saw his resurrected half brother who said I am who I said I am. You can trust me and that transformed James radically so that he became a deep man of faith, a deep man. of prayer who laid down his life for his brother to announce the good news of the kingdom. We all go through crises of faith. We all go through dark nights of the soul. We all have moments when God feels distant, when we're asking questions that we don't think we can find answers to.

But God has not abandoned you. Ask in faith and he will provide. Before you forget, sign up for the 10-minute Bible Talks newsletter. Hit the link in the show notes and you'll get an email every Wednesday that's going to help you beat that midweek slump and go deeper in your walk with Jesus. Thanks for listening.