This morning I wanted to use this time together to really highlight the Perspective course coming up in the first part of 2025, and to encourage all of you to prayerfully consider making that gutsy call to step forward and put yourself out there and take the course.

Perspectives is a globally-focused discipleship class that is hosted in churches and universities around the world. It's a 15 week experience that will expand your vision of God and your worldview. And though we typically think Perspectives is this Missions class, it really is one of the best tools for launching folks into ALL SORTS of ministries.

God has a heart for every people group on this planet. Read the Book of Revelation - you'll see that John saw in his vision there around God's throne were people from EVERY tribe, tongue, and nation. How does that happen? Are you one that doesn't even THINK about that? Or one that just presumes that other people are going to get that done?

Perspectives helped me understand why God even WANTS all of that around His throne, and how God has called ME to be a part of seeing that future promise become reality.

What’s the first thing you do when you get up in the morning? Whatever it is, it’s probably the same thing every day. Everybody seems to have their own morning rituals to get them going.

Some part of everybody’s morning ritual is coming face to face with the mirror.

Most of us probably get our first look at ourselves while we’re still pretty scary looking. Our eyes have that bleary, dazed look; hair is sticking out in strange places… Ugh. Not a great experience, right?

Here's the bad thing about mirrors: they're too honest. Unless you have one of those carnival fun-house mirrors that distort things… What you see is what you get!

Mirrors don't flatter, they don't gloss over the junk we have stuck between our teeth or the make-up that's been smudged. They don't try to tell us we look better than we really do. Every wrinkle, gray hair, blemish — they're ALL there staring back at us.

So, the question is…why do we even HAVE mirrors in the bathroom? And why the bathroom???

Well, because as unpleasant as it may be, the reality is: if we DON'T take a look at ourselves and (most of the time) make *some* kind of adjustment (sometimes MAJOR adjustments), then the rest of the world will have to deal with THIS!

And so we figure it's better to face the truth and do what we can to not scare everyone else off!

Today we're looking at a passage in James 1 that likens God's Word to a mirror. Not a mirror for our physical appearance, but a mirror for who we REALLY are, deep down where it really counts.

John Adams, in a letter to the Massachusetts militia, dated October 11, 1798, said this: Because we have no government armed with the power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion, avarice, ambition, revenge, and licentiousness would break the strongest cords of our Constitution, as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.

What Adams was expressing was this idea that Constitutions such as the United States of America has only work when those who live under it can exert a strong degree of self-control.

Adams wasn't alone in this view. To our Founding Fathers, it was “self-evident” that a democratic republic could only be sustained by those who were able to be self-controlled. Reflecting that thought, a contemporary German author and philosopher Johann Wolfgang von Goethe stated: “What is the best government? That which teaches us to govern ourselves.”

A later prominent 19th Century minister, Henry Ward Beecher, simply said: “There is no liberty to men who know not how to govern themselves.”

Self-governance consists of self-regulation of attitudes and actions. In keeping with this philosophy, the Founding Fathers believed that the success of our nation, our culture, hinged on both individual and community virtue - that is, moral character.

This morning, we are still in the first chapter of James (wow!). And the text we are looking at is short - again, just three verses long, but HUGE in its impact. Because what we are going to see is the key, according to James, to being the people God has called us to be.