James opens with a pairing. "Greetings," chairein, is the ordinary opening of any ancient letter, and the next word is charan, "joy." The two share a root. He writes to the twelve tribes in the Dispersion, believers scattered far from home, and he starts with trials. James calls himself a servant, though he could have introduced himself as the Lord's brother, and in the next breath he tells a scattered, struggling church to count trials as joy.
The command is to 2"count it all joy" when you 2"meet trials of various kinds." The word behind "meet" pictures an unexpected encounter, something that falls on you. James means the trials that simply happen, illness, poverty, and a hostile world pressing on people who follow Jesus. Happiness rises and falls with circumstances. Joy is the settled confidence that God is doing something with this circumstance.
3"the testing of your faith produces steadfastness." The chain is trial, tested faith, steadfastness, completeness. Paul traces the same sequence in Romans 5, and it was common teaching in the earliest church, the way believers learned to think about hardship before it arrived.
Then James turns from external trial to internal enticement, on a single Greek word again. The word for "trial" in verses 2 and 12 becomes "temptation" in verse 13, and English has to use two words where James used one. The same trial that tests a person from outside can become, in the same heart, the temptation that undoes them from inside. 13"Let no one say when he is tempted, 'I am being tempted by God.'" What happens next depends on something inside the person. 14"each person is tempted when he is lured and enticed by his own desire."
15"desire when it has conceived gives birth to sin." The image is pregnancy and birth, unfolding in stages. Desire conceives, sin is born, and sin left to grow brings forth death. It is one of the starkest sentences about how sin works in the New Testament, and it names the culprit plainly: your own desire, unchecked.
Between the trial and the temptation sits a promise. 12"Blessed is the man who remains steadfast under trial, for when he has stood the test he will receive the crown of life." The crown is the victor's wreath, the image Jesus uses for a suffering church in Smyrna (Revelation 2:10).
The chapter closes by tracing every good thing to its source. 17"Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above." Whatever shifts in your circumstances, God does not flicker, and this unchanging Father gave something greater than gifts. 18"Of his own will he brought us forth by the word of truth."
James promises that the trial has a purpose and that wisdom is available to ask for (verse 5). What trial is in front of you today? Ask what God might be doing with it, and guard the desire that would turn it into temptation.
Prayer
Father of lights, with you there is no variation or shadow due to change, even when everything around us shifts like grass in the sun. Teach us to count trials as joy by trusting what you are doing with what falls on us. Guard our hearts from the desire that conceives sin before we notice. Thank you for bringing us forth by the word of truth. In Jesus' name, amen.