We've made it to the last chapter in the book of James! We’ve still got a lot of ground to cover, but we are looking at the finish line here.

Let's go ahead and read chapter 5 verses 1-6 tonight.

”1 Go to now, ye rich men, weep and howl for your miseries that shall come upon you. 2 Your riches are corrupted, and your garments are motheaten. 3 Your gold and silver is cankered; and the rust of them shall be a witness against you, and shall eat your flesh as it were fire. Ye have heaped treasure together for the last days. 4 Behold, the hire of the labourers who have reaped down your fields, which is of you kept back by fraud, crieth: and the cries of them which have reaped are entered into the ears of the Lord of sabaoth. 5 Ye have lived in pleasure on the earth, and been wanton; ye have nourished your hearts, as in a day of slaughter. 6 Ye have condemned and killed the just; and he doth not resist you.” (Jas 5:1-6 KJV)

When I was a kid there was a show on TV called lifestyles of the rich and famous. It was basically a tour of these ridiculously nice houses. Some guy with a fifteen car garage full of Porches and Ferraris and a custom built pool. You probably remember it.

There are tv shows like that now. Lots of them. There are thousands of youtube videos. Everyone dreams about being rich. Living the rich and famous lifestyle.

In the passage we just read James drops a bomb on that.

This text is a very stark warning to the rich. Apparently, there were some rich people in this early church and they weren't acting right and James was sending a shot across their bow. This may be one of the most severe passages in the whole Bible.

Now, you might say, Pastor, we aren't a rich church. We are middle class at best. Some of us are downright poor.

Paul McCartney is famous for saying that some man’s floor is another man’s ceiling. We are certainly rich when you look at most of the people in the world. The average person in India, a country of over a billion people, makes $600 PER YEAR. Certainly everyone in here is rich to the average indian.

We need to hear this, because we could all become rich, or we may dream about being rich, or we may seem like we are rich to some other people.

Basically, there are four indictments here agains the rich. James is playing the part of the prosecutor. He's being the Trey Gowdy figure here. And he's got four charges he's bringing against these rich Christians.

Let's look at them, and remember that we can be guilty of all of them too.

The first charge:

1. You've invested in the wrong things.

Look at verses 2 and 3:

”2 Your riches are corrupted, and your garments are motheaten. 3 Your gold and silver is cankered; and the rust of them shall be a witness against you, and shall eat your flesh as it were fire. Ye have heaped treasure together for the last days."

James first looks at their riches.

He talks about their clothes. Nowadays clothes are almost free. My guess is that just about everyone here has too many clothes. We regularly sell clothes for next to nothing at yard sales or give them away to charity. But that is not the way it used to be. It used to be that clothes were very, very expensive and very few people had more than a one change of clothes. Clothes were an investment.

And here James says your clothes are motheaten.

Then he talks about their gold and silver. Gold and silver have always been synonymous with wealth and money. They are considered to be a safe investment. But James says there gold and silver is cankered and rusting. They are decaying before their eyes.

Now, what is James point? James point is that they are investing in the wrong things.

This is harkening back to what Jesus said in Mark 6:19-20.

”19 Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal: 20 But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal:"

What are you investing in?

There is a guy I work for sometimes who runs an investment firm. He's actually kind of a big deal. He's written papers in forbes and bloomberg and given conference talks all over the world. He's one of those guys that they call onto Fox News or CNN to talk about investment and the economy.

I was looking over his blog the other day and he had an article about being a father. He normally just writes about money stuff, so I wanted to read it.

Now remember, this guy manages large fortunes for a living. In the article he talks about one of his clients who passed away and left is two kids 100 million dollars. That's a LOT of money.

He was talking to one of these kids who is about to be a father for the first time and the kid (who just inherited tens of millions) said "I don't won’t to be like my father.”

My friend said “Why? Everyone loved your father? He was larger than life.”

His son said “I never say that man. My dad worked 16 hour days, 7 days a week. He had an office in the basement and he'd come up for dinner and then go back down stairs. My mom did everything. Every football practice. Everything. I was basically raised by my mom. I don't want to be like that for my kids.”

Here is a man who invested so much in money. He amassed a huge fortune. For what? My client's point was that maybe he could have had a nest egg of ten million or even less and been there for his kids and he would have been far better off.

Are you investing in the right things? Are you investing in eternity? Are you investing in your family? Are you investing in the church? Are you investing in the things of God?

I'm not against investing. I don't think James was either. But you have to be very careful because where your treasure is there will your heart be also.

So that's James' first charge. They invested in the wrong things.

The second charge was...

2. They cheated their workers.

Look at verse 4:

”4 Behold, the hire of the labourers who have reaped down your fields, which is of you kept back by fraud, crieth: and the cries of them which have reaped are entered into the ears of the Lord of sabaoth."

The Old Testament had a command that if you hired a laborer, they had to paid the day when they finished their work. Laborers were very poor and they needed that money right away.

Apparently, these rich folks in the early church were holding back payment from their workers, there was some kind of fraud or lying involved.

I know this doesn't apply to most of us, but if you have people working for you, you have a Christian responsibility to take care of them. To pay them quickly and fairly. It's important.

James said that their cries have reached the lord and he uses a very specific name of the Lord - “the Lord of sabaoth.” That's not the Lord of the sabbath, that’s an old testament Hebrew name that means the Lord of Hosts. The Lord who is coming back as a conqueror in all his power.

James is saying you better watch out, if you cheat your workers, the wrath and fury of God the conqueror is going to come after you.

So they invested in the wrong things. They cheated their workers.

The third charge is...

3. They lived like an indulgent fatted calf.

Verse 5 says:

“Ye have lived in pleasure on the earth, and been wanton; ye have nourished your hearts, as in a day of slaughter.”

The third charge is that they are living an indulgent, immoral, comfortable lifestyle. They've pampered themselves. Fattened themselves up.

It's actually a word picture here of a fatted calf, who would be kept away from the work and fed and pampered until it was good and fat and then killed for a party or special event.

James is saying that if you keep treating yourself like the fatted calf you are going to get slain like one. Bad things are coming.

Let me diverge here and just say, we live in such a pampered, comfortable age. Most of you would flip out if your house was a few degrees off of 69 in the summer or 72 in the winter. Most of you eat out at restaurants several times a week. Most of us do very little actual cooking, not compared to people in times past, we buy meals at the grocery store that basically just get heated up.

I was watching the Jetsons a few months ago and Jane Jetson was standing at this giant bank of buttons just pressing a button to make a meal, pressing a button to clean the floor, pressing a button to dust the furniture. And she turns to George and she says "This housework is too much, I need a maid.” We aren't too far off of that.

Imagine if we could take someone from the 1800s and drop them into today. They wouldn't believe how easy you have it. Yet we complain and complain.

There is this scene in the movie Wall-e that I think is one of the most prophetic and condemning things I've ever scene. They show all the people up in space and they are all living on these "peoplemovers” where everything they want is taken care of for them by technology. They can't even walk on their own.

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Listen, it shouldn't be your goal in life to just be comfortable and pleasurable all of the time. To minimize difficulty and work. To live in constant pleasure. Unfortunately, all of us can be guilty of that.

James wants us to remember that if you live like a stalled calf - comfortable and kept from all hardship - you might meet the fatted calf’s end - slaughter.

So 3 charges so far James has brought against these rich men:

• They’ve invested in the wrong things.
• They’ve cheated their workers.
• They’ve lived like an indulgent fatted calf.

There is one more charge James brought against them:

4. They were acting like the people who put Jesus on the cross.

Look at verse 6 - James says:

”Ye have condemned and killed the just; and he doth not resist you.”

This is a tricky verse to interpret, because James is speaking to people in the church. He’s speaking to Christians. Almost nobody thinks that James is actually accusing these church-members of murder here.

So what is James saying? I think what He’s saying points back to when the Pharisees and Sadducees - all rich men like these guys - were trying Jesus, they knew they were dealing with a just man. But they let him be railroaded. They let him be condemned anyway.

Why? It was the path of least resistance. They didn’t want to ruffle feathers. They didn’t want to hurt their business.

Probably there were poor believers in their church who were being persecuted by their rich friends, and rather than sticking up for them they were keeping their mouths shut so they didn’t lose their country club memberships.