How to Study the Book of James in Five Sittings

James is short, practical and slightly uncomfortable, which makes it one of the best books to study when you want something you can finish.

Five sittings will take you through all of it. Give each one about thirty minutes and read the passage twice before you write anything down. Psalm 119:11 gives the reason for a plan like this one. I have hidden your word in my heart, that I might not sin against you. Hidden is a storage word. Five sittings is not really about finishing James, it is about having some of it on hand months later.

Sitting One: James 1:1 to 1:18

This is the trials passage, and it opens the whole letter. James says to count it joy when you meet various trials, which is either offensive or freeing depending on the week you have had.

Read it looking for what testing is said to produce. James 1:5 sits in the middle of it, offering wisdom to anyone who asks, and that offer is the hinge of the paragraph.

Write down one trial you are in the middle of, and one thing you would ask for if you believed that verse.

Sitting Two: James 1:19 to 2:13

Hearing and doing, then favoritism. These belong together because both are about the gap between what we say we believe and how we behave in a room.

The mirror image in the first half is the one to sit with. A person looks at himself, walks away, and forgets what he looked like.

Ask a plain question here. Where do I know exactly what to do and have not done it yet? That is the whole passage in one sentence.

Sitting Three: James 2:14 to 2:26

Faith and works, the passage people argue about. Read it slowly before you decide it is a problem.

James is not arguing against faith. He is arguing against a faith that never shows up anywhere, and his test is a person with no coat and no dinner standing in front of you.

Note who is nearby that this applies to. He means an actual person you could name.

Sitting Four: James 3:1 to 4:12

The tongue, two kinds of wisdom, and where quarrels come from. This is the longest sitting and the most searching.

Track one thread through all of it. James keeps tying what comes out of the mouth to what is going on underneath, and by the end he has named it plainly as wanting things.

Write down one conversation from the last month you would handle differently. Be specific about what you would say instead.

Sitting Five: James 4:13 to 5:20

Plans, wealth, patience and prayer. The letter ends with a farmer waiting for rain and a church praying over someone sick.

This is where James stops pressing and starts comforting, which is easy to miss if you read the book as nothing but a list of demands.

Finish by reading the last five verses out loud. They are about going after someone who has wandered, and it is a gentler ending than the letter had led you to expect.

After the Fifth Sitting

Go back and read the whole letter in one sitting. It takes about fifteen minutes and it will hold together in a way it could not while you were working through the parts.

Then pick one thing. James would want that more than a full set of notes. Open to chapter one this week and begin.