In this episode, you’ll also hear:
James came to Christ at the age of 16, when he encountered Jesus as soon as he raised his hand to answer an altar call. “Jesus actually came to me in His glory state and touched me on my head, and then disappeared — gone. And then I just blew up with joy. I knew he saved me.”
From that moment on, James tried his best to follow God’s commands. However, even though people around James saw the positive change in his life, he had no discipleship or training. Over time, the excitement and joy faded.
“Moses came down from the mountain just glowing,” he explains. “And that’s how our hearts are when we accept Christ. Then life comes in, and the glow goes away. We don’t need to cover the glow anymore; it becomes dim and sometimes gone. Mine went, too.”
Realizing he was sitting on the fence — neither hot nor cold in his faith — James decided to walk away. Instead of dedicating his life to obeying God’s commands, he focused on becoming a successful businessman. He started out in carpentry, and then eventually started up his own development business. And for a while he was very successful. But it didn’t last. When a new technology complex drove interest rates to skyrocket, James lost everything.
With nowhere else to turn, James turned back to Jesus. “I gave my heart back to Jesus and said, ‘I'm going to try, but I don't know how to do this,’” he recalls. As he started a family and moved from California to Iowa, James started studying, learning, and — as he’d promised — trying to obey God’s commands.
When James first received the idea to write his book, The Four Commands of Christ: Disciplines of Faith, he had no idea how to go about actually writing it. “I knew God wanted me to do something with this, but I didn't know what it was,” he says. “So I started emailing all the pastors I knew.”
That still didn’t seem to lead anywhere, until one night James received a much clearer understanding of God’s commands, broken down into four basic commands from Christ:
James explains that many churches aren’t following God’s commands to love and forgive each other as they should. As a result, people who aren’t part of the church don’t want anything to do with it. Instead of seeing changed lives and miracles, they’re seeing Christians fighting each other and forgetting to show love.
As for the fourth command, “Go,” James believes this is something Christians must do every day, no matter how qualified or unqualified we may feel. The problem, however, is that Satan is very skilled at giving us excuses not to share the Gospel as we go along in life.
“The weeds come up and choke us out so we don't do anything,” James says. “And we just go to church, and we're good people. We're Christians, and we do good. But God wants more for us. He doesn't want just that — he wants a better, deeper relationship.”
As James has seen in his own life, our ability to follow God’s commands and share the Gospel doesn’t rely on our own qualifications. God is the one who qualifies us — our job is to listen and obey when He calls us.
The way James explains God’s commands in his book is very simple and direct, even though the commands themselves aren’t necessarily easy to follow. T