Be a Simple Kind of Man

The pastor closed out the study of James on Mother's Day by drawing a straight line between the book's direct, loving commands and the kind of advice a good mother gives. The sermon moved through the final passage of James alongside a few unexpected companions: Linda Sue McDaniel, and Lynyrd Skynyrd's "Simple Man."

What was said

the pastor opened by noting that James 5:13-20 is built from imperatives, as the whole book has been, and that those imperatives fall into four categories: encouragement, exhortation, warning, and challenge. He realized that list sounded familiar. It sounded exactly like his mother, Linda Sue McDaniel, who he described as five feet tall, all love, and always ready with an encouraging word no matter how hard that word might be.

Working through the passage, he pointed out that James puts the responsibility on the person who is hurting or sick to act. If you are suffering, pray. If you are cheerful, sing psalms. If you are sick, call the elders. That last one struck him as worth sitting with: James does not say wait for someone else to arrange a visit. He says let the sick person call. The elders will come, they will pray, they will anoint with oil, and the prayer of a righteous person, as the ESV puts it, has great power as it is working.

He then introduced the musical thread that had been running through his mind all week. "Simple Man" by Lynyrd Skynyrd kept looping because of something specific in its chord structure. The song uses the one, four, and six chords but never resolves to the five. It sits in a kind of unfinished tension, a minor chord that never fully lands.

He played through the song's verses and mapped them onto James almost line by line. The mother's opening instruction to sit down and listen echoed James's call to be swift to hear, slow to speak, slow to wrath. The warning to forget lust for the rich man's gold sat directly next to James's rebuke of favoritism toward the wealthy and contempt for the poor. The repeated refrain to be a simple kind of man, to love what you understand and not chase the things of this world, ran parallel to James's consistent pressure against double-mindedness and worldliness.

The unresolved chord was the point. The song never settles because the young man's life is the resolution. Whether he takes his mother's advice or not is what determines whether the music finally lands. The pastor said the same is true of James. The book is full of good, direct, loving counsel, and it only resolves in a person's life if that person actually takes it.

He offered a word of care to anyone who reads James and finds it only condemning. He said to back up and look at what is being ignored, because the Holy Spirit is sent to convict of sin and convince of God's righteousness, not to leave believers under condemnation. James is not beating anyone down. He is spurring people on toward a simple, active, God-directed faith, the same way a good mother does.

He closed with a challenge to let their lives be that fifth chord, the note that causes a mother's advice, and James's advice, to finally resolve. For those who did not have a loving earthly mother who gave that kind of counsel, he pointed back to the Bible itself as the place where the same voice can be found.