Happy birthday to you.

to you. Thank you so much.

The answer to the question you're too polite to ask is 45.

I am 45 years old and if you had told me that on my 45th birthday I would have the rare gift of doing this twice in one day. I wouldn't have believed it, but I'm so grateful. I would not spend my birthday any other way.

Well, that's not entirely true. I do also intend to spend it not cooking and a few other things but this

is a great way to start it so thank you. Also I think my family was like oh man she's

going to be so busy all day long we're not going to have to bring our A game until the weekend.

So everybody ended up winning.

It was good.

So this week, we got to take a look at a pretty uncomfortable topic. Temptation, something that we are all susceptible to and

something that we need to be educated on if we're going to stand any chance of getting any

better at dealing with it. But let's back up for just a second and put ourselves

where we need to be in this book by taking a look at what we talked about in the last

weeks leading up to this. We talked about how the book of James was one in which James wants us to

understand the marks of genuine faith, not so that we can turn to our neighbor and

say are you for real or not, but so that we can look at ourselves and and ask do we look like maturing believers

because the people that James were addressing were not maturing believers not

because they were lazy or slow but because the church was brand new and so he's pointing out to them

this is what you should be moving toward and he's faithfully doing so and each

week he's going to tell us something else that is a mark of genuine belief.

And so last week we learned a mark of genuine belief, a water mark,

as I showed you on the $20 bill, something that we can tell the difference

...