Tim Keller, Pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church,
has this good article regarding the importance of being missional.

http://www.redeemer2.com/resources/papers/missional.pdf

In his lectures regading the emerging chruch (www.christwaymedia.com), D. A. Carson recommends Tim Keller and Redeemer Presbyterian Church as a model for doing post-modern Christian work.  See also Keller's work on preaching in a post-modern city, part 1 and part 2.

Here are some thoughts I wrote for a 'devotional' for our church called the Word Interact.  I have introduced this before, but right now we are going through a series on James, and these are some thoughts on this passage that I published for the people involved to consider regarding this passage.

Why do we endure the pain of surgery?  Isn't it funny that we pay doctors to do to us, what we would call torture given a different circumstance?  I once asked a friend why he waiting so long to get a hip replacement.  He replied with a smirk, "Because they cut your leg off, lay it on a table, and then reattach it.  That just didn't sound pleasant to me."  So why would we ever pay someone a great deal of money to put us through such horrible ordeals?  How is it that we got tricked into paying doctors to do us pain?

 

Well, we really didn't get tricked, we came to realize that sometimes to heal one point of pain, we must create pain in another area.  The pain that an expert physician causes is similar to God's pain.  We don't consider physicians to be barbarians, though we pay them to do some seemingly barbaric work.  In a similar way, we are called on by James to consider the pain in our lives as pure joy.

 

James reminds us that trials, sufferings, and pain are useful tools in God's hand.  The pain and trials in our lives are not outside of God's control, rather it is God who is using these hurtful people and painful events, so that those who bear the name of Jesus will become ultimately mature and complete, not lacking anything. 

Thus, the appearance of trials and sufferings mean for the Christian that God is not yet done with his work of perseverance.  When a trial comes our way we tend to believe that God is against us, we doubt his goodness, we believe we are abandoned.  But James reminds us that our trials cannot be used as evidence for the non-goodness of God.  Rather, trials mean that there is some area in our lives that is not yet complete or whole.  What God is doing, then, is using trials to form us, purify us, to grow us up.

 

This is why Christians consider trials as pure joy.  We are not masochists, loving pain in and of itself.  Rather, we consider our trials pure joy, because God is a good surgeon, who will use the difficulties to make us 'mature, and complete, not lacking anything' (v. 4).

Here is an online presentation of 'kingdom of God' as a 'tract' for evangelism.  This is good!

http://www.sok.org.uk/

Okay, I know some might think that this is a lame post, since it deals with a previous post, but I am going to do it anyway.  Well, I haven't posted in sometime, I've been gone, etc.  So I want to re-recommend Carson's talks on Suffering to be found here:
http://www.denverseminary.edu/worship/media.php

These two lectures are great!  I highly recommend them!  I just listened on my iPod, while I was driving.  These lectures are very helpful for giving big structures for understanding the 'problem of evil'.

Again, listen to these!