Jesus was rejected by his hometown.  They knew him as a citizen, not as the Messiah.  You remember that Jesus said, "...no prophet is accepted in his hometown."  Luke 4:24.  And yet, James came to believe Jesus was the Messiah, even when most of the people in Nazareth rejected Jesus.

James was the leader of the church in Jerusalem.  The other disciples looked to James for guidance.  When you read the four short pages that James wrote, you can't help but be amazed at how many verses will be familiar to you.  Verses you learned as a child, or along the way.

Verses that reflect his strong unfailing faith in the God of the Jews.  Such as when he said, "Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and comes down from the Father of Lights, with whom there there is no variableness, neither shadow of turning."  (The most perfect of all the gifts being God's Son, Jesus.)  James had an abiding faith in the goodness of Jehovah.

James' strongest message in his letter was on the point of Christian identification.  He said over and over again that the way you are proven to be a Christian is by the works that you do.  No other writer drives that statement home like James does.  He says with authority, "What does it profit my brothers, if a man says he has faith, and doesn't have works? Even so faith, if it doesn't have works, is dead, being alone."  He is saying--in the most forceful words of all the disciples--that faith will produce good works.  Faith first, works as a result.

One of his most memorable verses concerns what faith in Christ doesn't mean.  It isn't simply believing that Jesus is God's son.  James says cheap belief is not enough:  "You believe that there is one God; you do well: the devils also believe, and tremble."  And the devil certainly isn't a Christian.

Read James.  It can be done in ten to fifteen minutes.  He is blunt.  Concise.  Demanding more of his reader than the other disciples do in their letters.  He is a, "Where the rubber meets the road" kind of guy.