The latest New Zealand water safety advert about life jackets I think is very much like
James argument about faith and works in the passage we had read out to us
today…
The advert
is designed to counter a false understanding about life jackets. That if you’ve
got one in the boat with you, you’ll be OK. But the add asks ‘ what good does
it do you if you just say you’ve got one on-board with you, if it do not take action and put it
on you ? Will it save you?James is countering a false teaching that you can claim
to have a saving faith in God and not have it change how you live. You can
confess faith in God and not show the compassion of God. What good is it to
claim to have faith if it doesn’t result in faith deeds? Can such a faith save
you?
My friend
Nick was a police officer, and he tells the story of going to a manufacturer’s
demonstration for bullet proof vests. The officers were shown the science
behind the vest, shown video of it being tested, shown testimony of police men
whose lives had been saved by wearing the vest, they tried them on to see that
they were wearable…and then they were taken to a shooting range and physically
shown the vest stopping a bullet. I think they even got to shot off a few
rounds at the vests. Then the person running the demonstration asked them if
they believed the vest could stop a bullet? And they said yes, yes they did…
The manufacturer then asked them again if they really believed it could stop a
bullet were they convinced. Yes they
were all convinced… he then asked who was going first who was going to be
first to put on the vest on walk down
the range and take a bullet. Nick said there was stone silence, no one moved,
no one volunteered. Their faith had to
go beyond the theoretical into the practical.
James tells
a different story to illustrate this point, challenging the same issue he has focused on all the way through letter so far. Imagine if one of us comes to
church, dressed in rags, cloths that are full of holes, ill-fitting and in need
of a wash… and it’s not that they were a Punk rockers from way back… its winter
and they are freezing in their thin threadbare garments. You can simply tell
that they haven’t had a good meal, or any meal for that matter for a while,
they are gaunt, and under nourished. After the service, as you are putting on
your coat and heading home to a cooked lunch, you greet them with a God bless
you, go in peace, have a good life… but they go away cold and hungry what good
is it? Faith has to go beyond the theoretical into the practical, real living
faith goes beyond the confession to compassion, or as James brutally puts it
Faith without works is dead.
And that’s
challenging stuff; it really gets down to the core of our Christian faith
doesn’t it? It’s so challenging that this passage has been seen as one of the
most controversial passages in the New Testament. Historically people have seen
James as contradicting Paul’s assertion that we are justified by faith, apart
from the law: That we are made right with God by faith alone not by our
works. Does James say you can earn your
salvation by good works? Historically it is the passage that caused Martin
Luther to want to write the book of James out of the scriptures, writing it off
as an epistle of straw. Something you couldn’t use to build the church. In my
own life I find it challenging as well as I wonder if my faith causes me to be
loving and compassionate or am I finding myself simply squeezed into the
selfish consumer lifestyle so prevalent in our society, maybe just with a bit
of Jesus sprinkles on top. You know how plain white bread used to get
transformed into party food by having hundreds and thousands on top.
Firstly I
need to affirm that we are saved by the grace of God. By the loving action of
God in Jesus Christ, and putting our trust and faith in what Christ has done
for us on the cross. A couple of weeks
ago we looked at James teaching on
temptation and we say in chapter 1 verse 17-18 that James tells us that even
good gift comes from God, that it is God who chose to give us birth through the
word of truth. Just like Paul James believes that it is because of Christ and
what Christ has done for us that we are put right with God. But James does not
stop there he goes on to say that God is at work in us to bring that new life
to maturity and fullness as well. To
make us the first fruit of all creation, that is why we can count it all joy as
we face all kinds of trial because God is able to use it to make our faith
mature. A living faith grows and bears
fruit, has a harvest.
The nature
of the New Testament epistles are that they are occasional, written to a
particular context. One of the background factors for Paul is he is writing to
a predominantly gentile audience and part of the back ground to this is that he
has had to wrestle with a faction within the church who say to be followers of
Jesus you must keep the Jewish Law… Be circumcised, offer sacrifices and Paul
is writing to correct that. In Acts 15 James at the council of Jerusalem
affirms that gentiles do not need to be circumcised to be Christian. But he
also affirms that there is an ethical side to faith in Christ: They do need to
care for the poor, avoid food sacrificed to idols and sexual immorality. What James
is writing about seems to be another false understanding of faith. His audience
is predominantly Jewish and as we saw with the idea of favouritism last week
and in James encouragement that true religion is to show compassion and not to
be polluted by this world, they maybe had gone the other way and thrown the
baby out with the bath water. Done away
with any ethical teaching…That it was simply all about holding to a certain
doctrine or belief.
That to
James is not faith. In fact he says what is different between you and the
demons or evil spirits. They just like you, says James, believe that God is
one. That was the Jewish confession the shema
from Deuteronomy 5. ‘ Hear O Israel the Lord you God is one God’, that was to
be nailed to the door of every Jewish household. For the Christian to believe
that God is one or that there is one God is an affirmation of the deity of
Jesus Christ, which would have differentiated them from Judaism. In fact he then has a real go at his opponents
by saying that even the demons act their belief in God causes them to shudder.
They are filled with fear. Some
commentators wonder if this isn’t a reference to deliverance ministry and James
is saying that the demons flee at the name of Jesus what do you do?
Both Paul
and James believe that real genuine faith results in loving action. In
Galatians 5;6 Paul finishes a discussion
about salvation and the law by saying that being circumcised or not in accordance to the law has no value it is
only faith in Jesus Christ. Then he goes on to say, ‘The only thing that counts
is faith being expressed in love’. Last week we saw James talking about the
royal law, the fact that Jesus had summed up the whole law in the two
commandments love the lord your God and love your neighbour as yourself, and in
this passage he is saying that this royal law should be a natural outworking in
our lives. In the parable of the sheep
and the goats Jesus says ‘not every one who calls me Lord, Lord will enter the
kingdom of God, but if you do this for these little ones you do it for me… To
have faith in Jesus, to put your trust in the compassion of Jesus is to show
that compassion to others. At the end of
the Sermon on the Mount Jesus had said “by your fruit you will know them”, and
here James says well without fruit I guess we can see that the tree is
dead. It is not that our works earn us
God’s favour or we must do them to please God but they come out of the love we
have known, the mercy we have received, in
Christ.
Then James
gives two examples from the Old Testament of people of faith and shows how that
faith was demonstrated in their deeds: Abraham and Rahab. In choosing these
two, James, includes all his listeners, men and women, Jew and Gentile,
esteemed patriarch who had believed and trusted God for all his life, and the
prostitute who comes to believe in God.
It is easy
in the Abraham example to think that James is associating Abraham’s offering
his son Isaac on the altar as the reason he was declared righteous. But the quote from scripture here ‘Abraham
believed God, and it was credited to his as righteousness’ come from genesis 15
not the story of the offering Isaac in Genesis 18. In Genesis 15God makes a
covenant with Abraham, saying he will have a son even in his old age. Abraham’s
faith was that he believed in the promise of God even before Isaac was born and
then was prepared to live trusting God to keep his covenant faithfulness, even
to the point that he was willing to offer his son Isaac up as an offering. Jews
consider this act as the last great test of Abraham’s faith.
Likewise
Rahab the prostitute who is counted as one of Jesus and thus James ancestors in
Matthew gospel is seen as an example of faith. She believed
the message of the spies who came to Jericho that Israel’s God was the true
God, and because of that she was willing to show hospitality to the Israelite
spies and protected them from death and helped them escape. She is then saved
from being killed in Jericho and welcomed into the family of Israel.
How do we
apply all this to our lives today?
I think it
is easy to fall into one of two traps.
The trap of
legalism and feel that you must do good things to earn God’s favour, if that is
how you feel and think, it is good to hear again the words of James who calls
the gospel ‘the law that brings freedom’.
God loves you, God sent his son Jesus Christ into this world for you,
and invites you to come to him and be made new, to find love and wholeness in
knowing and serving him, it is a free gift. A gift to be shared in loving other
people out of the abundance of what God has done for us.
The second
trap is what Dietrich Bonhoeffer calls ‘cheap grace’ to simply see faith in
Christ as a confession of belief in a set of facts or a system or a family or
cultural tradition. Maybe even to go forward at an altar call or be confirmed
without realising that it is a costly call to follow Christ. It is not simply a
get out of jail free card to be squirreled away under the board till you need
it. But an invitation to a life following and imitating Christ. Cheap grace is
grace without the cross… Dietrich Bonhoeffer called the faith that James was
talking about ‘costly grace’, for him it was a go to jail card. He learned the
joy of following Jesus by loving and caring for others, including his captures,
in a Nazi prison.
Lastly it is
a call to action. Maybe it’s as simple as taking the life jacket off the hanger
and putting it on… Faith is knowing the grace and the love of God in Jesus
Christ and showing the grace and love of God in Jesus Christ by caring for the
least and the lost…is not about Pleasant Pious Platitudes and cosy confessions
and creeds, It is more about Practical provision for the poor and care and
compassion for those who need consolation.
Seeing the needs around us and going and meeting those needs trusting in
God to take care of us and to provide what is needed. Our faith calls us out into our community city
and world with the love and compassion of Jesus to be about meeting real needs
in Christ.
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