Genuine Faith: James 1:22,26-27, James 2:1:4
“And remember, it is a message to obey, not just to listen to. If you do not obey, you are only fooling yourself.” James 1:22 (NLT)
I came back to this verse because it set the tone on living a Christian life. That we do more than just listen to the preacher and go home and forget what we have been taught is not what being a follower of the Way is all about. To read the Bible and memorize verses does nothing to change your life if you fail to make changes in your presumption of living the Word by contrition or change.
We must obey the word in every aspect of our lives. We must be the example of Christ, the imitators of Jesus and give by example the lessons that we are taught. As I listen to my friends, slander others, tell falsehoods and spread rumours, I cringe and forcibly tell them that they are wrong and are harming themselves by their own words. When I hear Christians telling others that because someone walks with Christ in another church than they do, that the dogmas of the other church is vaguely different from theirs, that the other is not of Christ, I want to ask them who appointed them the Holy Spirit. I wonder, where are their works? The words from their mouths say that they do not know God as well as they claim. They show no compassion, no mercy and little Love as Jesus proscribes it. When there is no encouragement, no mercy and no sharing of love, they live as if all you have to do is say, “I believe” to make it so.
“How can you claim that you have faith in our Glorious Lord Jesus Christ if you favor some people over others?” (James 2:1) How can you claim to be religious if by your own voice you condemn others who truly love the LORD our God. Your voice should be a tool of Faith and not an opera of evil. It should sooth the beast rather than anger the hearer. It is to be a spark that starts the warm fire of the Spirit of God rather than burn down the Forest of Unity. Why at this time, do Christian leaders spend so much energy speaking down on others, rather than lifting the members up? Do they really understand the Walk of Holiness that Jesus set us upon by His death?
But pure religion is based on how we treat each other, not on how many verses we can memorize. It is how we refuse to let the World corrupt us. It is to easy to allow sin to enter into our lives because we say things that the world wants us to say rather than listen to the voice of Reason, the Voice of God. We need to keep our “tongue on guard” so as to prevent ourselves from speaking by our emotions rather than the true spirit of the Word. We need to accentuate the positive, mitigate the negative, and resolve to do good and to speak good at all times. we need to let our words be the call to action for the good and not to deny, belittle or disrespect others.
Then there are the areas of bias and favoritism. Do we avoid certain people just because they are “different” or because their financial, social or race are other than our own? Have we failed to be a part of their lives because they come from the “wrong part of Town” or because they dress in strange clothes? Do we avoid talking to the young people because they have brightly coloured hair and dark clothing? Or is it the other way around, do we stay away from the older people because we “don’t relate” to them? Is it important for us to stay with our own kind, or the “important” people of the church or the community? These questions are put to us by James as he shows that the Jewish Christians maintained the attitudes of the priest in the temple who rejected the tax collectors and the publicans and the widows in Jerusalem.
There is another kind of bias, the kind that says we talk with nobody, we just go to church and sit in the pews and say nothing, do nothing and go home. Those who never greet anybody, who have few friends and don’t seem to want any. Or then there are those who speak only to a few freinds and make no effort to be a part of the church or any of its missions. Those who are nothing more than a Sunday Christian who think that that is all they have to do.
These questions we need to ask ourselves. I am not a member of any church right now, but visit many. I notice that even in a church that I have visited several times, at least twice a month for the last year, I am not greeted as a friend but only in a cold, disinterested way. I still even after a year feel like a stranger and not even a trusted one. Yet in this church I feel a closeness of Jesus and a love that is of God. The teachings warm my heart and encourage me. The leadership of this church is good and the example of the pastor is a prime example of the teaching of James. I just wish the members of the church where as welcoming as the pastor.
One time many years ago, a visiting missionary from a third world county visited a church I knew dressed in the clothing of the average person of the town he shared the Gospel in. This was a poor town of uneducated people who couldn’t even read. He made no announcement of his coming, although the pastor knew who he was. He just sat in the back of the church. Of a congregation of over 250 people, only three greeted him. Nobody even gave him a bulletin or offered to sit with him. When it came time to introduce him to the congregation and he stood up from the back and came forward, the congregation was shocked! He spoke elegantly of the people he ministered to and the congregation was shamed by their indifference. The mission giving increased greatly and there was an influx of greeting and social fellowship. In a few years, the membership of the church more than doubled.
What was his message? it was on James 2:2-4. I was not a member of that church, but the pastor shared the story with me. He said that he knew the people he loved, had no love for others. He had planned it. The attitude of his church should have never happened.
I also remember when my wife and I would go into the poorest section of our town and load up our station wagon with as many as a dozen kids and bring them to Sunday School and Worship Service. For many of these children, it was the only exposure to Jesus and the Word of the Bible. We kept it up for several years, but when we moved away, nobody bothered to see about these children. Even though several people drove right by that section of town, nobody would stop and see if any of these kids wanted to come to church.
Several years later, I went back to the park where I had first met some of these young people and those who still lived there thanked me for taking them to know Jesus. They told me that there was an old lady who came to the park on Saturdays and told bible stories to the little ones but nobody knew what church she belonged to. They said that the only Church in the neighbor told them not to bother coming to church because they were “the wrong kind of people”.
When I think of how my grandfather drove an old Model A Ford miles each Sunday to preach the Good News at two Churches in rural Coastal California eighty years ago, and how people who a hundred years ago lived in this Desert Valley and the mountains that surround it, would leave their homes on Saturday just to get to the only church for fifty mile around for Sunday worship, I cry that these children were refused the Word because they were “the wrong kind”.
Where was the pure region that James spoke of? When the rich feel entitlement of ther wealth and reject the poor and the labourers in the fields, Jesus is not there. When the powerful feel they are justified in taking from the widows and the weak, there is no love of God. When those who control the purse strings of the church feel that new sound systems are more important than caring for the homeless and the elderly, God has left the building. We need to address these distortions of Faith, these lies that tell us that God will take care of them, we don’t have to, or that they deserve to be abused and neglected because Jesus said we will always have the poor among us. Let us remember that the wealth we gain is not of this world but of the heavenly places. We serve a righteous God who looks upon the neglect of the needy as an affront upon Him. As you have done unto the least of mine, you have done unto me is the words that Jesus told in the parable.
We serve Christ best when we serve each other in His name and because of His Love. I want to close this with the lesson we learn from James. I have not finished with the subject It still deals with the effort we put into the works of our hand for the Glory of God. But James put this line in his letter that we could spend time examining our hearts to know how we must change ourselves in order that we become doers of the word. “Doesn’t this discrimination show that you are guided by wrong motive?” (James 2:4)
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