So, Stormy and I were recently talking about, let’s call it a pattern that we have noticed in the world. It seems to us that there are some phrases that people use in describing themselves that often suggest that maybe the exact opposite of what they’re saying is true. Let me give you a couple examples, the first ones that come to mind for me. First is one that I’m sure you’ve heard before.
Someone will say, I’m the nicest person you’ll ever meet. I would say, in my experience, that someone does not need to say that if they are in fact the nicest person you’ll ever meet because we all notice and there wouldn’t be any question to respond to. They would just be nice, right? No need to point it out and actually I’ll be the judge as to whether or not you’re the nicest person I’ve ever met. Thank you very much.
Another prime example, kind of like that. I don’t have a racist bone in my body. Something of that nature, you hear that sometimes. And again, the fact that someone feels the need to express that implies that maybe the sentiment is not entirely truthful.
After all, all of us are prone to prejudice against people who are different than ourselves. And the real question is not whether we’ve got a touch of racism, sexism, homophobia, whatever, but whether you’re trying to be better, right? So these phrases and these words and others like them are used whenever there’s a disconnect between what we’d like to believe about ourselves and what we’d like others to believe about ourselves and the reality of what we’re visibly living out in our day-to-day lives. And this is called, as you may know, cognitive dissonance. It’s when we believe one thing and we live another.
There’s that gap there. And when we find ourselves in a situation like that, it’s very mentally and spiritually uncomfortable. It can even be kind of painful. We don’t like the feeling of being something that’s different than our values, our morality.
And so we find ways to sort of bend around our reality, to justify ourselves, to kind of alleviate that pain of the discomfort. And so we insist things are true that aren’t actually true about us in order to try to make ourselves feel better. But to anybody on the outside, any kind of objective observer, the truth is pretty often easy to see. You know, you’re not actually the nicest person in the world, for example.
You do have one or maybe many racist bones in your body. Your behavior, despite identifying as a Christian, is not recognizably Christian, even as you claim to believe in Jesus, right? And so on. You get what I’m saying here. The book of James, more than almost any other book in the New Testament, is focusing on eliminating the gap between identity on one hand and action within the body of Christ.
James’s entire thesis, if you might say, can be summed up in the second chapter, which is in our reading next week, in verse 26. As a lifeless body is dead, so faith without actions is dead. The more familiar translation you might know is faith without works is dead. So James is fighting against the notion that you or I can somehow be a Christian in our heart but not be one in our outward living.
I believe in Jesus is not a particularly meaningful statement, and I would say it’s actually kind of a harmful one, if you are not striving to act like Jesus in all your being. And by being, I mean that in two senses. You know, the depths of who you are. Are you like Jesus from the inside out? But also you are like being, how you exist in the world.
Because our belief in Jesus is inseparable from action, or else it becomes kind of an open question as to whether we actually believe in him at all. Now we tend to view believing, this idea of belief, as simply accepting something in your mind. You know, someone tells you a story, and yeah, I believe that, right? Or you could say, we all have our own beliefs and opinions, and so on. But that’s not what believing in Jesus is.
It’s not a belief in the same way that an opinion is a belief. Believing in Jesus isn’t an opinion. I wish we had a better word in English for it. The word discipleship comes to mind as like kind of better.
But James here, in this chapter, refers to the belief in Christ as the implanted word that has the power to save your souls. That’s what we have in and from Jesus. And that’s a much more powerful thing than just saying, yeah, I believe in Jesus without anything behind it. There are beliefs that you can have that can remain abstract.
You could say, oh, I believe in aliens, right? That’s abstract. That’s detached from your daily living. It doesn’t require anything of you besides like, I think in my brain that I believe that. But faith in Jesus, believing in Jesus, costs something.
You should be able to feel that you are doing things or not doing things differently than you would be if you weren’t a Christian person. Maybe the best way to think about belief in Jesus is as an embodied belief. That’s the word that kept coming to mind. An embodied belief.
It’s not one that sticks in your head, but it’s one that dictates how you physically move through the world, especially in how you act and how you speak. If you believe in Jesus, that faith cannot just be in your mind. It can’t just be in your heart, but it should move your body. We hear from Paul in Ephesians that the body of Christ, the church, should be moved by Christ as the head.
This is the same deal. The faith that’s in your head should be moving your body. And so the absolute minimum cost of belief, of discipleship, is self-control, which is where James starts. James starts very basic here.
James speaks to things that I think we all, hopefully, know that we should be doing. And I think what he starts with is especially interesting. He starts with, Be quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow also to grow angry. These are the fundamentals of Christian behavior because, I think, they’re crucial for living as a community.
James is talking to the church as a community. Jesus and the early disciples were, like we are, forming a community in the form of the church. And we can’t really do that very well if, every time there’s a disagreement, it turns into a shouting match where no one’s actually listening to each other and/or if someone just walks away. You can’t really build on that.
And so the first thing is that you have to be slow to anger, quick to listen. We just can’t operate otherwise. Not as a community. You can’t operate that way as a family or in a marriage.
You can’t operate that way as a church. If you’re quick to anger, slow to listen, and just walk away when things get hard, it doesn’t work. And the same way, James goes on, an angry person doesn’t produce God’s righteousness because they’re just driving people apart. You cannot build something in that space.
James continues on after that that humility is important, and that’s for similar reasons too. If you’re not humble, you’re not open to being wrong. You’re not open to correction from God or from other people. And where do you go from there? You can’t build.
Wickedness will grow. Moral filth, in James’ words in the CEB. If out of pride we have no interest in exposing ourselves to the light that allows the seed of God to grow within us. And James points to another big one too.
If those who claim devotion to God don’t control what they say, they mislead themselves. Again, speaking malicious division or discouragement or hopelessness is fundamentally incompatible with what Jesus is doing in us and in the world. All the stuff that James is talking about too is mandatory. Like this isn’t a suggestion, this is mandatory.
Believing in Jesus must result in the transformation of our behavior to this kind of humility, gentleness, self-control, patience, peacefulness. Now we as Protestants, especially, have always had trouble with this idea of mandatory behavior as Christians. We inherit the Protestant Reformation skepticism of the Catholic Church. And in the 1500s when Protestantism arose, there was this idea that the Catholic Church based salvation on our works, you know, what we’re doing to earn salvation.
That was a fair criticism of the Catholic Church in the 1500s. There’s a famous Protestant slogan from the beginning, Sola Fide, you’ve heard this before, by faith alone. That’s the way that we’re saved, by faith alone. And that is totally accurate.
We are saved by faith in Christ, but it has been interpreted in kind of a convenient way because it helps us to get off the hook if we interpret it to mean that the only thing required us is that thinking kind of belief in Jesus. No, belief in Jesus, again, inherently leads to action, or else it’s something less than a real faith. It’s not our effort at being good or doing these things that James says that saves us, but God’s grace, but we still got to do them, right? And today in the year 2024, we’re to the point where identifying as a Christian, particularly in the Western world, in America and Europe, is completely detached from what we actually do with our lives. This year, there was a survey that found that over 40% of the people who call themselves evangelical Christians go to worship once a year or less.
And so if we don’t live out our faith in even the simplest of ways, what are we doing? What does it mean to believe in Jesus in some way that’s more than just in our head? And this is a very severe issue now. It has been in and out of Christian history. In the 1700s, John Wesley loved the book of James for this reason. Martin Luther hated the book of James, incidentally, but John Wesley loved it.
And he turned to it in his preaching and his writing all the time. He called it the great antidote to antinomianism, big word there, but it’s just another name for the idea that you can be a Christian without any particular standard for your behavior. He gave a famous sermon in 1744 at St. Mary’s Church in Oxford.
It got him banned from preaching there forever. And this is what he said to his congregation that was made up largely of pastors, of theologians, of really big name Christian people. He said, So many of you are a generation of triflers, triflers with God, with one another, and with your own souls. For how few of you spend from one week to another a single hour in private prayer? How few have any thought of God in the general tenor of your conversation? Who of you is in any degree acquainted with the work of his spirit, his supernatural work in the souls of men? Can you bear, unless now and then in church, any talk of the Holy Ghost? In the name of the Lord God Almighty, I ask, what religion are you of? He’s asking the very same question that James is asking, the one that’s being posed to us as we read James today.
Are we doers of the word of God or just hearers? Is your faith safely tucked away in your head? You know, I get this image of this pristine, fresh Bible that’s sitting on a side table collecting dust, right? Or is your faith embodied in your day-to-day living? Is your life, your week, even your Sunday afternoon, any different for having gone to church today to hear the word of God? Is your life recognizably different than your non-Christian neighbors? Are you kinder, more forgiving, more charitable, more loving? Are you more generous with your time and money? Does our church operate any differently than a secular business or organization in the world? And if you feel the Holy Spirit pulling on you right now, as James points all of this out, and I feel like we should all be feeling that, consider then how you’ll respond to it. Are you going to take a brief look in the mirror and for the next couple minutes think about that and then go home and forget what you look like? What good is that, right? You are looking into the perfect law, James says, and then deciding, Well, I’m not really all that interested. The word, God says, is planted deep inside us. So what good is it to have that seed planted there and then refuse to water it, to give it light so it never even grows? But again, this isn’t an impossible ask here.
Again, I have to point out that James starts with the most basic baselines for Christian behavior. That’s where he asks us to start. It’s not that we have to become immediately sinless saints when we come to faith. No, James isn’t talking about that at all.
James gives us some stuff to start with upon which everything else can be built. This can take a lifetime, but the starting stuff is good to reach for. Just avoid being angry. Avoid being an angry person.
Be slow to speak. Be quick to listen. Do your best to avoid moral filth and wickedness, the kind of things that make it harder to live a life of love towards God and your neighbor. Just avoid those things.
And above all, and this is a major theme that shows up throughout James, is control what you say. That’s just, you know, watch your mouth, right? If you think that you’re a Christian person, a religious person, and meanwhile you’re speaking division and scheming and conflict into Christ’s church or in the world, you’ve got another thing coming because James says that’s not authentic. If you think you’re faithful to God and then go out into the world speaking hate or simply being mean, you’re wrong. And no one’s going to believe you either, not to mention that you’re making God and God’s church look pretty bad.
Instead, someone who truly believes in Jesus is marked by their care, their gentleness, their compassion for people. And so it’s fitting that James ends this chapter on a really positive note, and he gives a description of what he calls true devotion, what that looks like. And he says it’s very simple. To care for orphans and widows in their difficulties and to keep the world from contaminating us.
And that just means, you know, to love people as Jesus did, which is in an embodied kind of way. You care for people and you fight for people. It’s not just in your head that you feel bad for somebody, but that you care for people. And meanwhile, to keep ourselves free from the world contaminating us, that just means that whenever we live in a world that is often so dark, so hateful, competitive, just mean, live in that world without letting it seep into your heart to poison your faith.
And so our challenge today is the same as it is every Sunday, which is don’t listen and then forget all of this, but put it into practice in your life. Look in the mirror right now, right? But then don’t forget what you look like. The word that is able to save you is planted deep in your soul. So help it to grow.
In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.