James 2:14-24
14 What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if you say you have faith but do not have works? Can faith save you? 15If a brother or sister is naked and lacks daily food, 16and one of you says to them, ‘Go in peace; keep warm and eat your fill’, and yet you do not supply their bodily needs, what is the good of that? 17So faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead. 18 But someone will say, ‘You have faith and I have works.’ Show me your faith without works, and I by my works will show you my faith.
19 You believe that God is one; you do well. Even the demons believe—and shudder. 20Do you want to be shown, you senseless person, that faith without works is barren? 21Was not our ancestor Abraham justified by works when he offered his son Isaac on the altar? 22You see that faith was active along with his works, and faith was brought to completion by the works. 23Thus the scripture was fulfilled that says, ‘Abraham believed God, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness’, and he was called the friend of God. 24You see that a person is justified by works and not by faith alone.
This is one of the most vexing passages in the New Testament. Martin Luther, who insisted that salvation is by faith and nothing but, said that he wished the whole book of James could be deleted from the New Testament.
Since Luther’s day at least, different flavors of Protestants have been arguing about the relationship between faith and works. Are we saved merely because of what we confess or are deeds of Christian service also necessary?
Nothing is truer, I think, than the claim that we are saved by works. It runs through the Bible from Genesis to Revelation. Though I try not to be hardline dogmatic, I do not see how anyone, based on Scripture, can deny not only that we are saved by works, but we are saved exclusively by works.
I had this discussion once with an ordained Baptist minister who was, as you might imagine, somewhat resistant to the idea of salvation by works, right up until I said to him, “The question is not whether we are saved by works. The Bible argues conclusively that we are. The question is, ‘whose works?’”
I could almost see the light bulb illuminate over his head. We are saved by works, but not our own works. We are saved by the works of God in Christ Jesus, and by Christ’s works alone.
I hope that this makes it easier to grasp what James is talking about. James is not trying to show that our faith in God and our works of Christian discipleship are two different things. James is trying to show that our faith includes works, else it is not faith at all. Faith is not something merely spoken or affirmed, it is also that which is lived and done. “Saving faith,” said John Wesley, “is not just believing beliefs. One may affirm the truth of one, twenty or a hundred different creeds and yet have no saving faith at all.”
James quotes Genesis 15.6, “Abraham believed God, and it was credited to him as righteousness.” James points out that we have no idea what Abraham believed apart from what Abraham did resulting from his belief. We know that Abraham believed God because he did what God told him to do.
What we do reveals what we believe. And that is why James says that faith without works is dead faith, because faith and works are not independent entities. We can no more say that faith and works are separate than we could claim we can spend one side of a dollar bill without spending the other side.
So we are saved by the works of God in Christ Jesus. We cannot earn salvation by our own works alone because the guilt and stain of human sin is too deeply rooted in us to do that. It is true, as James says, that faith without works is dead faith, but our works that do not spring from our faith are equally lifeless. Paul argues in Galatians that doing deeds ungrounded in faith in Christ is fruitless.
Jesus said, “Apart from me you can do nothing.” What is our faith? It is that in Christ, God was reconciling the world unto himself and that in the life, death and resurrection of Christ everything has been done that is needed to bring us into eternal company with God. We do good works in gratitude and loyalty to the One who has redeemed us, not to earn salvation but to rejoice in it.
Christ is both redeemer and judge of the world. Matthew 25 is one of Jesus’ discourses on his judgment. There is not a word in there that anyone is justified before Christ because of membership in one denomination rather than another, or by mode of baptism, or by being able recite the Apostles Creed.
Jesus says that the basis by which he judges us is what we do as his disciples. “For I was hungry, and you gave me something to eat,” he said, “and I was thirsty, and you gave me something to drink. For when you did it to the least of my brothers and sisters, you did it also to me.” Those are the disciples whom Jesus calls righteous, bringing them to eternal life.
But the ones who tell him, We ignored your brothers and sisters when they were hungry or naked or sick, and so never gave them aid, Jesus calls cursed and does not permit into eternal life with him.
And that should fill us with dread because the consequences of complacency are severe. If I may slightly paraphrase John the Baptist, it won’t do any good to tell Jesus, “But we are church members” because God can make church members out of rusty beer cans lying along the road.
“But my heart is in the right place,” someone might protest. That is a leading way we deceive ourselves. The Bible says that our hearts are almost never in the right place but are “deceitful above all things” (Jeremiah 17.9).
We are to live integrated lives of faith. Faith is:
- affirming the truth about God based on reason and evidence. “Blind faith” is not a biblical concept at all. Blind faith is not even faith; it is wishful thinking at best. The resurrection of Christ was a supernatural event, but none of the reasons to believe in Christ's resurrection are supernatural reasons. They just require logical thinking.
- but faith is more than making reasonable conclusions or knowing the truth. As James says, even demons know the truth about God.
- faith is also commitment to God based on trust in God.
- trust in God is founded on God’s love for us in Jesus Christ, whose resurrection proves that God will keep his promises.
- faith, then, is love before it is anything else. Faith transcends merely knowing the truth to become living the truth in love.
Divine love is vertical and horizontal. Love comes to us from God and from us to God in return. This gift from God enables us to accept the saving grace God offers. It is personal and specific for each one of us.
Divine love is also horizontal, intended to spread through us outward to others. And so Jesus said that everything God wants is simply this: Love God and love others. Paul said it was even simpler than that, “The commandments,” he said, “are summed up in one command, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself. ... Love is the fulfillment of the Law” of God (Romans 13:9).
The vertical and the horizontal together make the cross. Jesus on the cross was God’s love for humankind come down to earth in Jesus, and also God’s love for humankind outward through Jesus to all people.
Maybe that is what Jesus meant when he said his disciples must take up their cross and follow him. Actual crucifixion was a very real possibility for Christ-followers back then, but perhaps Jesus also meant that we are to embody the love of God coming down from God to go through us to the world. Jesus said the greatest commandment is to love God and love neighbor – reaching up to heaven and out to everyone in the world.
So what do we do with the love of God? How do we live lives of Christian integrity? Methodist author Robert Kohler wrote, “The kind of work that God usually calls you to do is the kind of work that you need most to do and that the world most needs to have done.” If you jump out of bed every morning so eager to go to work that you skip breakfast, but your work is writing ads for casinos in Tunica, it’s safe to say that you are not living your vocation. If you are a doctor in a leper colony but are personally miserable, chances are that you are not living your vocation.
Your vocation is not necessarily what takes the most time in your daily lives. It is what gives the rest of your life focus and meaning and may change over time. “The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet” (Frederick Buechner). God calls each Christian to use his or her gifts in the world. One test of identifying your vocation is to discern whether it satisfies your hunger to be about the work of Christ in the world. But if someone doesn’t have a hunger to be about the work of Christ in the world, then their chances of discovering their vocation are slim.
How to discern one’s vocation? John Wesley said that effective and genuine discipleship is lived according to three general rules. The Reader’s Digest version is simple:
1. Do no harm and do not sin.
2. Do positive good in the world.
3. Love and worship God.
I want to talk a little about the second rule, doing positive good. Wesley put it this way:
By doing good ... of every possible sort, and, as far as possible, to everyone.
To their bodies, by giving food to the hungry, by clothing the naked, by visiting or helping them that are sick or in prison.
To their souls, by instructing, reproving, or exhorting all; trampling underfoot the false belief that "we are not to do good unless our hearts be free to it.”
By doing good, especially to them that are of the household of faith or groaning to be.
Let me emphasize one of Wesley’s points: It is false that we don’t need to be active in ministry unless we think our hearts are in the right place, or unless we think we are called to it or unless we feel like it.
We don’t do ministry because our hearts are in the right place. We do ministry to put our hearts in the right place.
We don’t do ministry because we think we are called to it but to better discern the calling God gives us.
We don’t do ministry because we feel like it but precisely because we usually don’t feel like it.
We do ministry because Christ commands it and we have decided to follow Jesus including when we don’t know where he is leading.
We do ministry because Jesus promised unpleasant consequences if we don’t and eternal life if we do.
We do ministry because it is the only way to affix ourselves to what is of ultimate value and eternal significance.
We do ministry because we are profoundly thankful to Christ for redeeming us from ways of sin and death and promising to lift us to the heavenly places.
We do ministry because we love God and therefore, we love those whom God loves.
We do ministry because while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. That proves God’s love for us. In the name of Jesus Christ, you are forgiven!
We do ministry because we are Christians. It is what Christians do.
The psalmist wrote,
If the LORD delights in our way, he makes our steps firm; though we stumble, we will not fall, for the LORD upholds us with his hand. (Ps. 37.23-24).
If we believe that then we will act like it.