The Follow Through: A Sermon Based on James 1:19-27

"The world does not need a definition of religion as much as it needs a demonstration [of it]."

Andrew Murray added...

What a terrible delusion to be content with, to delight in hearing the word, and yet not do it. And yet, so complete is the delusion, that Christians never realize they are not living good Christian lives. ...people mistake the pleasure they have in hearing the Word of God for Christianity and worship. So people go to church, and enjoy the preaching, and yet do not do what God asks.

James 1:19-27 [ From the NLT - New Living Translation]

19 Understand this, my dear brothers and sisters: You must all be quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to get angry. 20 Human anger* does not produce the righteousness* God desires. 21 So get rid of all the filth and evil in your lives, and humbly accept the word God has planted in your hearts, for it has the power to save your souls.

22 But don't just listen to God's word. You must do what it says. Otherwise, you are only fooling yourselves. 23 For if you listen to the word and don't obey, it is like glancing at your face in a mirror. 24 You see yourself, walk away, and forget what you look like. 25 But if you look carefully into the perfect law that sets you free, and if you do what it says and don't forget what you heard, then God will bless you for doing it.

26 If you claim to be religious but don't control your tongue, you are fooling yourself, and your religion is worthless. 27 Pure and genuine religion in the sight of God the Father means caring for orphans and widows in their distress and refusing to let the world corrupt you.

James did not waste time mincing words.

He preached a 'no nonsense' approach to the Christian faith, and as a result some people love the book of James, and others avoid it.

But as we read his letter you can see that he was quick to identify and criticize any form of Christianity that appeared to be superficial. He was unimpressed by outward displays of religiosity. He was most concerned with Christian follow-through. He preached and preached strongly, that words are one thing, but actions speak louder than words.

He urged people to live their Christian lives with integrity, character and substance. You can look impressive on the surface - but integrity, character and substance can be and should be seen and experienced deeply throughout a person's life.

It doesn't so much matter how you look on the surface. Appearances can be quite deceiving.

There once was this proud and majestic ship, billed as being unsinkable. But on its maiden voyage, just before midnight on the 14th of April, 1912, it hit an iceberg and sank in a very short time. More than two thirds of the passengers and crew on board died - 1523 people. The ship had failed the test of its integrity, character and substance.

The proud outward appearance of the Titanic masked it's deficiencies, that in the end meant it's doom.

Similarly, outward displays of religiousness can mask the real quality of a person's faith. And genuine faith to James was faith proven by its actions.

Not on the proclamations of what one believes, but on the follow-through when the chips are down, and someone calls your bluff.

When we think of the things that test our faith it is natural for us to consider the big things. Maybe a serious injury, sickness or death, divorce, or financial ruin.

But this is not necessarily the kind of testing James was referring to. Yes, standing firm in oour faith under these conditions reveals a lot, but even more revealing is the way we live under normal, daily circumstances.

C.S. Lewis once wrote: 'Surely what a man does when he is taken off his guard is the best evidence for what sort of man he is. If there are rats in a cellar, you are most likely to see them if you go in very suddenly. But the suddenness does not create the rats; it only prevents them from hiding. In the same way, the suddenness of the provocation does not make me ill-tempered; it only shows me what an ill-tempered man I am'.

How we act in the daily routines of our lives is far more significant than how we present ourselves on specific occasions. So we might make ourselves presentable in our attitudes and behaviors for the time we are at church, for example. But if is not carried over into the rest of our life then what does that say?

What does it say about our integrity if we place our offering in the plate with one hand and then cheat our neighbor with the other? What does it say about our character if we pray for someone in church one minute and then slander them at home the next? What does it say about our substance if we love our neighbor in public and scurry past them in private?

When Oscar Wilde visited United States in 1882, he was asked by customs officials if he had anything to declare. He replied: 'Only my genius.' But fifteen years later, alone and broken in prison, he reflected on his life. He said: 'I have been a spendthrift with my genius. I forgot that every little action of the common day makes or unmakes character.'

Integrity, character and substance are consistent attributes displayed in the daily routines of a child of God, not just superficial acts that are performed for special occasions, dpendent upon who is watching.

From another translation James writes 'Do not merely listen to the word and so deceive yourselves. Do what it says. Anyone who listens to the word but does not do what it says is like a man who looks at his face in a mirror and, after looking at himself, goes away and immediately forgets what he looks like'

I know there are more that a few times, I'd rather not take that look in the mirror. We all have those times. Whether it's because you are literally having a "bad hair day, " or because looking in the mirror makes us really see who we are.

It's the same reason we will avoid looking into God's word for the truth. Because when you look into the Word, guess what, you're in there. Looking into God's word is just like looking into a mirror. And just as a normal mirror reflects back what work needs to be done to clean us up, so too, God's word does the same.

From Hebrews we are reminded that the Word is Sharper than any double-edged sword, it penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart. Nothing in all creation is hidden from God's sight. Everything is uncovered and laid bare before the eyes of him to whom we must give account.

I don't know about you, but sometimes I'd rather not do something like that. There are sins of mine that I would prefer to remain hidden, rather than uncovered and laid bare. It's way easier that way.

Gamaliel Bradford, a renowned American biographer who explored the lives and motives of famous individuals, candidly admitted, "I do not read the New Testament for fear of its awakening a storm of anxiety and self-reproach and doubt and dread of having taken the wrong path, of having been traitor to the plain and simple God."

But God wants the best for us, and he's given us the solution to our sin, if we will not walk away.

And that's the even bigger issue with James. Seeing the problem and the solution and just walking away.

James is not advocating an approach to Christianity that has you constantly wondering if you've cleaned up your life enough to satisfy God.

Of your own effort, that will never happen.

James is not urging us to do good works in order to prove ourselves.

That would be vain and self-glorifying.

Instead, James ask us to remember "who we are". Who do we belong to? He said: 'God chose to give us birth through the word of truth, that we might be a kind of first-fruits of all he created' 'humbly accept the word planted in you, which can save you' (1:21).

James is not telling us to become someone we are not. He is urging us to remember who we are and to live accordingly. We have been born again as God's children through the word of truth. Peter put it this way: 'you have been born again, not of perishable seed, but of imperishable, through the living and enduring word of God'

James gives us a pattern to follow that helps us build a life of faith and live as people who honor God day by day.

If we're going to live with the word of God as our foundation, then we have to prepare ourselves to receive that word.

So first, James draws our attention to the poison that anger can bring to our relationship with God and our ability to hear the word of God.

If we ever are going to be fully prepared to receive the word of God, we must confront the issue of anger.

We know that Jesus got angry, but notice that he was never angry when someone stood in the way of his own personal agenda or needs, when he himself was mistreated or abused. Jesus got angry when people compromised God's agenda. For example, he got angry in the temple because the religious leaders had developed rules about giving sacrifices that absolutely oppressed and abused the poorest people in society who couldn't afford the full sacrifices, cheating them by making a profit off of their desire to worship their God

We know that Jesus lived only by God's agenda, not a personal, human agenda. We're not going to accomplish God's ways by getting angry and insisting on our own.

James tells us next that our hearts need to turn away from evil; we need to say, "God, I want to be free from that. I'm willing to lay it all aside to hear your word, to find out what your way is."

He describes God's word as "the word planted in you." God's word comes to live within us; it's not just some writing on a page, it's a living, dynamic thing used by God's Spirit.

When God's word is planted in our hearts, our new life is sprouted and begins growing through the presence and power of his Spirit. Then that word begins to transform us from the inside out. It gives us guidance and instruction, helping us to see who God is and who we are and how we are to live this life of faith in Him.

James then goes on to urge us to be willing to submit to God's word and let it change us. James calls this word "the perfect law that gives freedom."

What God is saying to us is, "My law is a description of how I intend for you to live life to its fullest. It shows you how to have the best of this life! It's the blueprint for how I've created you and the world you live in."

I did this for you, because I love you.

A pastor online writes "I grew up in a Baptist church in the suburbs of Atlanta, Georgia, in the Bible Belt. I can't think of anyone from my childhood who didn't go to church. That's just what people did in that environment. So I was in church all the time, being exposed to the Bible. I learned all the stories, and I could answer more Bible questions than anyone else in my class in Vacation Bible School. This book was always around, but I only understood it as stories written down from some ancient time.

When I got into my teen years the Bible seemed far removed from anything real in my life, which was a reflection of both my own heart and the environment in which I lived. Everything about this book and what it meant to obey had been reduced to some formula. In fact, when I was growing up, in our church they had something called the "Ten Point Record System." We'd come in on Sunday morning and check off boxes: I went to church, I studied my Sunday School lesson, I read my Bible, and so on. I did well at all that, and the context told me that was what it was all about. But as I got older it all seemed totally irrelevant to anything that mattered in life. So the Bible went up on the shelf. I still went to church but I never read the Bible for myself. It had no impact whatsoever on my life.

In the summer between my senior year in high school and my freshman year in college, I met Christ. God brought into my life some dynamic high school and college students who were really on fire for Christ. This was around the time the Atlanta version of the Jesus Movement was beginning to peak, and God was doing amazing things among young people. The night that I became a Christian, I remember telling the girl I was dating, "I do not know what happened tonight, but I know that my life will never be the same." I went home and pulled that dusty old King James' Bible off the shelf, sat down, and started reading it. I spent most of the night reading that Bible. All of a sudden all those old stories came alive. There was truth in them that hit me-the truth about who God was. The Spirit of God took the word of God and made it alive to my hungry soul.

When God opened that book up to me on that very first night of my new birth in Christ, I fell in love with it. I started going to every Bible study I could find. I'd spend at least an hour reading it every morning before going to class as a freshman in college. As the Spirit of God made it alive, my life was being changed almost moment by moment."

Up to the time he went to college and truly met Jesus, He went to church on Sunday morning, went to Bible study, put money in the plate. He has a sense that he was doing what he ought to do. But it hadn't changed him inside. He didn't allow the Lord truly inside of him"

James is saying, "Wait a minute-you can feel as good as you want about doing your religion thing, but is it changing you on the inside?

If you are a real doer of the word and not just a hearer, how is it changing your life from the inside out-and is it leading you out of yourself into a world that needs to not just hear, but see the Word?"

An unknown author captured the way in which we so often practice religion but fall short of truly being "doers of the Word"...

I was hungry and you formed a humanities club and discussed my hunger.

I was imprisoned and you crept off quietly to your chapel and prayed for my release.

I was naked and in your mind you debated the morality of my appearance.

I was sick and you knelt and thanked God for your health.

I was homeless and you preached to me of the spiritual shelter of the love of God.

I was lonely and you left me alone to go and pray for me.

You seem so holy, so close to God.

But I'm still very hungry and lonely and cold.

We start Advent this Sunday, the traditional season of giving and love. We celebrate the coming of Jesus, God's ultimate gift of giving to all of us. It's a feel-good season. Church attendance at Christmas is the highest of the whole year. We like the happy music, we like to hear how much God loves us, we like to remember how blessed we are. Good things to remember.

But it's also a great time to remember that God loves not only us, not only the good religious people who do the right things and try to worship Him and please Him, but all the other people too?

Think about a person you find most difficult to love in your life, and remember that they are created in the image of God and he loves them like a child. Christ died for them as well as for you.

It's a perfect time of year to get out of ourselves and see the people in the world as God sees them. Not the honking, and pushing, and rudeness that happens as we buy all those gifts to assure Christmas joy, but actually, real, love as Christ lived and loved us.

He still loves us that much. Even the lovely people who like to share their colorful four-letter language skills or extend certain fingers in traffic.

They are and we are God's lovely people. We may be seemingly unloveable, but not so much that God can't love us.

And given that...how can we not, in true gratitude, show love in return. Especially to those who really seem like they could use a friend, and there is no greater friend than Jesus and those who love him.

It can be a difficult thing to do. But we have a gracious, loving, and wonderful God, and he never calls us to do things that we're not equipped to do.

God has given us so much in his love for us, he knows we have the capacity to love in return because he has given that to us as well, all he asks for is a little "follow-though".

Advent and Christmas is and should be all about Christ. May the world see Christ in us as we wait in anticipation for him in that manger at Bethlehem.

Amen

©2009 Timothy Henry