Introduction:
A. One day a nun who worked for a local home health care agency was out making her rounds when she ran out of gas.
1. Thankfully, there was a gas station just down the street.
2. So she walked to the station to borrow a gas can and get enough gas to start the car and drive to the gas station for a fill up.
3. The gas station attendant regretfully told her that the only gas can they owned had just been loaned out, but if she would care to wait he was sure it would be back shortly.
4. Since she was in a hurry, she walked back to her car to see what she had that she could put some gas in.
5. As she looked through her car, she spotted a bedpan she was taking to a patient.
6. The nun carried the bedpan to the station, filled it with gasoline, and carried it back to her car.
7. As she was using the bedpan to pour the gas into the tank of her car, two men drove by and one of them turned to the other and said: “Now that is what I call faith!”
B. Let me ask you a question: what kinds of things might your faith cause you to do?
1. Over the years, I have used the story of the great tightrope walker named Blondin to illustrate the kind of faith that saves.
2. Blondin lived from 1824-1897, and first appeared in shows in England.
3. But he owed his celebrity and fortune to his idea of crossing Niagara Falls on a tightrope.
4. He made history on June 30, 1859 when he made his first walk above Niagara Falls.
a. For his crossing, Blondin utilized a 1,100 foot long, 3 inch in diameter rope stretched across the falls.
b. The crossing took 20 minutes, and he used a 30 foot long balancing pole that weighed 40 pounds.
5. During that summer of 1859, Blondin completed 9 crossings of Niagara Falls, the most difficult one occurred on August 19th when he carried his manager, Harry Colcord, on his back.
a. Six times in all the manager had to dismount so that Blondin could gather his strength.
6. One of the most often told stories of Blondin’s Niagara crossings was when he went across pushing a wheelbarrow.
a. After crossing pushing the empty wheelbarrow, Blondin then asked the crowd if they thought he could do it, with someone sitting in it, and the crowd cheered “yes.”
b. Blondin then pointed to one of the men in the audience showing the most enthusiastic approval and said, “Okay, since you claim to believe I can do it, why don’t you get into the wheelbarrow.”
c. Needless to say, the man made a quick exit.
7. That episode demonstrates that there is often a great difference between the faith we say we have, and the faith we really have.
a. The real measure of our faith is not our “TALK”, but our “WALK.”
b. Saying that we have faith in God is one thing, but really putting our trust in God is another!
8. Incidentally, in case you were wondering, Blondin was 73 when he died in England of natural causes.
C. As we continue in chapter 2 of the letter of James, we see that James expands on his theme of what it means to be doers, not just hearers of the Word of God.
1. James now switches his attention from playing favorites to a faith that saves.
2. Three times in this section (verses 17, 20, 26), He declares that faith without works is dead.
3. He is telling us that faith without deeds is “empty faith,” not saving faith.
4. So, let’s work through this passage and see how James develops the difference between what saving faith IS and what it is NOT.
I. First, What Saving Faith Is NOT
A. As James presents God’s truths, he touches on three things that saving faith is NOT. First, Saving Faith is NOT just something we SAY.
1. In verse 14 we read, “What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if someone claims to have faith but does not have works? Can such faith save him?”
2. Notice that James doesn’t say that the person in question has faith, but just that the person claims to have faith.
3. The person just talks about having faith. The person knows all the right phrases.
4. There are a lot of people in our country who say they have faith, but they have no deeds.
5. In 1991 James Patterson and Peter Kim took on the task of surveying America. They tabulated and published their results in a book called “The Day America Told the Truth”.
a. In the chapter dealing with America’s religious beliefs, they stated that 90% of the people questioned said that they truly believed in God.
b. Yet they also discovered that of those who said they believed in God – 50% had not been to church in at least three months and 30% had not been in a service in a year.
6. Pollster George Barna claims that in his surveys, 4 out of five Americans claim to be Christians, yet what they say they believe has very little to do with how they live their lives.
a. How can 4 out of 5 of us be Christians, and yet we have such problems with drugs, adultery, pornography and crime?
b. The stated faith of the majority of Americans is not positively impacting their lives.
7. Jesus warned us saying, “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only he who does the will of my Father who is in heaven.” (Mt. 7:21)
8. Not everyone with a Christian bumper sticker has saving faith.
9. Talk is cheap! Saving faith is not just something we SAY!
B. Second, Saving Faith is NOT just something you FEEL.
1. Christianity in our time is really into emotions, and, of course, to some degree, emotions should be a part of our religious experience, but saving faith is more than just emotions.
2. We can be emotionally moved in worship, or in our interaction with others, but never act concretely or positively on our emotions.
3. We can go to church and get goose bumps, or as some call it “a quiver in our liver,” but it may never make any difference – it may not result in action.
4. James illustrates it with another one of his hypothetical case studies (last week was about the two visitors that came to church – one poor the other rich): 15 If a brother or sister is without clothes and lacks daily food 16 and one of you says to them, “Go in peace, stay warm, and be well fed,” but you don’t give them what the body needs, what good is it? 17 In the same way faith, if it does not have works, is dead by itself. (James 2:15-17)
5. In one of the classic Peanut cartoons, its winter time and Charlie Brown and Linus are shown all bundled up while Snoopy is outside in the cold shivering.
a. Charlie Brown and Linus discuss how cold Snoopy looks and how they need to do something to comfort him.
b. So they walk over to Snoopy and say: “Be of good cheer, Snoopy.” “Yes, Be of good cheer.” Snoopy responds with a big question mark (Like how does that help me!).
c. Where in the world did Charles Shultz get the idea for that comic strip? I wonder!
6. Saving faith is more than just feeling sympathy or empathy.
7. How much does it help to say to someone, “I really feel for you, man!”, if we walk away without doing something about their need?
8. Saving faith is not just something we FEEL.
C. Third, Saving Faith is NOT just something we THINK.
1. For some people, faith is an intellectual trip or exercise.
a. It’s just something to be studied, discussed or debated.
2. Notice what James says in verses 18-19: 18 But someone will say, “You have faith, and I have works.” Show me your faith without works, and I will show you faith by my works. 19 You believe that God is one. Good! Even the demons believe—and they shudder.
3. So, James imagines an intellectual objector.
a. This intellectual guy says, “I have faith; you have deeds. That’s cool. You have your thing, and I’ve got mine, and we are both okay.” Right?
b. Wrong! James says that it doesn’t work that way.
4. Saving faith is more then just something you think – it has to be demonstrated or practiced.
5. Then he brings up the demons.
a. James says that faith, that is only intellectual or emotional, is like that of the demons.
b. They believe in God and it causes them to shudder. But that’s about it.
6. There are a lot of people who have strong beliefs in God and the Bible.
a. They can recite creeds and catechisms and talk about doctrine, but what they think or believe doesn’t change their lives.
7. Kind of like the Samaritan woman in John 4.
a. Jesus met her at the well and began discussing spiritual things with her.
b. She was well-versed in the spiritual controversies of her day, but she was living an immoral life.
8. The devil and his cohort of demons are not atheists.
a. They believe in God in an intellectual sense.
b. They are great theologians who even know the Bible and try to use it against us.
9. James says that the demons believe and shudder.
a. The Greek word means “to bristle” – to have your hair stand up on end.
b. To shudder is what happens to us when we read a Stephen King novel, or hear a scary story around a campfire.
c. Now here’s a humorous thought – what is a scary story for demons? – what’s a story that would make them shudder?
d. Picture demons sitting around a campfire telling the story of Jesus casting demons into the pigs, who then drown themselves in the lake – pretty scary if you’re a demon – or a pig!
10. Saving faith is more than just having an intellectual belief – it is not just something we THINK.
D. So, in summary, James is telling us that saving faith is NOT just what we SAY, FEEL or THINK.
II. What Saving Faith IS – It is something we DO.
A. In verse 18, James said: Show me your faith without works, and I will show you faith by my works.
1. Someone has said that faith is like calories, you can’t see them, but you can see their results!
2. Or you can’t see electricity, but if you or I grab onto a 220 volt wire, it is going to make you do something – it is going to result in some action!
3. There is no way that we can be connected to someone like the God of this universe and it not have a visible effect on our lives. Right?
4. Saving faith leads to action.
B. Look again at verse 17: In the same way faith, if it does not have works, is dead by itself.
1. And let’s add to that verse 26: For just as the body without the spirit is dead, so also faith without works is dead.
2. The word translated “dead” is the Greek word nekron and it refers to being really dead like a corpse is dead - that image certainly gets our attention, doesn’t it?
3. We have all been to funerals and seen a corpse lying in a casket.
a. The funeral director may have done a great job dressing up the body with makeup and clothing, but there is something very unnatural about a body with no life.
b. The body without the spirit is merely an empty and useless shell.
4. In the same way, faith devoid of works is empty and useless.
5. Unfortunately, some people who have dead faith try to give their faith the appearance of life like the corpse in the casket.
a. They go to church, either regularly or sporadically.
b. Sometimes they place a Bible on the coffee table, or carry it in the car as a kind of “good luck charm.”
c. If you ask them about their faith, they might say that their family has been Christians for generations, or pull out their baptismal certificate, as if it’s a “Get out of Hell Free” card.
6. Saving faith is more than just something we say, or feel, or think, it is something we do.
C. As James drives this point home, he brings up two examples from the history of God’s people.
1. James points to Abraham and Rahab.
a. He could not have chosen two people who were any more of a contrast.
b. Abraham was a man; Rahab was a woman.
c. Abraham was Jewish; Rahab was a Gentile.
d. Abraham was a major character; Rahab was a minor one.
e. Abraham was a patriarch; Rahab was a prostitute.
2. In this tremendous contrast, James is saying that it doesn’t matter who you are as long as you have one important thing – A faith in God that leads to ACTION.
3. We don’t have a lot of time to spend on either of these stories, but let me touch on each briefly.
D. Some 40 years before God tested Abraham with the supreme test, Abraham had been called to follow God and was given a promise that through his decedents all nations would be blessed.
1. Abraham’s offspring would be as numerous as the stars in the sky.
2. Abraham believed God and it was credited to him as righteousness. (Gen. 15:6)
3. The only problem was that Abraham at that point had no children.
a. It would be 25 more years until Isaac, the child of promise, was to be born.
4. Once Isaac was born, everything seemed to be cruising along just fine, until God gave Abraham a very difficult command. (Gen. 22)
a. Isaac was probably about 15 or 16 years old, and God commanded Abraham to take his son to a certain mountain and sacrifice him there.
b. Nothing could have been more troubling and confusing than that command, but Abraham believed God and immediately obeyed him.
c. As you know, Abraham made the altar, placed the wood on it, then bound his son and placed him on the altar.
d. It wasn’t until he raised the knife to kill his son, that the voice of God told him to stop.
e. “Do not lay a hand on the boy. Do not do anything to him. Now I know that you fear God, because you have not withheld from me your son, your only son.” (Gen. 22:12)
5. Abraham’s faith was demonstrated by his action - his works proved his faith.
E. The other example is that of Rahab the prostitute from Jericho. (Joshua 2)
1. Rahab did not have a long history of godly living when those two spies sent by Joshua entered her house in Jericho.
2. But operating within her was the prompting of the Holy Spirit that alerted her to the fact that these men were different than the men who came to buy her services.
3. She acted on that tiny bit of faith, and hid the spies and then helped them to escape by lowering them out her window.
4. Through her actions, the lives of the spies and the lives of her own family were saved.
5. Her willingness to defy her own king, putting herself at great personal risk, singles her out as a person who didn’t merely talk about faith, but was willing to act on it.
6. We don’t know much about her life after this point, but we know that she ends up being a heroine in the Jewish tradition, and her name is listed in the Matthew 1 genealogy of Jesus.
F. So, what’s the point? In a very real sense God is saying to us, “Talk is cheap. Put your money where your mouth is. If you believe in Him and in His Son, then prove it.”
1. Our faith must be demonstrated by our actions.
2. Actions speak louder than words - our behavior shows what we really believe.
G. Now, let’s make an important clarification.
1. It would be very easy for us to read this passage and conclude that we must work our way to heaven, but we must never come to that conclusion!
2. What James says in these verses seems to be a direct contradiction of what Paul wrote in the book of Romans.
a. Paul wrote, “For we maintain that a man is justified by faith apart from observing the law.” (Rom. 3:28)
b. Whereas, James wrote, “You see that a person is justified by what he does and not by faith alone.” (2:24)
3. What we need to understand is that there is absolutely no contradiction between what Paul and James wrote.
a. They both were inspired by the same Holy Spirit and they both preached the same gospel.
4. The difference is that they were fighting two different enemies.
a. Paul was fighting legalism, and James was fighting laxity.
b. Paul was focused on an argument about the way of salvation – by faith and not by works (especially the works of the Law).
c. Whereas, James was focused on the evidence of salvation – faith is proved by works.
5. Both believed whole-heartedly that salvation was by grace through faith, not by works, so that no one can boast. (Eph. 2:8-9)
a. And Paul continued in Eph. 2:10, “For we are God’s workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.”
b. Oh, yes, there are good works for us to be doing, but they are not the basis for our salvation, but they are the evidence of it.
6. So, imagine that Paul and James are like two lawmen in one of the old T.V. Westerns.
a. They stand back to back in the middle of the street at high noon.
b. They are shooting in opposite directions at two totally different bad guys.
7. Both have in mind the same thing - Saving Faith – a faith that is alive and active.
Conclusion:
A. All that is left for us to do at this point is to ask ourselves, are we demonstrating a saving faith?
1. Is our faith just about saying, feeling and thinking, or is it about doing?
2. What is my faith prompting me to do in worship to God?
3. What is my faith prompting me to do in service to God?
4. What is my faith prompting me to do about fellowship with God’s people?
5. What is my faith prompting me to do about sharing my faith?
6. What is my faith prompting me to do about financial giving to the Lord?
7. What is my faith prompting me to do about holiness and character and love?
B. May God help us all to have a saving faith - a dynamic and active faith – a faith that works!
