Faith Lives through Works

[podcast]http://www.revkwon.com/podcast/faith_lives_through_works.mp3[/podcast] This morning I will continue to make the argument of “we need to love Jesus the same way Jesus loves you and me: with a fierce determination and unabashed certainty.” If you remember last week, I spoke about how discrimination or favoritism or partiality is actually diabolical because it creates limits and preferences for Christ followers to love and/or to limit love. I went as far as pointing out that this is why we still have racism and discrimination to the extent that we do in America in the 21st century. Well, this morning, we’re going to continue on with James’ letter and I want us to recognize the thread of logic that James is using to connect us to indiscriminate love as a measure of how much we really love God. Let’s go to James 2:14-26. 14?What good is it, my brothers, if someone says he has faith but does not have works? Can that faith save him? 15?If a brother or sister is poorly clothed and lacking in daily food, 16?and one of you says to them, “Go in peace, be warmed and filled,” without giving them the things needed for the body, what good is that? 17?So also faith by itself, if it does not have works, is dead. 18?But someone will say, “You have faith and I have works.” Show me your faith apart from your works, and I will show you my faith by my works. 19?You believe that God is one; you do well. Even the demons believe—and shudder! 20?Do you want to be shown, you foolish person, that faith apart from works is useless? 21?Was not Abraham our father justified by works when he offered up his son Isaac on the altar? 22?You see that faith was active along with his works, and faith was completed by his works; 23?and the Scripture was fulfilled that says, “Abraham believed God, and it was counted to him as righteousness”—and he was called a friend of God. 24?You see that a person is justified by works and not by faith alone. 25?And in the same way was not also Rahab the prostitute justified by works when she received the messengers and sent them out by another way? 26?For as the body apart from the spirit is dead, so also faith apart from works is dead. (James 2:14-26) Did you follow the logic of James’ argument? Do you see how it connected with what James said in verse 8 in chapter 2? If you really fulfill the royal law according to the Scripture,?“You shall love your neighbor as yourself,” you are doing well. You are only doing well if you’re “doing the royal law.” The “royal law” if you remember is loving others as you love yourself. You can write this equation down because I’m going to boil it down for you: “works = acts of love”. I want you to know that James is not talking about volunteer work or charitable works because I know lots of secularists that perform altruistic works but do not have faith. What he is saying actually resonates with what Paul is saying about love being the defining work of a person of faith. I want to stop for a moment to talk about how acts of love can be works. I’m actually going to talk briefly about four types of acts of love and why these four types of acts of love actual counteract four acts of unlovingness.

• Radical Hospitality – (I feel judged). If people around you say they feel judged by you, you need to love by providing some radical hospitality. There are some of us in this room that are really judgmental. I’ll admit, I’m one of those judgmental people. Ask my wife. She told me that we were walking somewhere and I looked at her because we saw this girl walk by on the other side of us dressed funky. I can’t actually remember what she looked like or what she was wearing, but I can tell you that I judged her, or at least that what’s Michelle tells me. My memory is terrible, so you’ll have to take my word for it. Some of us are so unloving toward people who have different taste preferences than us. Moreover, some of us are so partial and discriminatory, maybe not racially, but in other ways that we need to start love by showing radical hospitality. Radical hospitality looks like the parable of the great banquet that Jesus tells the Pharisees that come to question about why he heals people on the Sabbath. Look at verse 23 in Luke 14: “Then the master told his servant, ‘Go out to the roads and country lanes and compel them to come in, so that my house will be full.” 

• Fearless Conversation – (I don’t want to be lectured). Fearless conversation is seeking to understand. It is listening, really listening before speaking. It is asking great questions. It is asking wondering questions. It is allowing others to talk. It is offering nonjudgmental responses. It is trust that the Holy Spirit will use the words that are coming out of our mouths for a dialogue that is amazingly refreshing. Look at the fearless conversation Jesus had with Martha in Luke 10:40-42. 40?But Martha was distracted by all the preparations that had to be made. She came to him and asked, “Lord, don’t you care?that my sister has left me to do the work by myself? Tell her to help me!” 41?“Martha, Martha,”?the Lord answered,?“you are worried?and upset about many things,?42?but few things are needed—or indeed only one. Mary has chosen what is better, and it will not be taken away from her.”

• Genuine Humility – (Hypocrisy). We read this last week in James 2:5-7. But here’s what the Apostle Paul says about genuine humility from Philippians 2:3-4. 3?Do nothing from?selfish ambition or?conceit, but in?humility count others more significant than yourselves.?4?Let each of you?look not only to his own interests, but also to the interests of others. This is so simple but so difficult. We need to understand who we are and where our shortcomings stem from. If we don’t then we will inevitably be hypocrites. We will not be able to love like we need to love if we see ourselves higher like we’re on some sort of pedestal.
• Divine Anticipation – (Irrelevance of God). If you want to love and have love be your work of faith, then we need to expect God to show up and be real. Have you realized that the greatest shortcoming of our faith is that we don’t believe that our God, the God who saves will show up in our lives daily because of our faith? We need to anticipate God’s coming to show up in our lives. 12?“Truly, truly, I say to you,?whoever believes in me will also do the works that I do; and greater works than these will he do, because I?am going to the Father.?13?Whatever you ask in my name, this I will do, that the Father may be glorified in the Son.?14?If you ask me?anything in my name, I will do it. (John 14:12-14)

I want you to definitively see what James is talking about faith without love is dead. If you are not loving people every single day with your radical hospitality, your fearless conversation, your genuine humility, and your divine anticipation, what are you believing about God? If you really believed Jesus saves us so that we can tell the world and show the world what kind of God we have, and are not doing these things, what are we doing? Do we even believe at all? At the end of the day, we have to know that we don’t have faith if all we do is talk about it. We can only prove that we believe in anything when we actually go do what we say we believe. In verse 21, we see James’ example of Abraham. He believed that God would give him descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky and as the sand on the seashore. He was so sure of it that when God asked Abraham to sacrifice his one and only son, Abraham didn’t hesitate. He went up to the mountain with Isaac and began doing what he believed God wanted. This is faith. This is a love for God that transcends selfish human ambition. Honestly if it were me, I don’t know that I would have done what Abraham had done to his one and only son, especially since Abraham was like a hundred years old when Isaac was born! This is faith and this is love for God. I know some of you are saying “yes, that’s true, Abraham loved God, but did he really love his son Isaac?” The answer to that question is “Yes, Abraham, so loved Isaac that he didn’t withhold Isaac from God.” He was willing to give him to God as a sacrifice rather than withholding Isaac from God to be nothing. I think a lot of people don’t give this enough thought but, Isaac only became something because he was offered to God. Abraham loved God yes, he did, but he loved Isaac and refused to allow his one and only son be anything else but God’s alone. Abraham had faith and it was proven by the sacrifice of love he was willing to make. Abraham showed genuine humility, and fearless conversations. James then goes on to talk about Rahab—look at the type of love she was showing. She was showing radical hospitality to spies! Her people were looking for the spies, but she showed an incredible hospitality toward these spies. Moreover, her hospitality stemmed from a divine anticipation. She says to them, “we know the Lord is with you…” You may think that type of thinking is conceited and self-motivated, but if you look at the story carefully, the people of her city were going to kill two people who simply went to stake out the land. We have opportunities to perform acts of love that represent our faith. I want to encourage everybody here to work at loving people as a measure of doing the “royal law” so that our faith will be fulfilled. After all, the amount of faith and love we have for God can only be measured by the “works” or acts of love we embody in the lives of the people around us. If you take anything away from you today, it is that Jesus Christ believed that his act of love would glorify God by saving the very people who abandoned him. We remember that the people who we give our love to may not deserve it, and may not even be the candidates for that love, but neither were we once. This week, I am pushing pause on our series in the Book of James to start our Easter series next week titled, “I Deserve It.” How different would the world look if everyone got what they deserved? Would your salary be the same? What would our prisons look like? Would nice guys finish first or last? God knows what we deserve. See if that’s what we get in I Deserve It. As we prepare for Easter, I want you start thinking about how our faith lives through works and why Jesus’ work on the cross saves us from an eternity away from God. Let’s pray.