Dead Faith Walking | James 2:14-26 | Faith That Works

In our latest sermon, "Dead Faith Walking," we confront the danger of a "museum-piece" faith. Drawing on the imagery of C.S. Lewis’s Narnia, we look at James 2:14-26 to see how the Holy Spirit breathes life into us, turning us from stationary statues into active ambassadors of God's grace. Watch as we discuss why a heart changed by the Gospel cannot help but move in love toward others.

 

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Thank you for joining us for this week's sermon from First Reformed Church in Edgerton, Minnesota. Each week, we dig into God's word, trusting that the Holy spirit will continue the good work of sanctification in us. In the book by C. S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardroom, there is a point where Edmund decides to betray his siblings and go to the Castle of the White Witch. Now, Edmund has heard stories of the evil activities of the witch. He has been told that she turns those who oppose her into stone. Still, Edmund has been enchanted by the Turkish delight candy that the witch had given him, and he doesn't believe that the witch could be all that bad. So he traverses the terrain of Narnia, and he finds the castle, and he comes upon a courtyard. And in the darkness, he sees a lion, and it stops him cold. He's terrified. But it doesn't take long for him to realize that the lion is stationary. It has snow that is accumulated on top of it, and what living animal would allow snow to rest on it, right? So he determines from this that clearly the stories of the witch turning her enemies into stone are true.

And he realizes that this lion is not a threat to him at all. What was once a ferocious beast is now nothing but a decoration. Now, had the lion been living, it would have been the end of Edmund. But instead, Edmund mocks the lion by using a charcoal pencil that he had in his pocket to draw glasses and a mustache on the once-mighty beast. What should have been terrifying to him had he come across it in the wild was now something he was willing to make a joke about. Now, you've likely been in a museum. You've likely been in a sporting goods store, and you saw an animal that in the wild would have been terrifying. But as you walk by it to admire it, you know it's dead and you feel no fear of it at all. So as we arrive at the second half, the last half of the second chapter of James this morning, we see that James expresses that faith without works is dead. Something that should be living and active is dead. Like the lion in the witches' courtyard or like a stuffed bear standing up, bearing its teeth at Scheel's.

It should be ferocious, it should be strong, but instead, it's just a decoration. Now, before we even start to look at the passage this morning. I want to inject a question into your thoughts so that it's the music playing in the background as we make our way through the text. Is your faith and ready to live, survive, and thrive in the world? Or is it just a museum piece, a decoration? And so with that in mind, I want us to come to verse 14, and we're going to find James describing museum piece faith. Now, my question that I asked likely got you thinking a little bit. But James now asks a question that might bristle at you. He asked, what good faith is if it doesn't have works? Can that faith say of you? Now, the reason I say that this question might get under your collar a little is because we believe that scripture clearly says that we are saved by grace alone, through faith alone, on account of Christ alone. We understand that our lives aren't one of those old-time scales with eternity hanging in the balance. We know that when we do something good, God doesn't put a weight on the heaven side of the scale.

And when we sin, he doesn't place something on the health side of the scale. We know that's not how this works. We have a deep understanding that apart from God's grace, we are dead in trespasses sins. There's no way we can save ourselves. It's more than just there would be an insurmountable amount of weight on the sin side of our scale. We understand that our sin has actually completely obliterated the scale altogether. Because no amount of good works is going to repair the chasm that exists between us and God because he is perfectly holy. We are creatures of the dirt who have rebelled against him. Yet the question James asked here seems to come in and break the whole idea of salvation by grace alone through faith alone. But that's not what James is doing here. James is not trying to deconstruct everything that Paul and the rest of the New Testament are teaching us. Instead, we see his point in verses 15 and 16. He's saying that if you You have been rescued from sin, death, and hell by the grace of God, yet you let your sisters and brothers in Christ walk around without clothes to protect them from the elements, and you let them struggle in finding basic nourishment, what are you doing?

His point is that when God has shown you his love, you should naturally desire to love others. If you don't, there's something deficient in you in your understanding of the grace of God. The problem is not with the scope and the power and the reach of God's grace. The problem is us and our selfishness. That's the problem. James isn't telling us that when we ignore our fellow Christians in need, that we're risking losing our salvation. Instead, he's reinforcing what we know deep down within us, that you don't ignore family when they're in need. This isn't some theological truth that needs parsing. It's something that's deeply apparent to us already. It's a reality. We know that when you love someone, you're not going to ignore them when they're in need. James doesn't pull any punches. When he talks about this, he says, faith by itself is dead if it isn't accompanied by works. It It's not faith plus works urns your way to heaven. The statement he's making here is making it clear that faith minus works isn't faith at all. It's dead. It's like the lion that Edmund saw in the witches' courtyard or the stuffed bear at shields that kids take their pictures with.

It's just a decoration, and it's not living and active. It has the shape, the claws, and the teeth But without a heartbeat in the chest, it amounts to nothing but a memorial of something that once was living and active. Before we move on to verse 18, I want to go back to that question I asked you a few minutes ago. Is your faith alive and ready to live, survive, and thrive in the world? Or is it just a museum piece and merely a decoration? I want to expand on that question a little. What do you want your faith to look like? Are you content with your faith being nothing but a display that sits and does nothing, and it's just dusted off when people come to see it? I would hope that none of us want a faith that's been to the taxidermist. I hope that none of us want a faith that is nothing but a decoration mounted on the wall. As the passage continues, if you haven't been convinced to desire a living and active faith by what has been said already, what is coming in the next few verses is meant to jar us awake and to get us to understand the seriousness of the matter.

Now, what we see in verse 18 is James making sure that we understand that a disconnect between faith and action isn't an option. James says that someone may try to separate the two by saying, You have faith and I have works. But for the Christian, the two are deeply connected. They can't be separated. Now, imagine that someone came to you and they wanted to show you an electronic device, and they told you of everything that it can do. They go on on and on about how this is a revolutionary, new, and generational product, and they were blessed enough to know somebody who gave them early access to it. They hold it up for you so you can see how great it looks. Intrigued, you say, Hey, can you give me a demonstration of this amazing device? And then instead of turning the device on, they tell you that they've never actually used it. In fact, they've never even charged the battery. And they go on to tell you all about the electronics on the inside. It is the latest and the greatest. Those electronics are the things that make this device the most It's the most amazing device ever.

But the battery on the inside, that's just a regular old lithium-ion battery that we've been using for years. The battery is boring. Why would I charge that old boring battery. The rest of this stuff is what is so great and revolutionary about this device. Now, that's a ridiculous illustration. I get it, but I think you know why I'm using it. Your works are what put your faith into action. They are what show how great and amazing the grace of God is. The battery isn't the revolutionary part of most modern devices, right? The internal engineering But without the battery, most of our modern devices just would be really expensive paperweights. Well, works are the battery that prove the circuitry of our faith is actually connected to a power source. James keeps drawing out the truth of this issue when he says that it's good that you believe that God is one, but even demons believe in God, and they shatter. Demons know that God is real. Demons are fully aware of his power and the judgment that will come upon them. But we so easily think that simple belief in the existence of God is evidence of saving faith.

When we say that we believe in God, what people often mean is an intellectual spiritual ascent to the existence of a higher power. What James is saying is that saving faith means we understand who this God is, that God rescued us from our sin and unbelief, and this causes us to live a life of service in response to the forgiveness that we have received from him. What we do then shows that we understand what God has done for us in Christ. And so James goes on to give us some examples of heroes of the faith who demonstrate what he is saying here. So the first example goes to one of the key pillars of our faith, Abraham. And James points out that God tells Abraham to sacrifice Isaac. So let's think through this story. How did Abraham show that he actually believed God? He acted. Now, it's really easy for us to say, I believe in God. It's an entirely different thing to actually trust in the promises of God. Remember how long Abraham waited for the child of the promise to be born? It was a really long time. Then finally, Isaac is born.

Isaac has grown to be a young man. There's a lot of time here that has passed. And what does God ask Abraham to do? To offer the child of the promise that he waited for for many years, and now that he has a relationship with as a young man, he asked him to offer him as a sacrifice on the altar. Abraham didn't say, I believe in God. That's enough for me. He did what God told him to do, regardless of how out of character it seemed for God, he listened to God and he moved. And the Book of Hebrews gives us insight into what was going on in Abraham's mind, the faith that Abraham had in that moment. It says, he considered that God was able to even raise him, Isaac, from the dead, from which, figuratively speaking, he did receive him back. Abraham followed the commands of God because he radically believed that God would keep his promise, even to the point of raising Isaac from the dead if he would plunge a knife in his heart. He didn't just say that he believed that. He collected the wood. He went on the journey to Mount Moriah.

He walked up that hill He built an altar, and he nearly went through with ending the life of his own son because he believed God. In other words, Abraham did what he did because he had faith in God, and it was counted to him as righteousness. He believed that God was able to save, and he acted upon it. Abraham wasn't declared righteous because of the activity of going to Mount Moriah. That wasn't the point. He didn't suddenly have righteousness because he was willing to end the life of his son. He was declared righteous because he had more than just give lip service to believing in the promises of God. The second example that James brings out is Rahab. In the story of Rahab in the Book of Joshua, we see that she had heard that God, the God of the Hebrews, Yahweh, was with the armies of the Israeli. We hear that she wasn't the only one of the people who believed this. There were many who were terrified that judgment was coming because the God of the Hebrews was with them and with their armies. There was fear in many people among the Canaanites.

But who among those people who heard and believed that God was with the Israelites, provided shelter for the slaves? Which one of them hung a cord out of her window, believing that she would be rescued? The hiding of the slaves wasn't a good work that earned credit on the account of Rahab towards God to have her sins forgiven. That wasn't what happened. No, it showed that she heard of the God who was with the Israelites, and then she believed it to the point that she did something about it. That's James' point. When we hear the story of God's mighty hand to save, and we put our faith and our trust in Christ, it causes us to do more than just agree to the idea of it in principle. Our belief causes our faith to move. We We love one another. We take care of one another. This shows us that we actually understand what God has done for us. It demonstrates that we believe the promise of God is for us. So James says that the body apart from the spirit is dead, and faith apart from works is dead. If you're not motivated to love because of the love God has shown you in Christ, the question we need to ask is, do we understand the grace of God at all?

Like I said, the passage that we've read this morning is very quickly used to say that salvation comes by doing good deeds. This shows that we merit righteousness for ourselves by doing good stuff. But that doesn't make sense based upon how the rest of Scripture speaks of salvation. And not only that, it misses the point. James is not trying to scare us into doing a bunch of good works to get on God's good side. He is appealing to his audience to have a faith that is living and active and not just a museum exhibit. Why? Because God has shown them mercy. I don't think that any of us object to what James is saying here, that faith without works is dead. It really is a pretty common sense thing. We know that unless thoughts and words are backed by some action, it doesn't mean much to us. I know I don't need to convince you of that. We've all experienced that. And chances are, as we read this, we are convicted in some way of a sedentary faith lifestyle. And we find ourselves thinking, maybe I'm like that lion in the courtyard of the castle of the White Witch.

My faith is just for display, teeth and claws, but no heartbeat. If you feel that way, what do you do? Well, in the book, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, that statue of the Lion comes back to life. Breath and heartbeat returns to the great beast after the great lion, Aslan, who is the Jesus figure in the Chronicles of the Narnia, comes and breathes on him. So if you feel like your faith is just a statue or a taxidermy display in a museum, the solution you need isn't to work harder and do more to show your faith. The solution is for the word of Christ to breathe life into you. Hear the word, believe God, trust in his promises, and move. You see, it's really easy for us to relegate the idea of faith to the internal and to make it entirely about how we think, or how we feel. The challenge for us, as we are convicted, is movement. If you were one of those statues in the lion, the witch, and the wardrobe that was revived, You wouldn't stand there all stiff and continue to live your life as a lawn tournament after Aslan breathed on you.

You wouldn't do that. You would move. You would rejoice. So the word of God God comes to us and it breathes life into us. We sit here this morning not as statues. Even though the temperatures are doing the best they can to freeze us, We are not the frozen chosen because we hear the word of God and it breathes life into us. We are the family of God. We are his gathered children. As we scatter from here, it's essential that we remember the message that we've heard from this last half of James 2 this morning. When my kids were younger, they used to love to watch the movie Night at the Museum. You've probably seen it. The plot in that movie is that after the museum closed at night through some magic that a pharaoh who was on display in the museum had, all of the displays in the museum came to life. All of the displays that were there, exhibited the personalities and the characteristics of the people that they were representing. And they could move freely at night, and they would even remain alive outside the museum if they escaped until morning. But they had to be back in place when the sun came up.

If a statue was outside the museum when the sun came up, it would just disintegrate into a pile of dust. Sisters and brothers, do not let this place be like that museum. In that movie, the statues only had life as long as they were in that museum and it was night. If they got caught out in the real world when the sun came up, they crumbled. Don't be like that. Our faith needs to truly come alive when we hear it in this building. And then as we move out, if it's a living faith. It is going to be more than just an animatronic exhibit. It is living and active. James point in our passage this morning is that when Christ breathes life into us by our hearing of the word and the work of the Holy spirit in us, we can't help but exhibit that life to the world. Our faith doesn't disintegrate when we exit through these doors into the world. That's where it thrives. By God's grace, we are more than just displays to the world. We are living and active agents of the light of the gospel in a dark and dying world.

As we close up, I'm going to go back to a point that I made a couple of times in the past few weeks, and you're going to hear me say it again, you'll probably get sick of me bringing this up. But we need to be deliberate that as we depart from here, we need to make sure that we emphasize loving our neighbor, not only in the abstract, but we need to make sure that we're making a difference where God has placed us as his servants. It's easy to feel like we've spread the gospel when we support a missionary on the other side of the world, or we support a cause that we are passionate about. And once again, I'm not saying that those are bad things by any stretch of the imagination. In fact, I would say those are good and holy things, but they're not meant to place us, loving one another, where God has placed us to be ambassadors for his kingdom. We are not the frozen chosen, and we aren't lawn ordinance. We are a people who have been breathed on by the living God. So as we depart from here, may we breathe out his word and show our faith by proclaiming his gospel and loving others that God places in our paths each day.

May we be known as a people who show the heartbeat of our faith to one another, to our community, and to the world. God did not rescue us so that we could be displays standing on a pedestal, being stationary. He rescued us to be his ambassadors. We are his living, breathing people with hands to serve and hearts to love. And so go forth, make disciples, and love your neighbor as a witness to the great truth that we are alive in Christ. Amen. Let us pray. Great and merciful God, we praise you for the gift of your word and for the conviction predicting words that we find in James 2 today. We pray that we would be reminded daily that your word and spirit has brought us to life and that we would desire to go out into the world as your ambassadors, ambassadors for your kingdom, messengers of your grace, who not only believe that you have saved, but love one another because you have first loved us. It's in the name of Jesus we pray. Amen. Thank you for joining us for this week's sermon. For more information about First Reformed Church, head to our Facebook page or website, edgertonfrc.org