Faith Is Never Alone

         

        When we come across our passage today from James 2:14-26, we are almost walking into the middle of a conversation. And the issue with walking into the middle of a conversation is that you are missing everything that was said before you walked in that might give you some important context for what everyone is talking about. So, let me try and slowly build up the backstory of what James is responding to here.

James begins by asking, “What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if you say you have faith but do not have works?” And he’s asking this, presumably, because some people are saying that there is much profit from having faith, even without works. And here’s why they are probably thinking that: because a key part of the gospel message of salvation is this: you are not saved by good works. The law of God does perhaps make one worthy of heaven if one keeps it entirely. But the problem of course is that no one does so. And James says just before this passage in James 2:11 that if you fail in one point of the law, you are accountable for breaking all of it. No one who ever lived, no one but Jesus, has been sinless. We have all fallen short of properly loving God and neighbor. We are all guilty and condemned by God’s laws. You cannot be saved by good works.

And the second part of the gospel message of salvation is this: what does save you is God’s grace. God forgiving you. God not holding your trespasses against you. God providing means of expiation and atonement for our sins. What saves you is God’s grace. And how you obtain God’s grace is through faith, is through believing in Jesus Christ and accepting the eternal life he won for us on the cross. Paul sums all this up succinctly in Ephesians 2:8 and 9. “For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God- not the result of works.”

            So, when James asks, “What good is it if you have faith but not works?” Many Christians are probably thinking, there is much good in that. After all, works seem inconsequential, because works cannot save us. Part of the radical message of the gospel is that a murderer or a thief can be saved by the exact same grace that saves us. Even if we haven’t done anything quite as bad, we are in just as desperate need of grace. So, again, it seems like the faith by which we receive God’s grace is all that really matters, and good works seem to not really matter at all.

            This is the part of the conversation that James is now entering into. And I don’t think James is at all disputing the basic facts that we are saved through faith and not through works. But what James is doing here is complicating the question of, “What does it really mean to have faith?” James is making us ponder, for example, if faith in God is as simple as simply believing in God. In other words, is faith mere intellectual consent to the idea that yes, a God exists, and yes, that God is Jesus Christ, who died and rose again? James thinks faith is more than just that thinking those things are true.

            And I think this is James’ train of thought. Let’s say you believe there is a God and that that God is Jesus. So, what you’re saying then is that you believe in the God of the Bible, for that is the God that Jesus claims to be. And the God of the Bible is described as perfect, as good, as loving, as a God who makes moral laws that instruct us in the right way to live, ways that will benefit ourselves and others. So, James is in essence saying, “Ok, you say you believe in that God. Well, if you say you believe in that God, then wouldn’t you therefore strive to the best of your ability to live out God’s laws? If you believe God is good and His laws are righteous, it would make no sense to go about living with no regard to God’s good laws, as if it doesn’t matter at all to your flourishing and the flourishing of others if you obey those laws.”

Is it really logically consistent to believe that there is a God and that God is good, and yet live in such a way that you show that deep down you think a lot of his laws are actually stupid or wrong? Do you really believe in God if you don’t believe in doing as God says when he says that you should live a life of meekness, forgiveness, and prayer? Do you really believe in God if you do not take any effort to heed God’s warnings about pride, envy, greed, and selfishness?

            James basically used this exact language last week in our sermon on favoritism. He said in James 2:1, roughly this: “You, when engaging in favoritism, do you really believe in our glorious Lord Jesus Christ? Because if you believe in Jesus and believed Jesus lived the best life you could live, you’d try to live like Jesus, and Jesus did not play favorites or give preferential treatment to the rich.” James seems to think that true belief results in us trying to align our lives with God’s laws.

            This is best seen when James notes, rather cleverly, that even demons believe. We see this in the gospels: the demons seem to know who Jesus is, even when the humans in the story don’t. The demons are often saying things like this when Jesus approaches: “I know who you are: you’re the holy one, the Son of God!” Even the demons believe… and they tremble. They ask Jesus, “Have you come to destroy us?” But though the demons know Jesus to be the true and high God, guess what? That doesn’t mean they have any intention of living how God wants them to live. They, as demons, still have every intention of breaking God’s laws, of corrupting God’s good commands. Even demons can believe! What it means to have faith must therefore mean something different than to merely have the same type of faith that the demons have, a faith that still results in persistent opposition to God. So, James begins to distinguish between what he calls a dead faith and a living faith. A faith that is absent of works is dead, while a faith that is made manifest in works is alive.

            As I said, James seems to be entering into a conversation here, debating with opponents who think that only faith matters and could care less about good works. Mistakenly, a lot of commentators have thought that James here is debating with Paul. They claim that James is disagreeing with Paul’s theology or that he is correcting what he sees to be an oversight of Paul’s theology. I think this is a misinterpretation and an unfortunate one that leads people to think that scripture is disagreeing with itself. And I personally don’t quite see how they get there either. Because if they read much of Paul at all, this theology of a faith that results in good works is found in Paul as well. We saw this in our reading from the book of Romans. Though Romans begins with a theology that James could be critiquing; by the end of Romans, Paul too addresses the same concerns James is addressing. Paul begins by talking about how there is no one who is righteous and the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus. He says that though we are not righteous we can attain the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus. Again, this seems to only stress the importance of faith and not works. But… then Paul starts walking through a thought process he’s worried some might have. He worries that some will think, “Grace is what saves me. Therefore, the more I sin, the more graceful God is to me.” They think, “I may as well keep on sinning then, because God will forgive me anyways, and because the worse of a person I am, the more glorious God’s forgiveness appears in that He is going to save and rescue even a wretch like me.” But Paul sharply critiques those who might think this way. He asks, “Should we continue in sin that grace may abound?” “By no means!”

            Paul thinks we have fundamentally misunderstood our salvation if we have a laissez faire attitude towards sin. He says you died to sin, you were saved from sin. Why would you want to go back and live in it any longer? Peter compares such people in 2 Peter 2 to a dog returning to their vomit. You were saved from the vomit of sin and given the feast of salvation, why would you ever go back?

Unfortunately, a lot of people really want to be saved in the midst of their sins, not saved from their sins. In other words, they want to go on living their lives however they want, not having to make any changes, not having to give up any sins, but just to be assured that come the end of their days they will be saved. But God is trying to save us not just in the midst of our sins, but to save us from our sins. Though we won’t be perfect till paradise, God is transforming us day by day, molding us into his new creation. God’s salvation does not just mean that we will get to heaven when we die. God’s salvation means that God is going to be making us more heavenly right here and now.

            But yes, Paul, same as James, does not envision a type of saving faith that does not result in the transformation of one’s character and thus the doing of good works. We see this not just in Romans but in Ephesians. For in Ephesians 2, right after Paul says that you have been saved by grace through faith, not by good works, well, the very next verse he says nonetheless that we were created in Christ Jesus for good works. We’re not saved by good works, but we are created for good works. Good works is not the cause of our salvation, but it is certainly the result of our salvation.

            So, the early Protestant Reformers sought to be very precise in their language around these issues. Some Catholics were teaching that we were saved by faith and works. Reformers like Luther and Calvin said no, we are saved by faith alone. Sola fide. But, they would also note that though we are saved by faith alone that faith is never alone. Wherever faith is, good works necessarily follow after it. It’s a small difference between the Catholic and Protestant language here, but a crucial difference.

            I find the writings of Dietrich Bonhoeffer helpfully illumine all that we have been talking about here. Bonhoeffer teaches similar things to what we read in James 2, but instead of using the language of faith and works, or dead faith and living faith, Bonhoeffer uses the language of cheap grace contrasted with costly grace. I’ll explain it this way. Grace is free, entirely free. But that does not mean that grace is cheap. It is a priceless treasure. I’ll try and give some examples. Friendship is free. And yet it is not cheap. It demands much of us to be a good friend, and a good friendship is worth more than anything money could buy. Similarly, grace is free, but not cheap. We treat grace as cheap when we take salvation for granted, when we are not properly appreciative of the gift we’ve received. Bonhoeffer says cheap grace is a grace that preaches forgiveness, but does not preach repentance.

            Bonhoeffer says that grace is costly. Now, at first, this language of costly seems entirely incorrect. Grace is free. How could it be costly? Well, grace doesn’t cost us anything, but it cost Jesus everything. He had to die on the cross for our sins. He had to bear the full brunt of our human evil. And grace is costly because even though it is free to accept, those who accept nevertheless owe unending thanksgiving and gratitude for the gift they’ve been given by God. And grace is costly because though it is free to accept, accepting it places the great demands of discipleship upon our lives. So, Bonhoeffer says that grace is costly because it costs a man his life, but it is grace because it gives a man the only true life there is. It’s like in Romans 6, grace requires that we die to our old self, but it is in dying that we are born again to new life.

            Church, let us reflect on this today: do we see the grace we receive from God as cheap or as costly? If we treat it as cheap then we are happy to say the sinner’s prayers, be told we are saved, and then go about living as we always have, unchanged. But if we know how costly grace is, we will come away from the moment of our salvation utterly changed. Because God gave us everything, we will want to do everything we can for God. Because God has been generous to us, we will want to be generous to others. Because God has forgiven us, we will want to forgive others. Because Jesus lived the perfect life, we will want to imitate the life of Christ.

            Friends, the good news today is that you are saved entirely by grace through faith. But the challenge for you to meditate on is that faith cannot live without works any more than the body can live without the spirit. Now of course this truth that faith needs to result in good works doesn’t mean that if we really believe in Jesus that we are suddenly going to be perfect and sinless. No, we will still struggle with sin. We will still fall short. But the sign that our faith is genuine is not that we never struggle with sin, it’s that when sin comes, we do genuinely struggle against it. A dead faith will give in early and often. A dead faith won’t care to put up a fight. But a living faith makes war with the devil. A living faith strives very hard to be good. And a living faith often does triumph by the strength of God and succeeds in doing many good and wonderful things.

            So, the good news is that God saves you; and that God saves you not just in your sins, but from your sins. The good news is that when God calls us to repentance, God also gives us the strength such that we have the possibility to overcome our bad habits. The good news is that we are not doomed to stay wallowing in the filth of our sins. The good news is that though we have not yet arrived at perfection, that we are being made perfect day by day until God makes us to shine like the noonday sun.