What does it look like for followers of Jesus to develop and live a life giving faith? That's what we'll discover this week in Gospel Community: The Book of James

SERMON TRANSCRIPT:

Good morning. I'm really glad that you are here. If we haven't yet had the chance to meet, my name is John, and I have the privilege of serving as the pastor here at Restoration City.

Last two Sundays, John Michael, our associate pastor has been teaching.

And if you missed either one of those talks, I really want to encourage you, go to the app, go to the website, go online, get it, because he just did a phenomenal job serving us as he was leading us through some really important sections of God's

Word. And if you are kind of just connecting with us as a church, this is really kind of how we do it. Regardless of who's teaching, we tend to just take a book of the Bible and work our way through it verse by verse, section by section.

So that's why we get James 2, 14 to 26 in front of us today. It's kind of just what's next. But as it turns out, just in the Lord's grace, it is also a fantastic text to put in front of us on Baptism Sunday.

In my book, Baptism Sundays are probably the most important Sundays we have throughout the course of a year, right?

Can't necessarily tell you that it's the cutest Sunday, that belongs to child dedications when we put infants up here and pray over them. But Baptism Sundays are essential.

They are the most important because we really celebrate the essence of what we are about as a church, right?

If you're just getting connected with us as a community, you need to know that we're a group of people that are really serious about helping one another live as followers of Jesus, or the way the scripture would say that, to live as disciples of

Jesus, and baptism is an essential component of that. Right, now just to be clear, to make sure we're all on the same page, we don't believe that baptism in and of itself makes you a follower of Jesus, right?

The essence of Christianity is that we are saved, we go to heaven, we become a follower of Jesus, not because of anything we do, but because of what Jesus has done on our behalf.

This is why the Apostle Paul in his letter to the church in Ephesus writes this, Ephesians chapter 2 verse 8 and 9, for you are saved by grace through faith, that we believe in the finished work of Jesus on the cross, and even this grace through

faith, it's not from yourselves, it's God's gift. It doesn't come from works, it doesn't come from our performance, it doesn't come from our religious obedience. It comes from faith through grace, so that no one could boast. Right?

So both of the ladies who are going to be baptized today have already made this decision to be a follower of Jesus.

They've already come to a place of belief, they've come to a place of faith, and what we get to do with them today is to celebrate that with them, to celebrate what God has already done in their life by calling them into a life of belief, a life of

faith by calling them to be a member of his family, to be adopted into the family of God as Scripture would say it. And as we celebrate that, I just want to make sure we know really what it is that we're celebrating, that we're thinking biblically

about baptism. Because if you think about baptism correctly, you realize that it is much more of a starting line than a finish line in the journey of the Christian life, right?

In a maybe seasonally appropriate comparison, it's more the first day of school than it is graduation, right?

Baptism is not intended to be this certification of, okay, great, you've learned everything there is to know, your life totally looks like Jesus, you've got it all figured out.

And now just to celebrate the end of the journey, let's baptize you and now just maintain course and speed for the rest of your life. That's not what's going on. The idea of baptism is people beginning this life of discipleship with Jesus.

And I want to say that for two different reasons. One, if I could just talk as a pastor for 30 seconds, people will often tell me, hey look, John, I get it, I just don't think I'm ready to get baptized.

I understand it's really important to the church, I understand it's a big deal in the Bible. I'm just not there yet, right? To which I always say, well, okay, appreciate you being honest with me.

Let's talk. And the conversation boils down to two questions. Hey, number one, do you believe in Jesus?

Do you believe that he was the son of God? Do you believe that he died on the cross for your sin? Do you believe that he rose from the dead?

And more often than not, people will be like, well, yeah, I mean, yes, I do believe that. I'm like, okay, that's great. Let's just do one more question.

Would you say that you're committed to following him? Like, I get it. Nobody's perfect, and it takes a lifetime to grow in that, and we all have our moments, but is it the desire of your heart to follow him?

Do you want to live in obedience? Do you want to do the kind of things Jesus did? Do you want him to be not just your Savior, but your Lord?

And people are like, well, yeah. I mean, like, I definitely don't always get it right, but that is what I want. I'm like, okay, great.

As long as your answer to those two questions is yes, you're ready to get baptized. And people will be like, well, I haven't figured out creation yet. I don't know what I think about that.

And I don't really know the Bible all that well. And I still have sin in my life. And I find myself getting real angry from time to time.

I love all this stuff. I'm like, great. Starting line, not finish line.

First day of school, not graduation. And that might be helpful for some of us that as you watch these ladies get baptized today, you're like, maybe I should be doing that.

And I would love to have the conversation with you because maybe you should be doing it. Maybe you're more ready than you think.

But I also want to make sure, and this is really where James is going in the passage that we're going to look at today, if baptism is a big party at the starting line of a race, then the absolute assumption is you're actually going to run the race.

Right over the last couple of weeks, Laura and I weren't in town. We were hanging out with family and doing all kinds of different things. And we spent a couple of days with my sister and her family.

And she is this fantastic human being, who has odd ways of spending her free time. For example, this coming October, she's going to run the Marine Corps Marathon for the second year in a row. And I'm like, wow, that's just weird.

And she's like, well, I think you should join me and praise God. I was like, oh, work commitments. No can do on a Sunday morning.

So I can just confirm right now. I will be here preaching in the end of October. Well, my sister is having a great time running 26.2 miles with 10, 20, 30,000 of her best friends down there, right?

And by the way, if you've never been to the Marine Corps, it's like phenomenally inspiring. I love to stand there and watch and cheer for people and have a coffee and it looks great. But she's gonna be out there doing her little thing.

And if baptism is like a party at the start of the race, the reason you're celebrating at the start of the race is you want them to get off to a good start for the rest of the 26.2 miles.

You would be really kind of confused if somebody was like, wow, what a moment! Thanks for cheering. And about a mile into the course, they pulled a john, as we call it, and just walked off.

And we're like, that was good. I don't think I'm gonna do the other 25.2 miles. I just, it was, I wanted the start.

I just wanted to get in on the beginning. You'd be like, no way, that's crazy. But we do that all the time in the Christian life.

We're like, yeah, I want a big moment. I want a spiritual high. I want an encounter with Jesus.

Let's sing the song. Sure. Let's not, why not get baptized?

Let's do the thing. Everybody celebrates, claps, woohoo. And then we get a little ways down the journey and we're like, yeah, so this Jesus thing isn't exactly what I thought.

It's a little harder than I thought. Turns out, it's gonna lead me in some different places than I was expecting. Yeah, I was there for the party, but I'm just gonna, just gonna fade away.

Right, the assumption that James is making in this text and what we want to call our attention to today is that our faith, if it's real, our faith, if it is what James describes as alive, our faith is intended to shape the entirety of our lives.

And many of us know that, but it's just really easy to pay lip service to that idea and not actually live it out. Right? Our faith should shape the way that we parent.

That we raise our kids differently because we believe in the death of the burial and the resurrection of Jesus. Our faith is intended to shape the way we give, save and spend our money.

Our faith is intended to shape the way we spend our evenings and how it is we engage with our neighbors and anything and everything else that you would add to that list. And if we aren't really intentional, that doesn't happen.

That doesn't happen by accident. You're not going to accidentally parent your children in a gospel-centered way, right?

You're not going to just stumble into a life where you engage your neighbors in such a way that they come to know, experience, and sense the love of God through you.

It takes tremendous intentionality, and it's just way too easy, particularly in this city, particularly with the demands on our life, to just settle into autopilot, where we settle for some sort of pseudo version of Christianity.

Where yeah, we go to church, we read the Bible every once in a while, but truth be told, we don't even really know what it would look like to raise our kids differently in light of the faith.

We settle into a life where, yeah, we're decent neighbors, but we're way more likely to be described as nice than we are passionate about Jesus.

Well, yeah, we do our best to do our jobs with integrity, but this idea that you read about in Colossians of doing it unto the Lord, you're like, I don't know. I'm not even really sure what that would mean.

I just tell you that the last thing this world needs is more people who profess with their lips to follow Jesus, but then don't live a life that's consistent with it. There's far too much of that already.

Far too much of a disconnect between what we claim to believe in the way we claim to live, and what James is trying to do is say, those two things should be completely consistent with each other.

That a living faith is also a life shaping faith, and there's no way around it. We don't want to find a way around it, but there is no way around it. All right, so the text really splits into two sections.

The first part is a warning against what James is going to call a dead faith, and then he's going to give us some examples of what a living faith looks like.

Right, a dead faith is the kind of faith that doesn't shape your life, and a living faith is the kind of faith that does shape your life. So let's start with the warning against a dead faith.

James chapter 2, verse 14, What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if someone claims to have faith but does not have works? Can such faith save him?

And you heard Ted read through the whole passage, so you already know the punchline that James is going to argue here in chapter 2 that the answer to that question is a very simple no.

So if you're reading along so far, and you're like, okay, he's asking rhetorically, can faith without works save you? And James is like, yeah, not so much. Doesn't work that way.

If your faith doesn't shape your life, your faith isn't real. Which should cause all of us to pump the brakes a little bit.

If you fell a little hesitation, if you're like, hey, I don't want to be rude, and I don't know exactly how this works, if there's like, I get to interrupt for questions, but I do have a question, not to ruin your sermon by actually paying attention,

but I actually was listening at the beginning when you did that whole Ephesians 2, 8 and 9 kind of thing. And I remember that it said, for you are saved by grace through faith, and this is not from yourselves.

It is God's gift, not from works, so that no one could boast.

And you can imagine when you put James 2 14 on one side of a sheet of paper and Ephesians 2, 8 and 9 on the other, why it is that some people mistakenly conclude that Paul and James have different gospels. Right?

Team Paul seems to be grace alone, faith alone, no works. Team James seems to be, whee, not so fast there, buddy. If you don't have any works, I'm not sure your faith is real.

People sort of set up this whole deal between James and Paul, and they're like, see, the Bible's filled with contradictions. See, the Bible can't even get its story straight. See, James and Paul aren't on the same page.

By the way, when most people do that, they tend to look down on James. That was Martin Luther's solution, by the way, the great reformer. He called the book of James an epistle of straw.

He was like, well, James has some problems. Boom, we'll forget he exists and just go with Team Paul over here.

Right?

What I want you to realize is you don't have to make that choice, because James and Paul are not saying different things at all about how it is that you would become a follower of Jesus.

Right?

You need to understand what James means in James chapter 2 when he uses this phrase works. Right? Douglas Moo is this sort of legendary New Testament scholar.

He taught at Trinity Seminary and then taught at Wheaton for a number of years. He's just one of those people that's like respected. Sort of wherever you go in the church, people are like, yeah, he's a really, really trusted voice.

So he would say in summation of the way James uses the word works, that James uses works in a general sense to refer to actions done in obedience to God.

And that's really significant because the issue is not that James and Paul disagree about how you become a Christian. The issue is that James in this letter and Paul use the word works differently.

When Paul is talking about works, he's talking about things we do to earn God's grace, love, or forgiveness. And he's rejecting that. He's saying you can't earn God's grace, love, and forgiveness.

You don't need to. He gives it as a gift. Jesus dies on the cross in your place.

Jesus does all the work necessary for your salvation, so don't try to earn what you can only receive as gift. James, on the other hand, talks about works as things we do in response to God's grace, love, or forgiveness.

And the little difference between those underlined words changes everything. It's not just a semantic game. Because one use of works, Paul's, the one he's rejecting, says, You better get it right to please God.

Good for you. You showed up at church. God's keeping score.

Let's see how close you can get to perfect attendance over the course of the year.

And the closer your number is to 52, the more God's going to love you, the more God's going to bless you, the more God's going to forgive you, the more mercy you're going to get. That's not the way Christianity works.

But James is saying, Hey, wait a minute.

If you understand the grace, the love, the mercy, the forgiveness of God, if you've tasted the joy of corporate worship with brothers and sisters in Christ, if your heart is stirred by the word of God, if you find a deep sense of peace and communion

with God when you come to a table and take bread and a cup and are reminded of the beauty of the gospel, wouldn't you want to come to church? Wouldn't you want to be there on a Sunday to celebrate with like-minded brothers and sisters in Christ to go

closer to the Lord? That difference in motivation, I'm doing it to earn God's favor, I'm doing it in response to God's favor. It shifts everything.

And James is saying, hey, hey, hey, look, if our faith is real, if our belief is genuine, if it is a living faith, it will translate into every aspect of our life. It will shape our lives. Our faith will give rise to our works, right?

What he's really asking is, can you have a faith that doesn't shape the way you live? And again, you know, the answer is no. James 2 17, in the same way, faith, if it does not have works, is dead by itself.

If your faith doesn't shape your life, maybe your faith isn't real. Now, this is where we have to pause for just a second and say, hey, we are all human.

We all, every single one of us, continues to struggle with sin throughout the course of your Christian life, right? So I already know about you, there were moments in your life this week where you fell well short of God's grace.

Or you fell well short of the life that you wanted to live. The reason I know that about you is I also know it about myself.

Right, so this doesn't mean, hey, if you don't perfectly follow Jesus in every moment, then guess what, sorry, you're not a Christian. Try again. You'd have to get saved like six times a day for that to work.

It might be exhausting.

It just means if you look at the trajectory of your life from the moment that you said you wanted to follow Jesus, over the last couple of weeks, last couple months, the last couple years, can you see ways that your faith is shaping your life?

Are you starting to date differently? Are you starting to use your money differently? Are you starting to use your time differently?

Are you starting to respond to difficult people differently? Are you becoming a little bit more loving? Are you becoming a little bit more self-disciplined?

Right? Are you finding joy in prayer? Are you finding joy in God's Word?

Those are the kind of questions we don't want to be afraid to ask.

At the end of the day, if there's no evidence that our faith is shaping our life in any way, then James and Paul both would say, well, maybe we need to question whether it's a genuine faith or just a religious experience that you had at some point in

the past. Right? And at times, the evangelical church can be dangerously good at creating little religious experiences where you're invited to pray a prayer.

Maybe you got baptized every summer that you went to summer camp with your high school ministry. You went on a retreat, whatever. You had a moment.

But whatever that moment was, it wasn't the starting line of a journey of discipleship. Maybe, if anything, it was more an exercise in group think or peer pressure or wanting to please mom and dad. You want to have a faith that shapes your life.

So he's also asking, can you have a faith that is purely about the things you believe? And again, he'll say no, because verse 18 and 19, 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. Right, he's saying, how do you know your faith is real? Because it translates into the way you live your life.

And then he says something really provocative about belief in the Christian life. And stick with me for a minute or two. You believe that God is one.

So this great Old Testament truth, Judaism is this monotheistic religion. Yes, we understand God is three persons in one God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, but Judaism, Christianity, we're a monotheistic religion.

And he's saying, hey, you've heard this, that God is one. It's this great confessional statement of the Jewish faith. He's writing to Jewish believers in Jesus.

He's saying, hey, you have this belief. Good! But even the demons believe and they shudder.

He's referring back to this sort of famous incident with Jesus, where Jesus has gone into a gentile region, but encounters a small group of Jewish people who have formed a synagogue, and he meets in there a man with an unclean spirit.

Luke chapter 4 verse 33 through 34 records what's going on, and this is what James is referring to. In the synagogue, there was a man with an unclean demonic spirit who cried out with a loud voice, Leave us alone.

What do you have to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are, the Holy One of God.

And Jesus ultimately casts out this demonic spirit, but there's this sense of, huh, isn't this interesting? This demon completely nails the exam of who Jesus is. Maybe one of the few people in the room to get the question right is the demon.

The Holy One of God is a way of saying, I know who you are. You're the second person of the Trinity. You're the Son of the Living God.

You are the Messiah of Israel. And I'm freaked out because you're here. Because I work for the Prince of Darkness, and you're the Prince of Light.

And I don't know what you're going to do with me. But I know who you are. I don't have any confusion.

I don't think you're just a good religious teacher. I don't think you're just a worthy example. I don't think you're an interesting philosopher.

You're God in human flesh. And you're a threat to me. You can believe, but reject.

You can believe, but hate. You can believe and oppose. It doesn't mean that belief is unnecessary.

It means that belief is the beginning of the Christian life. The life of discipleship starts with belief. Romans 10, verse 9, still applies.

If you confess with your mouth Jesus' Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.

But Luke 4 helps us understand that the Romans 10 belief, the Ephesians 2 belief, the James 2 belief, is a belief that says, I absolutely acknowledge who you are, and I want to follow you. I want to submit. I want to be on your side.

I want to be your child. I want to be your disciple. I want to be a part of your kingdom.

I want to step into the kingdom of light and grace and mercy and reject a kingdom of evil, reject a kingdom that opposes the goodness and the grace of God.

Right, so if you're trying to conjure up some sense of Christianity as just a matter of getting certain doctrinal questions right, but not having to do the hard work of actually following, James is saying, don't waste your time on what is going to be

unprofitable. Let your faith shape your life. Let a living faith become a life shaping faith. And then he just throws in three very quick examples of what that sort of faith would look like.

It's not meant to be sort of the definitive guide to all of the different ways that Christianity is meant to shape your life. That would be a little ambitious for any one particular passage. But he throws out three examples just to get us thinking.

And there are the three different sort of ones, a hypothetical that he creates and then two different Old Testament references just to say, hey, if you want to know what it looks like to let your faith shape your life, if you were to actually be

serious about running the race with God, you're gonna go the entire 26.2 with Jesus and see what he's gonna do. He's gonna do stuff like this in your life. This is the kind of person he wants you to become.

Verse 15 and 16, if a brother or sister is without clothes and lacks daily food, and one of you says to them, go in peace, stay warm, be well fed, but you don't give them what the body needs, what good is it?

He's using a very common example to say that following Jesus needs to be more than a matter of sentiment or well wishes, right? We would all look at that hypothetical in 15 and 16 and be like, what? That's like offensive.

Go in peace, stay warm, be well fed, right? Like help the person find a meal, help the person find shelter, get him a winter jacket, do something to make a difference in their life, right?

Christianity isn't just an exercise in sending love, positive energy, or happy vibes out into the world. Following Jesus is a call to roll up our sleeves and to serve, to do something about the problems of the world.

It matters that we're all going to hang around after church next Sunday and pull weeds and fix this school up as a demonstration of God's love for these students, right?

And when they walk in on the first day of school, they're not necessarily going to be able to connect the dots between a weed-free sidewalk and the love of God in one instant, but it's one way of us continuing to engage in relationship with this

school, so that we get to be a blessing in multiple different ways, and we get to show this is the kind of thing that followers of Jesus do. They roll up their sleeves and pull weeds when nobody else is available to do it.

They roll up their sleeves and care for a building, because they care about kids getting a good education, and kids having a sense that what they do in this building matters, right? We don't just say, man, I hope you have a great school here.

We're like, what can we do to help you with that? Right? Specifically, beyond just serving schools, we are called as followers of Jesus to meet the physical needs of the materially poor, right?

That's why the work we are already doing. If you're a part of our church, you're already engaged in supporting work and impoverished communities in rural Ethiopia.

We're partnered with Casa Chirilagua right across the road in the Chirilagua neighborhood. We support a church plant in Juarez, Mexico. Over the last couple of years, we've resettled three Afghan refugee families here in the DC area.

It is not just bonus feel-good Christianity to do stuff like that. It's the essence of the gospel. It's the heart of what it looks like to have a living faith.

If we aren't living that out as a congregation, we aren't getting it right. But also if we aren't living it out as individuals, we aren't getting it right either. We live a life of selfless service for the good of others.

It's a tall task. It's a high calling. It's why you were never intended to run the Christian race in your own power.

It's why God gives us the spirit to live inside of us, to motivate us to do what we could never hope to do on our own. But it's a beautiful picture of how your faith should shape your life.

Somebody who doesn't just offer the world free advice on your Instagram feed, but somebody who rolls up your sleeve and actually does something about it. James chapter 2 verse 20 and 23 expand the conversation.

Senseless person, are you willing to learn that faith without works is useless? If your faith doesn't shape your life, what are we doing here? Wasn't Abraham our father justified by works and offering Isaac his son on the altar?

You see that faith was active together with his works, and by works, faith was made complete, and the scripture was fulfilled. It says Abraham believed God. Notice, belief is there.

It starts with belief. It was credited to him as righteousness, and he was called God's friend. But Abraham's faith led to a life of risky obedience, right?

James is referring back to this famous Old Testament story where God asks Abraham to sacrifice his only son Isaac as an offering.

You do an entire sermon or an entire series of messages to explain all of the different questions that that would bring to mind of like, what kind of God tells a father to sacrifice his son? That's a great question.

And just for the sake of time, I can't quite get into it today. What you need to know is two things. Number one, in the moment where Abraham is about to sacrifice his son, God intervenes and he offers a substitute.

It was never God's plan to have Abraham kill his child. And there was a way that Abraham knew that because God had promised that the descendants of Abraham were going to be more numerous than the stars in the heavens, the sand in the seashore.

And Abraham was like, man, I don't know what's going on. I don't know how it is that I'm taking my kid and we're climbing up a mountain and I'm building an altar and I'm putting him down here.

I don't know what God's going to do, but there is no way that I'm left without a descendant. There's no way that I'm left without an heir. I don't know what God's going to happen, but I'm going to just trust him.

By the way, the reason that story is in the Old Testament is to get you thinking about a day where a different son would climb up a different hill.

Instead of laying himself on a pile of sticks, he would lay himself on two sticks, joined together to form a cross. Except that day, there wasn't going to be a substitute coming because he was the substitute.

He was the substitute for you, and he was the substitute for me. He was offering himself as a sacrifice to his father so that you and I could be forgiven.

Ultimately, Abraham and Isaac are help us see the beauty of Jesus dying for our sin on the cross. Yet, Abraham's faith was not just a like, oh, bless God, let me sing some songs. When God called him into a life of risky obedience, he followed.

And there are going to be times in each and every single one of our lives where we need to trust God and obey what we know he is leading us to do, even if it doesn't make sense to us.

Even if we look at some of the moral teachings of the Bible and we don't understand why God calls us to what he does.

Maybe even if we look at some of the ethical precepts of scripture and say I think I would set things up differently if I were in charge.

When we look at some of the sacrifices that God asks us to make, we're like man, I don't know that I would want to do that. I don't know that I want to move for the sake of the gospel.

I don't know that I want to stay in DC for the sake of the gospel. And we say okay, but I'm just going to trust your plan for my life God. I'm going to follow where you lead me.

That's what it means to have your faith shape your life. Where you don't just call the shots and sing Jesus songs on Sunday morning, but you say, all right Lord, my life is hidden in Christ. Show me where you want me to go.

Show me what you want me to do. And I'm going to follow you. Finally, verse 25, in the same way, wasn't Rahab the prostitute also justified by works in receiving the messengers and sending them out by a different route.

Again, this would have been a story extremely familiar to the people that James was writing to.

They would have known about the day where Joshua had sent spies into the promised land to scope it out before crossing the Jordan, and they would have known that there was a day where those spies went into the city of Jericho, and they were

discovered there by the king of Jericho, and the king of Jericho wanted to put them to death. But Rahab, this extremely unlikely lover of God who was a prostitute, helps these men escape from the city.

By the way, this most unlikely of women goes on to become the great-great-grandmother of King David. And when you read the beginning of Matthew's Gospel, she shows up in the genealogy of Jesus himself.

But she's there to remind us that a living faith leads to risky engagement in the mission of God. This idea that we leverage our lives to make the greatest possible contribution to what God is doing in the world.

So at the end of the day, what James describes as a dead faith, whether that's just religious sentiment or a feel-good moment with God, it's worthless. It's also boring and miserable.

Forcing yourself to go through the motions of Christianity when it doesn't represent who you are at the core of who you are is exhausting.

Trying to live the Christian life without the power of the Holy Spirit is an exercise in futility and frustration.

So today, we're celebrating the living faith of two members of our community, but we're doing it in a way that invites all of us to trade in any semblance of a dead faith for a living faith.

A reminder to all of us that we're called to allow the things we believe to shape the way we engage in any and every area of life. Let's take a minute and pray to that end. Father, you know where every single one of us is in this room right now.

You know the kind of week we've had. You know the kind of week we're going to have. And Lord, my prayer is that you would meet us and draw us closer to what James calls a living faith.

Holy Spirit, would you come find us? Would you speak to the core of who we are? I pray in Jesus' name, amen.