James 2:14-26
14 What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if someone claims to have faith but has no deeds? Can such faith save them? 15 Suppose a brother or a sister is without clothes and daily food. 16 If one of you says to them, “Go in peace; keep warm and well fed,” but does nothing about their physical needs, what good is it? 17 In the same way, faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead.
18 But someone will say, “You have faith; I have deeds.”
Show me your faith without deeds, and I will show you my faith by my deeds. 19 You believe that there is one God. Good! Even the demons believe that—and shudder.
20 You foolish person, do you want evidence that faith without deeds is useless? 21 Was not our father Abraham considered righteous for what he did when he offered his son Isaac on the altar? 22 You see that his faith and his actions were working together, and his faith was made complete by what he did. 23 And the scripture was fulfilled that says, “Abraham believed God, and it was credited to him as righteousness,” and he was called God’s friend. 24 You see that a person is considered righteous by what they do and not by faith alone.
25 In the same way, was not even Rahab the prostitute considered righteous for what she did when she gave lodging to the spies and sent them off in a different direction? 26 As the body without the spirit is dead, so faith without deeds is dead.
Faith and Actions Work Together
Have you noticed this? Over the last couple years you hear play say this phrase less and less: “thoughts and prayers.” Back in the day, when a tragedy struck, it wouldn’t have been uncommon to hear a newscaster conclude his comments by saying something like, “Our thoughts and prayers go out to the family and people involved.”
Lately, though, it’s not quite as common. In fact, I’ve even heard callers on the radio lay into the radio hosts for saying that. I remember one caller in particular saying, “I don’t want your prayers. I want your help.”
Without judging that person’s understanding of what prayer is, it reminded me of a Peanuts cartoon I saw a couple years ago that has stuck with me ever since. Charlie Brown and Linus see Snoopy shivering in the cold. Their hearts go out to him. They want to help him, so they go up to him and say, “Be of good cheer, Snoopy. Yes, be of good cheer,” and then they walk away, leaving Snoopy not only still cold but absolutely bewildered.
The cartoonist Charles Schulz is practically quoting the Apostle James:
Suppose a brother or a sister is without clothes and daily food. If one of you says to them, “Go in peace; keep warm and well fed,” and does nothing about their physical needs, what good is it?[1]
Have you ever said, “I’ll pray for you,” and then you did, but that’s all you did? Then James would say that your faith is dead.
Faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by actions, is dead.[2]
Sure, you may go to church. You may believe in the God of the Bible. You may sincerely desire that someone else’s situation improves. But if you have the ability to help someone else, and you don’t, then your faith is worthless, and you are a fraud – a pretender, a hypocrite, someone who likes to signal virtue but not actually follow through.
James gives us a few examples of what faith is supposed to look like:
Was not our father Abraham considered righteous for what he did when he offered his son Isaac on the altar?[3]
Abraham had prayed to God for a son for years. Then, after decades of waiting, Sarah finally gave birth to Isaac. He was the apple of Abraham’s eye, the desire of Sarah’s heart. He brought a laughter into their life that they had waited a literal century to enjoy. But a few years later, God asked the unthinkable: “Abraham, I want you to sacrifice your son, your only son, for me.”
Can you even imagine? How many times have you balked at something far less than that?
“God, I love you, but that’s a step too far. I’m happy to go to church every once in a while, but every week, that’s a bit much, Lord.”
“I know you tell me to give you my firstfruits as an offering and to trust that you’ll take care of me, but this month looks tight and I’m not sure how things will shake out. So, tell you what I’ll do God. I’m going to wait until the end of the month, and if I have anything left over, then I might give some to you.”
“I know you tell me to love my neighbour as myself, but I really don’t like them; they hurt me, I don’t want to be nice to them. How could you even ask me that knowing what they did?”
“I know you tell me to let my light shine and to let others know about you, but I’m afraid they’ll think I’m weird. Not today, God. Maybe tomorrow.”
That’s not really faith, is it? It’s just knowledge about God without any trust in God. It’s a willingness to acknowledge that God exists, but a refusal to live in any way that would reflect that. Real faith, on the other hand, inevitably yields good works.
Like Abraham. God asked the unthinkable and Abraham didn’t hesitate. He didn’t overthink. He didn’t back out. He put his faith in God and followed through with his actions. Abraham was more than just a believer; he was a doer too.
And this is how good God is. In the book of Hebrews, we learn what was going through Abraham’s mind:
Abraham reasoned that God could even raise the dead, and so in a manner of speaking he did receive Isaac back from the dead.[4]
Abraham fully thought that he was going to have to kill his son but he also trusted that God could still keep his promise to raise a great nation through Isaac by raising him from the dead. Abraham’s reasoning was sound – God does have the power to raise the dead – but it was still wrong. That wasn’t God’s plan. And yet, even with faulty logic, Abraham’s faith was properly placed – in a God who does not break his promises and has the power to do anything to take care of us.
Think about what that means for you. You don’t have to have perfect logic. You don’t have to be able to see into the future to trust in God. In fact, if you could, it wouldn’t be trust anymore, right? Trust is doing something even though you can’t know how it will turn out, and yet still putting your confidence in God to see you through.
And God does just like he did for Abraham. Abraham did not have to end his son’s life that day. God interrupted him in the best way possible:
“Abraham! Abraham! 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.”
Abraham looked up and there in a thicket he saw a ram caught by its horns. He went over and took the ram and sacrificed it as a burnt offering instead of his son.[5]
God provided an alternative sacrifice for Abraham. He challenged Abraham to demonstrate his faith, and, to his everlasting credit, Abraham rose to the challenge… this time. But this wasn’t the only test of Abraham’s faith in his life. There were other times that God pushed Abraham to go beyond just words and prove his faith by what he did, and Abraham failed. Like when, not once but twice, Abraham protected himself by using his wife as a human shield, or like when he lost his patience and didn’t trust that God would give him a son through Sarah, so he slept with her servant Hagar instead.
Abraham wasn’t perfect, but that’s why I think James uses the perfect example here. James doesn’t refer to Abraham’s faith when he left his home and his family behind to go to the Promised Land. He doesn’t reference Abraham’s faith when pleading for Sodom and Gomorrah. He references this episode with Isaac precisely because it calls to mind our Saviour.
Isaac was so special to Abraham in part because he was his only son, but also because God had promised that the Saviour of the world would come through Isaac. And in a way, Isaac became a type of Christ; he foreshadowed the coming of your Saviour. Jesus was God’s one and only Son, just like Isaac was for Abraham. God was willing to sacrifice his one and only Son, just like Abraham was. But unlike Abraham, God followed through with his sacrifice so that he could forgive you for when you fail to follow through with your faith.
Are there times you promised to pray for people but forgot to? Jesus never did. Even on the night before he died, with a thousand other, much more pressing, things on his mind, he prayed for you and for me – for the generations of Christians who would some day, long in the future, come to believe in him.
Are there times you offered to help – “If there’s anything you need, let me know” – and then you never followed up? Jesus never did. He promised that he would help you with your greatest need – forgiveness for your sins and salvation from hell – and he followed through, all the way to the cross and the grave. There were no rams caught in a nearby thicket to be sacrificed in his place. He followed through to the bitter end, and God did raise him from the dead, just as Abraham believed he could, for you, as proof that God meant it when he said he loves you and forgives you. He doesn’t hold your sins against you anymore.
Now, it doesn’t matter how many opportunities you’ve missed or how many times you’ve failed. Now, in the light of God’s love and forgiveness in Jesus, it’s about the opportunities that are ahead and the many different ways that God has equipped each one of you to make the faith you do have complete by what you do with it.
That’s a topic that I would dearly love to talk to each of you about, but it’s hard to do in a sermon, because each of you are so uniquely blessed with different gifts, resources and opportunities from God. We’re going to do a deep dive into specific acts of service that specifically apply to each of you in Bible class in a couple weeks. I hope you can be part of that conversation.
In the meantime, let’s not content ourselves with simply calling ourselves believers. Let’s show our faith by what we do, in service to God and to one another. Let your faith and your actions work together, so that your faith can be made complete by what you do, in Jesus’ name and to his glory forever and ever. Amen.
[1] James 2:15,16
[2] James 2:17
[3] James 2:21
[4] Hebrews 11:19
[5] Genesis 22:11-13