Sermon Video: Making Faith Complete - James 2:20-26

After his conclusion that faith that is not accompanied by works is dead, James offers two Old Testament examples to further prove the point.  The first example is the revered Patriarch, Abraham, a man renowned for his faith and righteousness.  The second example is quite the opposite, the Gentile prostitute Rahab, a woman with no interaction with God prior to the moment when she risked her life to save the spies sent by Joshua.  In both cases, actions confirm what faith has already begun, in Abraham's case, decades after it had begun, in Rahab's case, at its inception.  These two examples thus offer proof that actions (works, deeds, whatever they're called) are necessary to vindicate faith, for both those coming from a high position with a track record of faith, and those coming from a low position with no pretense of having a righteousness of their own.  The discussion of the necessity of actions along with faith by James offers a counter-balance to those who might misinterpret the writings of Paul and thus get stuck on the fact that our salvation is indeed by grace alone without moving beyond our initial repentance to focus upon the absolute necessity of having works of righteousness as part of our discipleship.  The path to being reconciled with God is grace (faith in what Christ has already done for us), the only way to walk with God once we have been reconciled is for our faith to propel us to take action.

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Apes, children, and the value of life.

There was a recent incident at the zoo in Cincinnati, Ohio, involving a three-year-old child falling into the gorilla enclosure and the subsequent killing of a male gorilla named Harambe by zoo officials who was either threatening or protecting the child, depending upon who you ask.  Setting aside the question of whether or not Harambe would have harmed the child if the zoo had instead tried to use a tranquilizer on him, for that ought to be a question answered by gorilla experts, we all ought to be able to agree that Harambe could have easily killed the child he was holding on to, whether intentionally or not.  Thus the question should not be about the intentions of the gorilla, but instead about the value of the two lives involved.  One of the two was a endangered gorilla, the other a human child.  How can these two lives be weighed, how can one decide their relative value?
For those who do not believe in God, and thus have no concept of humanity as having an immortal soul, nor of humanity created in the image of God, the question is a much more difficult one to answer.  If you don't believe in God, humanity is simply on step above primates, higher, but only relatively so.  If we are only the product of evolution, and our place at the top of this planet's food chain is only the outcome of chance, and not the design of a Creator, there will be little separating humanity from other life in terms of value.  For those who don't believe in God, the idea that a human life could have less value than an animal's life becomes a possibility.
To those who do believe in God as Creator, who see humanity as a reflection of the divine image, every human life must have an inherent value qualitatively different than any animal life.  Without God, human life is greater in a difference of degree, not a difference of kind.  But for those who see the hand of God in the face of every child, the gap between human life and animal life is, and must be, vast.
I would choose to save a human life, at the cost of any animal's life, even a great number of animal lives.  I would choose a 90-year-old with Alzheimers disease over an endangered baby animal.  I would choose a severely handicapped human life, mentally or physically, over any animal's life.  Why, because that human being has a soul, that life is a gift from God, and it is our duty to protect it in any way that we can.  In case this implication isn't clear too, I would also certainly choose the life of an unborn child over an animal's life as well.
Do I love animals?  I certainly do, some of my best memories and interactions have been with my dogs, and we've taken our one-year-old daughter to the zoo twice already.  My wife is obsessed with hiking in the woods out West to look for moose.  We've done this many times, and will undoubtedly do so again soon when our daughter is old enough to trek along.  I think moose are awesome, and would oppose cruelty or senseless killing of them or any other animals.  But don't think for a second that I would hesitate to protect my wife or child, or any other human life, if it was threatened by an animal.
This recent controversy over the killing of an ape to save a child has been greatly inflated by a significant number of people who have erroneously concluded that the life of the child and the life of the ape have a similar value.  Such belief is wrong, dangerous, and not connected to the teaching of the Word of God.  Perhaps the zoo could have used a tranquilizer, but to do so they would have put the life of a child at a greater risk in order to save the life of an animal, and that decision would have been not only unacceptable, but immoral.  They chose human life because they valued it as they should have.

Sermon Video: Living Faith in Action - James 2:14-19

In an effort to explain why his previous instruction about favoritism and discrimination is of the utmost importance, even beyond the prior notice that doing so is breaking the royal law of loving our neighbor and thus rebelling against God, James follows those thoughts up with a stark example of inactive faith that does not lead to action.  The conclusion about such "faith", of a kind that could watch a fellow Christian in a near-death scenario of need and do nothing in response, is that it is dead.  James doesn't call such "faith" weak or diseased, he flat out labels it dead.  Without actions being produced by faith, actions of righteousness, the only conclusion we can reach is that the person in question has no real faith at all.
Intellectual assent to the idea of God is not enough.  Saying that you believe in Jesus is not enough.  If these words are not matched by actions derived from faith, then the words in questions are just words, and not life changing professions of repentance.  We cannot be saved by works, James agrees with Paul on that (sorry Martin Luther, you were mistaken on this one), but we must have works once we are saved, works that show that we are in possession of a living and active faith.

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The agreement of Paul and James

The book of James has at times been viewed, most famously by Martin Luther, as being in opposition to the message of salvation by grace alone preached by the Apostle Paul.  While this misunderstanding of James has been explained and the reconciliation of James and Paul made clear by theologians long in generations past, an interesting bit of serendipity has occurred to me of late.  I have been preaching verse by verse through James on Sunday morning, and at the same time, working through Romans, verse by verse, in my Wednesday morning Bible Study.  Working on the two of them together, I have been impressed by how many times I have been able to explain something in Romans using a reference to what I had previously preached in James.
Paul's message of salvation by faith, through grace alone, is in no way opposed to James' emphasis on a living and active faith that demonstrates its viability through works of righteousness.  Paul is explaining how a person can become a Christian when he insists upon sola fide and sola gratia, James is showing instead how a person who already is a Christian needs to be living in order to prove it (A theme that the Apostle John takes up in I John as well).  We cannot be saved by our works, but she had better have them once we are saved.  This same point was made again and again by Jesus in the Gospels when he demanded "fruit" from God's people lest they be uprooted and tossed aside as worthless.
To put works before faith is to put the cart before the horse, but to preach a faith that never asks for works as a demonstration of that it is alive and well is empty and foolish.  If you want to quote Ephesians 2:8-9 to talk about salvation by grace through faith, that's the right place to start, but don't forget to keep reading through verse 10, "For we are God's workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do."  God saved us by grace, we couldn't do it ourselves, but don't let the necessary emphasis on grace fool you into thinking you don't have work to do for the Kingdom of God.

Sermon Video: The Problem with breaking some of God's Law - James 2:8-13

In order to impress upon his readers the seriousness of their willingness to show favoritism (and thus discriminate), James connects this misdeed to the "royal law" of Leviticus 19:18, "Love your neighbor as yourself".  Jesus taught that this was the second most important commandment, now James adds to the weight given to this commandment by pointing out that breaking one of God's laws is akin to breaking all of them.  Why?  Because breaking the Law of God is not simply a trespass against the Law, it is also an act of rebellion against God.  The Law of God reflects the nature of God, and tells us the will of our Creator, to ignore it is to reject God's authority over us.
In light of the gravity of breaking the Law of God, which all of humanity is guilty of, as a people who have been forgiven by God for our sins, it is incumbent upon us to live our lives now with mercy toward everyone, knowing that one day we will all give an account before God for the use to which we put the grace that he bestowed upon us.

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