Matt Chandler - Faith That Works

Well, good morning! If you have your Bibles, go ahead and grab those. We’re going to be in James chapter 2. We’re just going to look at three verses. Those three verses are embedded in a much larger text that needs to be fleshed out so that we don’t get confused. I won’t have the time to do that today, but if you remember, we walked through the Book of James about two years ago. You can find a sermon called «Faith That Works» on our webpage or on our app, and you can listen to that 52-minute sermon there, which will do more work on this passage than I have time for today.

Now, this weekend is Epiphany Sunday. What we’ve done is taken Epiphany Sunday and rolled it over the month of January because Epiphany is about the celebration of the manifestation of Jesus Christ. What that means is that Christians on this Sunday throughout church history have celebrated the fact that Jesus is not just some good teacher; He’s not another prophet; He is not just some moral philosopher, but that He is God in the flesh, the second person of the Trinity, and has shown Himself to us. He has manifested; He has condescended from heaven, and He has gotten into the muck and the mire with us. Right? So that Jesus is in the mud and the blood and the brokenness. We talk about this a lot here. When we talk about Jesus and what Jesus is doing and what Jesus has given birth to in us, it’s not just kind of an ethereal spirituality; it makes a difference here and now. It is alive, and it’s living, and it’s working. As we covered in our series on the kingdom, it is actively pushing back darkness and establishing order where there is chaos. This is one of the things we see the Kingdom of God doing even in the already but not yet that you and I are stuck in.

So, we don’t believe that as Christians we can usher in a utopia. If we got everything we wanted, if we got the right politicians in place, we got the right laws in place, we would still have sinful human hearts everywhere, which are going to make a mess of that system. You cannot legislate love for Jesus, correct? You just can’t do it. Therefore, the Christian’s goal—the Christian’s heart—is not just political, although the early church would clearly make a political statement when it said, «Jesus is Lord.» You and I have been trained to think about that in a kind of vague spirituality, which ultimately makes things sentimental and not full of power. But that statement, «Jesus is Lord,» stood in contrast to «Caesar is Lord» and was what led to a ton of persecution against the early church.

So what I want us to do today is look at a passage and remind us, on the cusp of where we’re going this month, that our faith is an active faith and that the gospel isn’t just a vague spiritual message. It is good news that breaks through the real darkness and brokenness of the world, and Christians are called into a victory that is assured in Jesus Christ. Are you with me? With that said, let’s look at this passage. If you’re like, «You seem a little amped today,» well, I am! Look at James 2:14–17. Many of you will know this passage. Again, I will try to clarify quickly, but it requires a lot of work, so I have to point backwards to that sermon because I’m just not going to have the time today.

Let’s look at verse 14: «What good is it, my brothers, if someone says he has faith but does not have works? Can that faith save him?» If a brother or sister is poorly clothed and lacking in daily food, and one of you says to them, «Go in peace; be warmed and filled,» without giving them the things needed for the body, what good is that? So also, faith by itself, if it does not have works, is dead. Now, surely if you’ve been at the village for a while, you know that this passage is not laying before us a works-based mentality around our salvation. We know that the gospel message is that we cannot, with moral deeds and good actions, earn salvation. That is not James’s point. If we could continue on through the Book of James, that would become extremely clear.

So the argument in this passage is not, «You better do works if you want to be saved.» He’s arguing actually the other way: that if your heart belongs to Jesus Christ, your life will bear fruit. If your life bears no such fruit, then there should be some concern, some doubt, about whether salvation actually exists in your heart and whether you have actually fully surrendered to Jesus. Now, most churches and most people want to stay away from this because it creates a kind of space that makes us anxious, and I think that’s not kind. I think it’s unloving because James here is pressing this point: you should bear fruit. Charles Spurgeon would use this illustration of an apple tree in an orchard. He said that life comes from the roots, and if, year in and year out, the tree in the orchard produced no leaves and no fruit, you would eventually…