Transcript
James Really Works: Doing the Word
First Baptist Richmond, September 1, 2024
The Fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost
James 1:17-27
But be doers of the word and not merely hearers who deceive themselves.
If you’ve seen the Preparation for Worship statement in your bulletin this morning then you know that we are beginning a five-part sermon series called, “James Really Works.”
Not everyone would agree.
Martin Luther, the great reformer, didn’t think the Book of James really worked. He didn’t think it belonged in the Bible. If it had been up to him he might have ripped those pages right out of the New Testament. Not because they are heretical, but because they put a greater emphasis on how we behave than on what we believe, and for Martin Luther it was all about believing.
But can I tell you why?
Martin Luther was afraid of Hell. In his childhood he had seen pictures of Jesus judging the dead, separating the righteous from the unrighteous as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats, sending the former off to the joys of heaven but the others off to the horrors of hell. And if you looked closely at those pictures, as Luther did, you could see all the ways the medieval artists had imagined hell’s horrors. Some of them had very vivid imaginations, and as a result young Martin was terrified.
Once when he was on his way back to law school after a visit with his parents a bolt of lightning stuck a nearby tree and he screamed out, “Saint Anna,
help me! I will become a monk!” He did, and for all those years he was in the monastery he tried to be good enough to earn his salvation. He doubled his daily prayers. He fasted for days at a time. His fellow monks would often find him naked and unconscious on the cold floor of his cell. When he confessed his sins to the abbot the abbot would sometimes say, “Martin, why don’t you commit some real sins so you will have something to confess?” Eventually the abbot suggested that he begin teaching at the seminary, and it was there, when Luther was working his way through one of Paul’s letters, that he stumbled upon the truth that would set him free: “It is by grace that you have been saved, through faith, and not by works, so that no one can boast.”
But there’s a story behind that as well. Read the third chapter of Philippians sometime and you can see that Paul was doing everything he could to get right with God. He writes, “I was circumcised on the eighth day, a member of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew born of Hebrews; as to the law, a Pharisee; as to zeal, a persecutor of the church; as to righteousness under the law, blameless.” And yet it wasn’t enough. Paul wasn’t tormented by the fear of hell; as a faithful Jew he may not have even had a concept of hell. No, he was tormented by the idea that he might do everything in his power and still not measure up to God’s standards of righteousness.
But then he met Jesus, and that changed everything. Then he realized that it wasn’t circumcision that saved you, it wasn’t keeping the Sabbath laws. No, it was putting your faith and trust in Jesus! That’s why he is able to say, after listing all his accomplishments, “Whatever gains I had, these I have come to regard as loss because of Christ. More than that, I regard everything as loss because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the
loss of all things, and I regard them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law but one that comes through faith in Christ” (Phil. 3:7-9).
If Paul had seen the letter of James (and it’s possible that he had), and if he had read that part about faith without works being “dead,” he might have torn up that letter on the spot. He had tried works. Works didn’t work. The only way to assure one’s salvation was to put one’s complete faith and trust in the Lord Jesus Christ. I would agree with that. In fact I would say that if you have not yet put your complete faith and trust in Jesus, do it today! When I give the invitation at the end of the service come down the aisle and begin your journey of faith. Because Jesus loves you (this I know). He wants the best for your life. And his way is the way that leads to life abundant, overflowing, and everlasting.
Who wouldn’t want that?
But if you are like most of the people who are listening to this sermon you’ve already made a commitment to Christ. You did it years ago. You’ve been following him more or less faithfully ever since. So now what? You have to remember that Paul was a missionary. He spent most of his time preaching to people who had never met Jesus. But James was a pastor. He spent most of his time preaching to people who had. And he seems to believe that once you’ve been saved, by grace, through faith, it’s time to put your faith into action. He might say to Martin Luther, “So, you’ve got faith? Faith enough to save you from your sins? Faith enough to rid you forever of your fear of hell? Good! Now do something with it. Do something that would make Jesus proud.” And James may have known something about what would make Jesus proud, because most scholars believe that this James—the one who wrote this letter—was Jesus’ little
brother.
While the Gospel of Matthew insists that Joseph did not have conjugal relations with his wife Mary until after Jesus was born, it implies that afterward he did, and that other children were added to the family in the usual way. In Mark chapter 6, when Jesus preaches in his hometown synagogue, some of the people there begin to grumble about him, saying, “Isn’t this the carpenter, the son of Mary, the brother of James and Joseph and Jude and Simon, and don’t his sisters live here among us?” Some of you may remember the poem I once quoted from the pulpit: “Did Jesus Have a Little Sister?” The answer, apparently, is yes, at least one. But Jesus also had four little brothers, and one of them was James.
That makes me think of my brother, Ed. He was the first-born in our family and he had a little brother named James: me. We grew up in the same house. I had the opportunity day after day to hear what he said and to watch what he did. I was influenced by him in all sorts of ways. We didn’t have TV when I was a boy. Sometimes in the summer my other brothers and I would be sitting in the living room reading library books and Ed would walk in with some big idea. “Let’s see who can be the first one to build a raft that will support his weight out of the stuff we can find along the riverbank!” Or, “Hey, I know! Let’s cut down three tall, skinny trees and lash them together to make a thirty-foot tripod in the back yard!” We would look up from our books, briefly, and go right back to reading. And Ed would snort and say, “What a bunch of house babies!” And that was the worst thing you could call somebody in our family. That was all it took to get us off the couch and out there building rafts or making tripods.
In the years that followed Ed had a tremendous influence on my faith. When I went off to prep school at the age of fifteen Ed wasn’t there. He had
already graduated. I quickly dropped out of the churchgoing habit and as a result my faith suffered. But when I went to college I encouraged Ed to come along with me, to transfer from West Virginia State to Saint Andrews Presbyterian, and he did. Ed was the one who would make sure I was ready for church on Sunday morning. He was the one who would drag me to Monday night Bible study. As a result my faith grew.
He taught school for twenty years after he graduated, but eventually answered God’s call and became a missionary to Mexico, where he served for the next fifteen years. He was forced by circumstances to leave the mission field, but that call has never left him. He’s been training missionaries for the last decade or so, and even now, when he has entered a kind of semi-retirement, I think of him as the best Christian I have ever known.
But Ed and I are not the same person. It’s obvious when you look at us side-by-side. We’re about the same height but Ed has always had blonde hair and I, like the other five boys in our family, have always had brown. Until recently, that is, when mine started turning gray. But Ed’s hair remains stubbornly blonde. When we were younger people used to wonder about him (as they may have wondered about Jesus), “Where did he come from? Why is he so different from the others?”
And it’s not just physical appearance. Ed and I approach life differently, we approach faith differently. He is comfortable with a kind of spirit-filled, non-traditional, Conservative Evangelical Christianity that I am not. We don’t preach the same kind of sermons. We underline different passages of Scripture. And yet we hold each other in the highest regard. He listens to me and learns from me, just as I listen to him and learn from him, and on more than one occasion when my children were growing up, when they were sitting on the couch and didn’t
want to go outside, I would say, “What a bunch of house babies!” And they would jump up off the couch immediately.
Thank you, Brother Ed.
Now if you asked me to tell you everything he said when we were growing up I couldn’t do it. And if you asked me to tell you everything he did when we were growing up I couldn’t do that either. But some of the things he did and said made a lasting impression on me, and if I wrote them all down in a letter they might make an impression on you. I believe, that among all the other things we might find in the letter of James, we find the influence of the Lord Jesus on his little brother. That’s exciting to me. That makes me want to go through the entire letter with a fine-toothed comb. And there’s one thing I want to point to today, one moment in Jesus’ story where I’m almost sure that James was present and equally sure that it would have made an impression on him.
It’s from the eighth chapter of Luke. It comes at a time when Jesus is overwhelmed by the crowds that are coming to him for help and healing. In Mark’s Gospel the rumor starts circulating that he has gone out of his mind. The scribes who have come down from Jerusalem say that he has Beelzebul, and that it is by the ruler of the demons that he casts out demons. His mother and his brothers come looking for him, to restrain him, to take him home, to help him get back into his right mind. You don’t get all that in Luke’s Gospel. You simply hear that “his brothers came to him, but they could not reach him because of the crowd. And he was told, ‘Your mother and your brothers are standing outside, wanting to see you.’ But he said to them, ‘My mother and my brothers are those who hear the word of God and do it.’”
I want you to think about James, standing outside and getting that report,
about someone telling him that Jesus had said, “My mother and brothers are those who hear the word of God and do it.” Do you think James could have ever forgotten that? And do you think that when he was writing a letter to his fellow believers it occurred to him to say, “Be doers of the word, and not hearers only.” Did he know that that’s how you become a member of Jesus’ true family, not by listening to a sermon occasionally, and shaking the preacher’s hand on the way out the door, and saying “Nice job, Reverend; I’ll see you again sometime!” but by putting God’s word into practice, working it into the rhythm of your everyday life, until it becomes as natural to you as breathing.
I know I’ve told you this before but that’s what we’re trying to do here. We’re trying to be doers of the word and not hearers only. The five essential ministry areas of Richmond’s First Baptist Church are based on five clear commands of Christ. Number one: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind,” that’s worship. Number two: “Love one another as I have loved you,” that’s community. Number three: “Love your neighbor as yourself,” that’s compassion. Number four: “Make disciples of every nation by baptizing them in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit,” that’s invitation. And number five: “Make disciples by teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you,” that’s formation. As I say to our newcomers’ class: “If you can picture heaven as a big, white fleecy cloud, and picture these five essential ministries as ropes hanging down, then when we do these ministries it’s like pulling on those ropes, and heaven really does come a little closer to earth.”
“Be doers of the word, and not hearers only,” James writes. I think he got that from his brother Jesus. I think that even after all those years he remembered standing outside that door and hearing him say, “My mother and brothers are
those who hear the word of God and do it.”
—Jim Somerville © 2024
