Faith Embodied.

You have faith, I have deeds, someone will say. Show me your faith. You believe that there is one God. Good! Even the demons believe that, and shudder. Faith without deeds is useless. Was not our ancestor Abraham considered, on the altar? You see that his faith and his actions were working together, and his faith, that says Abraham believed God and it was credited to him as righteousness, and he was called by what he does and not by faith alone. 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? As the body without the spirit is dead, so faith without deeds is dead.

Let's pray again this morning. Heavenly Father, we thank you so much for your word. God, we thank you. Help us to step away from any distractions. God, would you help us to quiet any anxious thoughts. And we say, Jesus, would you speak through your Holy Spirit? Would you speak through your word? We welcome you, Holy Spirit. In your name we pray, amen.

Okay, so James today, as we're picking up, we just finished talking last week about favoritism and how it's forbidden. And once again James uses such strong language here, where now he's saying, your faith without works is just dead. Period. That's it. So much of what we've talked about in James is him mirroring Jesus' Sermon on the Mount, where Jesus is saying, we have to do something.

We have to move. Faith is not something we can just think about, it's something we have to live. They had good, sound doctrine, and yet they're not living it. This pattern keeps coming up throughout the entire book of James, where he talks so much about not neglecting the poor, about feeding the hungry, clothing those who need it, about actively living.

The impulse to look away

As I was preparing for today, I was reminded of a story I'm sure I've shared here before, because it's so memorable, and whenever I share it, I think, everyone came out okay. We were going to college in Minneapolis, and there was a light rail system, if you're familiar with the Twin Cities. We lived a few blocks away, so it was pretty common that we'd walk to take the light rail somewhere off campus to hang out. One day I'm sitting there with one of my good friends, and we're waiting for the train to come. All of a sudden, as a train is getting ready to come, someone fell onto the tracks.

My friend, who was standing next to me, saw it happen and couldn't move. Now, me being the charismatic praying woman that I am, I decided I'm going to run toward the train, not onto the tracks, but up above, waving my arms in the air and screaming, praying. I wasn't saying stop, I was just praying and screaming so they'd see me.

Then some people jumped down without hesitating into the tracks and lifted the person up. The train saw the person. They were able to stop. They were able to lift them up. I asked my friend later, why did you look away? What was that response? She said, well, I didn't want to see them die. And I thought, oh my gosh, nobody did, that day. But we all had different gut reactions.

Turning away makes sense. A lot of us, that's our first response when we see hard things. I don't want to have to see it. I don't want to acknowledge that this pain exists and is real. So instead I turn away, and it's like it's not happening and I don't have to acknowledge it. But it was happening.

Some of you might be more in my boat, where you think about it and you pray about it, which is good, we love prayer. This is not an anti-prayer message. But someone has to be willing to risk it and get down for a person to be saved.

James is painting a picture today of what it looks like for us to have embodied faith. To say, yes, we are not only going to look at injustice, we're not only going to look at the darkness in this world and pray about it. We're going to be people who go first to Jesus, who intercede and pray, and who, just as Jesus left heaven and raised the dead back to life, participate in seeing his kingdom come.

James is not saying, don't have faith. He's saying faith invites Jesus in. It's not something we just think about, it's something people live by their acts. Not even this room exists just because some people thought, maybe we should have a church in Madison, or because someone thought coffee on a Sunday morning sounds good. Someone made it happen. And that's the first thing I want to talk about today: ideas alone do not bring life.

Ideas alone do not bring life

We can have so many good ideas, but ideas alone do not bring life. James is honing in on this when he says, what good is it, my brothers and sisters, if someone claims to have faith but has no deeds? Can that really save them? I love this quote from N.T. Wright: faith is not merely intellectual, it's serving and surrendering to someone as king, submitting to the kingdom, and participating in the vision they have for what that kingdom looks like.

It is great for us to have sound doctrine, and we should study theology and read the Bible for ourselves. It's so good that on Friday nights we come together and pray and seek the Lord. But it's from that place that we're empowered, not just to keep it to ourselves, but to align ourselves with participating in seeing God's kingdom come. Ideas alone cannot bring life, and love the way Jesus invites us to live it must be embodied.

If we're going to say we are people who want to be with Jesus, become like Jesus, and do what he did, then we must embody what that looks like. Jesus is the perfect example of this, in Luke 4, which keeps coming up all through our Lent season as well, where he quotes Isaiah: the Spirit of the Lord is upon me, to proclaim good news to the poor, freedom for the prisoners, recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free. Jesus didn't just come and say a bunch of good words, he enacted it. He continued to move toward the suffering, to move toward the broken, to not look away, to not fear the grief, to not fear the pain.

He continued to move close, which James is stressing to the church then and to us now: the need for us to keep coming close, to not fear, to not want to look away just because it might be too hard, but to look toward it and see that as our call, as who we were created to be, people who actively participate in kingdom living and kingdom work. The kingdom comes through participation.

Faith that labors

Now, I know you've all been wondering, is she going to talk about moms today? Watch this. I think moms can be one of the greatest examples of what it looks like to physically embody sacrifice and love, and to not just live by ideas but by action. As a woman, if you become pregnant, you don't get to just think about maybe giving birth. There comes a point where you physically labor, you're physically stretched, and you give birth to that new life. Once you're physically pregnant and physically giving birth, you don't get to change your mind. This baby is going to come out. It's going to happen.

I think for all of us, we have an invitation to participate in the kingdom the same way. The difference is, for many of us, we can just choose to look away. We can choose to avoid the pain, to avoid the suffering. But faith without works is dead. When we choose to participate in that labor and that suffering that we sometimes fear, it gives birth to new life. This is participation in the kingdom, so the labor is not in vain. The stretching, the anguish, the pain, it's not in vain, it's to give birth to new life.

In James, he's inviting the church to live in a way where we're not afraid to labor, not afraid of endurance, where we don't grow weary but continue to seek the Lord for strength. He's saying we need to be people willing to be inconvenienced. We need to be willing to carry each other's burdens, to pick each other up. We need a faith that's willing to suffer, willing to be patient and not give up. Jesus allowed his body to be broken. Jesus allowed his blood to be poured out so that new resurrection life could come into this world. And as the church, we're called to live the same way.

We don't have to die to ourselves for salvation, because Jesus already did that finished work on the cross. But now we get to live from that place, from that hope of resurrection life, knowing life has come to us and will continue to come.

Abraham and Rahab

As we move on through this passage, James references two different people toward the end, and it's interesting: one is someone everyone should be like, and the other is someone we'd rather avoid. He says in verse 20, you foolish person, do you want evidence that faith without deeds is useless? Was not our father Abraham considered righteous for what he did when he offered his son Isaac on the altar? You see that his faith and his actions were working together, and his faith was made complete by what he did. 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. You see that a person is considered righteous by what they do and not by faith alone.

And then here comes the second example he gives us of someone living out their faith. 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? As the body without the spirit is dead, so faith without deeds is dead.

So we're coming back to this: it's not by ideas we live, it's by acts. It's not enough for us to just have good thoughts, we have to live it out. He gives us two examples, a patriarch of the faith and a prostitute. I always feel for Rahab in these moments, because she did incredible things, through her embodied faith we see Jericho defeated, and yet she still carries this label.

James is saying, in the same way, should we not be like her too? As a spiritual mother, she shows us what activated faith looks like, faith that participates. Rahab was a woman living in Jericho at the time. She's first introduced in Joshua chapter two, and I'd recommend going back and reading her story this week. She's introduced as a prostitute, that's how her introduction starts.

When the Israelite spies came to enter the city, she protected them and hid them, because she knew she had to risk her life for God's redemptive work to take place. She'd heard about God, heard about this God of Israel, heard about his power and his might, but she had to choose. Was she going to be someone who just hears these things and thinks it's a good idea to participate in what this God of Israel is doing, or was she going to actually risk her life to do it? She didn't just say, I believe God is real, she risked her life so other people could know and experience that too.

Jericho falls, and Rahab becomes part of the lineage of Jesus. She acted, she participated, she protected. What I love about this is that our past and the things we've done don't define how God wants to use us in the future. James is so intentional with the two people he uses here, a father of the faith and a mother of the faith, and both have very different trajectories. Abraham wasn't perfect either, which is almost unfair, that he's labeled just for the good things, while Rahab, well, don't forget, but she did incredible things too. She goes on to become the mother of Boaz, and is included in the genealogy of Jesus. These are the type of people God chose to use for his redemptive work.

James is asking us: will we choose to embrace the suffering, embrace being stretched, embrace enduring the pain, or will we seek comfort instead? That choice is in front of us almost every moment of every day. Are we going to choose comfort, or are we going to actively participate in seeing God's kingdom come? James is saying, choose wisely, because one leads to life and one leads to death.

Comfort or kingdom

Obviously, on Mother's Day, we think about the mother of Jesus, Mary, the woman who literally carried the Savior of the world. I think about what that was like for her, becoming pregnant before she was married, and the scandal that would come with it, what she had to endure to give birth to the Savior of the world. When the angel appears to her, she says, let it be to me according to your will. There was active participation, active surrender, recognizing there would be pain, there would be endurance needed. I may never be the same after this, but I'm going to actively participate.

Faith is not passive, it participates. It doesn't avoid the pain, it embraces it, trusting that as we labor for the kingdom to come, new life is coming. We get to participate in this. James continues to echo Jesus' words, when he said, whatever you did for the least of these you did unto me. He's asking the church, begging them over and over with these illustrations throughout the book: will you see the people around you? Will you not be afraid? Instead of looking away when it's uncomfortable, will you stay close and keep looking? Will you ask the hard questions of how am I supposed to participate? Yes, we're going to pray, but then we're willing to get down and do what it takes to see people lifted up.

But it takes us being willing to let our lives be poured out as living sacrifices. It takes us being willing to be inconvenienced over and over again. I'm going to invite the worship team up as we get ready to close today. Whenever I think about teachings like this in James or in the gospels, it can be hard. What does it look like for us to embrace suffering and live into that? But here's what I want us to catch: James isn't inviting us into an exhausting, miserable life, into meaningless suffering that's wasted. It's the life we were actually created for, the life we long to see.

Because even when I think about Rahab, and all the mothers in scripture who physically gave birth and endured that kind of pain, they also got to physically experience the joy that comes with new life. Jesus is saying, if you're going to be more like me, you're going to pour out your love. Most of us will not physically carry children into this world, but we get to physically represent to people what it looks like to pour out our love, to pour out our lives, to sacrifice, and to experience the joy of seeing new life in the kingdom.

When we live into this, it goes back to that identity, this is how we were supposed to live. We weren't supposed to be people who just show up and consume, but people who were created to contribute, to add value to the people and the world around us. And this is where we have that decision all the time, comfort versus kingdom, that we have to look at and acknowledge.

In Matthew 16:25, Jesus says, whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will find it. This is good news when we labor, when we love, when we lose ourselves for Jesus. Jesus is coming from a larger teaching there, telling the disciples to deny themselves, which sometimes is hard, because you think, well, what does that look like? I think we have to balance that with laying down seeking comfort over kingdom. Denying ourselves doesn't mean denying every part of ourselves, it means denying that we're submitting to anything other than Jesus, and using every part of our gifts, every unique way God has created us, our passions, our dreams, to labor for his kingdom and not just seek our own comfort above everything else.

It's worth asking, how do I follow Jesus if I don't want to suffer? What does this look like if I just want to avoid it? I think it's acknowledging that with Jesus, laying it down before him and saying, I don't know what this looks like, and this feels hard, and maybe if I'm honest, not every day I feel like doing this. And inviting the Holy Spirit to come and renew that, to lift up that weakness and give you strength, to give you a fresh vision, to let you experience a taste of what that new life can look like as you participate. There's joy coming. Our present moment is not our promised future reality. Our hope is that as we usher in more of that kingdom, it's a taste of what's to come for all of eternity.

We know this pain, this suffering, this living our lives as sacrifice and faith embodied, is temporary, but the eternal joy we will experience is eternal, it's forever, and that is what is promised. So even though in this moment it might feel hard, as we continue to seek other people and their needs, and we look into the dark places of this world, into our city, and see where people need to be fed, where people need to be clothed, and how we're doing that, it matters. Those are the moments we're embodying our faith, saying we are not here to look away, but to be the ones who bring the hope of the kingdom.

Our so-what today is that it is by acts people live, not ideas, because faith is meant to be embodied. Faith was never meant to be something that just stays as good thoughts and well wishes and occasional prayers for people. The life we actually long for is meant to be embodied, which sometimes means participating in the burden and the discomfort, moving from conviction to compassion. And the now-what is to ask the Holy Spirit, how can I participate daily? Because I truly believe that every single day we get to encounter people, every day we get to ask how I am participating, because the faith we're invited to live into is embodied. It is for us to participate.

Closing prayer

I want to invite us to stand as we get ready to close today, and the team is just going to lead us. I want to give us a moment to just process this with the Holy Spirit. As we close, and we read about the two different people James lists, essentially James is saying, hey, let's be like them. One was known in that time as a patriarch, a father of the faith. The other, a prostitute, who was also a mother of the faith, part of the lineage of Jesus. Both had labels that other people put on them, both heard about places in their own faith.

I just want us to pray, to say, Holy Spirit, would you show me, whether it's doubts, whether it's because of things in your past, whether it's because you don't feel like you have enough to give, what are the things I'm putting on myself, saying, well, I can't fully participate in people experiencing your love because... And would you invite him to show you the ways he's uniquely made you, the gifts he's given you, the ways those personality traits you see as barriers are actually bridges for people who are far from God to come close. In the same way, there's probably parts of all our stories we can relate to Abraham or to Rahab, things where it's like, this wasn't exactly how I wanted my story to go, but here I am. Know that God redeems those things. Would you redeem even the broken things in our lives today? Would you help us see the way you see us, as your children, longing for us to come and participate in seeing your kingdom come?

Holy Spirit, we ask today, would you show us the ways we're keeping ourselves from participating? Would you lift any of those lies? Would you give us a fresh vision for what it looks like to live into the life we truly long for, one that isn't afraid to labor, but comes before you in the moments of pain and says, God, give us endurance. People who aren't going to turn away, but who look toward the pain, because we recognize that when we act, when we move, new life is coming. We don't have to fear it, because we know death did not have the final word, but you are victorious and you bring new life. Holy Spirit, would you come and speak to us today, would you transform our hearts, would you heal any wounds, any brokenness, and would you help us have a renewed vision for what it looks like to be more like you, Jesus?