Don't Maintain a Useless Faith

"But someone will say, 'You have faith and I have works.' Show me your faith apart from your works, and I will show you my faith by my works. You believe that God is one; you do well. Even the demons believe--and shudder. Do you want to be shown, you foolish person, that faith apart from works is useless?" - James 2:18-20

You can sense the accumulation of James' frustration coming out in these verses. These verses carry directly off of the verses I talked about in my last blog post. In the last blog post, we talked about how James is exhorting Christians to transform their dead faith to a living faith. Well, I think a similar thing is happening in these verses, and perhaps it would have been wiser to only write one blog posts about these two sets of verses, but because of my depravity, that is not the case.

I have often, accidentally read these verse thinking that "you have faith" to "by my works" is all being spoken by some imaginary character. If this was the case, which it isn't, it would suggest that the person is wagering with another Christian to see who can show their faith better; the person with works, or the person with faith. Now that I've told you what isn't happening, maybe I can try and enlighten you a bit.

Notice that the only part in quotes is "you have faith and I have works." That means that the person James is talking about is a person who disagrees with what James just said in the last verses. This is a person who is trying to say, "James, it's fine. Don't overreact. Everyone's different. Some people have faith while others have works." The person saying this can be paralleled with an atheist who, when I say, "become a Christian, for the kingdom of God is coming," will reply, "don't worry, you believe in God, I believe in science. Everything will be fine." It is a reply of ignorance, of laziness, and merely writing down the response further frustrates James.

James responds to this lazy tolerance by saying, "show me your faith apart from your works, and I will show you my faith by my works. You believe that God is one; you do well. Even the demons believe--and shudder." James is crying at the top of his lungs, with sarcasm and frustration that faith and works are inseparable. Not only are the two inseparable, but one without the other is completely useless. While faith without works is useless, just so is works without faith useless. The word "useless" used here means "careless, lazy, idle." It is a faith that does nothing. James even goes to the point of saying that a faith that doesn't merit works is just as useless as the faith of demons. If that doesn't convict you, I don't know what will.

If I believe that my mountain-bike will hold me up as I go over rocks and dirt, but I never test to see whether that is true, people are going to question whether I really believe that. If I go around telling people that I have the best bike in the world, and they say, "really, have you ridden it?" and I say "no," why would they believe what I'm saying? In the same way, if a Christian has faith and tells people he or she has faith but never shows that faith through self-sacrifice, patience, understanding, love, kindness, gentleness, and steadfastness, why would someone think that's actually what you believe? People doubt Christians today because they say they have faith, but they don't show it. Any belief, if not accompanied by action, is useless, especially when the belief has the very goal of convincing others that the belief is true. The Christian belief is meant to convince others of it's truth through the acting out of the the belief. The Christian who doesn't do this has missed the point and should expect to be unsatisfied in their relationship with God.