21. Faith & Deeds

Meditations in James: 21 :  Faith needs deeds

Jas 2:14,17     What good is it, my brothers, if a man claims to have faith but has no deeds? Can such faith save him? …. In the same way, faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead.

We will, over the next few days, cover this subject being now laid out by James in some detail, but we will take it step by step. Now there may be some who reading these verses say, “Oh this is so obvious that we don’t need to bother with this.” I would suggest that that is far from the truth. My observation is that the truth of these verses is only truly perceived when we give some little thought to it, and in fact this is some of the most vitally needed truth for the church in the twenty-first century.

Our starting point must be to ask, what is faith? Hebrews chapter 11 is the chapter of faith: “Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see.” (Heb 11:1)  Faith is about belief.  Faith is about believing about the future and it’s about believing about what we cannot see.  It’s believing about the future because if it was about the past we would ‘know’ for a certainty, and faith is being sure about what is yet to come.  Now supposing God said to you, “Pray for this person in front of you and I will heal them.” Now that is a future event because you haven’t yet done it.  When you stretch out to pray for them, that is faith.  You are expecting something to yet happen because God has said so.  In this instance, healing is something you can’t see until it has happened, yet when we sense we have heard God’s voice, we have an inner certainty that it will happen.  This is faith.

Now in our example we referred to God speaking. So how does faith come? “faith comes from hearing the message, and the message is heard through the word of Christ.” (Rom 10:17)  In other words, very simply, faith comes when God speaks. Now we may not be very conscious that we’ve ‘heard a voice’ because it may just be the quiet inner witness of His Holy Spirit within us.  Yet we hear something and that ‘something’ brings a sense of assurance in us, we become sure that it will happen.  That is faith.

Now suppose a third party is watching us.  We sense we have just heard God. Our observer sees nothing at this point; it is all going on in us.  We are sure that God has spoken but so far we have done nothing.  Now is this faith?  In one sense, yes it is, because we are sure of what we hope for and certain about what we do not see. But how can we be sure we are sure of what we hope for? (Yes, that question is right!)   We can only prove it, by responding to what we have been hearing, by doing what we heard.  Until then it is only a mind thing and we may be kidding ourselves, but faith is only real faith when there is action involved.  Faith starts with belief, so the Hebrews’ writer starts out, “By faith we understand that the universe was formed at God’s command, so that what is seen was not made out of what was visible.” (Heb 11:3)  We’ve heard or read, he says, that God created the universe, and so we live in the light of that.  He continues on with varying ‘belief’ items, until he comes to Noah when, warming to his theme, he says, “By faith Noah, when warned about things not yet seen, in holy fear built an ark to save his family.” (v.7)  Noah heard from God and showed his faith by doing something, building the ark. He continues, “By faith Abraham, when called to go to a place he would later receive as his inheritance, obeyed and went, even though he did not know where he was going.” (v.8).  Similarly Abram heard from God and showed his faith by going.  All of the examples that are then given in that chapter are examples of people DOING.

The big temptation that Satan puts before us, is for us to just be believers who believe things in their minds but do nothing with it.  Thus for instance we have believers who say they believe in the God of the Bible but deny anything that could be Him moving, and they certainly don’t expect (or want) Him to do things through them.  Passive, inactive Christianity is a denial of the Bible. Every now and then I come across seekers who say, “Well yes, I believe all this about Jesus Christ being God’s Son and dying for our sin.” and they remain completely unchanged.  Why?  Because they haven’t seen yet that that applies to them and he died for them, and they’ve got to ask God for it to apply to them.  That is faith, responding yourself to what God says. As James says, What good is it if a man claims to have faith but has no deeds? If it stays in the mind and the life is untouched, what good is that.  That is not salvation.  That person is still stuck in their sins and doesn’t know forgiveness or the powerful presence of God’s Holy Spirit who only comes when we respond to His word in obedience: “We are witnesses of these things, and so is the Holy Spirit, whom God has given to those who obey him.” (Acts 5:32).

So you were born again.  Was that the end of it?  No, just the beginning! From then on you entered into a new life: “For we are God’s workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.” (Eph  2:10)   There is a life to be lived, responding to God’s word and to His Spirit.  If we don’t respond, nothing happens and it just stays in our mind and we and the world get no benefit.  So-called faith, that is just belief in the mind, is in fact dead.  Nothing is happening, nothing is changing, there is no life here, and God is not able to move.  This is a dead situation.  Now there is a challenge in all this: “without faith it is impossible to please God” (Heb 11:6) God’s salvation through Jesus is meant to change us, change people, change the world, for that is what God’s will is.  He is only pleased when that is happening, and so if we just remain with a set of dead, inactive beliefs, that is doing nothing!  Nothing doesn’t please God!  God is pleased when His children respond to Him and He is able to move through them and bring blessing to His world.  Has your faith got actions to it?