23. Faith No Deeds

Meditations in James: 23 :  Faith without deeds

Jas 2:18 But someone will say, “You have faith; I have deeds.” Show me your faith without deeds, and I will show you my faith by what I do.

Faith is at the heart of the reality of the Christian Faith. That is why James perseveres with his argument and why we continue with it for a third day. Remember behind all James’ teaching is the thought that he is writing to a dispersed people living in the world and so James is saying things that they particularly need to hear, to combat the deception of the enemy in the world. One of the enemy’s strategies is to try to get us into an extreme position, so there are some ‘faith’ people and there are some ‘action’ or ‘deeds’ people. The ‘faith’ person is a great prayer warrior perhaps, or a great Bible expositor and the rest of the church hold their spirituality in awe.  Then at the other extreme is the person who is full of good works, constantly helping the poor and needy but who is never heard to utter a prayer and never spends time with God in the Bible. One of them has their head in the clouds of heaven, but that is all they have. The other has their feet on the earth, but that is all they have.

Now when we look at verse 18 there is a problem. Ancient manuscripts don’t have punctuation or quotation marks, and some Bibles change the punctuation marks to include the whole of the debate, but let’s accept it for what we have above. James imagines one of these ‘extremists’ saying, “Well you’re a faith person James; I’m a deeds person. I’m not a great spiritual giant like you, but I do stuff.” James’ reply needs to be seen as saying, “Well if you separate the two out, if you think they can exist separately, if you are a Christian show me your faith separated from deeds, and then I’ll show you a better way, faith shown by deeds.”

Do you see what James is doing? He is showing us the folly of trying to make faith and deeds two separate things that can exist by themselves. Well, deeds can exist by themselves, that is true. An unbeliever can do good works, and many do. Yes, good deeds can exist entirely separately from religious faith, but faith cannot. As we said in a previous meditation, and we keep on needing to hear, faith that doesn’t express itself in some way is merely a mind thing and we can’t be sure it even exists. If you say, “I believe” but there are no signs of the expression of that belief, then the reality is that you don’t believe; it’s just words. “But I go to church on a Sunday morning,” someone might say as a defence to this challenge. If that is the only expression of your belief, then it is rather shallow isn’t it? “But I keep the Ten Commandments as well,” I hear you protest. Still rather a shallow faith isn’t it, when you line that up with what we said previously about faith – about it being about hearing God and responding to Him in a daily, living relationship.

No, we would do well to consider further a “faith that works”. That little phrase sums up the Christian life well. It is, indeed, a faith that works. It works in the sense that a machine works, and it works in this way because it is simply an expression of how God has designed things to be. When we come into a living relationship with the Lord, we find a new peace, harmony and order appearing. Living God’s way, and in harmony and in fellowship with the Lord means that all His resources, His grace, are available, including things like wisdom or strength, and so suddenly there is an observable change that takes place that can only be explained using such words as peace, harmony and order.  Suddenly this life starts working as it should do. Until we became a Christian we had been dysfunctional, only working in the material realm, yet we are beings designed to work in the material and spiritual realms. If the latter is missing we can never fully function as we are designed to. No, we suddenly see a faith that is now working.

But even in saying that, what we mean is that there is a visible outworking of faith by the way the life is now being lived, seen by the things the person does. The actual living out of their life, the ‘doing’ of it, is what reveals the reality of the faith that is there. The person who goes to church on a Sunday morning but who still remains a self-centred, grumbling and moaning person, godless in every other way except Sunday morning, actually doesn’t have faith. The truth is that when God speaks, and a person responds and is born again, that affects the whole of their life. Satan will try and tell us to compartmentalise our lives and keep faith away from work or school or whatever, but when we came to Christ we surrendered the whole of our lives to him and he is to be Lord over every aspect of our existence. The result should be that every aspect of our lives, all the things we do, will reflect that.

Check this out. Are there areas of your life where you try to keep God out? Are there areas of your life where faith does not operate? If there are, you’ve obviously not realised that God is concerned to bless every aspect of your life, every single thing you do. It’s time to let Him have free access to every part of your life so that faith may work in all areas, and that all areas may work as He’s designed them to work.