As always, here’s my fairly literal translation of these verses:
26If
someone seems to be religious, not bridling his tongue but deceiving his heart,
the religion of this one [is] useless. 27Religion pure and
uncontaminated before God and the Father is this: To visit orphans and widows
in their distress and to keep oneself unspotted from the world.
As I related in my previous post, these two little verses
are absolute bombshells. I thought a lot about v26, where I learned if we don’t
let grace change our mouths, our religion ends up useless, since our natural
bent is to be accusers and liars, like the devil. Grace would remake us in the
image of Him whose lips dripped grace and truth.
Then, in the first half of v27, James told us our “religion”
is only real before God if it moves us to care about the people around us. The
Pharisees were “very religious” yet they hated the man who healed the sick and
gave sight to the blind. They not only did not love, but when someone crossed
their agenda they plotted to kill him! And so in the end they crucified the
very Messiah Himself. James would have us ask, “What about my “religion”? Does
it move me to actually love others? Does it move me to watch for people’s needs
and do what I can to help? Yes or no?
Then in the second half James adds this other quality to
look for in my “religion” – do I keep myself “unspotted from the world?”
This verse is something I’ve always found “easy” on the one
hand and discomforting on the other. I have come to realize both of those
things were true because I completely misunderstood what it means to be
“unspotted by the world.” We’ll ponder these same questions when James later
challenges us that “friendship with the world is enmity with God.”
Like too many people, I immaturely thought of “the world” as
being contemporary music and dress styles, consumption of alcohol as a
beverage, dancing, “going to parties,” and the like. On the one hand, that made
this standard “easy.” I could say, well, I don’t do those things, so therefore
I’m “unspotted by the world.” I’m “safe.” I think that is a huge reason why
people buy legalism. It makes their religion “easy.” It’s the old familiar, “I
don’t smoke and I don’t chew and I don’t run with girls who do,” so that means
I’m “separated.” “I’m keeping myself ‘unspotted from the world.’” “Obviously
I’m a very spiritual person!”
But that is also where I always found it discomforting.
Something down deep inside me knew there was something ominously shallow about
all of this. Something deep down inside me told me I was “making up the rules.”
I knew somehow that these standards I was setting up to define “worldly” were
not coming from the Bible. I and the people who agreed with me were making them
up. We told ourselves, these are “principles” and “applications” and salved our
conscience when we couldn’t find a single rightly divided verse of Scripture
that actually taught them. “The Bible is our only rule of faith and practice!" –
unless it doesn’t happen to say what we want it to – then we’re more than happy
to canonize our rules and congratulate ourselves for it.
At some point I started wondering what the Lord Himself
thinks it means to be “worldly." Once I started looking, I found it means
something much bigger and deeper than a few external rules that make it easy to
“look spiritual.” I think, like the Pharisees, I had been “straining on gnats
and swallowing camels.” I was “cleaning the outside of the cup” and
“whitewashing tombs.”
Listen to what God has to say:
“Do not love the world or the things in the
world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For
all that is in the world – the
lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life – is not of the
Father but is of the world. And the world is passing away, and the lust of it;
but he who does the will of God abides forever” (I John 2:15-17).
“Do not love the world”. Notice what it
says, “For all that is in the world – all their music and dancing and those
clothes they wear …” Oh, whoops, I
guess that isn’t what it says. It says, “For all that is in the world – the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes,
and the pride of life …” Uh oh. God is going for something way deeper than
some convenient external rules. The Pharisees were the ultimate “rule keepers”
but Jesus called them a “wicked and adulterous generation,” a people who “love
money,” and people who “love the place of honor at banquets” and “everything
they do is done for men to see.” For all their “rule-keeping” they utterly
failed at conquering the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride
of life. Their religion was not real. Jesus had one word to describe them:
hypocrites.
The fact is, they “loved the world.” They
were guilty of the very thing they thought their rules so gloriously
accomplished. It was their boast that they were “separated” from the world, and
“kept themselves pure.” They would have quickly claimed to be the very people
who “kept themselves unspotted by the world.”
But that is only true if you let them
define for themselves what it means. The second we go back to the Bible to find
out what God says it means, we find the very reason they failed. Their “rules”
kept them satisfied they’d already “arrived.” They never looked any deeper to
find out God has something entirely different to say. Their religion was not,
as they deceived themselves into believing, “pure and undefiled before God and
the Father.”
Once again, that was them and we are us.
The question is “How shall we then
live?” Right off the bat, whatever it all means, when the smoke clears and the
dust settles, I want to be like Jesus, not them. I want to be like Jesus, not
like whatever church culture today tells me I should be like (which is usually
just a modern version of the Pharisees).
What I mean is, I would suggest again we need
to look no further than Jesus Himself. The reason the Pharisees hated Him was
because He didn’t “keep” their rules. He wasn’t a very good “rule-keeper.” “He
consorts with tax collectors and prostitutes!” “He goes to wedding feasts where
there is wine – and even miraculously provides more for them when it runs out!”
“Scandalous!”
The fact is, He’s too busy doing one thing
they weren’t – loving people. If we’re going to love people, then we have to
“visit” them, we have to be with them, we have to live in their world. We
cannot, like the Pharisees, isolate ourselves from them. But I think that is
where the second half of verse 27 comes in.
While we’re there, while we’re in their
world, love would remind us the very reason why their hearts are broken, the
reason why their lives in the long run don’t work, why their marriages crumble
and relationships never “work,” why they always seem to end up lonely and
disappointed. It is because what drives them is “the lust of the flesh, the
lust of the eyes, and the pride of life.” They love “the world, and the lust of
it.” “The love of the Father is not in them.” The key here is that, while we
love them, we can’t love what they love. Grace has conquered my heart. I want
to “do the will of my Father.”
What makes this so dangerous, of course, is
that the old me, though dead, is still quite alive. I see what they see. My
flesh wants it just as much as they do. I’m just as capable of giving in to
sexual sin, to drinking in excess, to greed, to coarse talk. Like Jude says, “Be
merciful to those who doubt; snatch others from the fire and save them; to
others show mercy, mixed with fear – hating even the clothing stained by
corrupted flesh” (vv. 22,23). As Jesus said, we’ve got to be “in the world, but
not of it.”
I guess you could say, while I’m sincerely
trying to love people, while I’m with them, I must guard my heart that I am not
allured by the lust of my flesh or the lust of my eyes or my love of applause.
While I love them, I must still love my Father.
Can I draw this to a conclusion by asking,
isn’t that what made Jesus different? He really did love people, but He never
stopped loving His Father. Even while He was with us, surrounded by our
temptations, He remained free because He loved something bigger than this
world. He could live grace and still walk in truth.
I suppose this has been too long a post,
but I deeply regret how long it took me to learn this. It is not a “fine” line.
It is the difference between, on the one hand, shipwrecking our faith on a
shallow legalistic Pharisaical religion that is worthless and patently NOT “pure
and undefiled before God and our Father;” or, on the other hand, genuinely
being like Jesus, able to live in this world, to be very much a part of it, to
actively, openly love the people here, but to keep our own hearts above its
lusts and to live in the freedom of loving our Father and sincerely striving to
“do His will.”
God help us. Make us like Jesus.
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