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Pocket Paper ______________________ Message by Robert J. Morgan, Senior Pastor The Donelson Fellowship 3210 McGavock Pike 615/871-4769 www.donelson.org Today we’re beginning a series of sermons entitled
“365,” daily obedience based on the New Testament book of
James. Every single day this year
is a day in which our faith should be exhibited by the way we live and by the
obedience we have to the Word of God and particularly to the book of James,
which is one of the most practical books of the Bible. It is the New Testament version of the
Old Testament book of Proverbs.
It is made up of pithy sayings, commands, imperatives, and words of
practical wisdom. Some people
liken it to the Sermon on the Mount.
The theme of James is that faith wears work clothes. Faith wears work gloves. Faith is very active. The faith that James is talking about
is the kind of faith that operates where the rubber meets the road and where
the water meets the wheel. It is
a very practical kind of faith. This little book of five chapters has had a couple of strikes against
it in Christian history. First of
all, the book of James was slow to be accepted by the early church as Scripture. The process of coming up with the
twenty-seven books of the New Testament didn’t happen all at once, and
it certainly didn’t happen like some people have claimed it did at the
Council of Nicea in the early fourth century. It was a prolonged process during
which the church gradually came to recognize that certain books had divine
authority, primarily those written by an apostle or by someone very close to
an apostle. So within the first
years of the Christian era, these books began to be compiled and everybody
recognized they were New Testament books. James was one of the last of those
books to be accepted and there was some dispute about it for a while. We don’t have time to get into that, but over a thousand years
later, there was another strike against James by our old friend, the reformer
Martin Luther. Luther
didn’t care much for the book of James. He grew up in a world, in I want to show you some verses that Luther found in Romans. The theme of the book is in Romans
1:16-17: “I’m not
ashamed of the gospel because it is the power of God for the salvation of
everyone who believes, first to the Jew and then to the Gentile. For in the gospel a righteousness from
God is revealed, a righteousness that is by faith from first to last just as
it is written: The righteous will
live by faith.” When Luther read that, the light came on and he understand he could
never be declared righteous in God’s sight by trying to perform
tasks. Christ had already done
all that was required, and Luther was declared righteous in God’s sight
by faith in the finished work of Christ. Look at Romans 3:21: “No one can be declared righteous by
observing the law, but now a righteousness from God apart from law and apart
from the works, has been made known to which the law and the prophets
testify. This righteousness from
God comes through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe. There is no difference, for all have
sinned and fall short of the glory of God and are justified freely by his grace,
through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus. God presented him as a sacrifice of
atonement through faith in his blood.” There you have the gospel.
We can never be declared righteous in our own eyes by anything that we
can do, but God himself became a man and offered himself as the sinless
sacrifice. We can be declared
righteous only on the basis of grace through faith. Now in Chapter 4 he’s going to say the great example of this is
Abraham in the Old
Testament. All of the way back at
the beginning of the Jewish nation, this is the pattern. Abraham was saved by grace through
faith. This isn’t some new
doctrine. This is the way it has
always been. “What shall we
say that Abraham, our forefather, discovered in this matter. If in fact, Abraham was justified by
works, he had something to boast about but not before God. What does the scripture say? Abraham believed God and it was
credited to him as righteousness.”
That’s what Luther discovered and it changed his life. It changed all of Christian
history. “For it is by
grace that you have been saved through faith and this is not from yourselves,
it is the gift of God. Not by
works. Not by works, so that no
one can boast” (Ephesians 2:8).
Luther was full of this.
This was his message. This
was his clarion cry. This is what
he shouted all across Do you see that? Abraham,
Paul said, is the evidence that someone is justified not by works but by
faith and James says Abraham is evidence that a person is justified by works
and not by faith alone. Luther just couldn’t understand how James could say that in the
light of the great soul-transforming truth he had discovered in the Pauline
letters. Now we know, looking at
it from our perspective, that the two statements appear to be contradictory
on the surface but actually are not. In the context, we see that Paul and
James are coming at things from different aspects and looking at the same
subject from two different ways and complimenting one another’s
message. We’ll look at that
more carefully when we come to James In the 1500’s when Martin Luther translated the Bible from the
Latin Vulgate into the German language, he took James out of the Bible, along
with three other New Testament books that he was not too happy with. He put them in the back of his Bible
as a special supplement or appendix and did not list those four books in the
Table of Contents of the German Bible.
He just took James right out.
A little later when John Wycliffe began translating the Bible into
English, he followed Luther’s example. Then William Tyndale, the great writer
and translator of the English Bible who gave up his life because he was
translating the Bible into English, did the same thing when preparing his
translation. So in the German
Bible of Luther’s day and in our earliest English translations, James
was omitted from the Bible and put in the back as sort of an appendix and not
listed in the Table of Contents.
It wasn’t until the great Bible in the 1500’s, the
forerunner and precursor to the King James’ Bible, that the translators
took the book of James and put it back where it belongs. Well, I love the Book of James.
I am so glad it’s in the Bible. I don’t know why anybody
wouldn’t appreciate it.
There are some odd things about it and those are explainable. He does approach things differently
than Paul, but not in a way that provides contradiction. Paul and James compliment one
another. If you don’t have
James you cannot understand fully what Paul is trying to say. The great theme of James is the:
The kind of faith that saves us, the kind of faith that really
transforms us, has got to be the kind of faith that exists in three different
dimensions. James believes in
three-dimensional faith. We Need an Intellectual Faith First, we need an intellectual faith. Faith it is not anti-intellectual, it
is not anti-academic. Genuine
faith corresponds to what is true.
Faith is not believing in something despite the evidence, it is believing in something reasonably and
logically because of the
evidence. Look at chapter 2 of James and I’ll give you an example. He says in verse 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.
You believe that there is one God, good. Even the devils, the demons believe
that and shudder.” If all you have is intellectual faith, even the demons themselves have
that kind of faith. In their
minds they know there is a God.
They believe in God. They
shudder about it. At the very end of the book in chapter five, he says in verse 19:
“My brothers, if one of you should wander from the truth then someone
should bring them back, remember this, whoever turns a sinner from the error
of his way will save him from death and cover a multitude of sins.” He’s talking about wandering
from the truth. Faith is when our
thinking corresponds to what genuinely is true. Biblical faith is looking at the evidence and saying, “Hey, this
is logical, this is reasonable.”
This is why we are creationists and believe there is a Creator despite
what people have said for 100 years in so many of the school classrooms. I want to read you a little article that I pulled out of a magazine on
diabetes that I read while waiting at the pharmacy the other day. The title was: “Down the Hatch: How Food Turns
to Fuel.” I’m just
going to read a little bit of it to you because to me it was just so
interesting. The author here,
Merrill David Landow says: “Since nutrition, food, and digestion are
such a big part of diabetes management, we thought you might like to understand
just what happens when you take a bite.
Digestion starts in the mouth where enzymes secreted by the salivary
glands begin the process of breaking down complex sugars and starches into
simple sugars. The grinding
action of chewing is also important because it softens and smoothes those
pieces of filet mignon and sautéed broccoli into a pulpy mixture that
the stomach can more readily accept.
This mixture travels from the mouth to the
stomach via a 10” long tube known as the esophagus. At the bottom of the esophagus a ring
like valve relaxes with every swallow to let the food through and then
tightens again. It is in the
stomach that the process of digestion starts to swing into high gear. Here, enzymes and digestive juices
further mash the mixture as does the rhythmic contraction of the stomach
itself. After two or more hours
in this digestive furnace, food becomes a blended thick liquid known as
chyme. Another ring at the stomach’s bottom opens
periodically to move the chyme down into the smaller intestine. The small intestine is where your body
actually absorbs the nutrients from your food. Propelled by a succession of muscle
contractions, the chyme moves through the small intestine as additional
enzymes supplied by the pancreas, gall bladder, and liver further break it
down into the tinier molecules that our cells desire such as peptides, amino
acids, glycerol and vitamins. These substances are taken into the body via
finger-like tissue called villi which project from the myriad folds of the
small intestine’s lining, which are the folds which increase the
surface area if your are absorbing the nutrients. Some parts of the intestinal walls are
highly specialized. For example,
vitamin B-12 is taken up in only one corner of the intestine, iron in
another, and these nutrients are then transported to the cells around the
body by the blood and lymphatic systems.
Any remaining undigested chyme passes into the large intestine, the
colon, where additional useful substances, primarily water and salt, are
absorbed. After that the rest is
pushed through the colon by peristalsis until it reaches the end and is
eliminated. Given its complexity and vastness--spread out the
surface area of the small intestine alone would cover a tennis court--the digestive
system is a marvel. That’s just talking about one little part of me and of you that
we can’t see. It’s
right here on the inside of us.
How intricately and perfectly designed it is, like a marvelous
machine. That’s not talking
about the circulatory system or the nervous system or the complexity of
that. That is just this little
system that takes the food in and turns it into energy. The theory of evolution says that no one using nothing created a large explosion in which everything appeared in all of its complexity. That’s harder to believe than
that there is a Creator, and there are increasing numbers of scientists that
say that as well. There was an article just the other day about a scientist at MIT named
Dr. Rosalyn Pecard who is the Director of Effective Computing Research at the
media lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in This is intellectual belief.
It is believing there is a God, there is Christ, He lived, He died,
and He rose again! The Bible is
true. These things are
factual. These things are corresponding
to the truth. That’s
faith. That it the intellectual
dimension of faith. It is
necessary, we’ve got to have it, but if that is all you have, if that
is as far as your faith goes, it doesn’t do you any good because even
the devils believe like that…and shudder. We Need an Internal Faith This second dimension of faith is the internalization of faith. It is internal faith, interior
faith. It is when you say,
“I’m going to not only believe this in my mind, I’m going
to receive it in my heart and I’m going to derive peace and joy and
hope and excitement and enthusiasm in my life because of this
faith.” This is what James
is talking about in chapter 1:
“Consider it pure joy, my brothers, when you face trials of many
kinds because you know that the testing of your faith develops
perseverance.” James is saying, “When you have problems of diverse kinds,
different kinds of disappointments or struggles in life, well, if you have
faith, if you know in your mind that God created the universe, that Christ
died and rose again for you, you know the contents of this book are true, and
you personalize it and it is real to you, then that is going to help you
through those difficult times. In
fact, you can face these different trials with a sense of joy. You can reckon it joy, you can count
it all joy. You can consider it
joyful because it is an opportunity for God to work in your life through
adversity to help you get to know Him better and to find more of His promises
and to claim them more thoroughly in your own experience.” That’s “interior”
faith. It gives us piety, it
gives us peace, it gives us hope and joy and the very things that we need to
be emotionally healthy in life. I had a man who called me this week very disturbed because of some bad
news that appeared to be coming.
We talked for a while and he said that he was just so worried and
anxious. He said,
“I’m just cleaning out my carport to stay busy.” I said, “It’s important to
stay busy. That is one of the
best antidotes for worry. Just
stay busy and stay working. But
why don’t you also find some verse of scripture that speaks to your
need, and while you’re working on that carport just memorize that verse
as well.” I told him a
verse that I am memorizing now, 1 Chronicles 28:20. While that wouldn’t necessarily
be the one right for him, I suggested that he find a verse and memorize that
verse and just focus on that verse.
There’s something about discovering the promises of God, which
you believe in your mind, but then getting them into your heart and
meditating on them day and night that gives you perseverance. Perseverance is the ability to keep on
going with a reasonably joyful attitude, even in difficult times. That is interior peace. That’s interior faith. You have to have that. But, if that is all you have that is
not enough. That is an incomplete
faith. That is a faith that is
not consummated or resolved in your own life. It’s just dangling out
there. We Need Incarnational Faith There is another dimension of faith. Genuine is incarnational. Incarnational
is a word that means to become flesh. Carne
is the word for flesh, carnal.
Incarnational means that your faith becomes flesh and you begin to
live it out. It affects the way
you live and it results in obedience.
It results in helping people and it results in having a different
attitude towards life. It
manifests itself in tithing and it manifests itself in generosity; and
because you have faith, you’re kinder to people and you do good works
and do good deeds and people recognize that you’re a Christian. You can see it on the outside because
they are living out their faith every day. Their faith is wearing work clothes
and their faith has on gloves.
That is the kind of faith here that James is concerned about. Let me show you. Turn to
James 1:22: “Do not merely
listen to the word and so deceive yourselves. Do what it says.” So, faith is looking into the word of
God and doing what it says, living in obedience. Look at verse 26.
“If anyone considers himself religious, if anyone says he has
faith and yet does not keep a tight rein on his tongue, he deceives himself
and his religion is worthless.
Religion that God our Father accepts is pure and faultless as this, to
look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from
being polluted by the world.”
Verse 1 of the second chapter: “My brothers, as believers in our
glorious Lord Jesus Christ, don’t show favoritism, don’t be
prejudice, don’t be biased.” Look at Chapter 2, verse 14:
“What good is it, my brothers, if a man claims to have faith but
has no deeds. Can such faith save
him? Suppose a brother or sister
is without clothes and daily food and if one of you says to him, ‘Go, I
wish you well, keep warm and well fed,’ but does nothing about his
physical needs, what good is it?” In the same way, faith by itself, if
not accompanied by action, is dead.” This is incarnational faith.
It’s when we wear our faith everyday, wherever we are, in the
way that we live, in the way that we treat people, and the kindness that we
have and the generosity of our hearts and the purity of our lives and our
sensitivity to the needs of other people. Look at chapter 3, verse 13:
“Who is wise and understanding among you? Let him show it by his good life, by deeds
done in the humility that comes from wisdom.” In chapter 4, verse 17, “Anyone then who knows the good that he
ought to do and doesn’t do it, sins.” So, the theme of this book of James, it that it is not enough to have
intellectual faith. It is not
even enough to have intellectual and internal faith. We have got to have intellectual,
internal and incarnational faith, the kind of faith that shows up every
single day in the way we befriend other people and the way we keep our life
pure and the way we’re generous and the way we love people and the way
in which we live, the attitudes we have at home, the way we manage our
tongue, the way we manage our anger, the way we treat people, the way that we
notice when someone has a need. Conclusion There are two things that we can devote the year to. First, we need to find people and befriend them. Just find somebody every day that you
can befriend in some simple little way.
Maybe let someone have your parking space. Maybe help someone out if they are having
a problem, maybe a neighbor, maybe a friend, maybe just 10 minutes talking to
a youngster when you really don’t have time, maybe turning off the TV
and focusing on someone. Just
find different ways of befriending people. This is Christianity in action. Jesus said, “if you give a cup
of cool water in My name you do it as unto Me.” There was an article in yesterday’s Tennessean about a man down at the Rescue Mission who was saved
from a life on the streets recently, and now every night when it is frigid
and the temperature drops into the single digits, while you and I are warm
under our blankets, he’s going in his van up and down the streets of
Nashville looking for anyone who appears to be homeless out in the cold and
getting them in to a place where it is warm and getting them some food and
befriending them. That is Christianity in action.
That is faith in action and that is the kind of faith that James is
talking about here. Find someone. We need to do this as a church but we
need to do it as individuals, so find someone this year to befriend and
befriend them. Secondly, find someone to evangelize, then evangelize them. This needs to be the year of
evangelism. I’m praying for
more baptisms and more conversions than we have ever seen before. You, all of you, even more than me, are
out there every day where there are unsaved people around you - at work and
at school and the community. We
all need to do what Paul told Timothy, do the work of an evangelist. I read yesterday in Voice of the
Martyrs about a church in Java of 700 members, and the Muslims came led
by one fanatical imam who was determined to shut down that church. He organized a mob and on Sunday
morning they showed up, nailed the doors closed and not letting anyone in the
church. It was a highly Islamic
community, and the Christians there, when they came to worship, suddenly
found themselves in great danger.
But very bravely, every Sunday, the church would still gather outside
of its building and sing and worship.
This imam was the Mosque leader, and he showed up with his mob every
Sunday until finally there was one old woman in the congregation who is
particularly vocal with her singing and her preaching and with her
praying. The Muslim Imam pulled
out his machete and stuck it in front of her throat and said, “You be
quiet.” She looked up to heaven and said; “Father forgive them for they
know not what they do.” The
man dropped his machete. He had
never heard anything like that before.
Those words haunted him, and the next Friday at his mosque when he got
up on the platform to begin his Islamic sermon, out of his mouth came the
words, “I believe that Jesus Christ is the only way to
salvation.” He couldn’t believe that he said it. It just came out of his mouth. The people in the mosque stormed him
and beat him and he had to flee with his family a thousand miles away to
another island in the Indonesian archipelago. He is there now and he says,
“I’m serving the Lord and it’s all because of one woman
with a machete at her neck who spoke words for Christ that I never expected
to hear.” We don’t have a machete to our necks, but can’t we speak
some words? Can’t we say
some things and invite people to church and tell them what Jesus has done for
us and make this the year of evangelism?
The book of James says, “You’ve got to have faith. We are saved by grace through faith
alone.” But the kind of
faith that saves is intellectual and internal and incarnational. It is the kind of faith that finds
someone who needs a friend and befriends them. It finds someone that needs salvation
and wins them. That is what I
desire for us, for our church, for this year. Copyright StatementWe grant permission for any edition of The Pocket Paper to be photocopied for use in a local congregation or classroom, provided no more than 1,000 copies are made, the material is distributed free, and the copies include the notice: "Copyright (year) The Donelson Fellowship."For any other use, advance permission must be obtained from The Donelson Fellowship church office.Other messages are available from our website. Just click on the Pocket Papers link on our home page for a list of available messages. |
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