Religion (Part 3 of 3)

We've all heard the expression, practice what you preach.

It's a familiar way of saying our words should match our actions. We should be living in a way that demonstrates the reality of our faith. But how do we prioritize holiness while we serve in an unbelieving world? Today on Truth for Life, Alistair Begg concludes a message titled Religion, or in James chapter 1 verse 27. If we are the children of God, our Father, then we ought to look, in some measure at least, increasingly like our Father.

We ought to bear the family resemblances. You see, what we have here is what God has begun at least to nudge us in the direction of as a church family, and that is to remind us of the absolute necessity of keeping two things close together—the genuine proclamation of the good news and a genuine participation in good deeds. Emphasized not only by James but also by Paul when he writes to Titus, speaking of God, he says, who gave himself for us to redeem us from all wickedness and to purify for himself a people that are his very own, eager to do good.

They are the epitome, if you like, of do-gooders. When Wilberforce was converted, he wrote in his personal journal, God Almighty has set before me two great objects—the suppression of the slave trade and the reformation of manners. You should understand the reformation of manners not now about which fork you use for your salad but rather the transformative impact of the gospel in a culture and in a community.

And here we are, two hundred years from the historic parliamentary vote, and that classic vote banned the transportation of slaves by British subjects. And if you've read of Wilberforce and if you've read of Newton, you will have found there that, again, you discovered the juxtaposition of good news and good deeds. In many ways, God raised up Newton, who was a slave trader, ironically, converted him, gave him a compassionate heart, made it possible for him to write hymns and to preach the Bible, to become, if you like, a proponent of good news, and to become one of the key influences in the life of William Wilberforce, who is epitomized by good deeds. When you think about it, as God, in the immensity of his plans and purposes from all of eternity, causes the birth of these two little boys—one Newton and one Wilberforce—and the confluence of his redeeming purpose is to be found in this compassionate heart. When Wilberforce was buried in Westminster Abbey in 1833, seven years were to elapse before they put an epitaph on a statue in the abbey which some of you will have stood before and have read.

I have it written in front of me here in my own scribble, and I want to read it to you because it is so profoundly moving. This is what you'll find on the statue in Westminster Abbey. To the memory of William Wilberforce, born in Hull, August 24, 1759, died in London July 29, 1833.

For nearly half a century, a member of the House of Commons, and for six parliaments during that period, one of the two representatives for Yorkshire. In an age and country fertile in great and good men, he was among the foremost of those who fixed the character of their times. Because to high and various talents, to warm benevolence, and to universal candor, he added the abiding eloquence of a Christian life. Eminent as he was in every department of public labor and a leader in every work of charity, whether to relieve the temporal or the spiritual wants of his fellowman, his name will ever be specially identified with those exertions which, by the blessing of God removed from England the guilt of the African slave trade, and prepare the way for the abolition of slavery in every colony of the empire. In the prosecution of those objects he relied not in vain on God, but in the process he was called to endure great obloquy and great opposition. He outlived, however, all enmity, and in the evening of his days withdrew from public life and public observation to the bosom of his family. Yet he died not unnoticed or forgotten by his country. The peers and commons of England, with the Lord Chancellor and the speaker at their head in solemn procession from their respective houses, carried him to his fitting place among the mighty dead around, here to repose, till through the merits of Jesus Christ his only Redeemer and Savior, which in his life and his writings he had desired to glorify, he shall rise in the resurrection of the just."

Fantastic, isn't it? A man of conviction. A man of great compassion. And two hundred years later, we are the beneficiaries of his willingness to combine a commitment to the good news that Jesus sets the captives free, and that the implications of that transforming power in a culture cannot leave the least and the last and the left out, absent the fatherly care of God. Now, what Wilberforce did in the eighteenth century, Spurgeon did in the nineteenth century. Spurgeon, on one occasion at their evening prayer meeting on a Monday, all of a sudden breaks into the events, and he says to his congregation, We are a large church and should be doing more for the Lord in this great city. I want us to ask God to send us some new work. And so all the people then, in the remainder of the prayer time, said, Oh God, send us some new work. And the new work that God sent them was the establishing of what became the Stockwell Orphanage and Spurgeon's impact among the fatherless children of London.

And what Spurgeon did in the nineteenth century, Moody did in the twentieth century. And if you read the work and the writings of Ariatore and what Moody did, then you will know that he combined good news and good deeds. And it is imperative that the two are held together, for whenever the good deeds are disengaged from the good news, whenever the impact of a life is torn away from the compelling, transforming power of the gospel, then it eventually degenerates into pure moralism and nothingness. Social involvement dare not take the place of the gospel.

And I leave the remainder of this to you. If you take a concordance and look through it, you can go into the Old Testament, and you can go into the New and see that the Bible is replete with references to this. You have it in Acts chapter 6, don't you, where they had in the Jerusalem church already put together Meals on Wheels—whether they were on wheels or not, I don't know. But they had a roster for the widows in Jerusalem, didn't they?

And that's why the friction emerged, because people began to say, I'm not sure that our group is getting… I think the meals are coming a little late, or I don't think they're hot, or whatever it might be. And the apostles said, What are we gonna do about all this Meals on Wheels business? And then they said, Well, let's get seven guys who really know what they're doing, who've got the God in their hearts, and who've got a good head on their shoulders, and we'll give them the responsibility of this. Because it wouldn't be right for us to leave the preaching and teaching of the Bible to serve tables. And you've got that wonderful division of labor then. Very, very important that the apostles are not saying, It wouldn't be right for us to serve tables. It's always right for every one of us to serve tables. What they said is, It would not be right for us to leave the preaching of the Word to serve tables.

They knew what their job was. If you go to 1 and 2 Timothy, the pastoral epistles, you'll find that Paul is implementing the exact same program amongst the Gentile churches in 1 Timothy 5. And if you read secular history, you read Eusebius, he will tell you that by AD 250, the church in Rome was reportedly supporting fifteen hundred destitute men and women, children, and children on a daily basis. And you don't want to hear again from me about how the place I grew up in Glasgow was formed by Dwight L. Moody, and that it was customary for us both to feed the people from the streets, five or six hundred of them, before ever we got to any praise or worship on the Lord's Day morning. They came in in dire condition, off a Saturday night in the early hours of Sunday morning, to be given tea and food and to have the Scriptures open to them, to be provided for.

Why? Because they were homeless, because they were helpless, because they were impoverished, because they were without God and without hope in the world. And don't forget, the person on Skid Row is no more without God and without hope in the world than the affluent suburbanite on the east side of Cleveland. Finally, we'll just say a word about the third area of the test—part 1, a controlled tongue, part 2, a compassionate heart, and part 3, a clean life. Religion that God accepts as pure and faultless not only involves our controlled tongues and our interest in those who are so desperately in need, but also it demands that we keep ourselves from being polluted by the world. In other words, not only are we to be practically helpful, but we are to be personally holy—practically helpful and personally holy. We are to be identified with society in its need but not in its sin. Again, I say to you that social involvement dare not be at the expense of moral purity. Our friend John Dixon, in his commentary, which he so kindly sent to me with a letter, he argues quite strongly the case for this final phrase here in verse 27 as being a reference not, he says, to the pollutions of private immorality but to the socioeconomic perversions of society. And so he says that when James says, not only should you have a controlled tongue and a compassionate heart, but make sure that you don't get sucked into the polluted way that culture deals with socioeconomic questions.

I want to say two things about this. One, this sounds like an Australian theologian. And number two, he is alone in making this case.

He does make a good case. But I searched in vain throughout everywhere to see if there was another person in the entire universe who had ever suggested that the final phrase of verse 27 of James chapter 1 had anything to do with socioeconomic perversions. Maybe John's right, and all the rest are wrong. But I think in this instance we're probably safer with the majority, which means that what James is urging upon us is spiritual watchfulness.

Spiritual watchfulness. His readers then and now are surrounded by all kinds of distracting, demoralizing, and even dehumanizing influences. They and we walk around in a world that is actually opposed to the standards and purposes of God. They, the initial readers and we reading it tonight, need to remind ourselves that the standards of our life in Jesus are heavenly, and they're not those of the prevailing culture. The fact of the matter is that we are different. We are different. I know it's not uncommon for us to try and use as a sort of apologetic an approach that says to people, you know, we're just the same as you are. What we can say in that is we pull our trousers on in the same way or we share the same supermarkets or whatever it might be, but the fact is we are not the same as they are.

We're radically different from what they are. And James and Peter and John and Paul, every last one of them, makes the point. I could keep you all night quoting, but I won't.

I'll give you just one. 1 Peter 4 and chapter 3. 4, says Peter to his Christian readers, you've spent enough time in the past doing what pagans choose to do. What do they choose to do? Living in debauchery, lust, drunkenness, orgies, carousing, and detestable idolatry. And they think it's strange that you do not plunge with them into the same flood of dissipation and they heap abuse on you.

Why do they do that? I think in the King James Version the word is profligacy, which always struck me as a fascinating word. It's like obloquy from earlier. You immediately need a dictionary. Incidentally, obloquy is simply opposition or abuse, isn't it? But what he's pointing out is you're no longer what you once were.

You are radically different. You live in a world—and the world back in James 1 here is the word cosmos—you live in a world, a world that is actually opposed to the lordship of Jesus. And if you want to think about what he's saying here, to keep yourself from being polluted by the world, what he's really saying is, make sure that you don't swallow everything that is at odds with the lordship of Jesus in your life. Because remember, if you're going to get down and dirty, as it were, in the culture, if you're going to invest yourself in that way, if you're going to make yourself vulnerable, if you're going to open yourself up to so much that is there, you've got to make sure that you're controlling your tongue and that while you're being practically helpful, you're not neglecting to be personally holy. See, some people have used the approach to practical help as a cover for their own personal immorality. Why is it that you're interested in going to the strip joints all of a sudden, the man was asked, Oh, well, these poor girls, you know, they need all the help they can get. Yeah, but you might just not be the person to go there and help them.

Have you thought of having your wife or your grandmother do that assignment? See, be very, very careful, says James, that you don't get this thing all messed up, that out of a genuine desire, a compassionate heart to be helpful to the needs of others, it doesn't become a smokescreen for our own personal immorality. Because the world, dominated by Satan, is opposed in spirit and in attitude to the things of God.

And there is a clear line of demarcation between the two. We'll come to that in James chapter 4, when he says in verse 4, you adulterous people, don't you know that friendship with the world is hatred towards God? No, he says, I want you to be found without spot. Now, the word is aspilos. It's the same word that you get, aspilos at least, in Ephesians, where the bride of Christ is coming down prepared for her husband and without spot or wrinkle or blemish or any of those kind of things. It's the same word that is used in 2 Peter chapter 3, when in relationship to the return of Jesus Christ, Peter urges his followers, Make sure that as you anticipate the return of Jesus Christ that you will be found aspilos, that you will be found without a spot. And it's not surprising, then, that by the time Paul is writing to Timothy as a young man and urging upon him the vital importance of running the race and keeping the faith and finishing the course, he says at the end of 1 Peter 5 and verse 22, in just a phrase, Timothy, keep your self pure.

That's it. Keep your self pure. One of my friends, who will be known to you because he's heard every day on the radio, when I was in his company not so long ago, and we were talking together and praying together, he said to me—and this man is just a few years older than me—but he said to me, Alistair, you know, one of my daily prayers is simply this, Lord, don't let me become a dirty old man. I admired his honesty. I've thought about it often since.

I guess the way to become a dirty old man is to be a dirty young one and a dirty middle-aged one. And who, when the Bible comes and says, one of the tests of the authenticity of your faith is that you keep yourself unspotted from the world, is to say, no, I don't think that really applies to me. Well, says somebody, what a test.

I'm not sure what I got on the test, and I'm not sure what I should do if I prepare for this test. What am I supposed to do? Well, James has actually already told us what to do. The answer to all of this is a steady recourse to the Bible. Get rid, verse 21, of all moral filth and the evil that is so prevalent, and humbly accept the word planted in you which can save you.

You have it all here, right in the book. Humbly accept the word planted in you which can save you. Saves us from our selfishness so that we reach out with compassion. Saves us from our hasty outbursts and our sullen verbosities as it controls our tongues. And saves us from walking through the world and just becoming filthy as it purifies our minds and constrains our feet and keeps our hands in our pockets and turns our gaze again and again to our Heavenly Father. We need to be keeping a careful watch over our spiritual lives so we don't start blending in with the culture we're trying to reach with the Gospel. You're listening to Alistair Begg. This was the final message in our series Faith That Works from the book of James.

Alistair will be back to close in prayer in just a minute, so please keep listening. If you've enjoyed listening to volume one of the Faith That Works series, you can own the entire study from the book of James for just $5. That's 40 sermons through the entire book of James, comes on a USB drive. You can find it in our online store today at truthforlife.org slash store.

While you're there, be sure to take a few minutes and shop around. In addition to the Faith That Works USB, there are many other helpful resources available at our cost. For just a few dollars, you can stock up your library or your church's library with many wonderful books and teaching materials. Once again, go to truthforlife.org slash store. Believing a Christian isn't an isolated or individual activity. Believing involves belonging.

We are members of one another. By definition, this means we should belong to a local church. And that's a topic of a book we want to recommend to you titled Devoted to God's Church, Core Values for Christian Fellowship. Each church is unique in many ways, but there are some fundamental principles that ought to apply to every congregation. Author Sinclair Ferguson examines the early church to uncover the hallmarks of church life that apply regardless of church size or geographical location. Devoted to God's Church is a book that Alistair has highly recommended to the congregation at Parkside Church. In fact, he and the church pastors and elders selected this book to read through and discuss together. You can request your copy of Devoted to God's Church, Core Values for Christian Fellowship when you tap the book image you see in the app, or you can visit us online at truthforlife.org. And if you'd rather mail your donation along with your request for the book Devoted to God's Church, write to us at Truth for Life. The address is P.O.

Box 398000, Cleveland, Ohio 44139. Now here's Alistair with a closing prayer. Eventually you'll know all the choruses that I know from Sunday school as I turn them into prayers, but I want to use a Sunday school chorus as our prayer.

Say it in the first person, make it your own. Cleanse me from my sin, Lord. Put your power within, Lord. Take me as I am, Lord, and make me all your own. And keep me day by day, Lord, underneath your sway, Lord.

And make my heart your palace and your royal throne. For the sake of your Son, Jesus, we ask it. Amen.

I'm Bob Lapine. Thanks for listening today. What kind of signal is your congregation sending to a watching world? And what kind of signal are you sending to God? Join us tomorrow for a special message titled A Call to Worship. The Bible teaching of Alistair Begg is furnished by Truth for Life, where the Learning is for Living.