Why Faith AND Works Are Necessary

Do you struggle to merge your doing good works with your faith? This can be challenging, but fortunately, James has some great words of advice.

Why Faith AND Works Are Necessary
Photo by Krzysztof Baran / Unsplash
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Key Verses: 19 You believe that God is one. Good! Even the demons believe—and they shudder. 20 Senseless person! Are you willing to learn that faith without works is useless? 21 Wasn’t Abraham our father justified by works in offering Isaac his son on the altar? 22 You see that faith was active together with his works, and by works, faith was made complete, 23 and the Scripture was fulfilled that says, Abraham believed God, and it was credited to him as righteousness, and he was called God’s friend. 24 You see that a person is justified by works and not by faith alone. 25 In the same way, wasn’t Rahab the prostitute also justified by works in receiving the messengers and sending them out by a different route? 26 For just as the body without the spirit is dead, so also faith without works is dead. - James 2:19-26

As a hockey referee for ten years, I learned to put up with a fair amount of...shall we say...constructive feedback from parents and coaches.

One of these tools of feedback was the handclap. Maybe I'd given one team a series of penalties, and when I finally gave the other team one, the opposing coach would do a mock clap as if to say, "Ezra, thank you for finally getting around to doing your job."

In a similar manner, James begins verse 19 by making a statement that initially seems to be complimentary. “You believe that God is one. Good!" This was one of the core tenets of Judaism. “Hear O Israel: The Lord Our God is one.” Hand clap. But then he makes an uncomplimentary shift and follows this up with the statement, “Even the demons believe—and they shudder!”

The Great Divorce

The point James is making ties in with the central theme of his book, which is that merely saying one believes in God is not enough. It must be backed up with works. As author N.T. Wright points out, a quick scan of this word picture, which uses the body and the spirit to illustrate faith and works, suggests that the order should be reversed.

Shouldn’t James have used spirit to illustrate faith and body to illustrate works? Doesn’t faith happen in the spiritual realm while works in a bodily dimension? But as Wright goes on to point out, this order is accurate.

Within Judaism at that time, there was a problem very similar to the one we face today. Many viewed belief in God as “a shell, a husk, an empty affirmation, a bare acknowledgement. A body without spirit.”

But James is trying to shatter this picture. For him, just as it would be pointless to have a perfectly intact body with no spirit alive inside, so it is useless to have a faith in God that is a blah empty frame with no action.

Having a faith divorced from works can happen to anyone. It can be a PhD student at a Christian university who spends their days studying the deep truths of the New Testament, all the while never getting to know the names of their neighbors around them. It’s the pastor who spends nearly all his week in study preparation, but little time rubbing shoulders with non-Christians.