Wisdom in works

Recently I’ve been moving away from reading theological blogs. It’s not that I find theological nuances uninteresting, but too often the discussions are just words to me and I don’t see evidence of them bearing fruit in my daily walk. So rather than continue in that personal wilderness, I’ve been trying to take a more practical, wisdom-based approach to scripture.

As such, I’ve been increasingly drawn towards the moral wisdom messages found in the letters of James and Peter. We’ve been covering 2 Peter 1 in church this summer, so there’s undoubtedly some influence there, but this goes beyond that, I think. This past Sunday, after the boys had woken up and gone down to the basement to carry on with their general chaos-making, I had a few quiet moments to read in the kitchen before my wife got up and preparations for church began. Without a deliberate reading plan in mind, I opened to James. Should it have been any surprise to me then that the heart of the message at church was James 2:26?

“As the body is dead when there is no breath left in it, so faith divorced from action is dead.” (REB)

Or more familiarly, “faith without works is dead.”

Our senior pastor was away, so the message was delivered by our friend, Micah, who is the leader of SOULstice, a post-modern outreach of the church. His sermon was based on Philippians 2:1-18 and he gave an impassioned challenge to the church: get off your duffs and put your faith into action in the local community, not just the global missions programs that are well supported. It’s one thing to open our pocketbooks and support various programs; however, as Philippian imitators of Christ, our life as the collective body of Christ is to deny ourselves and give ourselves away in service to others where we are, not just where others are going in far-off lands.

If I might recast his words into a baseball analogy: the church is not home base, with the goal being to bring the unsaved into the church and score runs - rather, the church is the dugout from where the players are sent onto the field. The church is the means, not the end.

That seems like all well and good basic Christianity, but sometimes you need it thrown in your face in a different format to renew the spirit. Micah’s good at that and it was reviving to be challenged corporately in the same vein where the Spirit has been leading me individually.

My prayer is that the faith that I share even with demons would be put into action that reveals a Holy Spirit-filled life.

Update: for some additional thoughts on the impact of a working Church, see Chris Fann’s latest post on Koinonia.