Words don’t fill bellies. Even kind words fail to satiate hunger or thirst. You can have a thousand flowery, poetic, inspiring words and a warm bowl of soup, and the hungry man will choose the bowl of soup each and every time. If he doesn’t, if he says he’d prefer to hear your emotional rendition of an ode to hunger, they weren’t hungry to begin with.
James 2:18, “But someone will say, “You have faith, and I
have works.” Show me your faith without your works, and I will show you my
faith by my works.’”
James is not trying to be snarky or combative, as some have
claimed when he turns the tables and tries to elucidate the matter of faith and
works being intertwined. It’s not a matter of semantics or hair-splitting. It’s
not as though we can agree to disagree, and you attain salvation through works,
I attain salvation through faith, and we meet in heaven in the end. There isn’t
some fork in the road where you choose works or faith. There aren’t two paths
or ten; there is one. Works evidence faith.
This does not mean it’s works salvation, it simply means that
the faith you possess is living and animated and stirs you to good works. Whatever
way those works manifest is between you and God. There is no preset list of
works or an itemized list of bullet points that must be completed to progress
to the next level. When people begin to look at it that way, it betrays their
immaturity and lack of understanding in relation to the responsibility of a
servant. Move when God stirs you. Don’t resist when God moves you. That nudge,
that voice, that impetus, that feeling of empathy or sympathy for that one
individual out of ten thousand is the urging of the Holy Spirit and not some
accidental, random thing.
The ministry I spearhead puts out a newsletter once in a
while. In it, we present various needs, whether it’s for firewood, cows, goats,
fixing a roof, renovating an existing home, or building a new one for a family.
All we can do is present the needs as we find them. Those who respond usually
send a note designating their donation and, in various ways, telling us that
this particular need spoke to them in some form or fashion. Nobody’s standing
behind them, breathing down their neck, pointing to the need they should help
with. It’s the Holy Spirit speaking to them, and they in turn being sensitive
enough to the urging of the Holy Spirit to follow through.
When James insists that one show their faith without works,
he already knows they can’t. It’s like the people who got everybody to buy
Iraqi dinars while they themselves were not invested in the currency. Show me
you believe in the investment. Do you own any? Well, no, you see, I’m
diversified, and my portfolio can’t take the risk of this particular
investment. Hold on a minute; you’re trying to get me to invest in what amounts
to colored toilet tissue because you say my returns will be thousands of
percent. Why wouldn’t you liquidate everything and go all in if you believed
that to be the case?
Before what I’m sure is a large number of my Iraqi readers
get angry and start shooting off e-mails. I am not saying the dinar is toilet
tissue; it’s not sanitary enough to be used as such. What I am saying is that
your currency is largely worthless, especially in the eyes of those who
exchanged US legal tender for dinars in the hopes of reaping billions.
If you say you have faith, but your actions or works do not
confirm it, you’re lying to yourself and others. It’s not an easy truth to
accept, but it is the truth nevertheless. Good trees bear good fruit. Barren
trees bear no fruit, and eventually, the tree that bears no fruit is cut down
and cast into the fire. Jesus said that. I know; that pesky Bible again.
Essentially, James was saying, look at my works, and you will
discern my faith therein. My works are not salvific. They are evidence of my
deep, abiding, and living faith. Works highlight and accentuate the existence
of faith in an individual life. Should someone consider themselves spiritually
superior because they have works? Certainly not; all have sinned and fallen
short of the glory of God, so feeling entitled, superior, or better than your
brothers or sisters in Christ because you have works is a fool’s position.
Works are a byproduct of true faith and, as such, come
naturally to the believer without being forced, coerced, or performed only when
reward or remuneration are promised on the back end. We do them because they
come naturally once hearts are anchored in Christ.
One thing that I will always praise Americans for is the
culture of giving that is inherent in their upbringing. At least it was back in
the day. Things are changing, and not for the better, but that’s another story
for another time.
My people do not have a culture of giving. Being gracious and
charitable, welcoming and hospitable is not innately commonplace, yet you’ll
never find a more selfless group than the believers there. My mother was the most
generous person I’ve ever known, willing to give of herself until there was
nothing left to give, and not because she was born this way or because she
modeled others around her, but because it’s what Jesus transformed her heart
into once she surrendered at the foot of the cross.
Anyone who’s visited our apartment in California or the
ministry in Romania while my mother was alive can attest to her tireless
dedication. You never left the Duduman Boldea home hungry, and you were never
turned away if you needed a place to sleep. Back in the early nineties, even
though there were seven of us in a two-bedroom, one-bathroom apartment that we also
ran the ministry out of, we hosted an elderly Romanian couple for almost a year
because they had nowhere to go. They slept on the couch in the living
room/dining room/ministry headquarters.
The point isn’t to make you imagine the mélange of odors nine
people can produce in a hot California apartment on a summer’s day. It’s to
reaffirm that if you desire to help someone, you’ll always find a way to do so,
resource-scarce as you might be.
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