I am in a Community Bible Study now on James. Here's something amazing about CBS, there are more than 1,000 CBS Bible study groups in over 39 countries. And it all got started here in the U.S. in New York actually. The study books are written by a team in Colorado Springs. And Rwanda has the most classes per capita than any other country. Pretty awesome! Maybe the movie "Hotel Rwanda" made lots of people want to go to Rwanda as missionaries. I know it almost made me want to. If you haven't seen that movie, check it out. It's pretty intense though.
Here are my thoughts on my homework for this week on James chapter 2:
James 2 talks about favoritism of rich people over poor people. Now it's not so much favoritism with rich people as much as favoritism of the leadership in churches I think. People almost worship their pastor and anyone in leadership. But that is idolatry. And it is not being fair to the rest of the "normal" members of the church. We should respect those in leadership, but not worship them of course. We follow God, not our church leaders. If a leader says something that goes against Scripture we should feel ok with calling them out on it. Leaders can be wrong. They are not perfect and all knowing like God. Don't just take everything your leader says as being absolute truth. Find answers for yourself in the Bible. You don't have to believe everything that your leader believes blindly. Respect them but don't worship them.
James 2:13 says, "Judgment without mercy will be shown to anyone who has not been merciful." As in "do to others as you would have them do to you." And also, what goes around comes around. If you are merciful with others, they will be with you. But if you judge others harshly or try to control what they do, they will in turn try to judge you and control you. We reap what we sow. If we sow judgement and harshness with others we will reap that for ourselves.
And then there is this seeming contradiction: Eph. 2:8-9 "For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God— not by works, so that no one can boast." And James 2:24 "You see that a person is considered righteous by what they do and not by faith alone." This means that before we are saved, our works do not matter. We cannot save ourselves by what we do. We are saved by faith in God only. But after we are saved, much more is expected of us since we have the Holy Spirit living in us. Paul says, "walk in a manner worthy of your calling." If the Holy Spirit is in us, it WILL show. Like Jesus said, a good tree cannot bear bad fruit. If we are truly saved, we will be a good tree and have good fruit.
It's easy to get confused by what James says, but he is talking to people who are already Christian. We don't try to save ourselves by our good deeds. We don't do good things to get God to love us. We do good things BECAUSE God loves us. God's love flows out of us to others. Our good deed are the evidence that we truly have the Holy Spirit living in us; that is what James is saying. Faith without works is dead. As in, if someone is truly saved, they cannot help but want to help others and share the gospel etc. It's not a legalistic directive that James is saying. He is simply saying, your life should show that you are Christian, and if it doesn't, then maybe you aren't.
If you don't truly love people and want to help them, how can you know that you are saved? If you don't truly love God and long to talk to him every minute of the day about everything you go through, how can you really know you are saved? Of course there are stages in our relationship with God. The longer we have known God the more we want to talk to him, just like with a friend. But overall, we should desire to know God more and love others more, if we are really saved.
And those are my thoughts on the book of James so far. I'll write more on James later. May God bless you all!
No comments:
Post a Comment