So you see, faith by itself isn’t enough. Unless it produces good deeds, it is dead and useless. James 2:17

For as long as I can remember, faith was a static thing. Faith meant believing certain things. And the different sects and denominations that sprang up did so because each one declared that they, and only they, had the right things to believe. It mattered little whether you lived right as long as you believed the right things. Everything centered around the right doctrine. Doctrine was everything. What you believed would get you into heaven. And so we spent all our time studying doctrine to discover how to study and teach what to believe. And we studied Paul, and Peter, and John, and Jude, but when we came to James we skipped over most of it, because … well, there wasn’t much doctrine … mostly direction about how to live — just crazy talk about the tongue, and orphans and widows, and about good works that we never really understood because we were taught in doctrine that good works could get you nowhere, so we sort of wrote the whole book off as bad theology that somehow slipped through the cracks of the early church and experienced biblical scholars would someday explain it to us.

But they never did, and after a while you stumble upon James again and begin to be intrigued by the strange wording and content in James, wondering maybe it seems strange because it is pointing out to you a huge deficit in your own life that you had better start paying attention to. Which is exactly what we want to do this week.

What James in fact teaches is not that works will get you into heaven, but that faith that does not evidence itself in changed lives is faith that just sits there and does nothing. In other words, true faith moves us to action.

Like a gym membership that’s never used, a diet that never begins, or a resolution that never ignites, faith that never acts is not enough. James isn’t attacking belief, he’s attacking faith that just sits there. Faith that just sits there is just sitting there.