Faith and Works

(Message given at Wayside Friends Church on Oct. 19, 2025)

I’ve been thinking for awhile how to enter this second half of the second chapter of James today. I’ve ended up with an engine/car metaphor, and a gardening metaphor.

My friend and neighbor Todd is amazing with cars and engines. Over the years I’ve watched him completely rebuild cars. I know just about nothing about cars and engines in comparison. I can imagine if Todd were here, I can see him lean back with a smile and his hands behind his head and go, “Well this should be interesting…”

And Elaine, my partner of almost 40 years, if she were here I’d be just waiting for her to go: “You? YOU are giving a gardening metaphor?” Because all the gardening bounty and beauty at our house is because of her.

Now that I’ve established my impeccable credentials to share these metaphors, let’s go!

There are some basic truths about cars and engines.

If you put gas in the car, check the tires and the oil regular, then you can generally expect that turning the key will result in the engine reliably roaring to life.

Similarly, like we learned in elementary school with the little milk cartons filled with soil, when you put a seed in good soil, water it regularly, and put it in the sun, you can generally expect a sprout to emerge from the soil and reach toward the sunlight. (Elaine would probably be fairly proud of me for that.)

With the second part of James chapter 2, the main thing is this truth: 

We can generally expect that our faith, our belief, our trust in God will be expressed in actions that we take, actions that will match God’s generous care and love for the world. 

The general way things work is that faith is not just a list of true statements, not just a catalog of right beliefs. Faith is a living trust that leads to human beings becoming loving and generous, as God is. It leads to us caring for the widow and orphan and marginalized around us, caring in tangible, touchable ways. 

This practical care of food, clothes, tangible support run all through the book of James. It’s the clear implication to draw—caring for those who need it is how to live like God.

We don’t just believe it, we live it. We don’t just say it, we do it. That’s the general, simple, yet profound truth here, and I’m all for it.

I want this for myself. I want more of it in the world. I’ve got no issues with the basic gist that my trust in God generally leads me to live a life that looks like God’s practical, involved care and concern for others.

What was revolutionary for me probably 15 years ago was when someone said to me that the book of James is like wisdom literature in the Old Testament. 

Now that in itself may not be revolutionary for you, if you really don’t know or care about wisdom literature in the Old Testament. But let me try to bring these pieces together.

Several books in the Old Testament are in a category we call wisdom literature, which generally give helpful, practical things for living our lives.

Proverbs and Psalms are the great examples of this kind of wisdom literature. They  tell us what to generally expect from faith, what to generally expect from life. If you do these things, this is the result. Proverbs 3:5 and 6 are well known examples:

“Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways submit to [God], and [They] will make your paths straight.” (Prov. 3:5-6, NIV)

James is like Proverbs and Psalms. And I’m super glad it’s here! In a world that has so many different value systems, so many different messages for how to live and what to pursue and value in life, it’s really helpful to have this trustworthy general way of engaging the world.

Now, this kind of advice is very often an if/then, binary, mechanical sort of thing.

It comes across as strong and certain. If you do this, then this will happen. 

If you plant the seed and water it, the seed will sprout and the little tomato plant will grow. If you put gas in the car and change the oil regularly and turn the key, the car will drive.

And generally, this works. Generally, this is helpful. Generally, basing our lives on these truths brings the kinds of results we hope for. 

But the binary has some hard parts to it. 

It’s difficult for me to read this passage from James and NOT have it make me defensive. It sounds accusatory. 

In other words, it’s harder for me to access the positive, general thing of, “Hey, the way this generally works is that our trust in God enables us to live and be in the world in some good ways.” 

Let me try and read it with a little more of that tone. Or maybe, hold on—maybe one other picture first, one that I’m much more qualified to speak about: a baseball one. 

I was a third baseman, and I remember in high school working really hard on one thing. To fit the analogy to this faith/works thing, the “faith” or “belief” was that the faster you get rid of the baseball to throw someone out, the better. Normally you field the ball, take a step toward your target, and throw. But what my coach had me work on over and over was fielding, shifting my weight, and throwing without a step; at first, he had me working on certain situations like a throw to second base for a double play.

I worked and worked and worked on it in practice. Very intentional. Working hard to “work out my belief.” 

After all that work, there came a moment in the game when it all just happened—when I didn’t have to think, it just all flowed…ooh, that was it! 

That was the general truth James is trying to get at!

When it all comes together, when what we do comes naturally out of our belief and trust in God, that’s the beauty and power!

I’ll try to have that picture and that tone in mind as I read James 2:14-17 for us.

From the First Nations Version:

What good is it, my sacred family members, if a person says ‘I have faith,’ but has no deeds to show for it? Can that kind of ‘faith’ set [a person] free and make [them] whole? If a family member or any human being has no clothes to wear or no food to eat, and you say, ‘Go is peace, stay warm, and eat well,’ but fail to give what is needed, what good have you done?’ In the same way, without deeds, faith by itself is dead. (James 2:14-17, First Nations Version)

How did you do with accessing the general truth with this? 

For me, something else comes up with this passage. If I can get passed feeling defensive or accused by it…if I get past my own sense that God is shaking a finger at me, asking “what good is my faith?”…

If I get past that, one pitfall that I often go to is to turn and start shaking my finger at some other “them” out there. “What good is it for you to claim the name of Christ and deport mothers and fathers and lock up children? What good is it for you to claim the name of Christ and make a ton of money while cutting welfare and food stamps? What good is it for you to claim Christ and vindictively demean and devalue those you see as enemies?”

I call that a “pitfall” not because the things I just said are untrue. I think they are true.

The pitfall is this. I always get nervous when I resolve parts of the bible that make me uncomfortable by immediately pointing to someone else instead of wrestling with it myself. 

There’s a truth here for all of us to wrestle with and face. Not acting like we believe, the kind of blind spots we have, the hypocrisy we may show…this is a big problem. While it isn’t wrong to point out where others’ actions don’t match the faith they possess, we can’t let that be a way to avoid looking for the blind spots in our own lives.

Sometimes the general thing can teach us something when things go wrong.

Sometimes we do need to change our behavior. A couple of weeks ago I was mowing our yard. For years, four of us neighbors have owned a riding lawnmower together, including Steve Fawver and my friend Todd who knows so much about engines. 

I was mowing and there was a huge POP and smoke started pouring out of the engine. I shut it down as quickly as I could and texted everyone. Todd texted, “Ugh. That sounds bad.”

And it was. We hadn’t been checking the oil, and it was bone dry, leading the motor to have a catastrophic failure.

Steve and Todd were really good about not shaking the accusing finger at me.

They said we all collectively own this, because none of us were really paying attention to the oil. Todd and Steve found a new motor and replaced it, and I have no doubt in my mind that we will ALL be checking the oil religiously. (Pun intended.)

The general truth that changing the oil keeps motors going was proven true by failure. And now we all have a reminder that will cause us to live that truth more faithfully. 

Sometimes, even in failure, the general rule holds, and challenges us to change our actions.

But sometimes things happen that don’t fit the general rule at all.

Sometimes you plant the seed, and you water it, and the soil is rich, and the sun has been shining, and it just doesn’t grow.

Is it the seed’s fault? Is it the farmer’s fault, because I didn’t do enough? Why didn’t my right belief and right actions bring about the right result? Why didn’t the general rule hold, when I did the things I was supposed to?

Let’s try looking at a picture of this binary, this general truth.

(I want to be clear that this was not generated by AI. Nor, shockingly, did I hire a professional graphic artist. I created this incredible graphic all by myself. You’re welcome.)

You’ve got faith, and you’ve got works. Just two things. They are supposed to match up, but then you have this time where it doesn’t. 

If faith is supposed to lead to good deeds and good results, but they don’t, what happened? In a binary, there are really only two options. Either I believed the wrong things, or I did the wrong things. Hmm.

The more I think about it, there has to be at least another circle somewhere in this picture. What do I do, how do I fix it if the works aren’t coming out of the faith, aren’t matching the faith?

That very question shows there is something else.

There’s our will, or our “me”. Where do I throw “me,” where do I throw my will into fixing things that haven’t worked according to the general picture?

When things don’t go as expected, I’ve got a sort of angry coach voice inside of me that often flares up. (Actually, he sounds just like my high school baseball coach…) This voice attacks the works part, really pushes the “try harder,” “do the things,” “What’s wrong with you that you can’t do what you say you believe?”

I’ve also got the super sad, depressive voice inside me. 

This one tends to attack the “will” or the “me” part of the equation. “I’m a failure, I can’t do it, there’s no hope.” “Doing the right thing works for other people, but there’s something wrong with you, and that’s why faith or God doesn’t come through for you.”

There might be some of you who have a voice that aims at the faith side. 

You might have that voice that says “You didn’t trust God enough. You need to pray more, or give up more things, or worship more, or do some ‘God thing’ more. That’s why it didn’t work out.”

Those three voices are kind of the only options in the Proverbs/Psalms/James kind of wisdom. 

When things don’t work out right, we either didn’t have enough faith, or we didn’t do enough, or we are just a failure and outside of God’s will.

Thank God (literally) that there is a whole other strand of wisdom literature! Sometimes people feel like it’s contradictory or in tension with the other type of wisdom. I think it’s just a strand that wrestles almost totally with the exceptions to the general truths of how the world works.

In the Old Testament, this strand of wisdom is primarily in Job and in Ecclesiastes.

In Job, we get an example of someone who clearly DID have enough faith, DID do everything right. There’s nothing to confess, despite what his friends say. It just didn’t work because evil intervened to take things away.

Ecclesiastes is generally attributed to Solomon. The whole premise is, I was the wise one, I did get all the rewards, but it’s not enough. There’s still an emptiness there. Hmm, what do I do with that?

The hard thing is we don’t have a whole book of this strand of wisdom in the New Testament. We have some of Jesus’ parables and flashes here and there. But James is definitely not that.

James chapter 2 goes on to have a really hard issue to deal with. 

As Steve Fawver said when introducing this series on James, the bible has some hard things in it. Chapter 2 has one of them.

James goes on to use Abraham as an example of someone whose works demonstrated his faith. In the passage, which refers back to Genesis 22.

James’ example seems to show that the good faith that Abraham is credited with, is shown or demonstrated by his “work” of being willing to give up his son, the son God promised him. And Abraham almost goes through with the unthinkable, because Abraham thought God asked him to do it.

The words of the bible seem to be consistent on this point: Abraham showed his trust in God by being willing to do this thing that he heard from God.

And one part of me can kind of understand that “put God first” thing, when I just look at Abraham. Kind of.

But when I look at God in that picture, I just can’t.

One thing I cannot do right now is have a God who tests a parent’s faith and devotion with the life of a child. I cannot. Cannot.

So what do we do? 

We can set it aside. That’s really a legit option. We don’t have to always wrestle with the hardest parts of the bible. We can choose to not wrestle with the Abraham part for now. That’s ok. 

I love the bible. Still. It’s challenged me and helped me and encouraged me over the course of my life. And sometimes, it’s in the challenge that I find the greatest help and comfort. 

So this week I’ve been taking the challenge of wrestling with this Abraham stuff. I’m going to tell you how I’ve wrestled through this. 

I have no idea if it’s right. I make no claim to that. 

I’m not speaking as an authoritative person from the front, but as a person just wrestling to find a way to hold on to God and a text that seems off to me, with implications about God that trouble me. 

So maybe this. 

The bible is made up of human writings that reflect the human understandings of God. There is a unique inspiration from God for these particular texts that we have in the bible. I don’t pretend to have all the details of that figured out—but I will not let go of the God-inspired part, and I will not let go of the human part.

It’s clear, there isn’t much doubt as to how Genesis and this text in James were meant and understood: God asked something incredibly hard, and the “works” part of the faith and trust was to be willing to do the hard thing, which God then took off the table and provided another way. 

That’s the message that was intended when it was written down.

But let’s think about when it happened, the context, and let’s remember it happened hundreds of years before it was written down.

Abraham had no bible, no text to look at. Abraham was really the first person to begin what became the Jewish faith, but it wasn’t until Moses, some 400 years later, that there was any clear definition of what that faith looked like.

The kind of sacrifice Abraham considered—that kind of hard thing was asked by other deities around them at that time, and practiced by other religions at the time. It’s within the context of how a deity might act in Abraham’s world.

What if Abraham was culturally conditioned to hear God in this way, but it wasn’t correct? What if he misheard?

His working out his faith was a selfless act as he understood it, but what if he was mistaken in the faith he was working out?

One thing clear is that this Yahweh, this God, never condoned the action of this kind of hard ask. 

Abraham is the founding parent of this faith, Yahweh is still trying to help Abraham see what God is truly like.

So play out the scene as if Abraham is mistaken in how he heard God. He’s doing his best to obey a faith, but the faith and belief are incorrect. And if that is true…

God’s intervention is to say “No! Don’t do this. Here’s a ram I’m providing, here’s another way.” 

And if that’s it, what if the faith and trust that is proved by action is NOT the march up the hill with his son. What if it’s believing God’s word that there is another way, and not acting on his wrong faith? 

What if the great expression of faith through action is actually when we show by our actions that our previous misconceptions of God are no longer the way we are going to live and act?

Here’s a new, different way, says God. 

Here is the provision of a different way. And Abraham releases his misconception, embraces the new way. And that action shows how his faith has changed, and it is credited to him as righteousness. 

I’ll be honest, this is the most “out there” I’ve gotten with trying to wrestle with the bible. It’s why I made the disclaimer that I’m not claiming any sense of rightness about this.

But it has helped me, and it helps me hold both the general desire to let my faith shape my actions and a hard example in the text.

This helps me in the times when I’ve done what I thought was right, but it hasn’t worked out. Maybe there is a change I need in who I believe God to be. Maybe God’s gracious and just and loving character is leading me to extend grace and love to people I had been closed off to before.

So yes to the general hope and the general challenge of our works matching our faith!

May we hopefully spend more and more time just in the beauty of our actions matching the heart of God, like when the throw without taking a step came out of me so naturally in my high school baseball game.

May we, at the needed times, live up to the challenge—live up to the challenge when our actions aren’t matching the faith we hold. May we accept God’s correction, grace, and strength to live and act differently.

And may we, when needed, let go of the blind spots in the faith and beliefs around us. May we let go of the faith that doesn’t match the radical grace, justice, and love of Creator God and Jesus Christ. May we live lives that extend that grace and love to all.