where do your motives lie?

By a good manner of life demonstrate your deeds in gentle wisdom.
James 3:13b

Is your life filled with arguments? Are you striving for peace with people or for victory?

Has God answered prayer for you this week? How has what you learned Sunday affected you throughout the week? Share what God is doing in your life with us.

reflect.

We all stumble in many ways. Those who are never at fault in what they say are perfect, able to keep their whole body in check.
James 3:2

Judging solely by the things you say, what kind of person are you? Are you a salt spring or do you produce clean, fresh water? Are you in control of your tongue?

serving with honesty.

A few days ago, Keuer, Crowder, Kevin, Alan, and I were talking about how Christians and Churches should go about doing acts of service. Believe it or not it got to be a pretty heated discussion. Not that we were angry with each other or anything, we just all had a lot of different ideas.

The debate centered around the idea of whether or not the point of Christian service should be to tell the gospel to the people being served. In other words, if a group of Christians does something like make meals for homeless people and plans to share the gospel message in the process, the Church would tend to applaud their actions. But what if they serve without sharing the gospel? What if they don't even say they're Christians? Is the service as valid? Can the act of service have to do with something where human beings aren't even directly served (i.e. environmental clean-up)?

On one side of the debate is the idea that Christianity is primarily concerned with spreading the gospel and therefore every act of service must somehow center around this. Giving soup to the hungry, taking care of the sick, or building houses for the homeless must be followed up by proclaiming, in some form, that Jesus Christ is the Son of God who came to earth, lived a perfect life proclaiming the arrival of God's Kingdom, died, was buried, and rose again so that anyone who believes in and follows Him can be saved. I believe this message is true, I believe it must be shared, but is doing good things for others worthless without this message? In fact, won't a lot of people be offended if they realize that the only reason you gave them a cup of soup was so you could try and convert them? Also, are you really humbling yourself to serve someone if the second you're done you elevate yourself to preach at them?

The other side of the debate says that acts of service done without sharing the gospel are definitely as valid as if the gospel is shared. Taking into account the creation mandate in Genesis 1:28 ("God blessed them and said to them, 'be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the first in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground.'"), acts of service should also include taking care of the environment, even if serving and sharing the gospel with human beings is not involved. The question: does this ignore the importance of sharing the gospel? Does this place physical needs above spiritual needs?

As we discussed this issue, the parable of the sheep and the goats from Matthew 25 came up. The story talks about the coming of the Son of Man when all the nations stand before Christ. It says that He will divide "the sheep from the goats" putting the sheep on his right and the goats on his left. Then He tells those on his right, the sheep, to enter into His kingdom because when He was hungry they fed Him, when He was thirsty they gave Him something to drink, when He was a stranger they invited Him in, when He needed clothes they gave them to Him, when He was sick they looked after Him, and when He was in prison they came to visit Him. They asked when He was in all those situations and He said that anyone they saw someone hungry, thirsty, etc... and they took care of them, that was Him. To the group on His left, the goats, He tells the opposite. When He was hungry, thirsty, sick, etc... they didn't respond, they ignored it, they did nothing. He tells them that all the people they ignored were Him. In other words, Christ is there in the sick, the weak, the hungry, the naked, the oppressed.

I pointed out that when Jesus went around healing the sick, blind, and lame, casting out demons, and in general taking care of the oppressed, He did so without spreading any kind of message. While Jesus does teach on occasion in the gospels, on more occasions He does acts of service, and when He does, He doesn't seem to feel the need to preach to people. In fact, He even tells people to remain quiet about what happened. The point of service, it would seem, would be to meet basic needs. There shouldn't be an ulterior motive of preaching to people afterwards. And while it's true that we should be able to serve without hiding our true intentions from those we're serving, something about this argument didn't sit right with me or anyone else involved in the discussion.

Then it hit me.

Sure, Jesus didn't feel the need to preach any kind of message when He was going around serving people, but He wasn't exactly a stranger to them, was He? According to the gospels Jesus was followed around by mobs of people wherever He went. People knew that He was a great Rabbi. The majority of these people likely heard one or more of the few sermons He spoke that were recorded in the gospels and odds are they went around telling others what they had heard. When Jesus came to town, people knew about it, and they knew who He was. In fact, in most of the incidents where He served people, He was asked to do so.

So what's the implication here? Jesus didn't preach to people after He served them because they'd already been preached to BEFORE He served them. They already knew who He was and what He stood for.

The implication here is that the two sides of the debate my friends and I were standing on were both wrong.

The first side, the side that says to serve people and then follow it up with a gospel message, is wrong because it boarders on manipulation. The people being served quickly realize that you didn't care about their physical problem, you only cared about trying to convert them. (A lot of people really don't like this).

The second side, the side that says you don't need to preach any kind of message at all, is wrong because you're only giving half the story. The people ought to know what you stand for when you serve them. Even if humans aren’t directly being served, those that do know about the service should be aware of why it’s being done.

So what's the third option? Most likely when we go out to serve as Christians, the people we're serving don't know about us in advance. Jesus was known when He came to town. Everyone was talking about Him. The same is not true for us. When He served people they already knew what He stood for because they knew who He was. We can't presuppose they will know the same about us. In other words, before we do any acts of service, we need to be up front about who we are. That's not to say we need to preach a sermon at the start of every service project, but we shouldn't be hiding our intentions either. We should do everything we can to let people know who we are and what we stand for right from the start.

When we start with honesty, we can truly humble ourselves to serve others as Christ did and we earn the right to tell them why.

Faith and Action

As we study James it starts to become clear that the question is not, “Does a person need to do good deeds once they have faith?” but rather is, “Is faith without action even faith at all?”

To dive into this further I want to use the classic children’s Sunday School example to describe faith: a chair. The analogy is that you will sit in a chair without thinking about it because you have faith that it will not collapse or that it will provide comfort to your tired body. Typically this example is used to prove that everyone has to have faith in something.

I want to take this analogy in a different direction. Try to imagine a person who walks around making loud, bold claims about his faith in chairs. He has a bumper sticker on his car that says, “Chairs are the answer.” He wears a t-shirt that says, “Yes I believe in the comforting power of chairs.” And he stands on street corners shouting things like, “Be delivered from the sore, achy feet, legs and back your life is spiraling towards! Sit in a chair! I’m here today to tell you that it is possible to sit in a chair! Come talk to me if you’d like to find out how!”

Again, pretending that this person actually exists, let’s say that you follow him around for a couple of days. As you trail him from place to place you start to notice that he never sits in a chair himself, even though he claims he has this incredible faith in them. He’ll stand for hours on end, maybe lie down on a bed or lean against a wall, but you never see him sit in a chair. One night he even goes to a friend’s house for dinner and declines when offered to take a seat. Instead he stands up through the meal and later sits on the floor while everyone else sits in chairs to watch a movie.

At first you might be thinking, “Well, maybe he’s sat in so many chairs that he’s deciding to take a break,” or perhaps you’d think, “He’s such a selfless person! He’s willing to sacrifice his own comfort so other people can sit in chairs.” After a few days or weeks, however, of following him around and seeing him sit on everything from the floor, to boxes, to the hood of a car, anything but a chair, then you’d start to doubt his claims. You wouldn’t say, “He has faith in chairs… he’s just not practicing right now,” or, “He just needs to grow in his faith in chairs.” In fact, it wouldn’t be long before you’d be saying, “This man has no faith in chairs at all!” You wouldn’t believe his claim of faith in chairs because his actions would point out that he’s a fraud!

So why would we believe someone has faith in God just because they claim to?