Symptoms of Christianity

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Transcript:

All right, about two weeks ago, I started talking to you about this passage in James chapter 1, where he really goes after them about the concept of being a hearer of the Word versus being a doer of the Word. And he really, at the end of the chapter in verses 26 and 27, he lays out a contrast for us between real religion, real Christianity, and fake Christianity. And two weeks ago, I talked to you about some of the signs of fake Christianity, that really it’s more about show and pretending to do the Lord’s work, pretending to serve the Lord, than actually serving the Lord.

And told you if sometimes we can work so hard at pretending that we’re doing the right thing, if we just put half that much effort into it, we could actually do the right thing. But there’s a lot of show and there’s a lot of pretense when our hearts aren’t right before God and just trying to maintain the appearance of being a good Christian. There’s a lot of in there.

It’s not without reason that James points out and says, hey, by the way, one of the signs of a fake Christian is not being able to control your tongue. That’s not to say that, you know, if you slip and say something you shouldn’t, and I’m not even talking, we hear that and we think immediately of curse words. I’m not even talking about curse words.

I’m talking about sometimes things just come out that you don’t mean to come out, and sometimes you say things that I shouldn’t have said that. That wasn’t very nice. It doesn’t mean that we’ll never have those slip up moments but folks if everything that comes out of our mouth is destructive to other people and brings reproach to the name of christ then it’s indicative that there’s something wrong with the heart because jesus said that out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks you don’t draw you don’t draw good water from a bad well and so whatever’s in the heart is going to come up there’s there’s this evidence of bitterness of being a fake christian And really, it culminates in the idea that you can fool yourself.

And in trying to pretend to serve God, in trying to pretend to be a Christian, really, we’re only going to fool ourselves. We’re sure not going to fool God, and we’re not going to fool others very long. Well, he turns around in verse 27 and gives the other side of that, gives the contrast, and says, by the way, here are a few what I would call symptoms of real Christianity.

I know we look at that word symptoms, and that usually means something bad’s coming. But symptom just means it’s evidence of something else. If I know there’s something wrong with me physically, and I don’t know what it is, and I go to the doctor, he’s going to ask, or at this point, the nurse before that, somebody’s going to come in and ask, what are your symptoms?

What’s wrong with you? And I normally ask them, how long have you got? When they ask me, what’s wrong with you?

But you go through and you list your symptoms. list, okay, you know, I’ve been sick to my stomach, I’ve been thrown up for three days, I’ve got a pounding headache, I just feel dizzy all the time, I’m running a fever, and they’re probably going to look at you and say, ah, I bet it’s the flu. They can tell by the symptoms. Yes, they can go in and they can do a blood test and all that, but you can tell a lot. Not in every illness, but in a lot of things, you can tell what it is just based on the symptoms. And now, what they don’t want to do is treat the symptoms, they want to go in and treat the root of it.

Well, the same thing here. The symptoms are not what we’re aiming for. It’s the root cause.

And so it’s important to point out, and it’s important for you to note as we go through and we read this passage, and as I talk about these things, I’m not telling you, hey, go do these things and it makes you a good Christian. No, no. This is James saying these things are evidence. These are symptoms of you being a Christian.

If you are a Christian, it’s an inward thing. It’s an inward change, but it’s going to show forth in some way, and these are some of the ways it’s going to show forth. Don’t get the cart and the horse backwards and think, like so many of the things where the New Testament says, do this, do this, do this, it’d be very easy to hear it and say, oh, if I just go through this checklist, that makes me a Christian.

No, no. Being a Christian, trusting Jesus Christ for our salvation, asking God’s forgiveness, being born again, all that comes first, and then these checklist things come towards as a result. But let’s go to James chapter 1, starting in verse 21. He tells them, Wherefore lay apart all filthiness and superfluity of naughtiness, and receive with meekness the engrafted word which is able to save your souls.

And this word superfluity, we don’t use it very much anymore, but it means excess. And I’ve always kind of chuckled when I read this verse, thinking, well, how much naughtiness is okay and how much is excess? And I don’t think it gives us an example here.

But basically, he says, get rid of all the filthiness, all this excess wickedness that they were drowning in, and receive with meekness. Meekness is not the same as weakness, by the way. We’re told as Christians to be meek, but it doesn’t mean that we’re supposed to be weak, because with the strength of Jesus Christ, we are strong spiritually, strong in his strength, not in ours, but meekness rather is strength under control.

And so with this idea of meekness, with this idea that we are spiritually free, we are indwelled by the Spirit of God, we’re set at liberty, but we don’t go out and use that however we want with this spirit of meekness, this spirit of self-control, he says receive the engrafted word, get that word and make it a part of you which is able to save your sins. And you know the scriptures do, as they say, make us wise unto salvation. They point, every page points to Jesus Christ, to the one who was able to save our souls.

And he says, once you’ve received that word and it’s been engrafted into you, he says in verse 22, be ye doers of the word and not hearers only, deceiving your own selves. We talked about that two weeks ago, that when you try to just hear the word and not do the word, but try to look the part of a Christian without actually doing it, you’re really only deceiving yourself. He said, For if any be a hearer of the word and not a doer, he is like unto a man beholding his natural face in a glass.

For he beholdeth himself and goeth his way, and straightway forgetteth what manner of man he was. So in their day when they weren’t surrounded by mirrors, you might see yourself in a mirror a few times a year. They were expensive.

And then you’d go away and forget what you just saw. We see ourselves in mirrors and cell phone cameras. We see ourselves all the time.

I know what I look like. I don’t forget what my face looks like. And yet there are things that I look at and instantly forget.

I forget what prayer request you just told me. And it’s not because I don’t care. It’s because I blame my children.

I had a great memory until I had children. I forget the prayer request you’ve told me. I forget the zip code.

I forget what phone number I was trying to write down. I, you know, in an instant, I can look and say, oh, here’s this phone number over here. Da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da.

And then go over here. What was that again? I’ve forgotten it.

I can look at something. So even though we don’t have the exact same issue with mirrors, we get the point he’s trying to make. If you’re hearing the word and not doing it, you have made yourself as useless in God’s work as if you just looked at what he said and it went totally out of your brain the next second, like the attention span of a goldfish.

Now I hear that’s a myth they actually can remember longer than that. But we do that, don’t we? We act like we didn’t just hear this.

It’s like with the kids. Clean up the blocks. In there during discipleship training, I was with the kids.

And we sang some songs and we had a lesson and that only took 10 minutes. And then I let them play puzzles and blocks and then I’m telling them, okay, clean up the blocks. I turn around, they’re playing with balloons.

You just heard me say, clean up the blocks. Okay, that’s the point he’s trying to get across here about looking in the glass and forgetting. So if we’re hearers of the word and not doers, we’ve made ourselves useless in God’s service.

But whoso looketh into the perfect law of liberty, and continueth therein, being not a forgetful hearer, but a doer of the work, this man shall be blessed in his deed. So somebody who uses their liberty as a Christian to follow Christ, he says this man will be blessed indeed, because he’s going out and he’s actually doing the work that God’s called him to do. He’s actually hearing the word and, hey, he’s going to obey it.

He’s going to do what God’s called him to do. He said, if any man among you seem to be religious, and by the way, this goes for ladies as well, if any man among you seem to be religious, just appears to be, and bridleth not his own tongue, has no control over his mouth, but deceiveth his own heart, this man’s religion is vain. And that’s what I talked to you about.

That’s what I really focused in on two weeks ago. His religion is vain. It’s fake.

You can get dressed up to the nines every Sunday and sit on the most prominent pew at the best church in town and be a totally fake Christian. But he turns in verse 27 and says, pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this. He says, here is the religion that is pure, that is undefiled.

It’s not mixed with anything fake. It’s pure. It’s real through and through.

And not only that, but pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father. A lot of times when the Bible says God and the Father, be careful there. It’s not saying that God and the Father are two different people.

I think there are some groups that will take things like that out of context and say, well, there’s separate beings here. No, two names, two titles for the same being. But pure religion and undefiled before God.

So not just pure and undefiled, but religion that even God looks at. God doesn’t just see the outward. Man looks on the outward, and we can look good to each other for a period of time.

We can look good to ourselves for a long time. But God looks straight through that exterior, that crust we have on the outside, and he looks straight through to the center, and he sees exactly what’s there. And so for it to be pure and undefiled before God and the Father, it’s got to actually be pure and undefiled.

So when he’s talking here about real Christianity, he’s talking about real Christianity, that even God the Father looks in our hearts and sees what’s there and says, yeah, that’s the real thing. He says, pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this, to visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction and to keep himself unspotted from the world. Now, two things there we’re supposed to do.

Visit the widows and fatherless in their affliction and to keep himself unspotted from the world. Again, I’ve already said it, but just to reiterate, This may not be the last time I say it tonight. These things do not make you a Christian.

These are some of the symptoms. These are some of the things that the world should look at and say, you know what, he’s got some weird ideas. He’s got some weird ideas about Jesus, and he goes to church instead of playing golf like normal people. But you know what, he takes care of widows and orphans, and he doesn’t join in with the same things we do.

He must be the real deal. It’s something that people should be able to look at us and say, if this is there and this is there then he must be a Christian. It should be obvious what we are from our behavior. It should be.

I’ll be the first to admit it isn’t always. But it should be obvious from our behavior what we are. There’s that old saying if it walks like a duck and it talks like a duck it’s a duck.

We should be like that duck as Christians. We were going to eat lunch on the patio this afternoon. this morning.

We enjoy eating out there and we know there’s not that much more time before it gets too hot and so we’ve been taking advantage of that and eating outside. And we were getting plates ready and Benjamin came in and said, Daddy, there’s something on the patio. And I walked over there and looked at it and looked like two somethings.

And they weren’t pretty somethings. They were somethings that made me say, okay, I’ll bury that later and we’re not eating on the patio. It looked like one was a hunk of meat and one was a hunk of skin.

And I don’t dog got a hold of something or what? But Charlie and I are standing there looking at that going, what is that? Is that a bird?

Is it a rat? A squirrel? We couldn’t tell.

And I’m not telling you that story to gross you out. But as I’m talking about not being, we were looking and trying as we could. I know we’re from the city and y’all probably think we don’t know anything, but we do know what those animals are.

And we were looking at this and we could not tell for the life of us. Still don’t know what that animal is or was before something got a hold of it. He might have.

I told you he’s a rat terrier. And finally, I think after 11 years, he’s got it. Folks, here’s the point for me telling that story.

As a Christian, don’t make everybody have to stand around looking at you going, what is that? Are they a Christian? Are they not?

I can’t tell. They look like, I mean, this over here looks like it could, okay, is that a beak? Is that a foot?

It looks like it could be this. Don’t leave everybody confused about what we really are. We should be like the duck where they look at us and say, yeah, it walks like a duck and it talks like a duck.

It must be a duck. If we’re a Christian, it ought to show. If we’re Christians, it ought to show.

It ought to be obvious. They look at us, aha. That’s what it is.

And James here says, again, it’s the result. It’s the evidence. It’s the consequence of an internal change where Jesus Christ saves us and the Holy Spirit indwells us and we’re born again.

We’re changed from the inside out into a whole new creature, a whole new creation. And because of that, we live differently. We belong to him now and so we act like it.

And James says, and I don’t say to you tonight that this is the only evidence, but these are two of the big things that James identifies and says these are marks of a Christian. These are marks of somebody who loves Jesus Christ and has been changed from the inside out by Jesus Christ and by his word. He says, to visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction and to keep himself unspotted from the world.

What do these things mean? This first thing about the visiting the fatherless and widows, I kept reading it and kept reading it, and I read it in my King James here, and I went and read it in some other translations because I thought, I don’t think visit really sums up what, it just doesn’t feel like it sums up what James was trying to say here. and it’s not that there’s anything wrong with this translation it’s that the English language has changed over the last 400 years and visit had more shades of meaning at one point and so I went and read it and some of the newer translations they all said visit.

There’s one that I went and looked at called Young’s Literal Translation that is a really good translation extremely literal that it makes it hard to read and preach from it’s more of a reference thing and as I was reading that I thought I came to it and said that says what I thought all along it’s trying to say. It says to care for. And that word visit 400 years ago when they were translating the King James, they would have understood to visit them.

You’re not just going to say hi. You’re going to take care of them. You’re not forgetting the fatherless and the widows.

You’re not forgetting the orphans and the widows in their troubles. Now in their day, you know, they didn’t have things like social security. In our day, we may not have things like social security, but in their day, they certainly didn’t.

They had the family and they had the church. And if you were a widow over a certain age and there was nobody there to take care of you, you were destitute. If you were an orphan, I don’t know that there were programs for you to be adopted.

You were destitute. There are countries in this world today where you’re an orphan, there’s no state program. You beg on the streets.

It’s still that way. And so what he’s saying here is if you’re a Christian, you need to take care of one of the evidence of that is that you will take care of those who cannot take care of themselves. We will love others in a way that Jesus Christ did, and we will take care of those who cannot take care of themselves.

And I’ll admit, I have some difficulty with this, because I started out in ministry with a very giving spirit and just wanted to help everybody and save the world, and it took me about two seconds to figure out that the world will bleed you dry. And I’ve been scammed. I could tell stories.

Some of us have sat around and swapped stories about times that we’ve done stuff either on our own or through the church and come to find out somebody was just gaming the system to get what they could out of us. And it’s kind of hardened me a little bit. I saw on Tuesday somebody at Walmart putting out a sign that they and their baby needed help.

And I had just seen them getting out of a fancy vehicle, somebody dropping them off. Anyway, it’s a long story, but things like that kind of harden me, and they can harden all of us and make it to be where we just don’t want to help anybody. We just assume everybody who comes to us for help is scamming us.

And I’m not saying we do have to give everything that’s requested. You know, we do have to be good stewards of the things that God’s entrusted us with. But at the same time, we can’t be so hard-hearted that we just give up on noticing anybody who’s got a need.

And I know this church in the past has helped widows and taken care of things in their houses and helped where there was a serious need and to be commended for that. You know, I think we would all agree to help if we knew there was a legitimate need. But as Christians, do we notice those who can’t do anything for us?

A lot of times we want to help people who could, we want to scratch their back knowing they can scratch ours in return someday. Are we willing to help those who can’t help themselves? the widows, the orphan.

You know what, in our day and age I don’t want to go too far beyond what the scriptures themselves say but in our day and age I would extend it to, we as Christians have a responsibility to stand up for those who can’t speak for themselves, the unborn. I’d say we have a responsibility to help to help people with needs even if we politically don’t agree with them being here. Now I don’t bring, I try to keep the politics out of the pulpit.

But just so you know where I’m coming from, I’ll tell you, I have strong convictions about illegal immigration and border security. I have strong convictions about them trying to put refugees that we don’t know anything about them from the Middle East here in this country. I have strong convictions about, you know, the security of this country.

But at the same time, I know that I have a responsibility as a Christian, but if there’s somebody near me who needs help and can’t take care of themselves, I have a responsibility to do what Jesus would do and help them without necessarily asking to see their papers. And I hope you don’t run me out for saying that. But folks, we have a responsibility to take care of people around us.

Again, I don’t want to go too far beyond that part I said, that’s just my thoughts on it. But what he gets at here is the idea of the widows and the orphans, people who could not care for themselves. Do we care for those who can’t care for themselves?

And do we care for those? Are we only generous to those who can be generous in return? Or do we show genuine love by taking care, by actually doing things for those who can’t do things for themselves?

And then second of all, he talks about here this idea of keeping themselves unspotted from the world. You know, when we walk through the world the way we do, and as believers, you know, the Bible does say that we’re supposed to be in the world, but not of the world. In the world, we walk through this world, it’s hard not to get some of the mud from this world all over us.

I mean, and it feels like the mud hole is just getting deeper and deeper, doesn’t it? Now, I hear people say it’s worse than it’s ever been. I don’t know, I’m younger than most of the people I hear say that, so I don’t know that for a fact.

But I always, as much as it feels like that, I go back to what the Bible says about the days of Noah, where every thought of every man was only evil all the time, constantly. And I think at least we’re not to that point yet. So I don’t know that it’s the worst it’s ever been, but it does seem like it’s getting worse than it has been in recent years.

It seems like the world is just getting more vulgar. It’s getting more. .

. You know, I’ll say it this way. The things that people used to hide and lie about 30 years ago, they brag about now.

And I don’t understand it. And I don’t understand it because I wasn’t raised that way. And because I’ve been a Christian so much of my life.

and we’re called to love people. It’s a delicate balance that we’re called to. We’re called to love people.

We’re called to meet them where they are. We’re called to love them where they are, but we’re not called to join them in the things that they’re doing. And like I said, that’s a hard line to find.

That’s a delicate balance, and you really have to be attuned to the Holy Spirit’s leadership in each situation. But there should be a desire in our hearts to say, okay, as I walk through this world, I want to stay as pure as I can. I want to follow God as closely as I have the strength to do.

And, you know, God knows that we will slip and fall. We’re human. We can’t help it.

I hate that. I hate that I still sin. There’s nothing worse to me than the feeling of I have just disappointed my father.

I hate that. It nails me every time right in the conscience. But God knows that that, I mean, God knew when he saved us that we were still going to be fallen sinful creatures.

And yet he offers us not only the strength to do better, to walk according to his will more than we could do on our own, but he offers forgiveness and he offers to clean us up when we fall down. And so sometimes as we’re trudging through the mud of this world, we’ll fall into it. We have a choice then.

Do we wallow in it? Do we lay down and stay down? Or do we get up and ask God to clean us off and we march on?

So the world, it’s really unfair that the world looks at us and says, you know, when we sin, looks at us and says, ah, in a moment of sin, see, I told you they’re all fake. We’re human. We’re not fake.

We’re human. But it’s really unfair for us to lay down and stay down in the mud and expect the world to give us a pass on it. We as believers need to, it’s our responsibility.

And God will strengthen us for the task. And as I said, he will forgive us when we fail in it. And then he’ll give us the strength to continue on again.

We have the responsibility to march through this world and to stay out of the mud as much as possible. And when we fall down in it, get out of it and ask him to clean us up and we go on trying to stay out of it. And I think when the world looks at us and sees, I think when the world looks at us living that way, they may look at us and say, see, they mess up just like we do.

And I think the difference they’ll see is that we don’t stay down, that we don’t just give up and wallow in it. We ask for forgiveness and we go on. See, for too long we’ve led people to believe that we as Christians are just supposed to be good and perfect all the time.

And so they think we think we’re better than them. Sometimes we do think we’re better than them. We need to knock that off.

I need to knock that off when it happens. But they think we think we’re better than them. And if they really believe that, then we have done a disservice and we have conveyed the wrong message.

Because the message of Christianity is not about how good we are. The message of Christianity is about how good God is in contrast to how bad we are. And how if God could change a sinner like me, then he could change a sinner like you or a sinner like anybody else that we run into.

And that he can keep us unspotted from this world. These are some of the things that James looks at and says, you want to be a doer of the word instead of just a hearer? You want to prove that you’re a changed individual?

You want to prove that Jesus Christ lives in you, that the Holy Spirit indwells you, that you belong to God, that you’ve been bought with a price, that you’ve been changed, you want to prove that, here are some of the things you look for. These are some of the things that should show up. And again, I don’t believe James is saying that these are the only marks of a Christian.

If that were the case, the New Testament would be a whole lot shorter. But these are two pretty good ones. Because they demonstrate not only a love for our fellow man, that we would stop, that we would take time out of our busy lives, and we are busy, but that we would take time out of our busy lives when everybody is so caught up in what they want and what they’re doing, that we would take time out of our busy lives to stop and help somebody who needs it and can’t do anything for us in return.

It demonstrates a love for our fellow man, but it also demonstrates a love for God that, you know what, I’m going to try to do better than I did yesterday, not because that’s how I earned salvation, but because God’s already given me salvation and because I love him and I want to please him. It’s that love for man and that love for God that demonstrate our Christianity, I think, sometimes better than our words ever do. And it ties in perfectly with what Jesus told them about the first and greatest commandment.

Love the Lord your God with all your heart, your soul, your mind, and your strength. And the second is like unto it, love your neighbor as yourself. If we want to be the Christians that we claim to be, I use that word claim, not saying that you’re.

. . But I know sometimes I’m not everything I claim to be.

But if we want to be the Christians we claim to be, and we want to demonstrate it, and we want to live up to what God’s called us to do, it really is very simple. Loving others because they’re for them and died for them.

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