James 1:27

PURE RELIGION

‘Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this, To visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction.’

James 1:27

That we, through Christ, have become the sons of God, is the very central truth of the Christian faith; that God is our Father is the pledge and promise of a Father’s tender care through life, and, after death, of a mansion in our Father’s house.

But our Father is expecting gifts from His children; He is waiting and watching for proofs of their devotion. He is looking down from heaven His dwelling-place, and the fruit of our religion is beneath His searching gaze. Our service to the King of kings must be pure and undefiled.

I. ‘To visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction.’—This is but a sample of the innumerable good deeds that must flow freely from the Christian’s lively faith; a specimen of the daily life of our Master Who ‘went about doing good.’ We are wont to murmur as we behold with tears the multitude of evils upon earth; the burdens which sin and sorrow lay upon loving, weary hearts. We sigh as we behold countless numbers of our brethren toiling on beneath a load of poverty and ignorance; ignorance of the Father’s love and the possibility of their admission into the family of God. But we dare not gaze too long into the darkness when the light is shining brightly above it all.

II. Behold the grandeur and nobility of the mission of the Christian brotherhood!—It is ours to alleviate the sorrow that wounds and to banish the sin that defiles. The heart that for ever offers its gifts upon the altar of self soon becomes hard and ignoble, unworthy of the Father’s love; it misses some of the sweetest gifts that Heaven in its mercy bestows. Out in the world, away from self, is the labour of unselfish love. Who has not felt a warm glow of unutterable pleasure as, led by Divine charity, he has gone into the house of mourning and extended a helping hand to those whom God for discipline has smitten? This pleasure, unlike so many that the world offers to its votaries, will cast no gloom upon our life like the blight that withers and kills the fruit of the garden; it has nothing but the sweetest memories to delight the soul. If it had been possible for the Man Christ Jesus, while upon earth, to have felt the ecstasy of human joy, would He not have found it in the countless human faces upturned to Him in gratitude for diseases healed and sorrows banished; in the blind restored to sight, the bereaved mother blessed once more with a loving son’s devotion; in brothers, sisters, fathers, friends reunited in the bonds that death and the devil had rudely torn asunder? These are the golden fruits of religion pure and undefiled before God, Who is the Father of the fatherless and the God of the widow.

III. If our hearts are renewed by the grace of our Master, and touched by His self-denying life and death of agony, our motives will be holier, our labour more unceasing, our offering pure and undefiled before God Who is our Father.

Rev. W. E. Coghlan.

Illustration

‘I have often thought that it must be a source of the keenest delight to the skilful and kind-hearted physician, when, under the blessing of the Almighty, he is able, for a time at least, to banish or to mitigate the sufferings of the human frame, and to restore those who seem almost dead to the arms of the living who love them. As also it must gladden the heart of the good priest of the Church to be able, under heaven’s guidance, to calm the doubts that will rise at times in the human breast, or to win a wicked and unhappy man to a better and a safer life. But, in one sense, it matters not whether our profession be that of physician, or priest, or any other lawful and honest calling in the providence of God; we all have our work to do, our mission in the brotherhood of Christ.’

(SECOND OUTLINE)

PURE WORSHIP

Properly and strictly, ‘religion’ is ‘being tied down.’ It has a sense of confinement. Something like another word, which comes from the same root, ‘obligation.’ Then it came to mean ‘prescribed forms of worship.’ And the Greek word in the passage, as nearly as we can translate it, is ‘worship.’ More lately, ‘religion’ means a man’s creed, and the spiritual affections, and the holy life, which grows out of His belief and love—the way of salvation—the state of conduct of a man who is saved.

Here, in the text, we have it in its second sense, ‘worship’—the mind’s attitude to God, and the way of worshipping God.

Good works are more than the supplement of ‘worship.’ They make ‘worship.’ It is not ‘worship’ without them. They are ‘worship.’

The question, therefore, now is, not about the way of salvation, that is a settled thing; it supposes you are saved; the question is, How shall you, as a saved person, ‘worship’ God?

What is ‘worship’? And to ascertain this, we must take rather the spirit than the letter of the text.

And what is the rule?

I. Whoever has received Christ has had to do with the most perfect act of unselfishness that the world has ever seen.—He left His beautiful and happy home, and divested Himself of His glory, to visit an orphaned, widowed world. He became the hardest Worker that ever trod this earth. His whole life and death was one great unselfishness. We may say of Him, what we can say of no other, ‘Christ had no self.’

And more than this. By the act which makes you a Christian, you are no longer your own. You are ‘bought’—bought with blood. You are another’s. You are Christ’s. Mere ‘worship,’ commonly so called, has a great deal of selfishness in it. It consists very much in asking for self what we want; or praising for what we have; or in listening to something which is to do us good. It need not be selfish. It might consist much more than it does of simple adoration of God, for what He is in Himself, for His own sake. But practical ‘worship’ is far too much selfish. Therefore for ‘worship’ you need to do something that will take you out of self; something more like Jesus. This is the action of every one who is no longer his own, but Christ’s.

II. The power of Christ as a Man was His sympathy.—As a Brother, He lived with men, when He was here. As a Brother, He sits in heaven. As a Brother, He will come again in judgment. As a Brother, we have His presence now. As soon as a person is really united to Christ, he takes Christ’s nature. All his tender feelings are drawn out. Whatever he was before, he becomes gentle, loving, kind. He catches the sympathies of Christ. Before, he was a hard man—hard to sin—because he had never really felt sin; hard to sorrow—because he was occupied with his own sorrows or joys; hard to happiness, because he never himself was quite happy. Now, he is capable of sympathy. The expression in the original which we have translated ‘visit’ is looking to. It is the same word as ‘bishop.’ It implies one who takes care, and interest, and pays attention—which could not be without sympathy.

III. Effort.—Faithful, diligent effort, painstaking love. ‘Real worship!’ It is not to sit still and pity; it is not to send money; it is to go and do it yourself—‘to visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction.’ Jesus did not stay in heaven and issue a mandate. He did not devolve His mission to another. He came—He lived—He suffered—He did it Himself. Here is the force that many lose. You do kindnesses, great kindnesses; but you do it by deputy. You give to missions; but you are no missionary. You bestow money; but you do not give yourself to the work after the money is spent. You feel; but you do not act. You send; but you do not go. Your religion stops where actual labour has begun.