James 1:27,28

THE CHRISTIAN IN THE WORLD

‘And to keep himself unspotted from the world.’

James 1:27

As men and women grow older they change. Of all the changes that they undergo, those of their moral natures are often the most painful to watch. We all have a dim idea that if we could have taken the young life and isolated it we could have kept its freshness and purity. Out of the aggregate of the many influences which we call ‘the world’ have come the evil forces that have changed and soiled the life. It has not been himself. He has walked through mire, and the filth has gathered on his skirts; through pestilence, and the poison has crept into his blood. Not merely the evil heart within has shown its wickedness, but the evil around us has fastened upon us. We have not merely been spotted, but ‘spotted by the world.’ Our own experience confirms the Bible conception of ‘the world,’ and so we listen. And here the Bible steps in and describes lives shaped by this cosmos, this total of created things.

I. The stained lives.—Who does not know what this means? There is the outward stain—the stain upon the reputation. How few reputations remain so pure as to be fit patterns for others to follow! Then there are the stains upon our conduct, the impure and untrue acts which visibly cloud the fair surface of our best activity. And then, worst of all, there is the stain upon the heart, of which none but the man himself knows anything. These are the stains which we accumulate. You know what stains are on your lives. Each of us knows. They burn to our eyes, even if no neighbour sees them. You would not think that your children should grow up to the same stains that have fastened upon you; you dream for them of ‘a life unspotted from the world’; yet that dream is almost hopeless; and we soon give it up, and begin making excuses. The worst thing about this staining power of the world is the way in which we come to think of it as inevitable. I said the stain upon the heart was the worst, but there is one thing worse still. When a man not merely tolerates, but boasts of the stains that the world has flung upon him; when he wears his spots as if they were jewels; when he flaunts in your face his unscrupulousness and disbelief as the badges of his superiority. When it becomes reputable to show that we are men of the world by exhibiting the stains it has left upon us, then we see how flagrant the danger; how doubly hard to keep ourselves unspotted from the world.

II. And now, in view of all this, we come to our religion; and we hear St. James telling us, in unsparing words, what ‘pure religion and undefiled before God’ is. Mark, then, how intolerant religion is. She starts with what men declare to be impossible. She refuses to bring down her standards. She insists that men must come up to her. She proclaims absolute standards. She will not say, ‘Your case is a hard one, and for that reason I will waive a part of my demands; for you, religion shall mean not to do this sin or that sin.’ Before every man, in the thickest of the world’s contagions, she stands and cries with unwavering voice, ‘Come out, be separate, keep yourself unspotted from the world.’ There is something sublime in this unsparingness. It almost proves that our religion is Divine when it undertakes for a man so Divine a task. And our religion is not true unless it have this power in it, unless the statesman, the merchant, the man or woman in society, do indeed find it the power of purity and strength. We must bring our faith to this test. Unless our religion does this for us, it is not the true religion that St. James talked of, and that the Lord Jesus came to reveal and to bestow.

III. We go for our assurance to the first assertion of the real character of Christianity in the life of Jesus.—The life of Jesus was meant to be the pattern of the lives of all who call themselves His followers. His was a real human life, and yet the very sinlessness of Jesus has made Him seem to many not to be Man, instead of being the type of what manhood was intended to be, and what all men must come to be. The very principle of the Incarnation, that without which it loses all its value, surely is this, that Christ was himself the first Christian; that in Him was displayed the power of that grace by which all believers were to be helped and saved. And so for this reason the life of Jesus was lived in the closest contact with His fellow-men. He passed through the highest temptations to which our nature is exposed; He walked through the same muddy streets of sordid care; He penetrated the same murky atmosphere of passion that we have to go through, and thence He came out pure, and unspotted from the world; thus He is really God manifest in the flesh. As He came forth spotless, so by His power we must come out unstained at last, and ‘walk with Him in white.’

IV. As we study the life of Jesus we are taught that religion is, by its very nature, positive.—Jesus was never guarding Himself, but always invading the lives of others with His holiness. He did not shut Himself up, as it were, in the castle of His life, guarding every loophole, but He made it an open centre of operations from which the surrounding territory was to be subdued. So we learn from Him that our truest safety, our true spotlessness from the world, must come, not negatively, by the garments being drawn back from every worldly contact, but positively, by the garments being so essentially pure that they fling pollution off.

V. We must ever bear in mind the purpose of the Incarnation; we must grasp the bewildering thought of a personal love for our single souls; we must find its meaning in those precious words, ‘Christ died for me.’ Then will the soul, full of profoundest gratitude, look round to see what it has to give to the Saviour in return, and it will find it has nothing to give—save itself. It is its own no longer; it is given away to Christ. It lives His life—Who redeemed it—and not its own. Thus, it is by walking in this new sense of consecration to Him, it will walk unharmed; it will be kept ‘unspotted from the world’ by Christ. More than this; it is by a Christ-like dedication to the world that Christ really saves us from the world. You go to your Lord and say, ‘O Lord, this world is tempting me, and I fear its stains. Shall I run away from it?’ And the Voice comes, as from the opened sky, ‘No, go up close to the world, and help it; feel for its wickedness; pity it; sacrifice yourself for it; so shall you be safest from its infection, and not sacrifice yourself to it.’ It is possible so to be given up to Christ and our fellows, that the lust, falsehood, cruelty, injustice, and selfishness of the world shall not hurt us; it is possible to walk through the fire and not to be burned. But it depends always and wholly upon whether He walks there with us. Let us not trust ourselves, for we are weakness. Trust Him, work for all who need us; so shall we go through all impurity and be gathered safe home at last into the Father’s House.

—Bishop Phillips Brooks.

Illustration

‘We practically believe that no man can keep himself “unspotted.” You talk of political corruption which seems to have infected the safest characters, and the answer is: “There’s nothing strange about it; no man can live years in ——, and be wholly pure.” You speak of some point of doubtful conventional morality, and some business men will answer: “That’s all very well for you in your professional seclusion, but that will not do in the street. I should like to see you apply that standard to the work I do to get my bread.” And so of society: “It’s a mere dream to think that social life can be made noble; whoever goes there must expect the spots upon the robe.” But it is not true. Men do go through political life pure; some merchants do pass through the temptations of business life with clean hands and tender hearts; and social life is lighted up with the lustre of the white, unstained robes of many a pure man and woman. But the spots fall so thick that many believe none can escape them; and then men cry, “We are not to blame for the world’s spots upon us.” ’

(SECOND OUTLINE)

THE ALLUREMENT OF THE WORLD

The text places before us a great battle-field with innumerable enemies to fight against; they warn us against a power that may stain and defile, and cause us, after all our work and all our prayers, to miss the end and object of our life. We must visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, but we must also keep ourselves unspotted from the world.

I. What is this world that stains with a crimson stain and sullies the purity of a soul for whom Christ died? It is not that mass of material beauty which the Father hath created; the contemplation of the material world ennobles the soul, and leads it, in worship, to the mighty Creator. The grandeur of the noble mountains and rushing rivers: the beauty of the forests and the meadows; the glittering wonders of the heavens when night has thrown her curtain over the earth below; the contemplation of all these eloquent tokens of Divine power leads the soul in reverence and humiliation to worship the invisible Creator. No; the world that defiles is none of these. It is that unholy thing that laughs at the young man when he bends the knee in prayer, that would give him unclean words for praises, and curses for hymns to God. It is used here in its worst and unholiest sense; it refers to no pleasures that are either lawful or innocent, to no pure merry-making that friends may have with friends. It is no creation of the imagination, but a cruel reality that tempts the soul to ruin. It is everything that is meant to be a blessing exaggerated and abused till it becomes a curse; it is the call of the thoughtless to the wine that sparkles in the cup, the invitation of the immoral to the false and fleeting pleasures of an unholy life.

II. We all know with what eloquence the world appeals to the young just starting in life; how it tells them that ‘pure religion and undefiled before God’ is unmanly and without beauty: fit indeed for weak women and effeminate men, but no fit guide for the true hero in the battle of life. This is the devil’s own favourite lie. There are and have been more true heroes among the soldiers of the Cross than among the votaries of the world. What of the noble army of martyrs who presented a resistless phalanx to the rushing tide of evil and stemmed the torrent with their lives! ‘They were stoned, they were sawn asunder, were tempted, were slain with the sword; they wandered about in sheepskins and goatskins; being destitute, afflicted, tormented; they wandered in deserts and in mountains, and in dens and caves of the earth.’ They underwent all this, not for some visible reward that they could see with their eyes and touch with their hands, but in the invincible faith of the Son of God Who loved them, and had promised them ‘a city not made with hands eternal in the heavens.’ The soul that is the noblest and purest by nature, becomes nobler and purer still beneath the light that shines from the revelation of the Gospel of Christ: ‘pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father’ can increase the hero’s courage, deepen the martyr’s self-denial, stifle the unholy word as it rises to the lips, and quench the impure thought in its birth; it can exalt the whole man till he come to his perfect stature, and renew the faded beauty of the image of his God.

III. Let us keep ourselves unspotted from the world.—It is no easy task, the result of one passionate look to heaven, the answer to one heartrending cry for help. It is a daily battle beginning with the morning light, ceasing only for a time when sleep has hushed the tempting voices and lulled the passions to their rest. Sometimes there is an onslaught of almost resistless fury, sometimes the deadly stillness of a dangerous ambush. And still the fight must continue till the last sleep come and the spirit return unto God Who gave it. But we are not alone in the fight. There is the all-prevailing intercession of the Son before the throne of the Father; there are the whispers of the angels and their sustaining help; there is the indwelling of the Holy Ghost; there is the food that Jesus gives for the strengthening and refreshing of the struggling of weary souls. Surely we may be ‘more than conquerors through Him that loved us’; we may be enrolled among the number of those crowned heroes who ‘have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb,’ to whom with the Father and the Holy Ghost be majesty and dominion for ever.

Rev. W. E. Coghlan.