Believing and Behaving

Scripture — James 3:13-4:3 (NRSV)

Who is wise and understanding among you? Show by your good life that your works are done with gentleness born of wisdom. But if you have bitter envy and selfish ambition in your hearts, do not be boastful and false to the truth. Such wisdom does not come down from above, but is earthly, unspiritual, devilish. For where there is envy and selfish ambition, there will also be disorder and wickedness of every kind. But the wisdom from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, willing to yield, full of mercy and good fruits, without a trace of partiality or hypocrisy. And a harvest of righteousness is sown in peace for those who make peace.

Those conflicts and disputes among you, where do they come from? Do they not come from your cravings that are at war within you? You want something and do not have it; so you commit murder. And you covet something and cannot obtain it; so you engage in disputes and conflicts. You do not have, because you do not ask. You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, in order to spend what you get on your pleasures.

Devotion

Last time I wrote a set of devotions for you, we talked about the way the epistle of James focuses on the good works that Christians are called to do (and how much, incidentally, this annoyed Martin Luther).

In the passage for this coming Sunday, we are still in the epistle of James, and James is discussing some of the specific ways Christians can behave ethically. Today’s excerpt comes directly after a much more famous passage on our need to control the tongue (James 3:1-12, which, if you attend a church that uses the Revised Common Lectionary, you probably heard read last Sunday.) In the rest of chapter 3 and the beginning of chapter 4, James broadens out to speak more generally about the way we behave in our communal life.

Maybe I’m still mulling over the fact that Luther questioned whether James taught the Gospel, and so I’m looking for ways James actually does fit into the grand narrative of Scripture, but reading this passage this time around I thought about how much it recalls two other great ethical statements in the Bible. One, of course, is the Ten Commandments (Exodus 20:2–17, if you want to read them in the context of the Israelites’ wilderness journey), where we are ordered not to bear false witness (James 3:14), murder, or covet (James 4:2). The second one is Paul’s famous listing of the fruits of the Spirit in Galatians (Galatians 5:22-23). That list is markedly similar to the list James gives us here in 3:17—not to mention that the works of the flesh which Paul condemns (Galatians 5:19-21) sound a lot like the same behaviors James is condemning here as well.

The message of all three of these passages seems connected to me: God wants us to live a certain way; we have a pretty good idea of what that way looks like; and what makes for a good communal life, as a church and as a society, is to follow those instructions.

When I was a young person, two different ideas were often set before me in terms of how we were supposed to bring others to the Gospel. One was the idea that what mattered was to convince people to believe rightly, no matter how much harm we might cause in the process; this would lead them to behave rightly. The other was the idea that all that mattered was behaving rightly, and that our behavior would convince others to believe even if we never spoke about the Gospel. For the record, I think both believing and behaving are important. But I think—based on these and other passages—that calling people to Jesus starts with behaving kindly to them far more often than we tend to think. As the church, let’s get a head start on being “pure, then peaceable, gentle, willing to yield, full of mercy and good fruits, without a trace of partiality or hypocrisy.” That’s quite enough to get started with. It would transform society if we did it.

Find all Life for Leaders devotions here. Explore what the Bible has to say about work at the unique website of our partners, the Theology of Work Project. Reflection on today’s Life for Leaders theme can be found here: Selfish Ambition (James 3:13-4:12).