The Practice of Doctrine; James 1:26-27
James
We now run into a little bit
of confusion because of the vocabulary used by translators to communicate this
in the English. We know that religion is one of those bad words that people
react to because it has so many different connotations and means so many
different things to so many different people. When you start asking people to
define religion the definitions that you get are somewhat vague and nebulous.
In fact, for most people when they hear the word religion what they think of is
something that has to do with any combination of ritual, moral activity and do-goodism. We all know because of the study that we have had
of the Scriptures that those concepts are antithetical to the message of James
and to the Word of God. So what in the world is going on here in this text and
why is this word translated “religious,” and what does James mean?
Before we translate the word
we have to have an understanding of what James has been telling us in this
first chapter, because the context is very important for understanding
translation. His basic theme throughout this epistle is to challenge every
believer with the fact that in life we are going to face a myriad of tests.
These are, as it were, examinations or evaluations to give us the opportunity
to apply doctrine. If you don’t have doctrine in your soul you are not going to
pass those tests. If you don’t pass those tests you won’t advance spiritually,
you won’t grow spiritually, you won’t ever achieve
spiritual maturity. What we learn in this chapter that success in the spiritual
life depends on absolute reliance and dependence upon God; exclusive dependence
upon God, which is the faith-rest drill. God has provided for us ten different
stress-busters or problem-solving devices. They are various spiritual skills
which give us the ability to handle any problem, any difficulty, any heartache in life. Because God is omniscient and
therefore has known about every situation we will ever face in life He made
provision for it for us. The other thing that we have learned in this passage
is that when we fail, when we refuse to trust God exclusively and we doubt Him
(v. 6) that person is double-minded and unstable. What psychology calls
neurosis and psychosis is really the result of failure to handle life’s
adversities on the basis of Bible doctrine. So James writes this epistle to
teach believers how to handle adversity on the basis of doctrine and he
organizes his teaching around three mandates which are given in verse 19: “But
everyone must be quick to hear, slow to speak {and} slow to anger.”
The second division in the
epistle is “be quick to hear,” and it is the subject of
Then in v. 22 we learn about
the priority of learning and applying doctrine, that if the believer is going
to advance spiritually he must learn and apply the Word of God and not end up
by deluding himself by accumulating just academic knowledge. Remember,
spiritual maturity is result of the filling of the Holy Spirit plus understood
and believed doctrine or EPIGNOSIS doctrine, it is not the result of just being able to
regurgitate what you learn in Bible class or what some Bible teacher has said.
Just because you know the vocabulary and can articulate it back in a test
doesn’t mean you understand the concepts.
Then in vv.23-25 James talks
about the procedure of learning doctrine and he contrasts the self-deluded
believer (vv. 23. 24) with the advancing believer (v. 25). Verses 23, 24
compare the deluded believer to the person who looks at himself in a mirror,
and the Bible is the mirror that we have that gives us an objective evaluation
of what is going on in our life and in our soul. What happens dynamically
within the soul as we accumulate EPIGNOSIS doctrine is that we develop criteria for evaluation. In terms of analogy, what we have formed within
our own soul is a mirror. That mirror is basically the doctrine that we have
that gives us the objectivity to evaluate our thinking and our circumstances
and situations so that we can then under the filling of the Holy Spirit draw
upon the resources of doctrine stored in our soul and apply the right doctrine
to those situations in life. What James is saying in vv. 22ff is that there are
some people who are merely hearers of the Word. All they accumulate is a lot of
GNOSIS,
academic knowledge.
The believer that has EPIGNOSIS in the
soul is the believer who is the true hearer. He is the one described in v. 25
as the one who has made doctrine the highest priority of his life. He looks
intently, diligently, examines very closely, Bible doctrine. Doctrine is more
real to him than any experience, any distraction, and anything else in life. He
is not a forgetful hearer but an effectual doer, and the result is that he is
blessed. He has happiness.
What we have seen in this
brief review is that James is talking about the application of doctrine in this
context. He is comparing the one who just listens to the one who listens and
makes it a part of his soul and applies it, practices it. That’s what the word
“doer” means, it doesn’t mean to be involved in church activity, to teach
Sunday school, to go out knocking on doors, all the various activities
associated with religion such as ritual, etc. it is to focus on application,
doing what you learn.
Secondly, James is not
talking about religious expression as commonly understood. There is nothing in
this context to talk about ritual, altruism, human good, or any of these other
things that are commonly associated with religion. So we have to ask, what
exactly does he mean? The Greek word gives us a little help, but not a lot. It
is the adjective THRESKOS [qrhskoj].
The noun is THRESKEIA [qrhskeia].
In Arndt and Gingrich THRESKOS is described as religious. The noun is described
as the worship of God, religion, but note” “especially as it expresses itself
in religious service.” What have we learned from that? Not a whole lot. It is
still pretty vague. A term like “religion,” and we have a lot of terms in the
Scriptures that have come down through the fact that they are used in the
Scripture and they have picked up a lot of religious baggage over the years.
There are all kinds of concepts that have become attached to those words that
take away from their meaning. For example, confession.
For a lot of people when they hear the word confession they either think of
emotion, feeling sorry for their sins, trying to go through some form of penance,
going confessional at the church and confessing to a priest. All this baggage
becomes associated with that word and so you have to take the time to explain
that confession simply means to admit or acknowledge that you have done
something. The same thing is true about “religion” which has picked up all
sorts of baggage which has ideas about worshipping God and general rules of
church activity. But the problem with religion is that this is a word that is
applied to all kinds of activities, whether it is Hinduism, Judaism, Buddhism,
New Age concepts, or any other kind of ism. All of this, along with
Christianity, are lumped into this one word. That is
the problem we have, because understanding the Bible we realize that
Christianity is radically different from all of these other isms. What makes
the difference? The difference is that religion—all of these other things from
Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, whatever it is—is a system of morality and altruism
which is designed to impress God and to gain divine favour. So all of religions
adherents are depending upon something they do to curry favour with God.
Religion puts the emphasis on human activity—morals, works and human merit—in
order to gain divine approbation. So religion, then, is man doing the work and
then God is supposed to bless us. For that reason we say Christianity is not a religion
but Christianity is a relationship, a relationship based upon the fact that God
did all the work and man simply receives it or accepts it. Man can do nothing
to gain the favour of God. So Christianity is a relationship based upon the
merit of someone else. It is a system that is exclusively based on the concept
of grace. The trouble is that grace is another one of those words that has a
lot of religious baggage. True biblical Christianity emphasises the exclusivity
of God’s work and if man tries to curry favour with God on the basis of
asceticism, mysticism, legalism, works, morality or any form of ritual, then it
absolutely destroys his relationship with God.
Then we must come to another
factor about religion, and that is that religion is Satan’s greatest weapon in
Satan’s arsenal. He uses religion to distract people from the spiritual life,
from salvation, and to put the emphasis on their own efforts. He has distracted
millions from the true worship of God and he has been extremely effective
throughout the church age in trying to transform Christianity into another
religion. When the devil wanted to find a way to try to thwart the plan of God
and try to upset God’s plan for the human race he developed a concept of
religion. Most people, when they think of the devil, they think of something
very horrible, very ugly and very wicked. Unfortunately that has little to do
with the devil. 2 Corinthians chapter eleven tells us that Satan and his angels
go about as ministers of righteousness. Satan’s greatest tool is human good,
human morality. All of the violence, all of the hostility, all of the crime,
ands wickedness in the world is totally against Satan’s plan. Satan’s plan is to
show that he can be God, that he can run planet earth
and he can produce a wonderful, peaceful, happy environment in which all the
human race is achieving maximum prosperity and achieving their full potential.
The problem is that he has 5-billion people on the planet with their own
volition and they want to do it their way, not his way. The result of that is
that there is violence, warfare, poverty, and all of these things,
and that is really a testimony to the fact that everything is out of control.
It is not in Satan’s control, it is out of his control because he wants just
the opposite. So Satan’s greatest weapon is religion and human good in order to
try to promote human ability.
What has happened in the
history of Christianity to demonstrate how human good and religion has entered
into Christian theology and thinking? Up to the Reformation the church is
usually divided into two periods called the early church and the medieval
church. The early church really begins about 100 AD in terms of plotting it out
because the last apostle died just before the turn of the century. The apostle
John died somewhere between 95 and 100 AD and after that there were no more
apostles, no one left who had a direct connection to the inspirational ministry
of God the Holy Spirit, all there was was their
followers. It is interesting how quickly things declined. Very soon after that
there were several developments that begin to bring in the whole concept of
human works and human effort. First of all there was what is called the
monarchical bishop (one person who rules). This was promoted by several people
like Ignatius of Antioch, Justin Martyr and several others between 130 and 175.
They would go into a town where there might be four or five different churches
and before long there was persecution and other problems and they developed the
idea that one of these men ought to be elevated as the ruler of the others. So
rather than having autonomous congregations they began to unite for various
purposes under the authority of one bishop. Before long there was a bishop in
Today in our generation at
the close of the century we have the influence of moral relativism, mysticism,
and the New Age movement. These are the dominant ideas that are floating around
in our culture. And if you go out there tomorrow and witness
to the guy down the street and he suddenly says, ‘You know, you are right.
Jesus died for me, I believe that.’ Well, lets say he
is 35 years old. For 35 years he has been imbibing the culture and he thinks in
a mystical, emotional framework. He has to change that, and it is hard to do.
The same thing was true in the early part of the church age because the major
thinking in the culture was called Neo-Platonism, it
was very emotional and mystical. What matters is not what happens on the
physical realm but what happens at a higher spiritual realm. So that produced a
view of spirituality that we call asceticism. Let’s get rid of everything we
have, let’s give it all up and impress God and go live out on the desert. There
was the whole rise of the monastic movement. All of a sudden there was the
introduction of human works under the guise of asceticism and monasticism to
impress God with things.
Then there was a problem with
people understanding grace. There was a major controversy in
But one of the major issues
in this whole area is, what do you do with
post-salvation sin? They had lost the concept of grace by this time and they
realized that from the time we are born until the time we are saved all of
those things are forgiven, but what do we do with those sins after you we are
saved? They believed baptism also washed away sins, the physical water was
important, so a lot of people would wait until they were pretty old and then
get baptized, and maybe they wouldn’t have too much to answer for! So there was
this problem with post-salvation sins and two solutions came up, one of which
was penance. At first they came up with penance and that you could only do it
once in your life, and you had to go through this process of giving up a lot,
going through asceticism with its deprivation. It didn’t go too well because it
could only happen once, and what happened if you screwed up again? So that
concept of penance went out and then another concept was developed by the Irish
and Scottish Christians. It was less severe and was the idea of just paying
some money or going through certain religious activities, helping the poor, and
if you did that you could have forgiveness. That is where the idea of the
confessional came from and doing penance, saying Hail Marys,
and prayer beads, etc. But what about the person who didn’t have any penance
and who didn’t deal with those post-salvation sins and didn’t get baptized.
Well you couldn’t say he was going to hell, but you couldn’t let this poor
sucker get into heaven either because he has these post-salvation sins that
haven’t been dealt with. The literature actually says that you have to add to
the payment of Christ. So if they didn’t go into the confessional they would
end up in some holding area where they would have to work their way out, and
you have the development of the whole concept of purgatory.
By the late Middle Ages there was the full development of Roman Catholic
theology, and then on
All of this is to say that
the modern concept of religion is this: it is do-goodism.
If we are going to get out there and do good things for society we are going to
correct social ills and social problems, and by doing so we are going to
impress God, make our country perfect, and we are going to bring in a perfect
society. That is what people think of as religion because that is what has happened
historically and how we got to where we are today. We have gone through this to
understand the history. History is very important. History is how we got to the
mess we are in so that we can have some kind of discernment as to what is going
on and how to get out of it.
When we come to our passage
here we have had to go through this because whenever we read this most of us
have been so affected by our culture that we are going to completely misapply
and misinterpret this passage. We are thinking of religion as what our culture
has always said about religion. So when we come to this word and we see it in
the English everybody is going to say 1) if you are going to be really
religious and do good you are going to watch your mouth, and 2) your going to
take care of the sick and the elderly and the orphans. This word THRESKOS does
not mean that concept of religion, what it means is the outworking of your
beliefs in God. That may work itself out in terms of personal worship, but when
we take in terms of the context of what James is telling us, probably the best
way to explain it is, “if anyone thinks that he is applying doctrine in his
life.” That is what James means by THRESKOS. This is the negative, this
is the person who is the hearer but not the applier. James is going to expose
his emperor’s clothes right here and say, here’s a condition—“If,” 1st
class condition, maybe yes, maybe no.
James is going to give a
little test. This is how doctrine gives that mirror to perform an objective
self-evaluation to determine of you are applying or if you are just
accumulating nothing. “If anyone thinks that he is applying doctrine, and yet
does not bridle [control] his tongue…” Sins of the tongue come in. If your understanding of doctrine isn’t having some effect—and he
is just using sins of the tongue here to represent all categories of sin. The
whole metaphor here is talking about self-control, self-discipline. “… he is deceiving himself.” He is not learning doctrine, he is
not applying doctrine, and he is not going anywhere.
The doctrine of the sins of the tongue
1)
The sins of the
tongue, like all sins, emanate from the sin nature. James is using the sins of
the tongue just as an illustration of all the other categories
of sins, primarily because it is one of the most difficult areas we will ever
face in terms of self-discipline. Psalm 34:13 NASB “Keep your tongue
from evil And your lips from speaking deceit.”
2)
Sins of the tongue
are sponsored by mental attitude sins. Sins of the tongue are in one sense overt.
Psalm 5:9 NASB “There is nothing reliable in what they say; Their inward part is destruction {itself.} Their throat is
an open grave; They flatter with their tongue.”
3)
Of the seven worst
sins, three are sins of the tongue.
4)
Sins of the tongue
produce triple-compound divine discipline. Matthew 7:1, 2 NASB “Do
not judge so that you will not be judged.
5)
The continuation
of the sins of the tongue can produce enough callousness and hardness of heart to
eventually result in the sin unto death.
6)
God both protects
and blesses the believer who is victimized by the sins of the tongue. Job
7)
The believer can actually lengthen his life and
find greater happiness by avoiding the sins of the tongue. Psalm 34:12, 13 NASB “Who is the man who desires life And
loves {length of} days that he may see good?
8)
Troublemakers are always characterized by sins
of the tongue. Romans 16:17, 18 NASB “Now
I urge you, brethren, keep your eye on those who cause dissensions and
hindrances contrary to the teaching which you learned, and turn away from them.
9)
Control of the
tongue is a sign of maturity and the fruit of the Spirit. James 3:2-13.
10)
Since the sins of
the tongue can destroy a congregation of believers it is the responsibility of
the pastor to constantly warn against that and to bring correction when it gets
out of hand. 2 Timothy 2:14-17.
In contrast we find the
successful believer who is advancing to spiritual maturity described in verse
27. “Pure and undefiled religion in the sight of {our} God and Father is this:
to visit orphans and widows in their distress, {and} to keep oneself unstained
by the world.” The word for “pure” is KATHAROS [kaqaroj]
and it is related to the verb KATHARIZO [kaqarizw]
which means to cleanse, and is the word that we find in 1 John 1:9. So pure
application of doctrine is preceded by the use of 1 John 1:9 to guarantee that
we are under the filling ministry of God the Holy Spirit and producing divine
good and not human good. The word “undefiled” is the
Greek AMIANTOS [a)miantoj]. In the ancient world they often used the streets
and the gutters as their sewers. Being defiled is being splattered by the
contents of the sewer. AMIANTOS means that we have been cleansed and that we are undefiled,
which means that we have been forgiven and are advancing in the spiritual life. So this is application of doctrine that is purified
and undefiled (being in fellowship with God), so it is pure “in the sight of
our God and Father.” There are two applications that are given: a) to visit orphans
and widows in their distress. This is known as compassion for others,. Showing mercy, and that is all part of grace orientation.
What are we talking about in
this chapter? We are talking about believers. This is what you and I need to do
when we encounter tests and trials in life. What happens when things start really
going bad? Who do we start focusing on when we are out of fellowship? We get
into the arrogance skills and we become self-absorbed. We start whining to
everybody we can about tough life is, but then we say we are trusting God. We
forget that there are a whole lot of people out there who have it a whole lost
worse than we do. The point is that if we are following the precepts found in
v. 21 and are receiving the Word in humility, which is grace orientation, and humility
does not think more highly of one’s self than it ought to think, is not
self-absorption, what we are talking about here is application of humility and
application of grace orientation. If we are really advancing in the spiritual
life then when we are encountering these tests and trials we are not going to
become self-absorbed but are still going to pay attention to the problems that
other people have, showing compassion and mercy because of the resources in our
own souls. If we do not have resources and we are spiritually bankrupt with no
doctrine there, then what is going top happen when we go through hard times is
that we can’t see past our hard times to help anybody else in their hard times
because there is nothing left in our banks account, spiritually speaking, to
draw on. This is not the do-goodism of religion. The
act itself may not be any different, it is the
rationale that underlies it that is different. It is why you are doing it, it is your understanding of reality that is different. That
understanding of reality is your worldview, that big picture that you have, a
frame of reference you have within which you integrate everything.
The person who has grown up
in a world dominated by the New Age movement, by emotion, and by all kinds of
things in the religious world, and has bought into everything, has to do something.
He has to completely renovate his thinking. Romans 12:2 NASB “And do
not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing [renovating]
of your mind, so that you may prove what the will of God is, that which is good
and acceptable and perfect.” The entire system of thinking that he has is the worldview.
Whether he has thought it through logically and systematically is irrelevant. He
now has to renovate this. “Be not conformed to the world,” which is the whole
system of human viewpoint thinking, “but be transformed by the renovation of
your thought…” That means you now have to develop a whole new system of
thinking based upon divine viewpoint precepts and you have to challenge all of
your human viewpoint concepts, ideas, and opinions with the divine viewpoint of
Scripture. We don’t like doing that because we are comfortable with our human
viewpoint concepts, and so we would rather say it is okay to be emotional, or
it is okay to be this way or that way, rather than no, I have to change not
only what I think but how I approach life. That is why James concludes by
saying, “keep oneself unstained by the world.” Human
viewpoint has all kinds of techniques and skills and suggestions for how you
can handle the problems and difficulties of your life. We think that somehow
the Christian life, the spiritual life is going to be easy, but it is a hard
life and it demands thinking and concentration, because we have to get rid of
all of our human viewpoint notions and replace them with divine viewpoint
notions, and then we have to apply that divine viewpoint to the problems of
life so that we can advance. That is why James says it is important to listen,
to make learning doctrine the highest priority of your life so that you can
apply it and keep yourself unstained from the thinking of the world.