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‘Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this, To visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction.’
Jam_1:27
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.’
PURE WORSHIP
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.
‘And to keep himself unspotted from the world.’
Jam_1:27
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.” ’
THE ALLUREMENT OF 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.