Faith Without Works Is Dead | Sermon

We've got all the anxiety and chaos of this world for these next few moments where they just stay outside of these doors. And that right now, Lord, we would get a touch from heaven because Jesus being in your presence will change us. It is in the mighty and majestic name of Jesus. All God's people said,

amen. Any of you guys here raised Catholic? Quick show of hands. Just trying to see who's still fighting through Catholic guilt. Okay. A lot of us, Takes a while to undo some of that trauma, but, it's a process. Stick in there. Know,

I was raised Catholic and I would make an argument outside of like, unless your parents were both priests or something like that, like my family is just more Catholic than yours. Okay? Like we're like

Catholic Catholic. So on my dad's side, my dad's grandfather, my great grandfather was in the Irish Republican Army in Ireland fighting to get the British out of Ireland and the IRA did some less than favorable tactics trying to get them out of the country. And in the process, he was actually arrested

and he was in jail, was going to spend the rest of his life in prison, but the Catholic church was able to smuggle him out of prison in Ireland. They brought him to The United States and he worked the rest of his life as a janitor for a Catholic church in Ireland. He then raised my grandfather Catholic,

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of the wars that he was fighting in and basically said that they were surrounded. He thought he was gonna die. He literally had to with like seven guys lay in a field and basically just hide and pray that they would survive. And he said in that field, he said, God, if you get me out of here, I've got six little kids at home. I promise I'll get out of the army and I'll give my life to serving you. So he survives and spends the rest of his life serving the Catholic church, raising money for all these Catholic boy schools. So on both sides of my family, it is like as Catholic

as you can get. And so I was raised as a kid in the Catholic church. I did the baptisms.

I did the first holy communions. I did the confirmation classes. I did all of the stuff. I was the altar boy, right? Anybody in here an altar boy, an altar girl, those were amazing classes. And the part that was hard as I was taller than all the priests and stuff. So I'd have to go up to hold the book and I'm like, all right, bud, here's your book.

And like all the robes would like go to my knees and not far enough down. Was like, this is miserable mom. Like I don't want to do this, but it's just what you do as a good Catholic kid.

But there came a day where I started to really enjoy mass. And that was the day that I realized what they did with the communion after service. Now, if you've never been to a Catholic mass, it's different than what we do as a Protestant church. We're part of the Protestant denomination, if you will, but our church tradition is very different than the Catholic church tradition. One of the biggest differences is how we do communion.

The Catholic church teaches the doctrine that's called transubstantiation, which is a big word that means when the priest stands at the altar and says, This is now the body and blood of Jesus, they believe that the body and blood literally becomes Jesus'

physical flesh that you eat and you drink his blood. We don't believe that. We believe it's a metaphorical representation of it, but side point. The reason that it matters is that for the Catholic church, once you've transubstantiated

the body and the wine into blood, you can't just pour it down the drain. Apparently it's offensive to Jesus to pour His blood down the drain. So literally what they do is at the end of Mass,

all the leftover wine that everybody's been drinking out of, they take it all and they pour it back into one big chalice. It's kind of gross, but this is what they do. And then in the back of service, the priests, the deacons, the altar boys, and sometimes some of the communion,

Eucharistic minister people sit in the back and you take turns passing the cup around and you drink it until it's gone. And I remember the first time I was back there like 12 or 13 years old and the priest takes a big old swig of this thing and then he hands it to me and I'm like, there's no way. Like this is a test. Like my mom is about to pop around the corner or something like there's no way. Like I know this is like no shot and they're looking at me like, man, this is like your holy duty, like do it for the Lord. And so I'm like, all right, God I'll do it for you. And so I take a big old drink of this wine and I hand it to my knucklehead brother and he just drinks the rest of it, right? And so we go back out to like finish the mass and I look over and I'm like, I think my brother's drunk in church right now. This is awesome. I'll totally do this more often, right?

And the funny part is, again, if you've never been to a Catholic service, there's this thing that starts the service called a procession where the altar boys carry candles and there's usually one that carries this big cross and they're massive,

they're heavy. And then you got the guys with the robes following behind them and there's like smoke and incense going and the Holy Spirit is hovering around and it's very holy. But on the way out on this procession, you've now got two like tipsy altar boys that are carrying candles on the way out. Well, my little brother doesn't realize it, but he's slowly tilting the candle to a spot that the wax

actually falls off the candle and it hits him in the back of the neck. So burning hot wax hits him in the neck. He freaks out, drops the candle, the candle falls and hits the kid that's holding the big cross.

He loses his balance and drops the cross and in the middle of this mass, just absolute pandemonium breaks out and I'm sitting there watching it all kind of tipsy myself being like, this is amazing. Like I

could come back for these kind of services, right? And I just look over and see my family was like my super Catholic pious grandma whose worst sin is that she would say the S word sometimes during Lent and like, I just was like, this is amazing.

And the reason that I start there is I was thinking about it this week as I look back over my childhood for me, faith in religion

was something that I could do without much thought. I could recite all the prayers. I could do the entire service. I knew when to stand. I knew when to kneel. Truthfully, could do most of it in Latin because we had to go to some masses that were done completely in Latin.

And it shows me sometimes the danger of what cultural church can become.

Because the problem is, and again, this isn't a knock against the Catholic church completely. There's a lot of people that are Catholic that love Jesus and I believe we're all going to the same heaven. But for me, the Catholic church was nothing more than dogma. It was nothing more than religious activity.

It's why the moment I had an opportunity to leave the church, I did. And I started to do my own thing and live my own life and I thought this faith thing was crazy. And it wasn't until I kinda hit rock bottom in my own life and I walked back in the doors of the church that I heard the gospel preach and I connected the dots to the church to Jesus.

The reason that I start there is I don't think it's just the Catholic church that sometimes has people that are in it that are just going through the motions. I think the danger is our church can do the same thing.

I think the greatest danger, sometimes one of the scariest places we can find ourselves is week in and week out sitting inside of church, but having a heart that's far from God.

For those of us who've been raised in church, who spent most of our life in a church setting, we have to be really careful to really measure what's actually going on inside of our heart, not just the religious activity that we've learned to do.

What the book of James is going to implore us to look at this morning, and I would encourage you, man, go read the whole book of James. It's pretty short. The book is written by Jesus' half brother who was almost uniquely qualified to really talk about what real faith is, what genuine faith is, what it looks like. And most of the book of James, if you don't know, is Jesus' half brother expanding on Jesus' teaching of the sermon on the mount. Jesus sat down and gave one of the longest teachings

that was ever recorded in his ministry called the sermon on the mount where he broke down what the kingdom of God is supposed to be. The book of James is really him expanding on that. And the basic thrust of James' message is that faith is something that you and I can't just claim to have in our heart.

It is something that, yes, it's personal, it's private, it's inside of you, but it should at some point begin to overflow out of your heart and into your life. And the people around you should be able to see that there's something different about you because of the faith that you claim

to have. Here's the big idea I wanna spend the next few moments unpacking with you that James is going to walk through. Friends, faith, this thing that we claim with faith, it's important to remember it is not just a result of our works. Okay? You can't earn faith,

But what James is going to say is that faith always results in works. This is an important distinction. What I'm not going to try to convince you of, what James is not saying is that faith is something you receive through works.

But what he is gonna say is that real, genuine, authentic faith in Jesus, not cultural Christianity, real faith, it will always result in works. It will always result in you and I living differently than the culture around us. You tracking with me so far?

I got two of you. Okay. The rest of you, you're gonna have to catch up. You got thirty minutes. Get it together. Here's how James two begins in verse 14.

James is talking about this faith that doesn't work and he says, what good is it dear brothers and sisters if you say you have faith but you don't show it by your actions?

Okay. He says, what good is a faith that you talk about, that you claim, that you verbalize, but you don't live out? The question that he forces us to wrestle through today, it is a throat punchy question. He says, can that kind of faith save anyone? He's talking about salvation.

How do you know that the faith that you claim to have that doesn't impact how you live? Why are you so sure it's gonna get you into heaven one day? Why are you so willing to say that you trust God with your eternal resting place, but you won't trust him with how you date?

You won't trust him with how you order your finances, how you plan your schedule, how you run your business. You won't trust him with how you raise your kids and how you vote. You won't allow your faith to move into your life to impact how you live and what you do,

but you're so sure that that faith is going to get you into heaven.

James is saying is we have to have an honest assessment at some points to go, what have we really put our faith in? Because my fear is that we have a lot of people. Jesus told us in Matthew chapter seven that there will be many of you that come to me at the end times and say, Lord, we did all these things in your name. We cast out demons, we healed the sick. And Jesus says, I will say, get away from me for I never

knew you. It's crazy to me to think that there's a lot of people that sit in church every week convinced that they have a saving faith in Jesus. And the truth is all they have is cultural Christianity. They do not have real, genuine, authentic faith.

It's much lower than what the numbers were twenty or thirty years ago, but they say today, 60% of Americans would identify as being a Christian. 60%

of our country would raise their hand and say, yes, I believe in Jesus. Now I know that's a lie because I drive on the freeways, right? Like no shot, six out of 10 people I interact with on the freeway are following Jesus. There's become this thing that I think the Western church is part of the problem.

We've propagated this thing that says, faith is just you sit in a seat, you have a prayer moment and then you just kind of hang out, you give the church some money when we need to build something, but that's all really God wants from you. He wants the bare minimum and it's a really low bar that you can just step over and you can have enough faith to where you can go, yeah, I'm Christian and I'm going get to heaven one day, but then also not have so much of God that it begins to impact how you live. And you can still have all of this world and you can do everything you want on the weekends. You can date how you want to date. You can order your life how you want to order. You can do whatever you want outside of these doors

and keep your faith and spiritual experience relegated to this room. And I'm telling you friends, you are in the middle of the plan of the enemy for your life. That is the last thing that Jesus came to give his life for was for a bunch of us to settle into playing church and cultural Christianity.

James says is does that faith actually save us? That's the question we have to wrestle through this morning. Here's the tension

of why the book of James can be hard to address in a setting like this. Because the book of James almost seems like it stands in contrast to a lot of the rest of the Bible. Again, you will be tempted this morning to hear what I'm not saying.

I am not saying James is not challenging us to say faith is something you have to earn. Faith is something you work for. If you just stop sinning for long enough, if you just become perfect, then God will be pleased with you. That's not the gospel.

Okay? This is why Martin Luther, the famous reformer who broke away from the Catholic church and started what we now have as the Protestant denomination.

Martin Luther called the book of James the epistle of straws because he felt the tension that it seems like James is asking a question and imploring us to wrestle through an idea that stands in contrast to what other authors of the New Testament like Paul would say. Because Paul famously says in Romans chapter three verse 28,

that faith is not something that you can earn. Faith is not something that we work for. Faith is something that's given to us. It's imparted to us through Jesus. It's a gift that we receive. It's not something that we work for. So how can it be a gift that you receive? And then James says,

yeah, but if the faith doesn't work, is that a saving face? This is the tension that we have to wrestle through. This is the tension that James is going to say, we can't just ignore. We have to really analyze what have we given our life to? What was the saving faith that we put our trust

in? Was it real? And was it genuine? And was it Jesus? Or was it just Western cultural Christianity? That's the question all of us this morning have to wrestle through. Here's how James continues.

In verse 15, he says, suppose you see a brother or sister who has no food or clothing and you say goodbye and have a good day, stay warm and eat well, but then you don't give that person any food or clothing. What good does that do? So you see faith by itself, it isn't enough. Unless it produces good deeds, it is dead

and useless. James is talking about this connection between faith, the thing that is imparted to us through the righteousness, not of ours, but of Christ that is given to us. When we are the Bible says, what is removed from us is a heart of stone, a heart that could not feel, a heart that was

resistant towards sin, a heart that didn't care what we did. And what is now given to us after giving our life to Jesus is a regenerated, reborn heart of flesh that now feels, that now sees the depravity of our sin. He says that if that's happened to you and you still live as if you're no different than you were before,

you have to ask yourself the honest question, was your heart really regenerated? Were you really born again? The famous interaction between Jesus and Nicodemus, the Jewish leader, when Nicodemus says, I don't understand this. Jesus says, all of us have been born of the flesh.

But if you're really going to inherit the kingdom of God, you must be born of spirit. You must become a whole new creation. And what James is saying is that if you claim to be a new creation, but you live as if you're the old self, you have to question whether or not you have a real saving faith.

What he's not saying is that you have to work for salvation. He's saying the notion that you would be Christian and have a dead faith, it's a contradiction. It can't exist. It cannot happen. And he goes really practical.

He says, imagine that you're sitting in a church service and you feel really inspired by the worship and the teaching and you go, okay, this is awesome. And then you walk out of these doors and there's opportunities given to you to meet the needs of people in your community, practical needs.

And you look at them and you go, man, somebody should do something about that. But your heart is not moved towards action. Your heart is not grieved to do something. Again, what I'm not saying is that everybody in here has to solve everything, but all of us have to do something.

And if you're not doing anything and if you're able to walk by people that have need and you look at and go, man, somebody should do something about that. But your heart is not compelled to action. James is saying is you have a faith that is dead and it is useless. It does not help further the message of Jesus in the world today.

The question that he forces you and I to ask ourselves when it comes to our faith. Your faith, not your spouses, not your kids, not your parents, not your friends, your faith. If you're honest, is your faith, is it really a lifestyle that you live Or is it just lip service and things that you say?

What James is saying, what does not help the cause of Christ, what is not the hope of the world that the church is supposed to be is a bunch of people who just say things with our mouth and then we don't live it out with our actions. Here's why I know we will be tempted to settle into just a lip service style faith,

because lip service is really easy. Lip service is cheap. It doesn't cost us much. Here's what I'll tell you about a life that's truly submitted to following Jesus. It will be really costly. It will be really difficult in times. It will cost you things.

It will force you to face things that you don't want to face. It will force you to wrestle through things that you don't want to wrestle through. But the greatest news is that what's on the other side of that is a blessing beyond your wildest dreams. But if you're not careful, what we'll settle for is just lip service

and our faith will be nothing more than talking points on social media. It will be just arguments that we have intellectually, but the truth is as we really look at our life, if we're honest, we don't really have a lifestyle of following Christ. If people were to follow us around

with a video camera, they wouldn't see a life that is trying to honor God. They would see somebody that's kind of just settled into cultural Christianity. And you know what's killing our witness today? You know what's killing the church's influence in the world today? Is lip service Christianity.

We need to be about it in action, not just in work. As I sit with couples doing premarital counseling and weddings and stuff, I've reminded them, hey, the wedding you're about to have, this wedding ceremony,

I know it's stressful in planning it, but the truth is, is it doesn't really cost the bride and groom very much. It costs the bride's dad a lot of money, right? But for the couple, it takes some energy, it takes some effort, it takes some planning, but for them it's really actually not a very costly thing.

But what's going to be really expensive is the marriage that they're about to build.

What's going to be really costly to them is the foundation of marriage upon which the hope of the world rests. The marriage that will be the bedrock for a family. The family that will be the foundation upon which the hope of the world can be launched off of. That will cost them something. Why? Because marriage forces you to look at the parts of you that you think are awesome that nobody else thinks are awesome.

It forces you to wrestle with the parts of you that when you're alone and when you're by yourself, you can just ignore. But when somebody else is in the picture, you now have to look at those parts of you. Marriage is part of the beautiful design that God has to sanctify us to make us more into the image of Christ.

But if we're not careful, we'll just ignore those things and go, you know what? We'll just do our own thing. Lip service is easy. Lifestyle friends, it's where the real gold is. Here's how James continues

in verse 18. He says, I know some of you may argue, some people have faith, others have good deeds, but I say, how can you show me your faith if you don't have good deeds? I will show you my faith by my good deeds. Verse 19, he says, you say that you have faith for you believe that there is one God. Good for you.

Even the demons believe this and they tremble in terror. Okay? James says, I know that as I'm making this argument, some of you are gonna say, yeah, I'm just more of a faith person.

I lean more into just the faith side of things. And James is saying, yeah, but your faith should be shown by your deeds. There's this deep connection between faith and works. Okay? John Calvin has a quote I wanna share with you. Here's what John Calvin says when it comes to the connection between faith and works. He says, It's faith alone that justifies,

but faith that justifies can never be alone.

Okay? This is why theology is so important. You and I are justified. We're right. We are set good with God. Our slate is wiped clean. All the sin is removed from us in a moment when we give our life to Jesus, when we confess with our mouth and believe in our heart that Jesus is Lord. The Bible says that you are saved and your sin is cast as far as the East is from the West and you are no longer guilty for the mistakes that you've made, past, present and future.

God now sees the righteousness of Christ in you, but that's not the finish line. That's not okay. You've done it, man. Good job. We'll see you in heaven one day. Friends, that's the firing gun saying that now you're in the race,

but you better believe you have a race to run. You have a calling on your life. You have a destiny. You have a kingdom to expand.

Every single one of you in this room, you have a calling on your life from God. God wants to use you to expand the kingdom, to bring hope to the world, to rescue children out of sex trafficking, to be the hope of the world. It's not reserved to people who work in church. It's you and me together. We have a race to run.

We have a calling. That process where we now go through the process of being made into the image of Christ is sanctification.

And again, here's what John Calvin is trying to say is that we're justified by faith and faith alone, but faith that happens will never be alone. There will always be a life that begins to change and transform.

And some of the things that you're wrestling with will take a while. When I got saved at 19, man, I was a train wreck. I was smoking cigarettes. I was doing all kinds of stuff as a Christian. I was new in youth ministry and I started to get opportunities to teach kids.

And I literally would like smoke a cigarette, blow it out, and then walk on stage and preach. And in the goodness and the grace of God, He's patient with us. But what we have to look at is to go from the moment we gave our life to Jesus to now. Is there any level of progress? Does your life look any differently?

There will be seasons where we backslide. There'll be seasons where we make mistakes. Yes and amen. But what we can't do is look and go, Oh yeah, I gave my life to the Lord in 1985. And I can't remember when something changed in me since then. What James is saying is that friends is a faith that is dead and useless.

He's writing to a bunch of cultural Jews. Side point, man, if you're a Christian, you have not watched the chosen series, I'm telling you, do yourself a favor and go watch it. Fair warning, the first episode or two are a little bit slow, but it gets really, really good afterwards.

The reason I think it's so important is because what the chosen has done is they've humanized

Jesus. They've humanized the disciples. You can see the tension that existed while he was on this earth. You can see the scenarios that he was walking through. Then it begins to give color in life to what is otherwise just page or words on a page in a book that can sometimes be hard to understand. I can't encourage you enough to read it. What James is writing to is a bunch of really religious Jewish people.

And he says right here in this verse in James chapter two, he's quoting from the old testament. He's quoting from Deuteronomy chapter six.

And he says, I know that you guys pride yourselves on the fact that you're the only ones in your entire area that believe in the oneness of God. And you believe in the one true Yahweh. You pride yourselves of being the people that worship the one true God amongst the people that worship all these polytheistic gods.

And he says, that's awesome. That's good for you. But at that level of that's the depth of your faith is just some head knowledge about God, some theological information about who he is that doesn't lead to life transformation, that doesn't lead to action. You have the exact same level of faith that the demons have.

You talk about the throat punch of all throat punches. It's James saying you might have the same faith as demons. What is he saying? He's asking us to ask the question to ourselves, is our faith when it comes to our personal walk with Jesus, our soul, is it dynamic? Is it growing? Or is it what James would say is demonic?

What's a demonic face? I think demonic face, what James is talking about is pretty simple. When you read the New Testament and you watch Jesus's encounters with people who were possessed by demons, every single time what would happen when Jesus would encounter somebody that was possessed by a demon, it's amazing to watch.

The demons will always instantly they will acknowledge who Jesus is. They know his authority. They know his power. They know what he's come to do. They know that they have no authority in the room because he's there. And they always

at the instruction of Jesus at the command of his voice, they run and they flee and they hide. They intellectually know who he is. They can quote scripture.

When Jesus is tempted in the wilderness, what does Satan do? He quotes scripture to Jesus the entire time. Satan and the demons know the Bible. Therefore, what James is saying is that you and I can't fool ourselves into thinking because we find ourselves in a church on a Sunday and we know some things about God that that therefore

makes us a Christian. It doesn't make you any more a Christian than me standing in your garage telling you I'm a car because I'm in the room. What James is saying is you have to at some point analyze what is actually being produced from your life. Is it just head knowledge? Is it just information?

Because I will tell you some of the most dangerous, some of the most hurtful, some of the most harming people that I've been around in the fifteen years of ministry, they're in church every single weekend. They know a lot of things about God,

but what they've refused to do is allow the information to travel from their brain to their hearts. What the demons refuse to do is to submit the will in their lives to Jesus, to not just know things about Him intellectually, but actually from the heart

hand the reins of their life to Him saying, you are now Lord, not in general, but you are Lord over my life. Friends, the question we have to ask ourselves again, it's a tough question, is our faith dynamic? Do we see growth? Do we see progress? Are things getting better? Are we getting victory over sin in our life? Or

is our faith just what the demons have? There's some head knowledge. We can quote some scripture, but the truth is we don't really live like there's a God. James would say if that's you, you might not be a Christian.

And we've got to be really careful to have an honest assessment. Here's how he continues and kind of wraps up this section. He says in verse 20, how foolish. Can't you see that faith without good deeds is actually useless?

Don't you remember that our ancestor Abraham was shown to be right with God by his actions when he offered his son Isaac on the altar? You see his faith and his actions, they worked together. His actions made his faith complete.

So it happened just as scripture says, Abraham believed God and God counted him as righteous because of his faith. He was even called the friend of God. So you see we are shown to be right with God by what we do, not by faith alone.

In verse 25, he says, Rahab the prostitute is another example. She was shown to be right with God by her actions when she hid those messengers and sent them away by a different road. Just as the body is dead without breath, so also faith is dead without good works. James

crescendos his entire book. He sums it up in one sentence in James two twenty six. He says, faith that does not work is dead. It's not real. It's not genuine. It is a facade. It is cultural Christianity at best, but it's not real saving faith in Jesus. And he uses two examples.

James is a brilliant orator. He's using incredible illustration and application for the people to see. Again, writing to a bunch of cultural Jews. He says, take Abraham.

Okay? All of us know Abraham. Abraham for them was the LeBron James, the Michael Jordan. This is like the greatest of all time. This is the father of the faith, the guy that all of us aspire to be. Abraham was the guy that the entire nation of Israel was birthed from. And he says, Abraham was being he was made right with God, not by his works, but by his faith. But there came a moment in his life, multiple moments in his life where he had to put his faith into action by doing things that made no sense. At one point, God, when he was a 100 years old, he told him he was gonna birth many kids. And Abraham said, I don't have a single one yet. Right? He had one that he had made with his his maid servant, but the only son of promise that he had with his wife was given to him at a 100 years old named Isaac. And God told him to take that son, that son of promise, that son that he had prayed for. And he told him, take him to the top of the mountain. I want you to sacrifice him to me. And I wish I had three hours to unpack all of this, but the point of it, the reason that James is bringing it up is that following God will force you and I to hit moments where God will ask us to do things that make no

sense logically. And in those moments, your faith will really be put to the test. And we will have the litmus test of is our faith just lip service or is it lifestyle put into action? And Abraham passed the test.

He took his son. He went to the top of the mountain and he was willing to sacrifice him. And as you know the story, God sent a ram in the thicket and he didn't sacrifice his son, he sacrificed the ram. And he starts James starts by talking about Abraham, the greatest of all of us.

And then he goes to the other end of the spectrum. And he says, and you guys know Rahab. Rahab was a Canaanite prostitute. This is a woman who culturally was worse than them, who gender wise was worse than them, occupationally

was beneath them. He's painting a picture of the greatest amongst us and those who we would perceive as the least amongst us. He says, God saved both of them by faith. It's a picture that says, you can't be so awesome and amazing and holy that you don't need God. And you can't be so far gone that you're beyond the reaches of the grace of God. But whether you enter in on the end of needing the grace or knowing that you're kind of on the righteous side of things,

either way, once you're in the family of God, your faith is made real not by your words, but by your actions, by what you do, not by what you post on social media. He says even Rahab, she had to. She had to hide the guys that came and they were trying to inspect the land and she put her life on the line to protect them.

He's saying that at some point, friends, we have to look at our lives. We have to begin to look at and say, what is our life really producing? Is our life producing good fruits or is it producing bad fruit? This is as simple as this message gets. How do you know sitting here today that you have a real,

faith in Jesus and that you have the spirit of God alive and active in you? It doesn't mean you're perfect. It doesn't mean you don't have mistakes. It doesn't mean that you don't occasionally screw things up.

But when you look at the trajectory of your life, you're getting better. There is progress that is happening and there is fruit that is good being produced out of you. And here's the danger. All of us in this room, our lives are going to produce something.

The question is, is your life producing fruit that's good or fruit that's bad? Here's the hard part of this whole message. You and I are really, really good at faking it. This is what's so difficult as our church gets bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger. It's easier and easier and easier and easier to hide.

It's easier and easier and easier to pretend like everything's okay on the outside. To show up, go through the motions, say the things, do the things, pray the prayers, check the box, and then walk out of this room and live like God doesn't exist. Here's what's hard about this message is I can't tell you

how you're really doing, only you can. You don't know how I'm really doing. I can be as much of a fake and fraudulent as you are. We have to be the ones that are willing to look

at the inside. I've wore these shoes today as kind of an illustration for us. So these shoes, if you're not a sneaker head, they're called Panda Dunks. All right. Now you can be cool and know what Panda Dunks are. They're the white and black ones. The reason I got into shoes is my 10 year old son, Braden, was like all about shoes for some reason. He knows everything about Jordans and Jordan ones and Jordan fours. And so I was like, all right, I'll get into shoes because he's into shoes. And then I realized they wanted like $300 for these shoes. I was like, yeah, that's not happening. So I found a website that you can buy direct from China. They're not panda dunks, they're panda funks. They're like fake dunks. But

you get basically the same shoe for $35 So I was like $35 I'll be the cool dad. All right? So I ordered the shoes. We wait whatever the four weeks that it takes to ship them from China. They come in the mail. They've got like the Chinese stamp on them and me and my son are inspecting them. These things are amazing.

They look so good. Right? And we even pulled up a YouTube video that showed how to tell the fakes from the real ones. And I'm telling you, these shoes have everything that they say that the real one is supposed to have, that the fake ones won't have. My fakes have all the real stuff.

But there's one thing that these shoes don't have that the real ones have. If I took my shoe off and you looked at the tag on the inside,

the tag has some markings and some indications that I guess they can't replicate when they're faking them. So the only way to really know if these are real PandaDunks or fake ones is you got to take them off and you've got to look at what's going on on the inside.

I think the illustration is perfect when it comes to what James is saying is the same with our faith. This is the part for you that you have to be really honest with you. The greatest person that we convince and lie to is ourselves.

We have to have honest moments and just say, how are we really doing not on the outside, but on the inside. What James is saying is that what we can use the outside for is to look at and potentially measure. Okay. What your life is producing.

It's a better indication of the condition of your heart and your soul than almost anything else is. But even those good works, sometimes you can fabricate those and they can be done with the wrong heart.

That's what makes these messages so difficult is that I don't really have like some easy bow to tie on this and say, okay, here's the seven things that we do as we walk out of this room and then we'll all be better people. The part that's hard with this is the so what the application, the take home for this message.

It's not okay. We need to produce good fruit. So therefore stop cussing, stop smoking cigarettes, become a better person, workout. All those things could be practical things. But what you and I have to do is we have to start at the source. We have to start at the core. We have to start with the heart.

And the one thing that you and I cannot change on our own is our heart. We need a heart transplant. We need our heavenly father to come in and do business with our soul, but we have to invite him in. We have to give him permission

to do it. So here's how I close and try to wrap this thing up. I'll tell you a story about a guy that was a tightrope walker in the eighteen hundreds. He lived in France, but would travel the world. His name was the great blondine. I got a picture of him that I'll show you right here. This is the great Blondine

doing his thing. He would walk across these crazy tight ropes with no harnesses. He would use a pole to balance himself. But the guy was a lunatic. Just would do the craziest stuff. Well, in 1856, he came to America.

And there was a millionaire that lived in The States that thought it would be incredible to see if he could string a tightrope across the Niagara Falls and get the great blond dean to walk across the Niagara Falls. So he does it. He gets the tight rope strung.

They somehow through a bunch of marketing, they get 20,000 to 30,000 people pre internet, pre TikTok, all that stuff to show up to the Niagara Falls to watch the great blond dean walk across. Then this guy shows up and at first he just walks across normally and the crowd's like, man, this is incredible.

And then he puts a blindfold on and he does it blindfolded and the crowd starts erupting, right? And then he does it blindfolded and backwards. And the crowd's just like, this is crazy. This can't get any better. And then he takes a stove out onto the middle of the tight rope and he cooks an egg and he eats it and the people are just losing their mind.

But they didn't know that this was always a buildup. What the great Blondin was doing is he was building to the crescendo of his performance. And what he would do is he would then get a wheelbarrow And he would get a little ghetto wheelbarrow like this.

And he would ask the crowd, he said, you guys think I can do it with a wheelbarrow? And by this point they were so spun up. They're all screaming, of course you can. You're the great blond dean. Right? And so he would walk across with a wheelbarrow and get to the other side. And then once he got to the other side that he would ask the crowd again, do you think I could do it with a person in the wheelbarrow? And they're like, of course you can. You're the great blond dean and the place is just erupting.

And then his pitch would come and he'd go, okay, all I need is one person to get in the wheelbarrow with me. And the whole crowd would fall silent. And here's what's crazy is you won't find a single picture of the great blond dean walking across the tightrope with a person in the wheelbarrow

because nobody was willing to actually get in and do it. They were all willing to stand on the sidelines and cheer and say how they believed it was possible. But when it came time to act, when it came time to step in, when it came time to do it themselves, they weren't willing to do it. And friends, I think unfortunately,

that's where we've become as the church. And what James is saying is that we just have to have an honest moment and say, faith was never supposed to be a cheerleading sport. This is a participation sport.

You can't do it from the sidelines. You can't do it from the outskirts. It's not enough to stand and cheer and champion with our voice. We have to, at some point, get in the wheelbarrow. We have to get in the game. We have to be willing to be used by God in whatever arena,

in whatever platform you've been given to leverage everything that we have to expand the kingdom knowing all of this, man, it's temporary. This isn't our forever home. This is all fleeting. It's all falling apart. But while we're here, while we still have breath in our lungs,

we have a mission. We have a kingdom to expand. We have a calling and a destiny on our life, and we can't do it from the sidelines. But here's the beautiful part. The part that I love about my job is I'm not here trying to convince you to get in a wheelbarrow with the great blonding.

I'm trying to get you to get in the wheelbarrow with the one that calls himself the great I am. The one whose arms are stretched wide with nails in both hands proving

his love and devotion and commitment to you. How do you know that you can trust him with your life? That you can get in the wheelbarrow and he's not gonna drop you that though it might be scary to go all in. How do you know that he's got you? Because the bible says that he knows you better than you know you. That when you stand up and when you sit down, he knows. He knows the hair on your head. He while you were in your mother's womb, he knits you together. He intricately

knows you. And what his invitation is for you and for me is a life that is full and rich and meaningful, but it requires us to stop playing church and to go all in. So here's my hope. Here's my prayer. Here's my ask for you today.

I believe that right now, if I were to ask you what's the one thing in your life that God is asking you to do? What is the one place he's asking you to go? The person he's asking you to talk to? The thing he's asking you to do? Or for some of us in here, it's the one thing we need to stop doing.

The sin that's been so ensnaring us. What is the one thing you need to start doing or stop doing this week? I believe that we could potentially change the world if we all just commit to doing that thing this week. So father, I ask

God with eyes closed and heads bowed and a room full of hundreds of people that I could never know all the things that are happening in their life. I trust and I know that you do. And that God, I know through the power of the holy spirit, you're speaking to people here right now.

And that God, you're not in the business of condemning us. You're convicting us. The shame, the guilt that the enemy would try to heap on us through a message like this, that's not from you. God, we reject any shame. We reject any condemnation. But Lord, would your conviction lead us to change?

Would your kindness lead us to repentance? God, would you give us the courage and the boldness and the power through the Holy Spirit to walk out of this room and actually live differently? The stakes could never be higher.

There is no plan b to reach this world, God. It's us. We are it. Would you use us through the power of the holy spirit? It's in the mighty name of Jesus, all God's people said. Amen and amen.