Faith Risks

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Faith Risks

58Faith Risks

James 2:25-26

Main Idea: As an example of faith and a recipient of scandalous grace, Rahab feared the sovereign God and risked everything for the spread of His glory.

  1. Radical Rahab (2:25-26)
    1. She was a recipient of scandalous grace.
    2. She feared and revered the sovereign God.
    3. She risked it all for the spread of His glory.

Excursus: Radical Action

  1. Summation of Justification
    1. Three realities
      1. Christ is the basis of our justification.
      2. Faith is the means of our justification.
      3. Works are the evidence of our justification.
    2. Two reminders
      1. These realities are only possible by the grace of God.
      2. These realities are ultimately involved in judgment before God.

The theme of the second half of James 2 is captured in several verses:

Faith, if it doesn't have works, is dead by itself. (v. 17)

Are you willing to learn that faith without works is useless? (v. 20)

For just as the body without the spirit is dead, so also faith without works is dead. (v. 26)

We've seen Abraham used as an example of genuine faith that produces works. In verses 21-23 James tells us that Abraham was willing to sacrifice his only son because he had faith. Now in verse 25 James says, "And in the same way," which means he is not introducing a new truth. Rather, he is giving us another example of saving faith, and the example he uses is Rahab.

59And in the same way, wasn't Rahab the prostitute also justified by works when she received the messengers and sent them out by a different route? For just as the body without the spirit is dead, so also faith without works is dead. (James 2:25-26)

Radical Rahab

Radical Rahab

James 2:25-26

The story of Abraham in Genesis 22 is familiar to most people, but this may not be the case with Rahab, so we need to consider the context of Joshua 2 for the setup to what James is saying. The people of God were ready to take the promised land for the glory of God, and the first major city in the land was Jericho. So Joshua decided to send some spies into the land to scout things out.

Joshua son of Nun secretly sent two men as spies from the Acacia Grove, saying, "Go and scout the land, especially Jericho." So they left, and they came to the house of a woman, a prostitute named Rahab, and stayed there.

The king of Jericho was told, "Look, some of the Israelite men have come here tonight to investigate the land." Then the king of Jericho sent word to Rahab and said, "Bring out the men who came to you and entered your house, for they came to investigate the entire land."

But the woman had taken the two men and hidden them. So she said, "Yes, the men did come to me, but I didn't know where they were from. At nightfall, when the gate was about to close, the men went out, and I don't know where they were going. Chase after them quickly, and you can catch up with them!" But she had taken them up to the roof and hidden them among the stalks of flax that she had arranged on the roof. The men pursued them along the road to the fords of the Jordan, and as soon as they left to pursue them, the gate was shut.

Before the men fell asleep, she went up on the roof and said to them, "I know that the Lord has given you this land and that the terror of you has fallen on us, and everyone who lives in the land is panicking because of you. For we have heard how the Lord dried up the waters of the Red Sea before you when you came out of Egypt, and what you did to Sihon and Og, the two Amorite kings you completely destroyed across the Jordan. When we heard this, we lost heart, and 60everyone's courage failed because of you, for the Lord your God is God in heaven above and on earth below. Now please swear to me by the Lord that you will also show kindness to my family, because I showed kindness to you. Give me a sure sign that you will spare the lives of my father, mother, brothers, sisters, and all who belong to them, and save us from death."

The men answered her, "We will give our lives for yours. If you don't report our mission, we will show kindness and faithfulness to you when the Lord gives us the land."

Then she let them down by a rope through the window, since she lived in a house that was built into the wall of the city. "Go to the hill country so that the men pursuing you won't find you," she said to them. "Hide yourselves there for three days until they return; afterward, go on your way."

The men said to her, "We will be free from this oath you made us swear, unless, when we enter the land, you tie this scarlet cord to the window through which you let us down. Bring your father, mother, brothers, and all your father's family into your house. If anyone goes out the doors of your house, his blood will be on his own head, and we will be innocent. But if anyone with you in the house should be harmed, his blood will be on our heads. And if you report our mission, we are free from the oath you made us swear."

"Let it be as you say," she replied, and she sent them away. After they had gone, she tied the scarlet cord to the window.

So the two men went into the hill country and stayed there three days until the pursuers had returned. They searched all along the way, but did not find them. Then the men returned, came down from the hill country, and crossed the Jordan. They went to Joshua son of Nun and reported everything that had happened to them. They told Joshua, "The Lord has handed over the entire land to us. Everyone who lives in the land is also panicking because of us." (Josh 2:1-24)

Keep in mind that someone who served in Rahab's profession, if we can call it that, also served as an innkeeper of sorts. Her house was a common place for people to stay. The spies entered Rahab's house, and she protected them from death, so when the people of God took the city of Jericho in Joshua 6, she and her household were saved. So, why is James talking about this prostitute in the New Testament? There are three reasons.

She Was a Recipient of Scandalous Grace

61

Think about the contrast between Abraham and Rahab:

Abraham Rahab
the patriarch of the Jewish people a prostitute in the middle of a Gentile nation
the friend of God living in the middle of the enemies of God
a great leader a common citizen
at the top of the social order at the bottom of the social order

You can hear the shock in James's voice in verse 25: Was not even Rahab the prostitute considered righteous? We're reminded of the genealogy in Matthew 1. Ruth, a Moabite woman grafted into the people of God in the Old Testament, is listed in the genealogy of Christ in the New Testament. However, according to Matthew 1:5, Rahab was Ruth's mother-in-law! What kind of family tree is this? God—the holy God of the universe—took a prostitute and brought her into His family, into the line that would lead to His Son. This is scandalous grace, and I don't mean in an immoral way, but grace that shocks by reaching down into the least likely of lives and pouring out mercy.

Praise be to God that He has reached down past our gross immorality, extended His arm across our filthy sinfulness, and brought us into His family. We are recipients of scandalous grace. This is the whole picture of justification. How can a holy God be just and yet include you in His family? By pouring out the just wrath due your sin upon His Son. God is just—He punishes sin to the fullest extent—and He justifies those who have faith in Jesus (Rom 3:26).

She Feared and Revered the Sovereign God

Remember what Rahab said to the spies: "When we heard this, we lost heart, and everyone's courage failed because of you, for the Lord your God is God in heaven above and on earth below" (Josh 2:11).

Now Rahab didn't have a lot of information; all she had was hearsay, stories she had heard about the people of God walking through the Red Sea on dry ground and being delivered by God against foreign armies. But the little bit she had heard, she believed. She knew Yahweh is God62 in heaven and on the earth. She knew He was sovereign over all things, and she knew she was accountable to Him. Rahab knew judgment was coming on her and her land, and she feared and revered the sovereign God. She was willing to take this risk, this radical step of obedience, because she believed God. And when you believe God, you are willing to risk everything.

She Risked It All for the Spread of God's Glory

If the king had discovered that these Jewish spies were in Rahab's home, she and her family would have been executed immediately. This was treason: Rahab's life was on the line. Like James, Hebrews points to Rahab as a hero of faith (Heb 11:31). But is she a hero of faith because of her rituals or religious activities? No, she is a hero of faith because she put her life and everything dear to her on the line for the Lord, trusting Him without hesitation, qualification, or reservation. She risked it all, going against everything in the culture around her. She risked it all so the people of God might take Jericho for the glory of God, and according to James she was considered righteous for what she did.

Are you willing to do that in your life? Are you willing to take risks in obedience to the Word of God because you revere the sovereign God who has saved you by His scandalous grace? Thousands of years after Abraham took his son to a mountain to sacrifice him, thousands of years after Rahab risked her life, are we today willing to risk it all? Will we go against the grain of the culture around us, even the Christian subculture that surrounds us? Are we willing to take some risks for the glory of God's name?

Excursus: Radical Action

During our study of this portion of the book of James, the Lord did a surprising work in the church I pastor. When we came to James 2, we were confronted with this reality that those who have received mercy extend mercy. And we knew from James 1 that we don't have the option just to hear this Word and not do something about it. I wrote 63about our church's response in the books Radical and Radical Together.

As we were studying James, we were going through our church budgeting process. To be honest, I hate budget season. As a pastor, I believe it's where our church comes face-to-face with how prone we are to give our resources to good things while ignoring great need. Christians in North America will give 2.5 percent of their income to their church this year (Empty Tomb, "Giving Research"). Out of that 2.5 percent, churches in North America will give 2 percent of their budgeted monies to needs overseas (Ronsvalle and Ronsvalle, State, 104). In other words, for every one hundred dollars a North American Christian makes, we will give five cents through the church to a world of urgent spiritual and physical need. This does not make sense.

Knowing this, one night our pastors took a hard look at the realities of the world, from the vast numbers of our brothers and sisters who are starving to the great multitudes of people who have never heard the gospel. Then we looked at our budget. And then we took action. We decided to change our spending drastically to align better with the will and ways of God.

This began with reallocating budget overages. Our staff had already been frugal, and we had saved more than $500,000 for the future. But James caused us to realize we had brothers and sisters around the world who already needed it. God began turning our eyes toward our brothers and sisters in India, a country that is home to 41 percent of the world's poor. Many children there do not even live to age five, so we looked for an avenue through which we could serve them. We learned that for about $25,000, we could provide food and water, medical care, and education to moms and their babies in a particular village for one year. We found 21 churches in impoverished villages across India, and we started thinking about which ones we might be able to serve. That's when we stepped back and realized, "If there are 21 churches in villages we can connect with, 64and in each one we can serve starving children and their families for about $25,000, that comes to a total of $525,000. Meanwhile God has given us over $500,000." So we decided to give it all away.

Then we began looking at our 2010 budget. We decided to ask the staff to go through the budget with a fine-tooth comb and cut every expenditure we possibly could so we could give more around the world. When I sat down with our leaders, I tried to soften the blow of what cuts might mean for individual ministries. But as I was sharing, one of our preschool leaders spoke up. "David," she said, "you don't have to go soft no us. We realize from God's Word this is something we need to do, and it is something we want to do. So let us get to work and start cutting our budgets!"

With that said, we split up into different teams to reevaluate our budgets. What happened next was amazing. Whereas the budgeting process usually involves leaders vying with one another to see who can raise their budget the most, this year our leaders were competing with one another to see who could cut their budget the most. We soon saw that making cuts was not just going to affect our budgets as leaders but the lives of our members. So we believed it was important to have the entire church vote on moving forward in this direction, and that's what we did. We put a proposal before our church family that said the following:

In love to God, in light of the needs around the world, and in obedience to Scripture (Prov 14:31; 21:13; 28:27; Matt 25:31-46; Jas 2:14-24; 1 John 3:16-18), the leadership of The Church at Brook Hills proposes that the church body affirm the following actions:

  • We will immediately begin radical saving as a church during the remainder of the year for the sake of urgent spiritual and physical need around the world.
  • 65Our leadership will work together over the next two months on a budget that saves every expenditure possible for the sake of urgent spiritual and physical need around the world.
  • We will immediately designate up to $525,000 of our current excess cash to serve impoverished churches across India.

A couple of weeks later, the church voted overwhelmingly in favor of reallocating resources in this direction. We were able to free up an additional $1.5 million from our next church budget. With that money we began to focus more on spreading the gospel in Birmingham and around the world.

Locally we identified an area of our city with particular needs, and we committed time and money to partner with other churches, organizations, and schools to share and show the gospel in tangible ways there. Not wanting to give our money without going ourselves, we challenged every member in our faith family to pray about possibly leaving their comfortable neighborhoods and moving into this area of the city. Since that time several individuals, couples, and families have done exactly that.

Globally we focused on northern India, home to 600 million people but where fewer than 0.5 percent are evangelical Christians. Based on relationships we already had and new partnerships we were able to form, we committed time and money to meeting urgent needs there. During the year through local Indian churches, we were able to provide food, education, medical care, and most importantly the gospel to more than a thousand families in extremely impoverished and unreached areas. In addition, we were able to work with other Indian churches to build a hundred wells that would provide clean water for tens of thousands who previously didn't have it. On top of these things, we were able to train hundreds of national church leaders, mobilize church planters to engage hundreds of villages for the first time with the good news of Christ, and 66give millions access to the bible in their language for the first time.

My purpose in sharing these things is not to draw attention to the church I pastor. Anything we have done is merely evidence of God's grace among us. And we know that we have a long way to go. I share these things simply to encourage you to consider the possibilities of what might happen in your life and in your church when you put God's Word into practice. In light of James 2, let's continually put everything on the table before God in order that we might spend our lives and our resources intentionally and sacrificially for the glory of our King.

Summation of Justification

Summation of Justification

As we come to the close of James 2 and the discussion of what saving faith looks like, we need to consider what it means to be righteous before God.

Three Realities

Christ is the basis of our justification. How can you and I as sinners be declared right before God? We can't get rid of our sin, and we can't stand righteous before God on our own; there is nothing we can do. We need someone else who is righteous to be righteousness for us. And this is what the gospel is all about. Jesus lived a righteous life in our place, and then He died the death that we deserve. Second Corinthians 5:21 says, "[God] made [Christ] who did not know sin to be sin for us, so that we might become the righteousness of God in [Christ]." Christ's work is the basis of our justification. So if someone asks you, "How do you know that you are right before God?" and the first words out of your mouth are "Because I have done _______," then you are missing the point of the gospel. You can only be right before God because Christ lived the life you could not live and died the death you deserved to die. This is the starting point.

Now the question becomes, How is Christ's work applied to your life? 67Is it automatic, so that when He died, everyone was saved automatically? Is it something you are born into? Or is there something you have to do? This question leads us to the second reality concerning how we become righteous before God.

Faith is the means of our justification. Faith is the antiwork. It is trust. It is surrender. It is the realization that you can do nothing but trust in what has been done for you. And through faith you are united to Jesus, being clothed and credited with His righteousness. However, such faith is not mere intellectual assent. Faith is not merely, "Yes, Jesus died on a cross." Demons believe that, and they don't have faith. Faith, according to Scripture, means turning from yourself and trusting in Jesus as your Savior from sin and as the Lord of your life. It's the moment when God opens your eyes to see His glory, to see your need, and to see His provision, and in faith you confess your need for Christ and you submit your life to Him. This is faith, and in the words of Paul in Romans 5:1, "Therefore, since we have been declared righteous by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ." Justification happens in an instant, but the faith by which we are justified changes everything about us, and this is the point of James's letter.

Works are the evidence of our justification because faith bears fruit. Does that mean our works are now the basis of our justification? Absolutely not. Our works (not works fueled by the flesh that don't honor God but works that are the fruit of faith and bring great glory to God) are the evidence that we have been justified. Abraham believed God, and consequently he was willing to sacrifice his son. Rahab believed God, and consequently she was willing to risk it all. In these two examples from James 2, Abraham and Rahab showed their faith by what they did.

Two Reminders

These realities are only possible by the grace of God. God's grace not only draws us to faith while we are dead in our sins, but even after this our obedience is fueled by God's grace. Both our faith and our works are made possible by God. All is of grace. As an analogy, imagine giving money to one of your children for them to buy you a Christmas present. They give you the present, but did they really? Sure, in a sense it came from you, but it was also an expression of their love for you. The illustration is not perfect, but it does help us see that anything we bring to God as an offering that is pleasing to Him is an overflow of His grace. I think this is one of the reasons James chooses, of all people, Rahab as an example of faith. In this picture of a prostitute, he wants to make sure we're not 68talking about merit we bring to God—our own righteousness. No, we're talking about the grace of God alive in the risk-taking obedience of a woman. By grace we are saved through faith (Eph 2:8).

These realities are ultimately involved in the judgment before God. The judgment refers to the time when you stand before God in heaven. We're talking about final justification, the time when your eternal destiny will be declared openly and finally. What will be the basis by which you enter into heaven to dwell in the presence of God for all of eternity? Christ. The only way we can go to heaven is on the basis of Christ. And what is the means by which you will be declared right on that day for all of eternity? Faith. The faith that says, "Father, I have nothing in me to stand on. I trust wholly in the righteousness of Christ to stand for me. You opened my eyes to Your holiness and my sin, and You opened my eyes to Christ as my Savior and my Lord. By grace you did this, and faith is the means." In the background of your life on that final day, it will be evident whether such faith was indeed a reality in your life. What Paul said is true:

[God] will repay each one according to his works. (Rom 2:6)

For we must all appear before the tribunal of Christ, so that each may be repaid for what he has done in the body, whether good or worthless. (2 Cor 5:10)

If there is no fruit of real faith on the last day, and the only thing you have to lean on is a card you signed or a prayer you prayed, or even religious rituals in which you participated, then it will be shown clearly that you never really had faith at all. And you will miss eternal life and be cast away to eternal death.

I do not desire to be a hellfire and damnation preacher, but even more so I do not want people to be deceived. It grieves my heart when people die in my own community, people with no fruit of faith in Christ, and yet our church-filled community concludes that surely they are with God in heaven. It's not true. Now, to be clear, none of us knows the inner secrets of a person's heart, nor are we the final judge. But God's Word is clear: any claim to faith with no resultant fruit is like a dead corpse. There's no life there. Instead, there's death in hell for all eternity.

Therefore, if you have not truly believed in Jesus Christ for salvation, I urge you to do so today. Look to Christ crucified as the only basis by which you can be declared righteous. By God's grace admit your need for Christ and trust in Him. Do not give mere intellectual assent or 69perform a religious exercise. Cast yourself in faith on Christ. For when you do that, the God of the universe will look down on your sinful heart and save you. He will clothe you in the righteousness of Christ and you will have peace with God. And through such faith, Christ will come into your life and change it from the inside out, for your good and for His glory. He will transform your life into one that demonstrates His grace and love and mercy to the world around you. This is the faith that saves, and this is a faith that works.

Reflect and Discuss

Reflect and Discuss

  1. How does the free nature of God's grace give us hope as we encounter people of all different walks of life?
  2. Explain why Rahab's actions didn't earn her favor with God.
  3. How did Rahab's actions give evidence of saving faith?
  4. How is Rahab a picture of every follower of Christ, no matter their testimony?
  5. Why is reverence for God so crucial to our faith?
  6. What does risking it all look like in your life?
  7. What do we mean when we say faith is the means of our justification? How is this different from the basis of our justification?
  8. How is it that even our faith is a result of God's grace?
  9. If justification is by faith, how do our works factor into the day of judgment?
  10. How does focusing on trusting in the basis of our justification (Christ and His finished work) free us and motivate us to do good works?
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