Radically Whole E-Book

David Gibson

• Herausgeber: Crossway
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

An Expository Journey through the Book of James Helps Christians Move from Double-Mindedness to Wholeness Everyone longs for wholeness and honesty in their lives. In reality, people are often double-minded—pulled between good and bad—in their speech, actions, and character. These rifts can be spiritually and relationally devastating. So how does God heal a fractured heart? This analysis of the New Testament book of James helps readers identify double-mindedness in their own lives and understand God's grace as he "pulls apart the divided heart to make it whole." Explaining James's challenging epistle chapter by chapter, David Gibson helps readers embrace the painful yet profound process of redemption, defeat double-mindedness, and experience wholeness in every area of their lives. - Theologically Rich: Thoroughly examines major themes in the book of James, including double-mindedness, pride, spiritual maturity, suffering, and God's grace - Winsome and Accessible: This clear, expository study is ideal for pastors and laypeople, including college students and those involved in small groups or adult Sunday School - Written by David Gibson: Author of Living Life Backward: How Ecclesiastes Teaches Us to Live in Light of the End  - Includes Study Questions: Each chapter ends with questions for deeper reflection

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“David Gibson has given the church a guide to the book of James and the issues it raises that is biblical, pastoral, accessible, reliable, wise, and patient. While focusing on James, Gibson helpfully explores its great topics by drawing on all of Scripture, wise reading, and pastoral experience to lead the reader into the gospel-based wholeness that the Lord desires to form in his people.”

Dan Doriani, Professor of Biblical and Systematic Theology, Covenant Theological Seminary; Founder, Center for Faith and Work St. Louis

“No one ever says, ‘When I grow up I want to be a hypocrite.’ Yet most of us would have to admit that there are areas in our lives that simply don’t line up with what we say we believe. In Radically Whole, David Gibson ably applies the straight-talk wisdom of the book of James to the areas of our lives that need to become conformed to the gospel we believe and the Savior we love.”

Nancy Guthrie, Bible teacher; author

“If Martin Luther had been granted a future look at the pages of David Gibson’s Radically Whole so that he could glimpse the overarching theme of the book of James and its symmetries (its ‘melodic line’), he would not have voiced his infamous conclusion that it was ‘a right strawy epistle’ but would have recognized James as a profoundly substantial letter consonant with the gospel of grace. Gibson’s penetrating exposition reveals that the grand unifying theme and purpose of James’s letter is the perfection—the singular wholeness—of God’s people. The book’s nine chapters are laced with gripping theological insights and life-giving applications that lead toward biblical wholeness. Gibson is a devoted, hands-on pastor, so Radically Whole sparkles with memorable analogies and aphorisms that help the reader understand and put to work its truths. And, in doing this, it focuses us on Jesus, the only man in history who not only knew God’s word but did it. This is a marvelous book, one that will be read, reread, underlined, and taken to heart—with enduring benefits.”

R. Kent Hughes, Senior Pastor Emeritus, College Church, Wheaton, Illinois

“This excellent book gets right to the heart of James’s message and his method. It is beautifully written, and David’s exegetical skill and pastoral wisdom make it not only a compelling exposition of the letter but also a searching examination of the heart. I recommend it thoroughly for anyone who wants to understand James better, and to benefit spiritually in the process.”

Andy Gemmill, Director of the Pastors’ Training Course, Cornhill, Scotland

“The purpose of your consultation at the James clinic is to help you toward full spiritual health. You already know that you will first meet a different physician, a Dr. Gibson, who has studied under Dr. James for many years. He is a somewhat younger man, but his familiarity with Dr. James’s inspired insights is impressive, as is the way he seems able to express the spirit and atmosphere of his teaching, as well as the central truth that Jesus Christ makes you whole. It is an idea that will recur in different ways as Dr. Gibson leads you, gently but firmly, through a comprehensive assessment process. And it begins with the first pages of Radically Whole. In its series of enriching consultations, David Gibson surefootedly provides the diagnosis, prescriptions, and prognosis we all need if we are to be made whole in Jesus Christ.”

Sinclair B. Ferguson, Chancellor’s Professor of Systematic Theology, Reformed Theological Seminary; Teaching Fellow, Ligonier Ministries

Radically Whole

Other Crossway Books by David Gibson

Living Life Backward: How Ecclesiastes Teaches Us to Live in Light of the End

From Heaven He Came and Sought Her: Definite Atonement in Historical, Biblical, Theological, and Pastoral Perspective, edited with Jonathan Gibson

Radically Whole

Gospel Healing for the Divided Heart

David Gibson

Radically Whole: Gospel Healing for the Divided Heart

Copyright © 2022 by David Gibson

Published by Crossway1300 Crescent StreetWheaton, Illinois 60187

Originally published by Inter-Varsity Press, 36 Causton Street, London, SW1P 4ST, England. Copyright © 2022 by David Gibson. North American edition published by permission of Inter-Varsity.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher, except as provided for by USA copyright law. Crossway® is a registered trademark in the United States of America.

Cover design: Jordan Singer

Cover image: iStock

First printing 2022

Printed in the United States of America

Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture quotations are from the ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved. The ESV text may not be quoted in any publication made available to the public by a Creative Commons license. The ESV may not be translated into any other language.

Scripture quotation marked NIV is taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. www.zondervan.com. The “NIV” and “New International Version” are trademarks registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office by Biblica, Inc.™

All emphases in Scripture quotations have been added by the author.

Trade paperback ISBN: 978-1-4335-8206-6 ePub ISBN: 978-1-4335-8209-7 PDF ISBN: 978-1-4335-8207-3 Mobipocket ISBN: 978-1-4335-8208-0

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Gibson, David, 1975– author.

Title: Radically whole : gospel healing for the divided heart / David Gibson.

Description: Wheaton, Illinois : Crossway, 2022. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2022011826 (print) | LCCN 2022011827 (ebook) | ISBN 9781433582066 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9781433582073 (pdf) | ISBN 9781433582080 (mobipocket) | ISBN 9781433582097 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Bible. James—Criticism, interpretation, etc.

Classification: LCC BS2785.52 .G53 2022 (print) | LCC BS2785.52 (ebook) | DDC 227/.9106—dc23/eng/20220627

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022011826

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022011827

Crossway is a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers.

2022-09-26 01:01:13 PM

For

Trinity Church, Aberdeen

Truth be told . . . the one thing in this world I want more than anything else is a great big crowbar, to jimmy myself open and take whatever creature that’s sitting inside and shake it clean like a rug and then rinse it in a cold, clear lake . . . and then I want to put it under the sun to let it heal and dry and grow and sit and come to consciousness again with a clear and quiet mind.

Douglas Coupland, Miss Wyoming

Contents

Preface

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Getting Your Bearings

1  Perfection

2  Doing

3  Love

4  Seeing

5  Words

6  Wisdom

7  Presumption

8  Wealth

9  Suffering

Postscript

Notes

General Index

Scripture Index

Preface

Complete. Intact. Unbroken. Undivided. Whole.

I’m sure you’ll agree that there is something very attractive about these words. Even just sitting there alone on the page without any context they manage to convey health and fullness. They depict how things are meant to be.

And I suspect that you, like me, would love these words to be true of you.

The Bible has different ways of describing what goes on inside us at the deepest level of our beings. There’s the word conscience, for instance, the part of us that knows what it is to be either clean or dirty on the inside. A further inner world is conveyed by the word heart. It portrays the seat of our personalities and the sum total of our internal motivating engine.

I want to take you on a guided tour through one Bible book’s penetrating analysis of another internal condition we each live with: “double-mindedness,” as diagnosed in the epistle of James.

We know what it’s like to be in two minds about something. We’ve all stood in a shop trying to choose between pairs of shoes, or coats, or new phones. We weigh up big decisions all the time in choosing between alternatives: a school, a house, a career. This is normal. It’s what it means to be finite creatures with incomplete knowledge of the ultimate good as we feel our way forward on the path of life.

But the fact that we are capable of going in more than one direction has a darker hue when it comes to our character. Everyone reading these lines will know what it is like to say and do things that can leave us on the other side of our words and actions utterly bewildered about where those choices came from. How could we have been so stupid, so selfish? What on earth made us speak like that? Creatures made in God’s image we may be, but sin renders us absurd even to ourselves.

Digging deeper, we know that no one else can see what goes on inside our heads, and so we live with truths about us that only we can comprehend. We are the solitary observers of our inner closed-circuit TV. Sometimes this means there are things we are anxious to keep hidden. Often it means there are things we love which somehow say more about the real us than others can discern on the surface. Always it means there is a kind of fault line running through our personalities, a fracture at our core, which means that what we project is not the full story. We are so often less than who we wish we were.

According to the Bible, we are split down the middle.

So, I want to introduce you to James’s painful-but-profound medicine for healing the divided heart. It is a lovingly prescribed course in wholeness. Not just “spiritual” wholeness, as if the spiritual side of our lives were separate from the physical, emotional, or relational aspects of who we are. The picture James paints is one that integrates every part of our lives, before God and in relationship with others. He portrays a Christian life of beauty and moral fitness, a cohesive uprightness to our character, that displays the glory and goodness of God to those around us. It is profoundly attractive, and I want to captivate you as you gaze.

Make no mistake, James’s words can cut like a knife. But he is only ever wounding in order to heal. This beautiful book in the Bible can put us together again and lead us part of the way back to who we were always meant to be.

See how God pulls us apart in order to make us whole.

Acknowledgments

The epistle of James has long been a perplexing book for me. On the one hand, James writes with a disarming simplicity of command and exhortation that is hard to sidestep or misunderstand; on the other, my logical mind has always struggled to perceive a distinctive wavelength or to trace a consistent argument from start to end. So, what you hold in your hands is my own attempt to wrestle with a portion of Holy Scripture which speaks a language we know, but in an accent that nevertheless sometimes leaves us unsure.

If there is any coherence to these pages—and if in God’s kindness you gain from them any light for the journey—then it is entirely down to an array of people who have wrestled with James before and alongside me, to outstanding commentaries, books, and sermons that instructed me on the way, and to friends and family who helped me as I wrote and thought.

First and foremost, I am indebted to Dr. Andy Gemmill and his fresh and illuminating work on James. I have heard him speak on this book in many different contexts over the years, and the architecture of my approach has been profoundly shaped by his clear thinking, his own personal and pastoral engagement with the sharp end of James’s words, and his gift for penetrating application. His is the blueprint; mine is the attempt to fill in and elaborate as many details as I can. I am very grateful for his constructive comments and preacher’s eyes on my material.

My friend Ben Traynor preached James with me and opened up parts of it vividly for us at Trinity Church in Aberdeen. I am grateful for his permission to include some of his thinking here. Our staff team and elders enabled me to write, either by taking on parts of my work at different points or by offering feedback on earlier drafts. I am very grateful to Will Allan, Simon Barker, Nicola Fitch, and Drew Tulloch. Our ministry trainees and others worked with me on the questions for discussion and personal reflection that appear at the end of each chapter, and the whole book is the better for their input. My thanks to Alex Hanna, Hannah McEwan, Sam Moore, James Shrimpton, Sam Williams, and Struan Yarney. Nothing would ever have materialized without the skill and support of Eleanor Trotter and Caleb Woodbridge (IVP), and Justin Taylor and Anthony Gosling (Crossway). They all provided kind encouragement and wisdom at every step along the way.

As always, it was my own family who made everything possible. My wonderful parents picked up the slack more times than I can count, and certainly more than they will ever say. I owe thanks to my brother, Jonathan, for his excellent suggestions. My wife, Angela, and our children, Archie, Ella, Sam, and Lily, regularly went without me while I tried to write a bit here and there, and even packed me off to the remote Culfosie Cottage in Strathdon (courtesy of the kindness of Phil and Philippa Mason). I’d like to think it’s a sacrifice they made to see the book finished, but I am quite sure life is just generally easier all round without me!

In this our eighteenth year in Aberdeen, I want to dedicate this book to the church family I am privileged to serve at Trinity. These precious brothers and sisters first heard what is printed here in sermon form. As always, they received these faltering efforts with humility and grace, and with patient and attentive listening. It is one of my great joys in our shared life to be seeking to grow in the grace of the Lord Jesus together, until we are made whole forever in a world made new. “Blessed is the man who remains steadfast under trial, for when he has stood the test he will receive the crown of life, which God has promised to those who love him” (James 1:12).

Introduction

Getting Your Bearings

You have to bite the hand that reads you.

Tina Brown, quoted in The Week

Why is unfaithfulness such an undoing?

In a world of casual sex, and where pornography is readily available to be consumed on a massive scale, it remains a surprising fact that adultery is rather taboo. It is as though we have thrown a precious item under the bus (sex), but we have kept the price tag in our hearts (faithfulness). Something about breaking a promise and trashing a covenant still seems to stand out to everyone as being obviously damaging. In our culture’s eyes it is not that sex with multiple partners is wrong per se. But if it happens in violation of the assurances of loyalty that we have given to someone else, then we seem to know deep inside that something has gone awry.

Sexual unfaithfulness can devastate like few things on earth. Our very identity is at stake in the delicate connection between what we promise with our words and what we do with our bodies, such that infidelity shatters trust between people and can destroy the self-worth of each individual involved. It divides that which is not meant to be divided.

Unfaithfulness is such a catastrophic undoing because it strikes at the very heart of who we are meant to be as people: whole, committed, united to God, and united to others in faithful relationship. This is why, from start to finish, the Bible is the story of a marriage, God’s marriage with his people, with human marriage given to us as a real, lived-out illustration of God’s relationship with us.

The story of the first marriage in the Bible, in Genesis 2:24, is retold by the apostle Paul not only to instruct husbands and wives how to love each other but also to communicate how God loves us: “‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.’ This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church” (Eph. 5:31–32). It is simply astonishing that the physical, sexual intimacy of husband and wife is given to us as the analogy of how close we are to Jesus in his saving love for us. That act creates a oneness out of twoness. It’s why Paul can say, “He who loves his wife loves himself” (Eph. 5:28). Just as Jesus loves us in such a profound way that we become members of his body, so too the joining of a man and woman in marriage means that there is no longer a “he” without a “she,” or a “her” without a “him.” Ray Ortlund notes that the original marriage of Adam and Eve was based on the fact that the woman was made “out of the very flesh of the man, so that the bond of marriage reunites what was originally and literally one flesh.”1 Two become one new whole, and they are to remain whole.

This reality of human love in marriage as an illustration of divine love in our union with Christ is why the Bible uses the severing of marriage in adultery as a powerful image of what we do to God in our sin. What God desires is our oneness with him in love, and wholehearted obedience flowing from that love, but what we return to him instead, in our rebellion, is our love of someone or something else alongside or instead of him. The fundamental problem of the human condition is not primarily what we say or do; rather, it is who and what we love instead of God. He is the husband of his people (Isa. 54:5; Ezek. 16:8–14), but we are his adulterous people in return (Num. 15:39; Ps. 106:39; Ezek. 23:20).

In this book I suggest that the epistle of James shows this essence of our sin in crystal clear terms. James is deeply in tune with the Bible’s story of God’s own people prostituting themselves with other lovers. Instead of being wholly devoted lovers of God and fully integrated lovers of others, God’s people can be so deeply divided that James will cry out, “You adulterous people!” (4:4). This is precisely what makes his letter so painful, and yet his clear sight is also, of course, what makes it so full of grace and hope. James has a beautiful conception of what life should be like when lived out of love for God and love for others, so his cutting words are merely flowing from his profound sense of how different things could be. He has such a clear vision of the good life that when he sees its ugly opposite, he cannot beat about the bush, but simply calls it out for what it is. We always think we want the truth, but actually hearing the truth is usually much more difficult.

The first thing to learn as we walk the road of becoming whole with James is that it involves him telling, and our accepting, the truth about ourselves.

In what follows, I work from the assumption that James is so preoccupied with the theme of wholeness that we will find it running through every single part of his letter like a golden thread. He is so taken with this idea that it is present at the level of a controlling motif and underlying argument, shaping everything, even when he’s not using specific words for wholeness or oneness. It is his governing and unifying theme.

Stand Back and See the Whole

Down through the years, many commentators and preachers have got lost in James, in part, I think, because they have moved through its various details and twists and turns without a clear sense of the entire epistle. The letter seems to bounce from one topic to another. Martin Luther accused James of “throwing things together chaotically.”2 One minute we’re reading about trials and testing (1:2–3), then we’re thinking about the rich and the poor (1:9–10), then we’re back to trials again (1:12). What is James getting at? In fact, James frustrated Luther so much that he went as far as to say that James is “a right strawy epistle” which “has nothing of the nature of the gospel about it.”3 This was largely because of James’s words “You see that a person is justified by works and not by faith alone” (2:24). The apostle Paul teaches us justification by faith alone, and here is James flatly contradicting him, right? For Luther, James mangles Scripture.

This apparent clash between Paul and James has been taken by some to represent a conflict between “Pauline Christianity” and “Jewish Christianity.” In 1894, Adolf Jülicher called James “the least Christian book of the New Testament,” and more recently James Dunn regarded James as “the most Jewish, the most undistinctively Christian document in the New Testament.”4

All of this unease might sound strange to you. Many of us love James for its simplicity. It is such a practical letter, without too much tough theology to wrap our heads around. Maybe Romans is for the left-brained people who like linear logic, but James is for the right-brained artistic people who think in pictures. “If we put bits into the mouths of horses so that they obey us, we guide their whole bodies as well. Look at the ships also . . .” (James 3:3–4). It’s so vivid, and we understand it straight away.

At the outset, however, I need to say very clearly that Martin Luther was wrong. James is not worthless, and I want to show you why not. He does not contradict Paul, and we’re going to see how and why. It is also a wonderfully Christian book in its Jewishness. I agree with Richard Bauckham when he says in his superb study that James’s relationship to Judaism simply parallels Jesus’s relationship to Judaism.5 In other words, if James is “undistinctively Christian,” then so is Jesus himself. We will find some of the greatest riches in the book precisely because of their closeness to the teaching of the Lord Jesus, and it is he, of course, who is the true and ultimate fulfillment of Judaism’s oldest promises in the Scriptures and its greatest hopes for the Messiah and his new world order.

The opening verses suggest that James’s epistle was probably meant to be a round-robin letter to various churches in Asia Minor: “the twelve tribes in the Dispersion.” This is obviously a reference to the twelve tribes of Israel, but it’s also clear that James is writing to those Jews who confess Jesus as the Messiah. Thus, they were very likely to be Jewish Christians who lived outside the land of promise, those who had been dispersed from their ancient religious landmarks, such as Jerusalem. Douglas Moo suggests that the fact that these Jewish believers in Jesus the Messiah had been forced to live away from their home country explains a “major characteristic of the readers of the letter: their poverty and oppressed condition.”6 At the same time, Moo notes, although “the situation of the church in the world provides one important context for the letter . . . the letter ultimately has much more to say about the problem of the world getting into the church.”7

That is a nice turn of phrase. Notice how it focuses our attention on the idea of mixing two things that should not be mixed (church and world). It directs us to the seriousness of James’s tone and the pointed urgency with which he writes. So, I want to side very clearly with those who say that this is a wonderfully practical letter, but then I also want to ask, “Are we sitting comfortably?”

We are in for a very painful ride. Very painful indeed.

For James is a letter written to churches in danger of dying, churches that could become very sick. James knows that the recipients could embark on a one-way journey to the morgue. This means he will quickly blow out of the water any ideas we might have that this is a lovely letter full of “how-to” tips and nice, simple rules for life. Rather, the words in James are what you get when you go to the doctor and say, “Look, I’ve got this cough, but I’m sure it’s nothing really.” You’re examined and scanned, and then a message arrives urging you to schedule an appointment. The doctor says to you: “Now about that cough: it’s a symptom of a much bigger problem. I’ve got some bad news. You have a deadly disease.”

I want to show you that James is like the best of physicians in three ways: he sees symptoms, he diagnoses the underlying disease, and he knows exactly which medicine we need to take.

Observe the Symptoms

James is writing to churches that could soon be on their deathbeds unless they take drastic action; they are fellowships containing men and women behaving badly. And when we look at a church that is going so badly wrong, it needs to serve as a warning to us too. It is the measure of God’s kindness to us that sometimes he puts the cadaver on the slab, cuts it open, and tells us to have a look at what killed this once living, breathing organism, so that we can take action to prevent it from happening to us too.

Maybe, as you read these lines, your fellowship is not the kind of church that is facing some of these drastic situations. Indeed, I hope your fellowship is healthy and thriving. If so, it is so important for us to listen to James’s words now, before trouble comes. Good health is like that, isn’t it? We don’t really notice it until it’s gone. It’s what older people say as they succumb to frailty and weakness: “Oh, I wish I’d appreciated the health of my youth.” It’s what someone says after the terrible diagnosis: “I just didn’t know I was living; my health was the best thing I had, and now it’s gone.” It’s what we all said as the coronavirus pandemic turned our worlds upside down in 2020, and we realized how much we had been taking for granted, unthinkingly. Suddenly, 2019 was the best year that ever was.

But not everyone reading this will be on the mountaintop. It is possible that you have recently come through, or are still experiencing, the ugly and upsetting seasons that can roll into a church’s life. They are so very common, and most fellowships face times of tension at some point. Maybe you are hurting right now from the reality of sin working its way through relationships you hold dear and harming a church family you have cherished for many years. You might need the Lord’s help to forgive and to embark on a new path of spiritual wholeness. Some of us may need to be honest and admit that we’ve even played a part in things going off the rails.

Here are three symptoms of what is going wrong in the churches to whom James is writing.

Symptom 1: These Churches Are Speaking Angry Words

We get the first hint of angry words within the church very early on: “Know this, my beloved brothers: let every person be quick to hear, slow to speak, slow to anger” (James 1:19). This is amplified a few verses later: “If anyone thinks he is religious and does not bridle his tongue but deceives his heart, this person’s religion is worthless” (1:26). The sense that a lot of problems in this letter revolve around our speech becomes crystal clear in chapter 3: “And the tongue is a fire, a world of unrighteousness” (3:6). James is writing because he knows it ought not to be so, but, in fact, it is so. For these believers, the tongue is a world of trouble.

Do you know what this is like? Fights, quarrels, and words that ignite and explode and harm and hurt? Of course you do.

I am grateful for the perceptive words of Andy Crouch that one of the great gifts of families at their best is that there we discover what fools we are. “No matter how big your house, it’s not big enough to hide your foolishness from people who live with you day after day.”8

For the Gibson family, foolishness always seems to reach epic proportions on Thursdays. I don’t know what it is about Thursdays. I call them TTT: Tongue-Torched Thursdays. Maybe it’s because, for me as a minister, by that point my work is beginning to funnel down toward Sunday, and I’m starting to feel the pressure of all the things left to be done before there’s any semblance of a coherent sermon. My wife has finished her part-time work for the National Health Service and is feeling tired. Our kids all seem to wake up cranky on Thursday mornings.

With alarming regularity, we manage to arrive at the breakfast table with short fuses and barely concealed irritation. Then someone casts a look deliberately designed to wind up someone else. There follows a condescending action, usually involving cereal bowls, spoons, and milk, or hairclips or lunch boxes—and out it comes, sibling to sibling, husband to wife, parent to child. The words are sharp. The touch paper is lit. The dog is bemused. And we’re off to the races. Again.

We all know what it’s like to try to tame the tongue. But do you know what James is saying to us here? Don’t bother. You won’t do it. It can’t be done. Now, don’t get him wrong. James doesn’t mean we don’t need to change our speech, nor does he mean that speaking in these awful ways is an acceptable minor blip. No, his point is that soap in our mouths won’t solve the real problem. The sinful speech is just a symptom; it’s not the disease.

We’ll soon come to the deeper problem, but first, two other symptoms.

Symptom 2: These Churches Are Drawing Ugly Lines

“My brothers, show no partiality as you hold the faith in our Lord Jesus Christ, the Lord of glory” (James 2:1). It’s obvious from the opening verses of chapter 2 that James’s first readers needed to be warned against drawing lines between those who had money and those who did not. They were honoring certain types of people and dishonoring others. There was an “in” crowd and an “out” crowd: an attraction to the people with means, wealth, and status and an overlooking of the poor, marginalized, and downtrodden. Haves and have nots.

This kind of demarcation within the walls of God’s family is an ugly aberration and a downright denial of the gospel of grace: “Listen, my beloved brothers, has not God chosen those who are poor in the world to be rich in faith and heirs of the kingdom, which he has promised to those who love him?” (2:5).

So, this letter is going to ask us to reflect on the price tags we attach to people as we experience church together. It is going to be an uncomfortable examination of whether our whole way of assigning value and worth is actually distinct from the world in which we live or merely an uncritical aping of it.

Symptom 3: These Churches Are Not Doing Good Works

“What good is it, my brothers, if someone says he has faith but does not have works? Can that faith save him?” (James 2:14).

Here is why I think the letter of James is so challenging for the evangelical church. James is writing to a church that has faith, one that loves the gospel. The theology on offer in its worship services is orthodox, the doctrinal precision second to none. This is a church that loves preaching. Its members love the Bible. Yes, they love hearing it, but they don’t do what it says (1:22). And so James writes with a very stark prognosis indeed: no good works, then actually no living faith. You’re dead. “For as the body apart from the spirit is dead, so also faith apart from works is dead” (2:26).

When I was little and visited the doctor, I remember being asked to stick out my tongue. Here James is essentially doing the exam: “Let me take a good look at you. Let me examine you and listen to you.” And what he hears are explosive words; what he sees are ugly lines and an absence of good deeds.

So, those are the symptoms. What’s the cure?

Please observe what James doesn’t say. He never says that the cure is simply this: speak good words, don’t draw lines, and do good deeds.

No. “Rather,” says James, in effect, “hop off the table and come and take a seat, for I need to speak to you. Let’s park your symptoms. They’re not your real problem. They have triggered one huge warning light. You have a deadly disease.”

Diagnose the Disease

See if you can spot the diagnosis:

If any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask God, who gives generously to all without reproach, and it will be given him. But let him ask in faith, with no doubting, for the one who doubts is like a wave of the sea that is driven and tossed by the wind. For that person must not suppose that he will receive anything from the Lord; he is a double-minded man, unstable in all his ways. (James 1:5–8)

The reason why I’m using the medical term diagnosis is that James’s analysis of the human condition probes beneath the surface to the deepest motivating factors of the human psyche. His judgment is that there is a terrible affliction called double-mindedness (1:8). The Greek word is dipsychos, which literally means “two-souled.” In fact, it seems to be a word that James himself has invented. It’s his own inspired attempt to convey the terrible opposite of what we are meant to be as children of God: wholehearted, consistent, shot through with integrity. As Moo observes, it’s James’s way of expressing what in other places the Bible considers the tragedy of the “divided heart.”9

King David says,

Everyone utters lies to his neighbor;

with flattering lips and a double heart they speak. (Ps. 12:2)

This inner duplicity is why Solomon has to entreat the people in his benediction at the dedication of the temple: “Let your heart therefore be wholly true to the Lord our God, walking in his statutes and keeping his commandments, as at this day” (1 Kings 8:61). Back in the Psalms again, David petitions God with the same request:

May integrity and uprightness preserve me,

for I wait for you. (Ps. 25:21)

We discover that

blessed are those who keep his testimonies,

who seek him with their whole heart. (Ps. 119:2)

Now, if you’re reading closely, you will have noticed that James uses the word “double-minded,” but I have crossed over into speaking about the heart