Some time ago I was visiting with a pastor in another state, and he was talking about how there are well over 30 churches in just their small community. He said, “You know how it is here; everyone says they are a Christian.” I told him I know exactly how it is; in a lot of places in America — in the South especially — virtually everyone you run into says they are a member of a church, and thinks they’re going to heaven. But the problem is, in many cases, they really don’t have saving faith.
Remember Jesus said, “Not everyone who says to me ‘Lord, Lord’ will enter the Kingdom of Heaven, but he who DOES the will of my Father who is in heaven.” In other words, there will be a lot of people who think they have saving faith, but really don’t. How can you know if you have genuine, Biblical, saving faith, or not?
The book that we’ll begin to study today give us a lot of answers to that question. The Book of James shows us what REAL faith looks like. Now I can tell you right off the top that there are some things that genuine, saving faith does NOT look like:
— it does NOT look like the person who supposedly makes a “decision” for Jesus at some point in their life, gets baptized, but then lives like they never met Jesus, with morals and standards just like the world around them.
– it does NOT look like the “religious” person who reads their Bible and goes to church every week, while they gossip about people, play up to those who have money, but totally ignore the elderly, widows, orphans, or the poor!
Real, Biblical faith, James tells us, is an entirely different thing. In Chapter 2, James writes: “If a man says he has faith, but he has no works, will that faith save him?” The answer, of course, is “no”! If you have genuine, saving faith in Jesus, you will have works that demonstrate that your faith is real. What does real, saving faith, look like? Do YOU have it? A lot of people in America today are deceived – are you one of them? This book will show you.
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