DEVOTIONAL by Dave Korb

“Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world.”
James 1:27 NIV

In this verse James is talking about the tension between actions and words, both in community and in one’s personal life.

The Bible has a lot to say about how we care for each other. I pulled a church covenant out of my file and it reads, in part: “We will care for one another in Christian love. We will pray for one another, come to one another’s aid in times of sickness and difficulty. We will be sensitive to each other’s feelings and respectful toward one another in our communication. When we have been offended, we will not strike back. And when we have done wrong we will acknowledge our responsibility. Together we will pursue the ways of forgiveness and reconciliation and as Jesus taught, do it as quickly as possible.” I would join a community like that in a second! Wouldn’t you?

The second part of James’ statement then has to do with personal holiness—the courage to live a godly life.

God is looking for religion as pure and acceptable as the sacrificial lamb in the Old Testament. James raises this question: What does authentic faith really look like? Well, it is demonstrated when men and women of faith look after the widow and the orphan, and keep themselves pure.

In the mid-1990s, Harvard professor Robert Putman caused quite a stir with a widely read article (and subsequently a book) entitled, “Bowling Alone.” Perhaps you’ve heard of it or read the article yourself. Putnam cites the decrease in social involvement and argues that civil society is breaking down as Americans become more and more disconnected from their families, neighbors, and communities. America used to be a place where people subscribed to and became a part of many different societies and associations in their community, but as time has gone by and television and the Internet have taken root, Americans have cocooned themselves and aren’t joining or committing to much of anything these days. As the metaphor goes, rather than bowling on a league with their buddies, Americans are bowling alone.

Isn’t it interesting that James says that the religion God accepts as pure and faultless is religion saturated with the word CARE. Caring is not always a warm hug and a gentle smile—sometimes it is dirty, ugly, and incredibly demanding. But James says that God defines pure religion through the caring acts of His children and the BOLD CHOICES to keep oneself pure.

I read this verse the other day and honestly found myself wanting to tack my own list on to what James had written, but the Spirit of God did not leave blanks for us to fill in. It does beg the question—how are we doing?

THE CROSS: Front and Center
Several weeks ago I (Dave) visited a new church here in Wheaton. This church spent a great deal of time emphasizing that it is not “the kind of church your parents grew up in.” The pastor made sure those in attendance knew that everything is user-friendly and designed to meet their needs. The sermon consisted of a series of nice stories about ways I could improve my marriage, with an inferential reference to the Scriptures. The overall message that came through clearly was that this church is a place where you can have your needs met in a setting that does not contain all the trappings of a traditional church.

This church may be on the extreme end of the spectrum, but nonetheless, it is an end which the American church is all too often embracing in an effort to be relevant. This is not a fair characterization of the majority of American churches, but nevertheless it is a vivid reminder that consumerism has not stayed outside in the parking lot, but is a struggle inside all American churches as they decide what to do with the “it’s all about me” mentality.

I’d like to share an excerpt from John Fischer’s book, On a Hill Too Far Away, which captures my feelings as I walked away from “church” that Sunday morning. Fischer writes:

“In Old Greenwich, Connecticut, stands a church with a cross in it. Unlike most churches, whose crosses adorn the front wall behind the preacher, this one is bolted down into the concrete floor in front of the platform, not more than three feet from where the preacher stands. Its positioning defies reason, art, and convention. No architect in his right mind would have designed such a placement. It is an obstruction. The preacher’s words have to pass through it; the congregation’s eyes always have it somewhere in view, so that even when they look away, it is still there, impressed on the back wall of the retina. It is a sturdy wooden cross, ten feet tall. Nothing about this cross is pretty. It is made of raw, untreated wood, and when you see it up close, you think of splinters, something hard…immovable.

The minute I walked into the church in Old Greenwich and encountered this startling placement of the cross, I felt as if I had discovered something truly significant. For just as the cross has been placed squarely in the center of this church, so it has always stood in the center of history, and in the center of any life that has truly embraced it. And just as the placement of this cross seems uncomfortable, so it is…and so it should be. There is nothing comfortable about the cross.

The church in America has become increasingly accustomed to Christianity without a cross—or, at best, with one hanging harmlessly in the background. In our eagerness to popularize Christianity, we have created a very user-friendly gospel that asks for hardly a sacrifice. We have forgotten that in the middle of this gospel stands a cross—an instrument of execution, whose splinters are largely ignored by a contemporary Christian world eager to tell mostly the good part of the story.

The Old Greenwich cross has to be reckoned with. It is in the middle of everything—weddings, funerals, concerts, baptism, dedications, prayer meetings, Sunday morning services. Every event that takes place in this church hast to accommodate this cross in some way. It’s almost as if the church was built around this cross—as if it were the first thing down before the walls went up and the roof went on. Something tells me that’s the way it should be.”

I had lunch recently with a young man whom I watched grow up in a church I pastored, and who is now a pastor himself here in Wheaton. In the course of our conversation he said, “I want to pastor a church that is not apologetic for being a church and remembers that in the middle of the church stands a cross.” I really believe that the American church longs to see a life driven by cross-like passion. I see this as a tremendous opportunity for our mission family. The opportunities lay before us as we speak to the call of God upon our lives.

How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth, Third Edition
by Gordon Fee and Douglas Stuart © 2003 Zondervan 288 pages
Reviewed by David Korb

Biblical Interpretation is one of the greatest challenges facing the staff of the local church. It is so easy to twist and turn a verse of Scripture to say what we need or want it to say, and not allow it to say what the original authors meant it to say.

In How to Read the Bible for all Its Worth, Fee & Stuart challenge readers of the Bible to adopt a position of Biblical responsibility with regard to the way they handle God’s Word. By way of illustration, the authors offer numerous examples of places where Biblical interpretation has gone awry. They remind us, for instance, that in I Corinthians 8 the issue of causing a brother to stumble is in all likelihood not a reference to a weaker brother, but rather to a brother strong in the faith. Or consider that the phrase in II Corinthians commanding us not to be unequally yoked with an unbeliever is not a reference to the person we marry. In fact, since there is confusion over what Paul was referring to in the original, we cannot state with certainty what it refers to in our time.

The basic principles of exegesis and hermeneutics are laid out in the first few pages of this book. The authors then spend the rest of the tome guiding the reader through a study of how to apply these principles to various styles and genres of Biblical writing. Fee & Stuart define exegesis as the process of discovering the original meaning of the text, while hermeneutics is striving to understand how this exegetical understanding applies to the here and now.

The overriding exegetical principle of this book is that “a text cannot mean what it never meant.” This seems so simple, but it is a principle often ignored. The authors state that the two basic rules for hermeneutics, then, are (1) “A text cannot mean what it never meant to its author or his readers,” and (2) “Whenever we share comparable particulars with the first-century hearers, God’s Word to us is the same as His Word to them.” Where the particulars are not the same, like food being offered to idols, one must use a great deal of precaution in applying the text directly into a current situation.

I used How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth as a basis for teaching a course in Biblical Interpretation in Sri Lanka a couple weeks ago. I recommend it to you as a “refresher course” we could all use as we daily “handle” the Word of God. It will keep us honest and accurate in our understanding and applications.