Life Hacks (Part 3): Living Authentically

Well, good morning and welcome to Orchard Hill.

It's great to be together.

We are in week three of a study of the book of James.

James is a book that gives wisdom, New Testament wisdom to our lives to instruct us in how to not just live a life that honors God, but also really works in our day-to-day life.

But just before we jump into the passage that you heard read, I want to take just a couple moments and highlight a few things.

This week really kicks off the fall here at Orchard Hill.

And what that means is there are several classes that are happening that start either this week or next week.

There's a class on financial peace.

If you want to think through how to apply some time-tested principles to getting your finances in order, that's kicking off.

Rick Iglesias is starting a class on Luke.

There are men's studies, women's studies, and my wife and I will be teaching a class on Wednesday nights on marriage.

Uh should be a great time as well.

It's also a time if you're not in a group, if you've been coming around Orchard Hill for a while saying, I'm not sure how to meet people, how to connect.

This week is the fall kickoff of life groups.

And so afterward today, you can go into the lobby, follow the balloons.

There's balloons.

And um and that is an opportunity to find a life group or an opportunity to connect with people in relationships, sit in circles, talk about things that matter.

And uh so we hope that that's something that you'll consider.

Also, this week launches all of our student ministries, so 724 for collide or for um, I'm sorry, high school students, collide is back running for middle school students during the morning worship times, and then small groups start for our students on Wednesday nights.

And that's a great thing if you are a student, if you have a student, to get your kids connected just to what's happening here.

Also, I just want to take one other moment and highlight something cool that happened in the last couple of months.

We don't often get a chance just to talk about some of these things here because of just the way that we're formatted here on our week-to-week basis.

But we had a chance to, as a church, buy the property that was for sale in front of the church down on Brand School Road.

I think there's a little map here that shows, so Brandt School Road runs across the top.

You can see the church at the bottom, church building.

There's about an acre plus down there that that was a big chunk, and we own all the land kind of up to the red line, straight back, and then to the right.

And so this really completed uh a purchase for us or a piece of land for us that should give us a lot of options in the years ahead.

We don't know when, it might be in the next couple of years, it might be 10, 15 years down the road, but just through uh a few situations, we were able to do that.

A handful of people and families uh made that possible through their generosity.

And so as a church, we were able to buy that land.

It's just a cool God thing, just in the midst of everything else that's going on, to be able to say we have secured some more property for the future.

Not even sure what that is exactly, is just I think God kind of providing the way for maybe future people that'll be here at Orchard Hill and what God might want to do in this space.

So let's take a moment and pray and we'll jump into uh the teaching today.

Father, I thank you just for each person who's gathered here, who's part of Orchard Hill today and the strip district and Butler County and the chapel.

And Lord, I ask very simply that you would meet each of us, that you would speak to us, that my word would reflect your word in content and in tone and in emphasis.

And we pray this in Jesus' name.

Amen.

So let me ask you a question.

If you want to invalidate somebody, somebody who takes a position or has a take on something, what's one of the best ways to invalidate that person?

Now you could argue with them point by point.

You could make a personal attack, but probably one of the best ways to make somebody seem non-credible is to claim that they're a hypocrite, that what they say and what they do don't match, that the things that they stand for, they don't stand for in all situations, but only in situations that are advantageous for them.

And certainly you don't have to have been around very long to realize that one of the great charges against Christians and against the church is that it's full of people who say one thing and live another.

But I'd like to take this charge of hypocrisy out of faith for a moment and just examine it in a current cultural moment that we're living in.

Because I think you'll see an analogy here.

And what I'd like to do is I'd like to just for a moment talk about the Nike ad that was released this last week on Colin Kaepernick.

I don't know if you've seen this.

This is Colin Kaepernick.

He played quarterback for the San Francisco 49ers, and he began kneeling during the national anthem.

He actually started sitting first, and when he was sitting, what he would do is at first he wore socks that said that had like cops as pigs, kind of a thing, and then he decided to kneel, and then it became a thing that several people started to do.

And Nike has come out with this ad campaign that says basically believe in something even if it means sacrificing everything.

Now, before you say, oh no, where's he going with this and where's this going to land?

I am not going to try to resolve how anybody should think about Colin Kaepernick here today.

I think the socks about the police were uh very poor taste.

But but here's what I actually want to talk about, and that is the reactions to this commercial.

So this was in the New York Post just a day after this ad came out.

Here's what they wrote.

They said, Brothers and sisters, go tell it on the mountain.

It's all a con.

Colin Kaepernick, now soulfully introduced as an across-the-board Nike prophet of for profit, profit spelled differently, uh profit for profit, via a Nike ad campaign suggests believe in something, even if it means sacrificing everything.

A noble sentiment for sure.

But let's take a look at Nike's beliefs.

It believes in third-world labor being paid pennies per hour to make sneakers sold as status symbols to the most vulnerable among us, children and teens.

At obscene prices.

Labor rights investigators have regularly listed Nike among the worst of the worst in operating Asian factories under draconian authorities in inhumane conditions.

Just do it.

Nike once explained that it wasn't Nike that was responsible for the abuse of workers, but blamed it on the foreign subcontractors.

Another con.

The subcontractors were contracted by Nike to make Nikes.

But I guess Colin Kaepernick's good with that.

Now, again, my point here isn't to say that I agree with this or disagree with this.

It's to say, here's what people who don't like what Colin Kaepernick has has stood for or what he knelt for or anything else can do to discredit him.

They can say he's a hypocrite because he doesn't care about uh forced labor in third world countries, or I've heard people say Nike is is currently fighting a lawsuit from women about unfair pay and about discrimination and poor treatment in the workforce.

Doesn't he care about women and doesn't he care about people in third world countries and how can he take money to get his ad out there if he's for the oppressed?

And what it successfully quickly does is it raises a question where you say, is he really about the oppressed?

Or was this just convenient?

Now, not to be outdone, people who see Colin Kaepernick as as a paragon of virtue will point to the hypocrisy of people on the other side.

And what they'll say very quickly is they'll say, well, anybody who who feels as if they need to take a stand for the flag or for America and for the military, there's at least some hypocrisy there.

And usually what they'll do is they'll point to a politician who is famously kind of going against this, and they'll say, that same politician, when asked if John McCain were a war hero, said, the only war hero I would have is one who's not caught.

And so they would say he can disrespect the military in one breath and appear to fight for it in another.

Again, my point isn't whether you agree with that or not, but how easy it is to say, I'm going to discredit this based on what people say.

And certainly you don't have to be an expert in pro football to realize that there are people who are now saying, I won't watch, or I won't uh kind of tolerate this, who have cheered for players, who have beat their girlfriends and wives, and who have been accused of assaulting women in various occasions, and yet they can still cheer for them.

And so people will say that's hypocrisy.

Now, now you may say, okay, where's this going?

Well, here's what James is doing, I believe, in James chapter 1, verse 19, and following, and that is he's pointing out the difference between what he calls worthless religion and pure religion.

James 1:19

Here's where we see this.

He says, very simply in verse 26, that those who consider themselves religious and do not keep a rein on their tongues deceive themselves.

And then he says this he says, their religion is worthless.

And then he defines pure religion.

He says, religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this.

And so what he's doing is he's saying, if you want to see what has credibility, what has staying power, here's pure religion versus worthless religion.

Now you may object and say, well, I don't really care for religion, and one of the reasons I don't care for organized religion is because of a standard, and I never want to be accused of not living up to a standard, but but here's what I would push back with, and that is all of us are religious in one way or another.

Even the Colin Kaepernick thing goes to beliefs that we hold.

And those who say, you know what, apart from maybe the Sox thing, uh, a man kneeling at the national anthem to bring awareness to some challenges in our culture and some inequalities, seems virtuous.

And people who would say, no way, because that's disrespectful to the military and to the flag and to different things and police entities, those are beliefs that are born out of something that we hold dear, and our beliefs ultimately come from a worldview.

And what a worldview is, whether we call it this or not, is it's a form of religion.

It's something that controls our thinking and leads us forward.

And here's what James is concerned about here.

He's concerned with people who say, I have a worldview, I have a perception of how things should be, but then live differently than what it is they believe.

And whether you believe the Christian message, or you say, I'm simply spiritual and not necessarily Christian or concerned about such things in my thinking, or maybe you're here and you're saying, I don't I don't believe really anything.

I see myself as agnostic, atheistic.

You still have a worldview, and what James is doing, I think, here speaks to universal things in the five aspects I'm going to talk about in all but one of these, probably cut across any belief system that you have.

And so here's what he does: he talks about five aspects in this passage.

First, I'm just going to say the relational aspect of how our worldview, our belief system should impact us.

Verse 19 and 20.

He says, My dear brothers and sisters, take note of this.

Everyone should be quick to listen, slow to speak, slow to become angry.

Now, again, this is New Testament wisdom literature, so what he's doing is he's giving these commands.

He's saying, here's how you should live your life.

He says, Be quick to listen, slow to speak, slow to anger.

And what he's doing in this moment is he's saying, so often the reason relationships are wrecked is because we're actually quick to speak and slow to listen and quick to anger.

And you may say, well, okay, anger, I get it, but but what he's driving at here, I think, is not so much an anger that is about an injustice outside of ourselves, but when our own pride is pricked.

Ephesians 4.26 says, be angry but do not sin.

And so it shows us that it's possible to be angry without violating something.

But what he's doing here with tying anger to being quick to listen and slow to speak is he's talking about an anger that's rooted in our selfish pride.

In other words, it's a kind of anger that says, in essence, I'm not angry because somebody else is being hurt, I'm angry because I'm being offended.

And how we know the difference is when we won't listen to another point of view and we have to speak to prove ourselves and to defend ourselves.

When we say, I have to get in the last word.

If you're in a relationship and somebody says to you, you always have to have the last word, or you always have to be right, that is not a compliment.

That is somebody saying, Your pride is always getting the better of you, therefore I can't have an honest conversation with you.

And what James is doing here is he's saying very simply that if you have a worldview that says there's something greater to live for than just myself, again, whether that's Jesus Christ or something else, he's saying it should impact how we live in our relational world.

And then he moves to a theological aspect, and this is the one that's probably most uniquely Christian, although not entirely, even here.

He says this, verse 21, therefore get rid of all moral filth and the evil that's so prevalent.

Now you might hear that and say, oh, this is this is the the Christian thing to call everything in the world filth and kind of this idea of moral perversion.

But I don't think that's actually exactly what's happening here because what he does is he says, Therefore get rid of all the moral filth and the evil that's so prevalent and humbly accept the word that's planted in you that can save you.

Verse 22, do not merely listen to the word and so deceive yourself.

So so what he's doing here is he's saying this in essence.

He's saying that that some of us will be so driven by our own agenda that we'll have no higher authority.

And the word for filth here does not mean filth out there.

It actually was a Greek word that meant wax in the ear.

And what it means is as we as we don't follow the teaching and don't humbly accept or be teachable to the things that are revealed in the Word of God, what happens is that we actually can't hear the Word anymore.

And so the theological aspect here of false kind of religion or hypocritical religion or a hypocritical approach to issues that are important and pure kind of faith is this, and that is that the person who is more hypocritical will say, you know what, I'm gonna define my own version of what is true and what is right.

And we see this all the time in our culture, where people will appeal to a higher moral authority and they can't define where it comes from.

But the the the the understanding that James is pushing here is he's saying that the true understanding of faith will humbly accept the word that's planted in us.

And what that means is that we verse 25 here, that we'll look intently at it, meaning we'll study it, we'll we'll savor it, we'll let it shape our thinking.

In some other places, the Bible uses the word meditation for this.

In Joshua 1:8, Joshua was instructed to meditate on the word of the Lord, Psalm 1, verses 1 and 2, to meditate, Psalm 19, verse 14, to meditate.

Joshua 1:8 Psalms 1:1 Psalms 19:14

And sometimes in our culture, people have seen meditation as being somehow non-Christian, because they say what you're supposed to do in meditation, Eastern meditation, is empty your mind and just take whatever thoughts come in.

And and that probably is not a Christian idea, but the idea of meditation in the Bible is the idea of filling your mind so thoroughly with the Word of God that it is implanted in you and it changes you, and to humbly accept it and to live it so that your way of living is aligned with the God of the universe, not just your own best take on what can be.

So then we see another aspect here.

I'm just gonna call it the verbal aspect, verse 26.

Those who consider themselves religious and yet do not keep a tight rein on their tongues deceive themselves, and their religion is worthless.

Now, this is the second time that he's used the word deceive themselves.

And I think what he's driving at here is that the tongue ultimately reveals what's inside of us.

And what this means for you, for me, is that whenever we basically say, well, I said that, but I didn't mean it, that the tongue is actually very revealing of what's deep inside of us.

Jesus said the same thing in Mark chapter 7.

Mark 7 · chapter mention

What he said in verse 20 and following, he said that the tongue and the heart reveal basically what's inside a person.

In other words, the tongue reveals the heart, it reveals what's there.

Now, sometimes the tongue can conceal, but but what Jesus was saying is ultimately your words will tell the story.

In fact, James in chapter 3, verse 1 and following talks about the tongue more pointedly, and he says, if anyone can control the tongue, that those people are in control of their whole being.

And so here's again what he's driving at.

If you have to have different standards for different places of how you talk, that then your sense of being driven by something higher is not real.

In other words, if you talk one way when you're out with your friends and another way when you're home with your kids, that that shows a difference.

Now, I don't mean that there's no distinction about appropriate levels of conversation, but but what I mean is if you have to change radically the way that you talk from one setting to another, when you're with clients, you talk one way, and when you're with your your friends from the neighborhood and the PTA, you talk a different way.

He's saying that is showing that there's an inconsistency.

And I would add this, and that is if you're not willing to let what you say in private be heard in public, there's a chance that your religion, according to James, is somewhat hypocritical.

One of the things that that I try to live by, and I certainly don't live by this all the time, but but I try to live by the mantra if I were being videoed, and the video would be shown on these screens someday in front of you know a thousand of my closest friends, would that embarrass me or show me to not be the same person?

And what I hope to live is somebody who says, I'm the same person in private as I am whenever I'm in public.

And what James is saying is that is the essence of true religion.

Now I'll be the first to say I don't always live that way.

But that's the goal.

Here's another thing that James says, another aspect that he points out, and that is the social aspect, verse 27.

It says, religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this, to look after orphans and widows in their distress.

And orphans and widows here stand for the people who are most marginalized, most without hope and help in the society in which we live.

And so what James is doing here very simply is he's saying that that if your religion doesn't actually lead you to care about the people that are on the margins in our culture and in our society, that then your religion is at least in part hypocritical.

Or he uses the word worthless.

Now, again, you know this intuitively.

If somebody is going to a march for the homeless and they walk past somebody who's homeless and say, Well, you know, uh that that's another issue because we're on a march for the homeless, you instinctively say, something's wrong with that picture.

And yet, what James is saying is many of us will practice our faith, our worldview, even if you hardly ever attend a church or hardly ever ascribe to any kind of doctrine, and what we'll do is we'll actually say, I care about declaring something, but I don't actually live it.

And here are the dangers that we get into in this.

I think there are two different directions here.

One is we can be so convinced that we are spontaneously compassionate that we never do anything that's systematic.

And the other is that we can be so um convinced that our systematic approach to compassion lets us get off the hook for spontaneous compassion.

And here's what I mean by this, and that is what some of us will do is we'll say, well, because I give or I support something, then I don't need to care about real situations.

And others of us will say, because I'm willing to care about a situation or I feel something, whether I do something or not, then I don't need to actually do anything that's systematic.

Now, as a church, there are a few things we do to hopefully help you be systematic.

Just in giving at Orchard Hill, one of the things That you're doing is you're helping some of the people in the margins in our hemisphere and in our world.

As a church, we have a partnership with Light of Life, and we provide meals and training for people to get out of a generational cycle of poverty.

So when you give here, there's a systematic component to it.

We help people in Haiti who are some of the poorest in our hemisphere.

We do things through our Elias ministry, our Helping Hands ministry to help people who are on the margins here, where we live.

But it would be easy to say, well, since I gave there, I don't need to care about actual people who are in real need.

And what James is doing is he's saying, if you don't care about real people in real need, then there's a situation that then there's a possibility that you haven't actually been moved by God Himself.

And then he adds, in case you and I haven't gotten the point yet, one more thing.

And it's a tag on to this verse where he says, religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless, verse 27, is to keep oneself from being polluted by the world.

And I believe that this is not a statement about somehow saying that the world is all bad and faith is all good, as much as what he's saying is that our view, our perception of how we live our lives, will be more built around the truths that we uncover in the word of God than it will be from our culture.

And I don't think this is talking about the kind of moral dilemma that you see on TV shows.

You know, the cop show where the cop is like, sees a person who has committed a crime and they say, I can put the person away, but I have to bend one of the rules in order to do it, and they have this ethical dilemma.

It's part of what makes good TV.

You know the show I'm talking about.

It's like all over the place, all kinds of shows.

And and the person's like, do I bend the rules to do a greater right, or do I keep the rules and somehow not do what I consider to be a greater right?

I'm not talking about that kind of an ethical dilemma or keeping yourself unstained.

That's not what's in view here.

What's in view here is the stuff that being polluted we don't even realize is happening because it's happening at such a slow rate that we just take in the values.

And here's where where this probably happens most prevalently in our day and age.

And that is that the church, people who are part of the church universally, often have views that aren't that different from the world when it comes to our material well-being or our sexuality.

Meaning, what we've often done is we've said, you know what, I live the same way my culture lives when it comes to my stuff, and I live the same way that my culture says to live when it comes to my sexuality.

And what James is saying is if if God has really worked in your life, then you won't be polluted by our culture, but instead you'll have a different approach to how you live.

Now, that's what James argues.

So here's what we could do at this point.

And that is, I could say, so if you want to be pure in your religion, what you need to do, what I need to do, what we all need to do is we need to really double down and not be angry and let God work in us so that so that we're not angry.

And what we really need to do is we need to be teachable when it comes to the word.

And what we really need to do is control our tongues, and we need to all practice more compassion, and we need to be more pure about how we live.

And what would happen is some of us would walk out and we'd say, you know what, I do pretty well on that.

And so that's good.

Give it to those people who don't do well.

And some of us would walk out and we'd say, Okay, I'm gonna try harder.

But right here in the passage, I think James shows us that this isn't ultimately the answer.

And you know, by the way, that this isn't ultimately the answer, because if it were, you wouldn't have been convicted as we were talking through that.

Because here's my guess.

As we started to talk through this, some of you started off saying, you know what, I do pretty well.

I do pretty well, but as we got further into the passage, you started to go, all right, maybe not as well on that one.

And what what what James is is driving at here is that the real change that we need, that we want, does not come from simply saying, I'm going to double down my effort, but it comes from something more profound and internal.

Here's where we see it.

Do not, verse 22, merely listen to the word and so deceive yourselves to what it says.

Okay, so he says, Don't be deceived, saying, I'm doing pretty well.

See, self-righteousness feeds on deception.

In other words, saying, I'm one of the good people who does all of this.

And what we do when we deceive ourselves is we judge other people to feel better about ourselves, so we look at somebody else and say, that person's the problem, that person's the hypocrite, and we invalidate rather than owning where we're at.

And he says this anyone who listens to the word but does not do what it says is like someone who looks at his face in a mirror, and though looking at himself, goes away and immediately forgets what he looks like.

So he brings in this little story here, and he says, Here's what it's like when somebody is not living the things that they say they believe.

It's like looking in a mirror, seeing themselves, and then walking out and not having any self-recognition.

That's the self-deception that he's talking about here.

Saying, you don't have real recognition of how you're living.

And then he says this, verse 25, and here I believe is the thrust of this.

He says, But whoever looks intently into the perfect law that gives freedom and continues in it, not forgetting what they've heard, but doing it, they will be blessed in what they do.

Now, when you read that, you could immediately read that and say, Well, doesn't that say double down, look intently into the law?

And that is exactly what it says.

But what is the law here?

Is the law mean going back to the law of Moses in the Old Testament and studying the Ten Commandments more perfectly?

It could be.

But I would suggest that the law here is actually what Jesus is referring to in Matthew chapter 5 when he says, I came to fulfill the law, not to abolish it, but to fulfill it.

Matthew 5 · chapter mention

And the law that gives freedom is ultimately Jesus and studying and savoring what he has done and how he has perfectly given himself to the law because you and I can't.

In other words, the answer here is not to say, I'll do everything just right and then I'll have freedom, but it's to say, let me look at Jesus who has done everything right because I could not.

Now you could hear that and you could say, well, does that mean it doesn't matter what I do?

Not at all.

Of course it matters.

But what happens is when we start to think that our religion and our performance gains us acceptance with God, then we've worked our way into what I would call a works kind of based faith, where we say, as long as I'm good, as long as I do these things, then God likes me and He'll bless me.

But what the New Testament and the Old Testament ultimately teach is that we're accepted because of what Jesus has done on our behalf if we have faith in him.

And because of that acceptance, then we start to say, why would I want to do anything else?

In other words, the way that we overcome relational hypocrisy is not by simply saying, I'm not going to be hypocritical and get angry, but by saying, I'm going to be so entrenched with the word of God, so taken with who Jesus Christ is, that personal insults and slights don't seem like a big deal compared to the glory that God has given to me in Jesus.

I'll be so taken with the Word of God, because I see His heart for me that I'll want to know what He says about what can be, that of course I'll be humble and teachable.

My tongue will be changed because my heart will be overflowing with His grace for me, so how could I be anything but gracious to others?

My compassion will be spontaneous and systematic because I'll be moved by what God has done on my behalf, so much so that I'll say, How can I do anything other than be compassionate to others?

And the same with being polluted, do you see that the way that we're changed is not through simply saying, I'll do better, but it's through saying, by God's grace, I have been accepted, and his love for me is so strong that I want to do this and nothing else.

And if you and I get that, if if we as a church get that, then we'll live authentically.

Not perfectly, authentically.

And the difference is this when you live authentically, you're able to say, you know what, I blew up yesterday and I shouldn't have, and I'm sorry, I let my pride get in the way.

Or you're able to say, I was selfish and my words were hurtful.

But if you're trying to live perfectly and you're self-righteous, you'll always defend yourself and you'll never be able to admit when somehow you have not lived up to the standard that God has given.

And by the way, as I said earlier, I think this is a standard that you don't need the book of James to have, because even if you say, I'm not sure about the the Bible, chances are you'd say, not blowing up at people, using your words well, being compassionate, living for a value that's bigger than just yourself, that's good.

And that's what James points to here and says, if you really want to demonstrate Jesus in your life, then then let yourself look intently into the perfect law, into Jesus who has fulfilled the law, so that these things will be true for you.

Father, we thank you just for what this word challenges in us.

And Father, we ask very simply that you would help each of us who's here to be able to not just hear the word, but to live it.

To live it because we're so taken with your goodness and your love.

And we pray this in the strong name of Jesus Christ.

Amen.