Abridged Worship – September 1, 2024

Next week, we will be breaking from the lectionary for our time together on Sunday morning, because I (Rev. Jacob Shaw) want to take you through a study, (one I did a few summers back that challenged both me and my former congregations in Ontario), to think about their faith life as something that is to be transformative to our lives.

We will be looking at what I call the commands of Jesus. Now to be transparent, what we will review are not commands in the same way as God gave out the Ten Commandments or the Law to the Israelites. What I’m calling the commands of Jesus are comprised of comments and statements, that are spoken from Jesus in the style of instructions or commands, which contain a spiritual or moral significance to them. Over the next year, we will cover about 50 of these commands. Though some lists put the total number of commands being upward of seventy or higher.

The purpose of doing this is to generate in our minds an image of what our lives, in a pragmatic way, would look like if we let Jesus dictate everything we do. It is to help us grasp what our lives would look like if we lived faithfully to what Jesus calls us towards as part of the heavenly work to believe and trust in him.

Now for the theologically inclined in the room, you might be thinking, if we are saved by grace through faith in Jesus, does reviewing all the commands push our faith into a works-based salvation, which is not what the Gospel teaches?

If you asked that question in your head, I would say to you, great question. Here’s my response.

We are saved by grace through faith, this is true, our faith is like a root, which embeds itself in the lust soil of the Lord our God, pulling the nutrients of life into ourselves, being sustained by what it cannot produce on our own.

If our faith is rooted well in God, then we will begin to produce fruit, and we will live and bear a reality of life that is reflective of the nutrients we gain from God.

Faith is the root; thus you can say works are the fruit.

Fruit then becomes a measure, if you will, of how well we are rooted in God. Now this is NOT saying, if you don’t produce fruit you are not saved, because we are not saved by fruit, we are saved by our faith in God and his grace, we are saved by our roots being nestled into God.

But in faith, as we hope to grow. We hope to grow in our relationship with God, because we trust in God, not only for the salvation He offers but for who God’s character is, and so we hope that we will become more like God, and if we are becoming more like Jesus Christ by our rootedness in God, then we will bear fruit. Some might be more fruity than others, but we will produce based on who God calls us to be. Some of us will bear a lot of fruit, others just a little bit of fruit, and others may produce some hard acorns, who knows, but the fruit will be a sign of your growth in faith.

Remember: Grace through Faith is the Root, and works are the fruit.

So, to look at the commands of Jesus, how Jesus calls people to live in faith, it reminds us that our Christian lives should be strongly rooted, but also producing for the kingdom. And, this lesson is a great way to give yourself a rubric, to see if you are bearing fruit, and to find ways to help yourself root deeper with God. Because ultimately the fruit and the law before that, are there to reinforce and celebrate humanity’s rooting into God.

And, we see this very pragmatic exercise of fruit, concerning root, all the time in the scriptures. In our passage from James speaks about how listening to the word of God should move you to then get up, and do what the scripture calls you to do, in this particular passage, it calls people of faith to look after orphans and widows, and to keep oneself from being polluted from the world. Two very pragmatic outputs from being faithful and listening to the word of God, love others and guard your heart.  

Jesus likewise speaks about what we produce into the world, as a sign of what is in us. He speaks to this in response to the Pharisees being concerned about what defiles a person, by what they eat or how they wash, but Jesus says, it is what we produce from within ourselves from our hearts that defiles us,  Jesus lists very concrete categories which defile us, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, greed, malice, deceit, lewdness, envy, slander, arrogance and folly. These are not abstract notions of what a faithlife should or should contain, but they are clear boundaries.

So, it seems that Jesus wants our salvation by faith to take us to our moral works. Again, the root of grace by faith, will produce the fruit of spiritual morality.

So how is it that the Pharisee at the time of Jesus did not understand this, you would think that the Pharisees, with their over-focus on the ritual laws of Moses would have understood this.

Jesus’s initial response should explain a bit to us.

He replied, “Isaiah was right when he prophesied about you hypocrites, as it is written: “‘These people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me.
They worship me in vain; their teachings are merely human rules.’You have let go of the commands of God and are holding on to human traditions.”

The Pharisees were doing work for the wrong reason. They were even formulating false works for the wrong reasons. Their works had become vain repetition for the sake of tradition, or measure of historic or social worth, and were not being used for their true purpose. The works were not being used to serve God, nor because the works were something God was trying to use to teach them, nor because the works were a chance to live out their faith pragmatically.

I remember when I first brought the commands of Jesus out to my former congregation. One Sunday, a woman stayed after church, we were about a month into the series, and she said to me something I’ll never forget.

She said, “Rev. Jacob, I appreciate what you’re trying to do, get people to live a more Christian life, but I think most people, including myself don’t really want that.”

I asked her what she meant,

She said, “Christianity is more of a backdrop of our lives out here, not really our focus. Church is a nice thing to bring our families together, to remember some old traditions, but it’s not really that important to us.”

That, very honest, response has stayed with me. Especially the image of Christianity as a backdrop.

If you have ever had your picture taken at a photo studio, and the photographer has a variety of backdrops they can pull down to make it look like you are in a forest filled with nature or a library full of books and knowledge. With a quick backdrop you can make an illusion of a reality but really you’re standing in front of a flat falsehood with no real depth to it.

Many people want their Christian faith, to be a flat depthless illusion, just behind them enough that when they look at themselves in the mirror they have painted a picture of someone faithful, but really it is just vanity, it a root that resists the soil that is our God, and ultimately stops the production of fruit.

So, we look this year at the commands of Jesus, we remind ourselves that the faith that saves us, is also something that will transform us, because God grace doesn’t just offer us mercy, but it brings us Christ and and Spirit to transform our lives for God’s glory. However, we need to return to Jesus to remind ourselves of what God will transform us towards, so we can let our roots grow deep, moving us towards a life of fruitful production.

Let us pray…  

God, your good gifts pour out upon us, give us the inspiration and energy to produce the fruit of every good act. May our lives yield a full harvest of goodness, righteousness and compassion! May our live honor You! Amen.