Friday, September 11

Today’s Readings: Proverbs 19:24-29; James 2:17-26; Psalm 19

Every once in a while I run across a theological issue that seems to cause other people lots of problem in terms of understanding/processing that I seem to get intuitively. That’s rare for me because it’s often the other way around. Any way, one of those theological issues that comes easy for me is resolving the issue raised in today’s passage from the book of James: the issue of how faith and works are related to one another. Lots of ink has been spilled on the debate about which of these is most important – faith or works. For me, it’s obvious: the two should go hand in hand. The way I’ve always thought about it is by comparing it to what happens when you fall in love with someone. “Do you begin by doing a series of things – i.e. take them out to dinner, buy them flowers, plan on exotic get-aways – in order to fall in love with someone? No. You naturally do those things because you have fallen - or are in the process of falling - in love with someone. Conversely, it’s hard for me to believe that a person could genuinely be in love with another person and not do those things. The two things are intimately intertwined. Same thing goes with our faith. “Faith and works, works and faith,” the author of James states, “fit together hand in glove” (James 2:18 from The Message). So how do you engage those concepts? Do you isolate them from one another and struggle to figure out which takes precedence in your life; or do you see them as being two sides of the same coin? Or perhaps you have another way of conceptualizing the relationship between the two. I hope you have fun exploring the relationship between faith and works today. Til next time…