Part 3: James 2:17 Carrying Out Your Faith

                I have been thinking about the passage in James where it says “faith without deeds is dead”. Many Christians take this passage to mean, “If you don’t go out and do ‘good things’ in general then your faith is useless”. This is not what the passage is talking about. Simply said, we should carry out our faith. This passage is not saying that we need to tag on good deeds to our faith, but rather, we should act on our faith. If we know God wants us to preach, then to not preach is to make our faith useless. If we do preach however, then we have carried out our faith “in word and deed”. Deeds (or works) can be anything that God has called us to do. It is not limited to helping the poor, but to everything we know by faith (even simply going and talking with someone can be living out our faith; whatever God’s will is for us). If we believe that God wants us to speak for or against something for believers (on the basis of God’s word) then in that case by doing it, we are acting in faith and deed.

                Both works and faith have to work together and can never be separated since we live out our faith in whatever that faith is (as based on the Bible). We can never then have faith apart from carrying it out (that would be sin because we are not doing what we know we ought to do) and things that we do should never be done not in faith, “for whatever is not done out of faith is sin” (Romans 14:23) From this we can see that we are justified by faith being taken to completion and not by deeds independent of faith.