James 5:19-20
James chapter five, verses 19
and 20. You’ll notice that James is speaking
to the whole church when he says, my brothers, if anyone among
you wanders from the truth and someone brings him back, let
him know that whoever brings back a sinner from his wandering
will save his soul from death and will cover a multitude of
sins. Amen. This is the word of the
living God for us, his children. One of the things I think about
from time to time is this question. Um, where would I not spend the
night? You never thought of that before
having, where would I not spend the night? I’ve slept before
in a tent, camped a lot, slept in my tree house. Thought that
was a great adventure when I was a kid. Even spent the night for
seven or eight nights out in the Grand Canyon with rattlesnakes
and all the rest. Even one lady on our trip had
a snake in her sleeping bag when we woke up the next morning.
But not me. Zipped that thing up tight. But
I would never sleep on a boat. I would never sleep on a boat
because I have this fear of drifting away. Drifting away, maybe out
to sea. You hear people say, oh, I love
sailing. We go out and we sleep on our boat and we drift away
at sea at night. Not me, a land lover, would not
sleep on a boat. And I think I have this fear
because when I was a kid, my grandparents had a place on Baden
Lake down below Asheboro. And we used to go boat riding
a good bit. And this was back in the early
80s when gas was pretty expensive like it is now. And boats are
gas guzzlers. I don’t know if you know about
that. They’re a hole in the water into which you pour all your
money. That’s what people say. So we would go down there on
a budget, our family, and we’d put $10 of gas in the boat. So we’d turn the thing off and
drift a good bit. And it’s interesting as a little kid where you’d end
up. And at this particular lake, there was a dam on the outlet
end of the lake, and it was called the Narrows Dam, and it was built,
I think, in 1917. So it was built before Hoover
Dam, but it’s a curve of concrete in a narrow gorge, much like
the Hoover Dam. And I remember as a kid, we would
drift, and often drift that way, because that’s where the two
river channels ended up. And across the lake, there was
a cable, probably a thousand foot long cable, I’m guessing.
And on that cable were buoys to hold the cable above the water.
You really couldn’t go past. And along this cable were signs
that said, danger, danger. And I have in my memory us drifting
down the lake. drifting down the river channel
and ending up in this spot. And at just the right time, my
dad would hit the engine, fire up the motor, and we would throttle
away from this great danger. And there’s, I think, a spiritual
picture here that James wants us to see. He says in this passage
of scripture, if any one among you wonders from the truth, drifts
from the truth, falls away from the truth, has a slow leak, or
as we love to say in the South, a backslider. That’s right. That’s
a biblical word. And what does it take before
somebody falls away? It takes a little time. It takes
a little wearing down. It takes a little time. And before we know it, They’ve
fallen away from the church. The official word for this in
the Bible is apostasy. The prefix apo means away from. Apostasize means to go away from
the faith. And we’ll think about that a
little bit more in a moment, theologically and biblically,
because we got to get a little technical about this. And I want
to speak just for a second about a couple of ways where we are
seeing this in our culture. Let me speak to the first way
first. Captain obvious, aren’t I? My
brain and my mind is about gone. I have a friend that I speak
with pretty often. We had lunch this past week and his children
are not walking with the Lord. He’s got four children. Not walking
with the Lord. They range from age 30 all the
way down to maybe age 18. And this brother’s children are
walking in all sorts of ways contrary to the faith and not
just, oh, I don’t love Jesus. Some rather difficult choices
they’ve made to not only walk away from the faith, but to do
other things that are in the face of almighty God. And one
of the things we’ve talked about over the years is they really
haven’t walked away from the faith. They’ve walked away, and
he admits this, They’ve walked away from the legalism. They’ve
walked away from the love of the phenomenal in
the church, say Pentecostalism and the lights and the smoke
and the hoorah, we might say, in the church. And what we’ve
ended up talking about over the years is they’ve not walked away
from just plain Jane Jesus Christ. high and exalted. They have walked
away from all the trappings that this brother has put before his
children and repented of. He’s told them, he said, look,
you, you’ve not walked away from Jesus. I never showed him to
you. That’s a pretty interesting conclusion to come to, isn’t
it? And so what he’s presenting to them now is he’s still ministering
to them in their adulthood is you need to walk towards Jesus.
And so let me encourage you, maybe some of you who have children
or grandchildren or great-grandchildren, and they’re in this stage where
maybe they grew up in the church, but they’re rejecting portions
of it that were not godly or biblical or Christ-like. That’s
a pretty common thing, I think, in today’s day and age. And maybe just an encouragement
for you, you might go to them and say, you know what, at that
stage in our lives, We didn’t know better. At that stage in
our lives, God had not taught us. And I hate the fact that
you don’t love Jesus like I do. But I also hate the fact that
I may have, don’t say I may have, that I did bring confusion into
your life. That would heal a lot of things between parents and
children and grandchildren, I do think. And that’s one thing I’ve
experienced in chatting with this brother. But there’s another
phenomenon that I think is out there And you’re seeing it maybe
first in Europe, but it’s coming this way. It’s called deconstructing
your faith. And maybe you’ve not heard of
that term, but you’ve seen it. People are peeling back all the
layers of their lives, all the layers of their parental upbringing.
They’re peeling back all the layers of their formal education,
you know, because it’s racism and you know, I wasn’t sensitive
to all the umpteen genders that are out there. And, um, you know,
I didn’t, my parents were hard on me or they expected too much
out of me. And then, Oh, I got dragged to church and, um, you
know, religion was shoved down my throat and all the rest. And
so they’re deconstructing their lives and then they’re constructing
it in an awful ungodly and unbiblical way. That’s really popular thing.
So when I was a kid, we’d be in youth group and we’d be bumping
along, you know, roller skating and bowling and doing things
youth groups did. And somebody in the youth group
would say, I’m an atheist. Well, they really weren’t. It was just
cool to say, 14 years old, I’m an atheist. They thought that
was pretty neat. That’s actually rather scary.
But I think now we’re seeing a very serious movement in the
life of many young people where they are saying, I reject and
I renounce all things religious. And I want to encourage you if
you’re in either of these two camps, maybe you’ve got a loved
one who’s declared to be deconstructed and deconstructing. Maybe you’ve got a loved one
who rejects the religion of their childhood because maybe it had
some messed up things in it. I don’t know about y’all, but
the American church is pretty doggone messed up. And to get
back to the purity of Jesus Christ is very important. So maybe you
fit in one of those camps, but hold on to your hats. We want
to think a bit about these things as we walk through this passage.
Remember where we are. We’re at the tail end of James.
And this is it. These are the last two verses.
And what do we say? He drops the mic. We gotta be
cool, right? He drops the mic. This is the
end. He doesn’t say, say hello to, you know, all the Greek names.
He doesn’t give them a benediction. He just says, save wanderers. That’s a great ending to a sermon,
isn’t it? This was a letter, an epistle
that was read probably like a sermon to the people of God. We’ve been
working through this since well before Thanksgiving. And here
we are in March, but this was read in one fell swoop in a congregation. And so at the tail end of this
passage or this letter, this epistle, he says, if anybody
is suffering, let them praise God. If anybody is sick, let
them call for the elders. Now he’s saying, if there’s any
among you who are wanderers, all of you, the whole church
need to minister to these people. Um, we have the little saying
in our church, look around, Take notice of who’s not here. And
just because somebody’s sick or traveling one Sunday doesn’t
mean they’re in danger of apostasy. Don’t start whack-a-moling everybody,
you know, because they weren’t here. But we do from time to
time have people that wander away. They slip away. And so
we should call them. We should write them. We should
encourage them. And maybe the lesson tonight is we should exhort
them to keep the faith, to walk with the Lord, I think of the
little saying that Cain responded to God with, am I my brother’s
keeper? And what was God’s emphatic answer?
Yes, you are. And so you may have the question,
are you one another’s keeper? And I think when we covenant
together as a congregation, the answer is yes. When we present
the glossums and the flinchums next week, we’ll have them give
assent to the vows of membership. But we’ll make a statement, I’ll
make a statement that says these brothers and sisters have obligated
themselves to this fellowship and to one another. And so they
owe you their gifts and graces, but we owe them our gifts and
graces. And sometimes that means we form
a relationship with one another in such a way that we may go
put our hand on somebody’s shoulder and say, what are you thinking?
What are you not thinking? Brother, what are you doing?
Sister, what are you doing? Now we need to be careful and
think through who ought to do this and how it ought to be done. But are we our brother’s keeper?
The answer is yes. I think of Ephesians chapter
four where Paul will soon preach as we’re making our way through
Acts. He’s gonna go from Athens, I think in Corinth, by Ephesus. And he says in chapter four of
Ephesians, he says when Christ was risen and was being exalted
up into heaven, usually a king in triumph, and he’s got Psalm
68 in his mind where it says when God ascends his throne,
men bring him gifts of tribute. You can imagine a king coming
back down the roadway into his little kingdom and the people
lining the roadway saying, long live the king. He’s won the battle.
Long live the king. He’s protected us. Long live
the king. Our realm is safe. And they give him gifts. They
offer him gifts that go into the treasury because you can
imagine after a long war, the treasury has gotten empty. So
the people give him tribute. They give him, um, Money, they
give them gifts, and they bring the victory spoils of war with
them and refill the chest of the treasury of the kingdom so
that when there’s the next war, they got money to fight the battle.
Well, Paul takes in Ephesians 4, Psalm 68, and he changes,
under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, the meaning of it,
and he says, when Christ ascended on high, in a sense, when he
was making his victory march back down the road into the heavenly
city, Instead of receiving gifts, it says he gave gifts to men.
And I don’t know if you’ve caught that in Ephesians 4, but it says
he gave to the church, some to be apostles, some to be prophets,
some to be pastors, and some to be teachers. And then he goes
on to explain the benefits. Maybe similar to 2 Timothy 3. You know, all scripture is breathed
out by God and is useful for teaching and rebuking and correcting
and training in righteousness so that the man of God is fully
equipped. for the work that God has prepared
for him to do. Well, Ephesians four says, why
do we, we don’t have apostles anymore. We don’t have prophets
anymore, but we do have pastor teachers. Why did God give them
to us? To bring us to the full measure
of the statue stature of bearing the image of Jesus Christ. And
if you’ve wandered away, If you’ve left the fellowship and you’ve
left the fold, then you’re leaving that opportunity to grow in grace. We are living in a day and age
of churchless Christianity. And there is no such thing as
churchless Christianity. To be a Christian means you identify
with and unite with the people of God in some way, shape, or
form. And so we have the little saying,
come early, stay late. Make yourself available to the
people of God. One of the things I love about
Sunday morning is the little coffee fellowship, and sometime
before nine o’clock. I got here this morning about
8.20, because I needed to be, and the coffee was already percolating.
Don’t come too, too early because you might find the door locked.
But people start coming a little before nine, I think, and they
sit around the table and they drink coffee and they catch up
with each other. Come early, stay late, make yourself available
to others. And this helps us, I think, as
we’ll see, avoid some of the examples of the Bible. Remember
when Paul finished one of his letters, he speaks of Demas. who was in
love with this present world. And he abandoned Paul. And then
there was Alexander the coppersmith who did Paul great harm. And
we think of Ananias and Sapphira and the Old Tester and the Book
of Acts who wanted to be first in the church. And they, you
know, they walked in with their big check, you know, here’s how
much we gave. And they were lying about it.
And then we think also of Judas. He was numbered among the disciples.
yet he betrayed our Lord and Savior. Our passage begins by
saying, my brothers, it’s speaking to the church, the church who
comes early and stays late. It’s speaking to the church,
those who’ve united together in fellowship by vow and by membership
and by conviction and by being engaged to one another in the
Lord Jesus Christ. My brothers, if anyone among
you, one of your fellow members. Y’all know, I don’t know, the
last 18 months, well, probably back three years during COVID
it started, we had a lot of people coming our way. But one of the
things the elders noticed is we had a lot of people coming
our way and staying and even taking ownership in the church.
But one thing they never did. And Many of them, am I exaggerating,
actually refused to join. I don’t believe in church membership. I do believe in taking over your
church, but not church membership. And so y’all know we made a correction
last year. It was a painful correction.
But we said you can’t have the benefits of marriage without
a wedding. You can’t have the benefits of the church without
joining. We believe church membership is important. Kick our tires
for a little while. If we’re for you, then join us.
But you can’t be perpetual tire kickers and you can’t come in
here and take ownership without membership. We believe that to
be biblical. And we took some bruising for
that, but we believe it was the right choice, the healthy choice.
And you now see why this passage is a prime example. We owe each
other our gifts and graces. We obligate ourselves to one
another. And we say, in fact, our last vow of membership, I’m
ad-libbing it, but our last vow of membership says, I’ll submit
to the authority of the church. And if I’m delinquent in doctrine,
going astray in doctrine, or if I’m delinquent in life, going
astray in life, I’ll submit to your exhortation. I’ll submit
to your words of encouragement or even your hard church discipline. My brothers, if anyone among
you wanders from the truth, I want to think for a moment about this
wanders from the truth. Albert Moeller, the theologian
of the Southern Baptist church, somebody who’s, um, Very respectable
thinker, probably the most incredible thinker of our day. He’s come
up with a theological triage. You know what triage is, right?
A hospital emergency room. You know, there’s a wreck on
the highway. And so they’re bringing on all these people by ambulance
and there’s triage. Who’s the most serious, right?
Who needs surgery? Who just needs a Band-Aid? Who
needs maybe some mid-range care triage, we look at, we assess
and we establish what’s what’s needed. Mohler says we need to
do theological triage and he has these three levels of theological
triage. First level would be creedal.
You don’t come to the church and say, I don’t believe in the
Triune God. because you can’t be a Christian and not believe
in the triune God. You don’t come to the church
and say, well, that atonement business, that’s a little bloody
and messy and that’s cosmic child abuse. That’s what some people
believe. Mainline denominations believe
that. In fact, somebody that came to us from the downtown
Presbyterian mainline church told us that when they served
as an elder and they were serving communion, they were not to mention
the blood. People don’t want to hear about
the blood. Well, I do. Because it’s all I got, the blood
of the Lord Jesus Christ. Theological triage says there
are creedal imperatives. Believe in the apostles’ creed,
the Nicene Creed, the major ones. The second level, though, would
be what we might call confessional. We have our Westminster confession
of faith. Those of you who’ve been through
our new members class recently, you’ve heard these distinctions.
We have our confession of faith, the Westminster Divines, and
a lot of people hold to our confession of faith. There’s a branch of
the Baptist that have the 1689 confession. They’ve taken our
Westminster confession of faith and they’ve just taken out the
Presbyterian government stuff and they’ve taken out the baptizing
babies and covenantal stuff and they’ve got a nice little confession
that we happily gave them. Is everything in the confession
necessary to be a Christian? What if you do baptize babies?
What if you only baptize adults? Believers baptism, pedo baptism,
we call it. Those are church confessional
things where the scriptures may not be so explicit that we would
say you can’t be a Christian if you don’t baptize babies.
Though we’re pretty strong about it. We think you should because
we believe in the covenant and all its promises. But you can’t
break fellowship. We should hug our local Baptist,
right? Who believes the Bible, who believes
in the Trinity, who believes in Jesus Christ and the blood
atonement. So we have our confessional level
of triage where there’s some differences. There’s some variations,
but then there’s this third level of triage and we would call it
convictional. And I want to give you some warning
as we think about this passage, because sometimes this convictional
stuff, this third level stuff is where we get in our church
fights. Are you a Republican or a Democrat? Do you homeschool? Do you send your kids to public
school or private school? Do you drink alcohol? Do you
play cards? Do you watch sports on Sunday?
Do you let your wife work outside the home? Are you on the Dave
Ramsey budget? Are you a spin thrift, just blowing
it all, using a credit card even? Um, how long is your denim skirt?
I mean, I’m starting to strike a chord, aren’t I? These are
things that you hear in the church and this is the stuff we fight
over, isn’t it? Aren’t they? We fight over this
third level business. And so when he says, my brothers,
if any of you wanders from the truth, you don’t go grab somebody
by the neck and say, I heard you voted for a democratic candidate.
How dare you? You’re about to apostatize. But
that’s where we, that’s where we go. And that’s what we do. That’s not what James is saying. This is someone who’s deconstructing
their faith. This is someone who is wandering
away from Jesus. This is someone who’s been in
the church and maybe their marriage is growing stale. And maybe the
lady next to them at work is becoming more attractive than
their wife. And they’re dabbling with adultery. which we know
from the book of Proverbs, because we’ve been reading it on Sunday
night, that leads you to death. A man who falls into the trap
of adultery is like an animal walking to the slaughter. I remember
as a kid, my mom noticed our next door neighbor was coming
home from lunch, coming home for lunch with another woman.
Wife was at work, child was at school, and my mom wrestled with
what to do. What do I do? What do I do? Do
I tattle? And she and dad talked about
it, and they prayed about it. And mom had to go tell the neighbor,
your husband’s bringing home another lady from work. They’re
pulling in the garage, and they’re leaving a little while later.
I mean, you do the math. Doesn’t take much to figure that
out. And they ended up marriage broken
apart. But I remember her coming over
one time. I was a pretty young fella, and she thanked my mom. You’ve rescued me from something
I had no idea over. But you know, how often do we
hesitate? Well, it’s not, it’s not my business, right? We look
the other way. It’s not my business. Or maybe
we don’t build relationships with others because we don’t
come early. We don’t stay late. We don’t get involved in other
people’s lives. And James very plainly says,
my brothers, if anyone among you rescues a wanderer from the
truth and brings him back, This is somebody going this way instead
of that way. This is somebody who’s fallen
into a pit. This is someone who’s in Satan’s grip. This is someone
who is on the wrong pathway and is making poor choices. You know,
sometimes we, um, we do church like we do our home. Do y’all
have this in your neighborhood? Everybody, everybody pulls in
the driveway, they open the garage door, they roll in and they shut
the garage door and you never see them. And sometimes we zip
in and out of church a little quick. And sometimes we slip
out before anybody can look us in the eye and say, how are you? Or we silence our phone or we
mute our text or we put a little fence around ourselves. I’m not
touchable. And there’s a sense where we
need to submit ourselves to the church, make ourselves vulnerable
because it may perhaps be that God in his wisdom lets you at
some point in time begin to wander from the truth. You say, oh,
I’m here on Sunday night, would never, never happen to me. Remind
you of the fifth chapter of our confession of faith on Providence,
which we thought about this morning. There’s a chapter, a fifth section
in that chapter on Providence that says, sometimes God in his
wisdom, for his just and his holy ends, does for a time leave
some of his own He leaves them in their sin, and he even lets
them go whole hog into it. And he does it for a purpose.
He does it to show them the wickedness that remains in their hearts.
He does it to show them their constant need for Jesus. He does it to show them how much
they need his salvation. That’s a scary, chapter, a little
subsetting of our confession of faith, and it’s in there.
I remember we studied it with the women a couple of years ago, and I
think the men will study it in a couple of chapters. And when
I read that, it really sunk into me about three years ago. Ooh,
God will let you. Maybe like Peter walking on the
water, you lose sight of Jesus and he lets you start to sink.
And isn’t it wonderful to be in a church where there’s all
kinds of arms to grab you? and to say, return to Jesus,
put your eyes back on him, don’t lose your faith, don’t sink.
I wanna end by a little simple illustration, a shepherd’s crook.
The pastor is a shepherd, the elders are shepherds, and a shepherd’s
crook is usually a pretty large staff taller than the shepherd,
and on one end there’s a hook, and that hook is to rescue, right,
to pull back. But there’s also a butt end of
that stick, and what do you think that’s for? What you doing? What you thinking, sheep? And that’s the ministry of the
church. And so when we don’t submit ourselves to the church,
we are rejecting God’s provision for us on earth. It is a pathway
to heaven that is full of dangers and toils and snares and devils. And to try to do it alone, it’s
very foolhardy. And so I hope that we will consider
our obligations to one another as we seek to keep everyone in
the arms and in the fold of our Lord Jesus Christ. Now, another
question comes to our minds as we think of the end of this passage.
Whoever brings back a sinner from his wandering, and it says,
we’ll save his soul from death, and there’s a second thing, we’ll
cover a multitude of sins. I almost forgot this part. Got
to turn my paper over. Who gets saved and who gets their
sins forgiven? Should we have this lottery where,
hey, everybody, you need to go rescue wanderers. You’re going
to get forgiveness. You’re going to get your sins covered. No,
he’s not talking about you. This isn’t a contest in the church,
you know, a raffle. Bring back the most sinners you’ll
get. I mean, that sounds like purgatory, doesn’t it? You rescue
a sinner and you save their soul. You save their soul from death.
You cover a multitude of their sins because they come back and
repent. Psalm 32, blessed is the one
whose sins are forgiven, whose sins are covered. And we have
to think theologically about this. I didn’t mean to start
a second sermon, but bear with me just a second. Think about
the four places the seed, the gospel falls. It falls on the
path. It falls on the rock. It falls on the thorns and it
falls on the good soil. The path is trampled, the seed
is trampled, the birds snatch it up. Jesus says later that’s
the devil snatching it. People can’t believe and be saved
because the seed is snatched. So it could be the person in
your church that’s wandering never was really saved, right? Seed falls on the rock. It grows,
but it’s withered because there’s no moisture. Jesus says they
have great joy, but no root. Great joy, but no root. They’re
tested and they fall away. We would say of that person,
they were never saved either. And then there’s the seed that
falls among the thorns. The thorns grow with it, but
choke it. And Jesus says, this is the person,
this is the person who hears, but the cares of the world, the
riches of this life, the things of this world choke out their walk with the Lord. Only
the seed that falls on good soil will grow and yield. Jesus says,
these are the ones who hear, they hold fast to his word and
they bear fruit in abundance. And so I think we have to think
theologically. The seed gets scattered and it
falls in all kinds of places. And so we may think someone has
heard the gospel. We think their testimony is true,
it’s credible. They can even bear some, what
looks like fruit in their lives. only to find out later they fell
away. Not everybody in the South is a Christian. Part of that’s
because a lot of people have come down and moved in among
us. But not everybody in the South
is a Christian. We used to think that, didn’t we? It is not the
case. And so pray to Almighty God that
those you love, those you are in contact with, the gospel will
fall on good soil and yield fruit. Let’s do go to God in prayer.
Father, we thank you for the chance to think on these words
and we pray that you would add your blessing to them. We might
store these up in our heart and our mind. Help us to think ministerially
towards others for the sake of their souls. We pray in the name
of Christ. Amen.