Sermon Tone Analysis

“*PURE AND UNDEFILED*”

                     (A Series on the Book of James)

 

Westgate Chapel 9~/29~/04                                             James 1:1

 

Proposition:      Life in the Spirit is a life of surrender to God’s mirror; His Word that shows us religion that is pure and undefiled.

! i.    introduction

!! -     THE last sermon series I preached here at Westgate Chapel was on the Book of Judges.

I entitled “No Other King.”

!! -     FOR those of you who remember it, we examined the life of Israel for the first 325 years they lived in the Promised Land…and it was not a pretty sight.

!! -     BELIEVE it or not, after all that God had done for Israel…

!!! ~*     …to deliver them from slavery in Egypt.

!!! ~*     …to feed them, water them and sustain them through 40 years in the desert.

!!! ~*     …to provide them incredible and miraculous victories over their enemies.

!!! ~*     …and to settle them in houses they had not built, eating from farms they had not planted…

!! -     THE vast majority of their first 325 years in the Promised Land were lived in rebellion against God and every kind of idolatry and filth known to human history.

!! -     WE learned that those 325 years were punctuated by the lives of judges who led Israel in between their periods of rebellion.

!! -     WE learned that present in all of those 325 was a deception of the enemy…whose principles illusionists use to this day to hide the truth from their audiences…and Satan still uses to hide the truth from you and me.

!!! ~*     From the stories of Caleb and Othniel, we learned about the principle of deception called misdirection.

!!! ~*     From the life of Ehud, we learned the principle of false authority.

!!! ~*     From the times of Shamgar, we learned about the ruse.

!!! ~*     From the story of Deborah, we learned about the danger of anticipation.

!!! ~*     From Gideon… duped by substitution.

!!! ~*     From Abimelech…confusion.

!!! ~*     From Tola and Jair, repetition

!!! ~*     And from Jephthah, disguise.

!! -     WE learned that the human heart, even though it is regenerated by the Holy Spirit when you and I are born again…can still be deceived by the enemy of our souls.

!! -     BUT what Judges did not teach us, was why the regenerated heart is able to be deceived.

!! -     2 CORINTHIANS 5:17 says,

!!!       “…*if anyone /is/ in Christ, /he is/ a new creation; old things have passed away; behold, all things have become new*.”

!! -     IF “all things have become new…” when you are born again, that has to include your heart.

!! -     SO, how come your new heart, filled now by the Holy Spirit, is vulnerable to enemy deception?

!! -     AND you have to understand and believe that it is.

!! -     DENIAL on this matter will do you no good.

!! -     IN several places in the New Testament believers are warned to ‘not be deceived.’

!! -     IN fact, in Luke 21:8, Jesus is teaching His disciples about what it will be like for Christians at the end of the age, when more and more imposters profess to come from Christ, and He says,

!!!       “*Take heed that you not be deceived*.”

!! -     HE wouldn’t have said it if it were not a possibility.

!! -     BUT why?

How can the born again Christian be deceived and then led off into sin?

!! -     I BELIEVE that we are going to find out in a series I am starting today from the Book of James.

!! -     IT is more than interesting to me, and more than a coincidence, that Judges is the record of Israel’s first 325 years in the Promised Land….and

James is the first book to be written in the New Testament, focusing on the first years of the people of God, this time from every tribe and people and nation…the Church of Jesus Christ.

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! ii.   pure and undefiled

!! -     THE author is the apostle James, brother of Jesus and leading apostle and elder of the church in Jerusalem.

!! -     AND He is writing to believers living in the first 30 years of the life of the New Testament church.

!! -     HE is writing to believers who…

!!! ~*     Have experienced the outpouring of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost.

!!! ~*     Who have seen, first-hand, the explosive spread of the Gospel from Jerusalem to Judea to Samaria and the outermost parts of the earth.

!!! ~*     They have seen the power of God heal the sick.

!!! ~*     They have seen demons cast out.

!!! ~*     They were all witnesses of what we call the Gifts of the Spirit…in operation with full maturity and power.

!!! ~*     In his book, “Pentecostal Spirituality,” Dr Land says that the Church in the Book of Acts was not in its infancy….Because of the work of the Holy Spirit it was birthed in full maturity.

!!! ~*     Name one place today, other than the rural church in China, where all the Gifts of the Spirit are in operation and the Spirit wills.

!! -     SO, all of this has been going on for roughly 30 years…in the power of the Holy Spirit.

!! -     FIRST century Christians have been living in the Promised Land of God’s new “royal priesthood and holy nation”….the

people of God, the Church.

!! -     AND the apostle James picks up his pen, and under the direction of the Holy Spirit writes…

!!!       “*Pure and undefiled religion before God and the Father is this*….”

(James 1:27)

!! -     THAT is the heart of this epistle.

!! -     FOR now, I don’t want you to finish that verse, because it will distract you.

!! -     WHAT follows in the rest of verse 27 is simply one example of what James is getting at.

!! -     AND what he is getting at is that life in the Holy Spirit is not primarily about power.

!! -     THEY were seeing plenty of power…and as you learn when you read the rest of the New Testament, the power of the Spirit was not the cure all for living a holy life.

!! -     MOST of the New Testament was written to people who saw an abundance of the power of the Holy Spirit in their lives every day….but

who needed a great deal of correction.

!! -     WHY?

!! -     BECAUSE their hearts were deceived and their lives lacked the fruit of the Spirit.

!!! ~*     James references deception either directly or indirectly 6 times in his epistle.

!! -     AND to this new Church “dispersed abroad” (verse 1), the leading apostle~/elder of the leading church in Jerusalem (18 months before he is martyred and 10 years before Jerusalem falls to Rome) writes the first letter of correction.

!! -     AND his message is,

!!!       “*Pure and undefiled religion before God and the Father is this*….”

(James 1:27)

!! -     THIS is the heart of the whole epistle!

!! -     JAMES holds the mirror of God’s holiness up to the new Christians of the new Church of Jesus Christ….and

asks, “Is this what your life looks like?

Is this what being filled with the Holy Spirit has done in your life?

Do you look like this?”

!! -     JAMES is not a list of works to run out and duplicate.

!! -     LIKE the Sermon on the Mount, you will soon find that you can’t do it.

!! -     THAT is not what it is there for.

!! -     JAMES is there only as a mirror, for you to look at to see if your “religion before God and the Father is….pure and undefiled.”

!! -     JAMES says to the New Testament Church and to the Pentecostal~/Charismatic movement today…

!!!       “OK, now you have the Holy Spirit….(hold up mirror) this is why He is in you and has baptized you.”

!! -     IT is not primarily about…

!!! ~*     speaking in tongues

!!! ~*     giving words of prophecy

!!! ~*     having words of wisdom or knowledge

!!! ~*     having the gift of faith

!!! ~*     or healing the sick or raising the dead

!! -     THE Holy Spirit is in you primarily for…

!!! ~*     Pure

!!! ~*     Undefiled living.

!! -     IN the original Greek language that the New Testament was written in, pure means…

!!!       “*…*clean, pure, purified by fire.

/1a2/ like a vine cleansed by pruning and so fitted to bear fruit.

1b in a levitical sense, clean, the use of which imparts no uncleanness.

1c ethically.

/1c1/ free from corrupt desire, from sin and guilt.

/1c2/ free from every admixture of what is false; sincere genuine.

/1c3/ blameless, innocent.