Episode 27: What Does Living Faith Actually Look Like?

James 2 asks a difficult question: is our faith actually alive?

In this episode, we unpack favoritism, mercy, “faith without works is dead,” and the shocking line that “even demons believe.” Through the lens of context and culture, we explore what steadfast, living faith truly looks like. A faith that doesn’t just believe the right things, but becomes visible through love, mercy, and action.

Transcript

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Welcome to Rooted with Emily Talento, where we explore who Jesus is through context, culture, and covenant. Today we are in week three of our study through James. So the first week we covered the first half of chapter one, where we looked at the ideas of trials, endurance, wisdom, and the process of sin, like what that looks like in progression. And then last week, in the second half of chapter one, we studied what it looks like to actually live living out God's word rather than just hearing it, being doers, not merely hearers only. And what all of this is pointing to, what the entire book is pointing to, is this idea of steadfast faith. That's the main thing that we are gleaning from James's writing, this idea that that is the aspiration, and also this is how we obtain that. And so today we are going to be in chapter two. We're gonna look at the whole passage of chapter two, which is a long chapter and it's kind of a lot, but it's so good, and there's so many important ideas that we need to get right in our head if we actually want to be living lives that are faithful and steadfast and glorifying to God. So, like always, we are going to study the text together, meaning we're gonna look at the text as a whole. I'll read it. Then we are going to like zero in in certain sections, pointing out observations throughout the whole text. And then, based on the observations that we point out, we are going to identify what this tells us about our God, and then based on what this tells us about our God, we then could determine how we ought to live. It's a response. And this is a way of studying scripture that you could apply to any part. We're gonna just be curious, we're gonna be looking and seeing what the text says, and then based on that, how can we apply this to our lives? We're going to specifically be answering the question: what does living faith look like? So that's the question. We're going to read the passage as a whole together, and then we will zoom back into some passages. Okay. Let's just remember, we just left off with James explaining what true religion looks like, what pure religion looks like. And it is undefiled before God, and it is one that visits orphans and widows, and is holy, keeping ourselves unstained from the world. Okay. Got it? So from there. Because remember, the chapters and the verse breakups, that was added later. This is a letter that James wrote, and so it's one continued thought. As much as we could be reading in its full entirety and understanding where things fit together, the better. So that's where we left off, picking up with chapter two. For if a man wearing a gold ring and fine clothes comes into your assembly, and a poor man in shabby clothes also comes in, and if you pay attention to the one who wears the fine clothing, and say, You sit here in a good place, while you say to the poor man, You stand over there, or sit down at my feet, have you not made distinctions among yourselves and become judges with evil thoughts? Listen, my beloved brothers, has not God chosen those who are poor in the world to be rich in faith and heirs of the kingdom which He has promised to those who love him? But you have dishonored the poor man. Are not the rich the ones who oppress you and the ones who drag you into court? Are they not the ones who blaspheme the honorable name by which you were called? Verse 8. If you really fulfill the royal law according to the Scripture, you shall love your neighbor as yourself, you are doing well. But if you show partiality, you are committing sin, and are convicted by the law as transgressors. For whoever keeps the whole law but fails in one point has become guilty of it all. For he who said, Do not commit adultery, also said, Do not murder. If you do not commit adultery, but do murder, you have become a transgressor of the law. So speak and so act as those who are to be judged under the law of liberty. For judgment is without mercy to one who has shown no mercy. Mercy triumphs over judgment. Verse 14. What good is it, my brothers, if someone says he is faith, but does not have works? Can that faith save him? If a brother or sister is poorly clothed and lacking in daily food, and one of you says to them, Go in peace, be warmed and filled, without giving them the things needed for the body, what good is that? So also faith by itself, if it does not have works, is dead. But someone will say, You have faith, and I have works. Show me your faith apart from your works, and I will show you my faith by my works. You believe that God is one, you do well, even the demons believe and shudder. Do you want to be shown, you foolish person, that faith apart from works is useless? Was not Abraham our father justified by works when he offered up his son Isaac on the altar? You see that faith was active along with his works, and faith was completed by his works, and the scripture was fulfilled that says Abraham believed God, and it was counted to him as righteousness, and he was called a friend of God. You see that a person is justified by works and not by faith alone, and in the same way was not also Rahab, the prostitute, justified by works, when she received the messengers and sent them out by another way. For as the body apart from the spirit is dead, so also faith apart from works is dead. Okay, so much here, so many important crucial things that we need to look at if we want to understand not only this passage and not only the book of James, but again, how do we live lives that are glorifying to God that are steadfast? So, picking up, we're going to do some observations first. We're gonna start in James 2, verses 1 through 7. That's the first section that we're gonna be looking at. Again, as much as I want to go verse by verse, it's just not the wise thing to do because there's so much to cover. And um we'll be here all day. So in chapter 2, verse 1 through 7, we get this passage where James is immediately giving an example that is grounding these concepts to everyday faith. So you have this scene where a rich man comes into an assembly, we could think of a church, and they get special treatment because of their status, their wealth. And then you have a poor man who comes in who is treated less than because of his lack of wealth, lack of status, so on and so forth. So immediately James is calling this out as an example. This directly builds on what James just talked about, literally a second before, where he's saying that pure faith or pure religion, sorry, is visiting orphans and widows. Okay, so this is the opposite of that. This way of thinking is incompatible with Jesus' teaching. We cannot show favoritism because Jesus preached actively against this, this entire idea, and James is bringing it up too: this idea of they are heirs of the kingdom. The last will be first, the first will be last. This is a classic Jesus concept, and so James is now reaffirming that and speaking into it as we are continuing to build out the church. And truthfully, we all are guilty of this on some level. And so James is just calling it out that we can profess faith while still continuing to think like the world in how we view people and how we treat people. And it's something that we need to continually keep in check and continually be seeking God in and continually challenging ourselves to love people more and more as Christ said, without expecting anything in return. And ultimately, steadfast faith requires us to see people differently because God sees people differently. We're not looking at the world through our eyes, we're looking at it through his. Which brings us to our first rooted moment of the episode. There's going to be a few. If you don't know, a rooted moment is when we look at the original context and culture of the time that scripture was written to peel back the layers, see the things that the average person would have understood that we are likely missing today in 2026. So this could feel like an insignificant little interaction. I mean, there are examples of this in all of our lives, like I said, and we could see this in churches and all the things, right? But this interaction between the rich person and the poor person, like this would have been expected because in ancient Jewish and Greco-Roman society, which is what the Bible was written in, right? It operated very heavily on an honor and shame basis, which a lot of the world still operates in to this day. So honor, what does that mean? An honor society is there's a sense of dignity, influence, reputation, public worth. Your reputation matters to your family. Like it speaks on behalf of them. This idea of like individuality is not something that they would necessarily identify with at all. Your value in an honor-based society very much comes from where you sat, who acknowledged you, who you associate with, the proximity to the important people. So when James says sit here in a good place versus stand over there or sit at my feet, that language is carrying a weight that I don't think we are fully comprehending because we are most of us are not from an honor-sham society. At the end of the day, like, okay, maybe our like our prides are a little bruised, but it doesn't affect our identity in the same way. At the end of the day, we're an individual. I don't represent my family or speak for anyone other than me in our culture, right? But that's just not the culture that scripture was written in. The seating arrangements, although could seemingly be insignificant, actually communicated a lot. Hierarchy, importance, value. The wealthy were elevated publicly, the poor were often humiliated or ignored. The early church was incredibly disruptive because suddenly you have rich and poor, you have slave and free, you have Jew and Gentile, you have man and woman all worshiping together as equals in the same place before God. That's unheard of up until this point. Especially remember, this is two Jewish believers. And so this is going against everything they knew to be true culturally. And now Jesus is calling them to something different. I mean, he does that for all of us, but just recognizing like the moment that we are sitting in. And I want you to hear me say this because this is where I think a lot of Christians we get lost. The issue wasn't ultimately where people were sitting, the issue was that the church was still thinking and operating like the world. That was the deeper problem. And so James builds on this in the next section where we are in James 2, verses 8 through 13. I'm gonna read it and then we'll unpack a little bit more together. It says, starting in verse 8, if you really fulfill the royal law according to the scripture, you shall love your neighbor as yourself. You are doing well. But if you show partiality, you are committing a sin and are convicted by the law as transgressors. For whoever keeps the whole law but fails in one point has become guilty of all of it. For he who said, Do not commit adultery, also said, Do not murder. If you do not commit adultery, but you do murder, you have become a transgressor of the law. So speak and so act as those who are to be judged under the law of liberty. For judgment is without mercy to one who has shown no mercy. Mercy triumphs over judgment. Okay, so much here. I will say, I really wish he would have used, every time I read this, I really wish he would have used a different example. Because he uses two extremes, right? He says murder and adultery. I wish he would have said murder and maybe lying. Because I don't think most people are committing murder or adultery in a in a direct sense, right? At some point in their life. But everyone lies. And so I would think it would have done a better, you know, job proving the point that if we commit one sin, if we don't keep Sabbath, that's the same as breaking the law as if we murdered. Yeah, okay, the consequences are different. However, it's still missing the mark, it's still not living in accordance to what God calls us to live. That was a whole sad thing. But this is also continuing to build on what we just talked about, this idea of partiality and favoritism. And so he brings up this idea of the royal law, and what that is, is it's love your neighbor as yourself. And so James is not presenting this as an option. Loving people is just a part of kingdom living. And this is what James is uh unpacking here. How we treat people is at the center or one of the center parts of our faith. Quick insight. So when he says royal law, he's pointing specifically to Leviticus 19, 18, which says, love your neighbor as yourself. And I think this does a really great job. Again, he's talking to the Jewish audience, pointing back from the heart of the Torah to the life of the follower of Jesus Christ and how it's one story. The continuity there is super, super important. And I think that that's something that we miss sometimes and it's overlooked. Our second rooted moment of today is connected to this idea of mercy triumphs over judgment. Now, this line in any time sounds crazy, but it especially sounds crazy in the ancient world. We kind of talked about this in relation to the honor, shame, culture thing. Um, but the ancient world was deeply structured around status, hierarchy, social rankings, judgment, maintained order. There needed to be consequences when people did things wrong. Because mercy was often perceived as weakness. Even just like if you think about that part of the world in general, like where this is, we're in the Middle East, like strength is what is respected. Weakness, uh, mercy, or these concepts that are pillars in Western culture, just are not pillars in other cultures. And we can obviously see this play out because although it's been 2,000 years uh since this was written, the culture isn't ultimately that different. So James is obviously expanding on this idea and like criticizing it to say that actually, just kidding, it's not what you think. It's not that strength is the answer, it's not that judgment is what it needs to happen. He presents mercy as evidence of maturity. Mercy triumphs over judgment. That is so unbelievably countercultural. James is completely reframing everything they know to be true, saying mercy is actually not a sign of weakness, it's not compromise, it's actually spiritual maturity. And uh, you, if you want to be faithful followers of Jesus and you want to be living out your faith, this is part of it. This is just what you do. Just another example of the upside-down kingdom that we can see in real time. And again, it's a challenging concept for all of us, but having the cultural mindset in place, like having that perspective to recognize this is crazy, crazy. It's a difficult teaching similar to how we love people, and that is evidence of faith, but showing mercy is also something that is an evidence of the faith that we claim to have. And so a mature person in the kingdom is not marked by harshness, but of mercy. Okay, the main event. Not that all this wasn't great, but this is the passage in this is, I feel like what probably, yeah, more than any other passage in James, this is what James is known for. Faith without works is dead. And it's also the source of like a ton of heresy over the years, where people take verses in James out of context being used to support the belief that we are required to do works for salvation. It's just not what the text says. I mean, it's if that is what James was actually saying, then he would be the odd man out, but it's not what he's saying. You also, I mean, I've said it a million times, we have to remember who he's writing to, the surrounding context. It's just it's so wild to me how we can just take the Bible and make it say whatever we want it to. Like you really could use the Bible to justify anything. You would not be being truthful to the word. You would have to be chopping things up and cutting things out and just ignoring blatant truths. However, you could you could do a lot of things, it's crazy, and it has been done. So this whole conversation, faith works, what does that look like? It's actually really interesting how James is presenting the argument because he's obviously starting by talking about specific examples, asking the questions, how do you treat people? And as he's continuing to build, he ends up, well, is your faith actually alive at all? He's questioning, not is your faith weak, is your faith immature? He's questioning, like, is your faith dead? Which think about this. That's that's that's such an accusation. He's essentially it's like it doesn't exist, it's non existent. And so what is important to recognize, I've said it like 18 times in this video, I'm sick of sad hearing myself saying it. But remember the context that this is written in, this is to a Jewish audience, and in Jewish religion, in the Way that it was designed to be by God is there was a lot of emphasis on works. There was a lot of emphasis on this idea of not for just the sake of checking things off the list, but rather how can we know that faith is real if we're not seeing it in action? And so obviously, Jesus then shows up on the scene and he's now totally pushing against that in a lot of his teachings, this idea that it's not about our actions, it's about our heart. And James isn't going against Jesus' teachings, but he's also saying if you have true faith in your heart, if you're making the decisions in your heart to die to self, to submit to God, all the things, X, Y, and Z, then that will be reflected in your life. It's not an island, like it's not like an isolated thing where, okay, this part of your life changes, but this part doesn't. And sometimes that is what it looks like. But ultimately, there is a pattern, there is a process of sanctification. If we've been saved for years at this point and we're still struggling with the same things, that's a really big problem. Then that's where we then say, okay, maybe there's something wrong here. Maybe I have to check myself, maybe I don't know. There's there's some work that needs to be done. Throughout the section, James is continuing to give very practical examples. So he's saying, if you see someone who's hungry, if you see someone who's without clothes, and you say nice spiritual words to them, but do nothing for their physical need, then what? Like there's something massively wrong here. Now, James says actually something very cool here in this passage. He brings up two examples of people who lived their faith. He brings up Abraham, who is the patriarch of faith, right? He is where this whole thing started, right? And you can see the language that it even uses around Abraham. It the text calls him a friend of God, which we can see in other places too. But I mean, what what a title. Okay, right. And then James uses the example of Rahab. If you don't remember, she was the woman who was in Jericho and she protected the spies, and then ultimately they came back for her when the city was destroyed and her family and she became part of Israel. Now, this is an extreme contrast because you really wouldn't put them in the same category. Like I said, Abraham's kind of the guy, and she was a Gentile, she was a prostitute, she, I mean, on paper, would not be somebody that we would honor. However, her faith saved her. She had faith in God, it the text tells us. And so, because of that, and it wasn't just faith, her faith was proven by her actions. And that's exactly the point. And the fact that the text brings up the point of Abraham was willing to kill his son because he had so much faith in God, like he would have done it, and so his faith was proven by his actions. It's not conceptual faith, it is real, lived, shown, proven faith. And I love that James uses both Abraham and Rahab as examples. I also just want to double back quick to verse 19. It says, You believe that God is one, you do well, even the demons believe and shudder. So the first part of verse 19 is in reference. Many scholars believe it's in reference to Deuteronomy 6.4, which, if you don't know, it's called the Shema. It's a central passage in Judaism. It's Hero Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. And so, remember, Jewish audience, and so they obviously would know what that meant. But it goes on. Even the demons know they believe and shudder. Belief isn't enough. We you could believe in God, that's great. The demons believe in God. What sets followers of God apart is the following: it's the dying to self, it's the rejecting our flesh, rejecting the things that we want, and reorienting and walking in the other direction. That's like that's the whole thing. And so, okay, cool. I'm glad you believe in God. That's great. It's not the text tells it's not that special. We need to be constantly checking ourselves to make sure that we're not just living in belief, but living in action. And I mean, that sums the entire passage up for today. I think we could end there. Before we close, close. I want to just go back through quick and point out some things in this chapter that we can see our God's character in. One, God does not value people according to worldly status. Our God desires mercy over superiority. Our God cares deeply about how we treat others. Our God is not looking for empty intellectual agreement. Our God desires a faith that is alive, embodied, and transforming. Like, so crucial. And again, we all have seasons, maybe we I don't know, regress a bit, maybe we're confused, maybe there's a lot going on. But if that becomes the norm and not the exception, then there's a much larger conversation to be had. So, based on what we just learned about our God from this passage, those things that I just mentioned, how should we respond? What's our responsibility here? We should be asking ourselves questions. These are just a few questions. Ready? Where am I showing favoritism? We all do it. Where is that happening in my life? Is my faith mostly intellectual? Is this something that's just had knowledge? Because the enemy also has had knowledge. Is it actually being lived out? Where has God asked me to act, but I've stayed passive? This one's convicting. Because it there's probably a reason that we are not acting. And so, in what ways do we have to die to ourselves? Does my life actually reflect what I claim to believe? Now, this question isn't just okay, does my life publicly reflect what I claim to believe? But does my life in all ways, obviously not all, because none of us are sinless, none of us are Jesus, but does my faith, both in private and public, reflect what I claim to believe? Again, not perfectly, but you know what I'm saying. And last but not least, am I marked more by judgment or mercy? Now, these are not easy questions. Maybe you spend some time journaling through it, maybe you pick one or two, maybe you I don't know. However, you feel led, I think that this is a great way of integrating what we can learn in scripture into our lives. So it's not just head knowledge, it's also applied. Anyway, I hope this was a helpful episode in continuing to understand the book of James and what it looks like to be steadfast in our faith. So if you liked it, if you could comment, like, subscribe, follow whatever they have on the platform that you're either watching or listening to this on. You could also follow me on Instagram at Emily Talento and at rooted with Emily Talento. I would really, really appreciate it. And I will see you next time.