James No.17 In Retrospect

Luke chapter 15 and verse 1. Then drew near unto him all the publicans and sinners for to hear him. And the pharisees and scribes murmured, saying, This man receiveth sinners and eateth with them. And he spake this parable unto them, saying, What man of you, having an hundred sheep, if he lose one of them, doth not leave the ninety and nine in the wilderness, and go after that which is lost, until he find it? And when he hath found it, he layeth it on his shoulders rejoicing.

And when he cometh home, he calleth together his friends and neighbours, saying unto them, Rejoice with me, for I have found my sheep which was lost. I say unto you, that likewise joy shall be in heaven over one sinner that repenteth, more than over ninety and nine just persons, which need no repentance. Either what woman, having ten pieces of silver, if she lose one piece, doth not light a candle, and sweep the house, and seek diligently, till she find it.

And when she hath found it, she calleth her friends and her neighbours together, saying, Rejoice with me, for I have found the piece which I had lost. Likewise, I say unto you, there is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner that repenteth. Let's thank God for that reading from his holy and infallible word.

Now I'd be glad if you'd have your Bibles open at James in chapter 5, as we come to our final study from this very interesting and very helpful letter, tucked away towards the end of our New Testament. You may remember that I suggested to you, not dogmatically, that the epistle of James is probably the first letter that was ever written of our New Testament. I'm not thinking of the Gospels, but I'm thinking of the letters.

And if that is so, then it indicates the need for practical instruction in the Christian faith. James, you recall, was the pastor of the church at Jerusalem, and he followed the method of teaching that was common to many of the rabbis, by going from one subject to another subject, threading as it were, because this is the Hebrew phrase that explains their type of teaching, threading pearls onto a string, going from one particular topic to another topic, sometimes not directly related, but always very important for the Jewish people, have their interests sustained as the rabbis introduce a variety of subjects in the lectures, in the discourses, in the sermons that they preached. And this seems to have been a practice, though inspired by the Holy Spirit, that the writer, the pastor of the Jerusalem church, James, also copies.

And you will remember from these past 16 weeks or so, what a great number of subjects have been touched on by our author as he has written this particular letter. He showed, as you recall earlier on, to distinguish between temptations and trials. He tells us something of the goodness of God, how every great and perfect gift comes from the Father above, and that this great God of glory, He doesn't change.

He goes on in the second chapter, and he shows us the absurdity of prejudice, of treating one person better than another person, of in any way honoring the rich over against the poor. He goes on further, and he shows us towards the end of the second chapter, that there's no real distinction between being justified by faith and justified by works, because saving faith always, as a consequence, leads to works which please the Lord God. And then, in perhaps the most important passage of Scripture in this epistle, in the third chapter, he talks about the use of the tongue, and how that this little agent can be a very devastating influence in a Christian assembly, if it is not inspired by the Spirit.

You remember how very weighty James's teaching is, as he runs home the point that the Christian is to use his tongue to the honor and glory of God, and not in carping destructive criticism. And then, when you go on into the fourth chapter, you, um, and into the fifth chapter, you are confronted with his teaching on exploitation. The rich are not going to exploit the poor, at least not if they're Christians.

And then, later on in the fifth chapter, he talks about prayer and healing, and that gave us the opportunity to deal with, at least in part, the whole phenomenon of the healing ministry of the Church. Well, there we are. Encompassed in five chapters, a very small epistle, relatively speaking, James deals with so many, many practical issues.

And one can almost see him at Jerusalem, with his stylus and his parchment, almost complete, but there's a bit of paper left. He's got two or three inches, and James wants to use this well. Of course, he could just have sent a salutation.

He could just have sent his greetings to these people. He could have told them personally what he was doing, so that they pray for him. But, but, no, James wants to use the last inch or so as well and as efficiently as he has employed the rest of his room.

He's got, just to change the metaphor a little, one piece of room left on the thread, and it'll take another pearl, so he's going to slot on a piece of teaching. Listen to him. It's his final injunction, the last word of the pastor of Jerusalem's church, to the church of Jesus Christ down the centuries.

My brothers, verse 19, my brothers, if one of you should wander from the truth, and someone should bring him back, remember this, whoever turns a sinner away from his error will save him from death, and cover over a multitude of sins. This passage easily breaks open into two parts. First of all, he tells us of a tragedy.

He describes it for us. He suggests a picture in which there is defection in the Christian fellowship. One of the brothers has dropped his testimony, has taken his leave of the, of the Christian church.

He's no longer giving evidence that he's in the faith. What a terrible scene this is, that James has to describe. Someone wandering, or as the A.B. puts it, erring from the truth.

Someone turning to his own way. What are we to say about this? Well, let our first observation be this is not hypothetical. This is not just theory.

There is evidence in the New Testament of people who did just this, who wandered, as it were, from the faith. When the apostle Paul is writing to young Timothy, he mentions in the second chapter of his second epistle, and in the 18th verse, the story of two men by the name of Hymenaeus and Philetus, and Paul says to Timothy, that's 2 Timothy 2, verse 18, these have wandered away from the truth. They've wandered away from the truth.

What had happened to these men was, well, it seemed as though they had every indication that they belonged to Jesus Christ. Every indication that they were orthodox in the faith. But alas, as time went by, the lack of testimony, their failure to live for Jesus, indicated that their conversion was a spurious thing.

They were not just backslidden, they were apostate, and the possibility is that this could continue down the whole of the Christian story. Listen to John writing in one of his epistles, the first epistle and the second chapter. He refers to those in the 19th verse who likewise have left the Christian fold.

They went out from us, but they did not really belong to us, for if they had belonged to us, they would have remained with us, but their going showed that none of them belonged to us. And of course, you don't need to look back to the first century, do you? You can take that little pronoun, if one of you should wander from the truth, and you can probably put in its place the name of someone that you know. The name of someone within our fellowship here.

The name of several people, because this is a tragedy that hits the 20th century as well as the first. James does not deal in hypothetical situations, and nothing, nothing is more sad than a person who gave evidence of faith to be seen, not only in a backslidden condition, but possibly moving into apostasy itself. Well then, what is it that went wrong with these people? Listen to James again, my brothers, if one of you should wander from the truth, and someone should bring him back.

Wandering from the truth, being brought back, and then references made to the error of the person's ways. What had gone wrong with this individual? What goes wrong with these people? Well, you see, it's something to do with the mind. It's something to do with not having clung onto the truth as it is in Jesus Christ.

This is the reason for backsliding. This is the reason for ultimate apostasy. But what does James mean when he says, if one of you should wander from the truth? What does he mean by the word truth? Is he just using it in the ordinary sense? He's a truthful man, and we mean by that is he's an honest man.

He's an upright man. No, James isn't referring simply to that. Let's go back, shall we, just a moment to the first chapter of this epistle, and the 18th verse.

And there we read that God chose to give us birth through the word of truth, that we might be a kind of firstfruits of all He created. Then go to the 14th verse of the third chapter. If you harbor bitter envy and selfish ambition in your hearts, do not boast about it or deny the truth.

What is meant by the truth when James uses it in these three examples that I've cited? Well, he refers to the truth as it is in Jesus. You remember that great statement that left the lips of our blessed Lord, I am the way, the truth, and the life. No man comes unto the Father but by me.

There is the essence of the gospel. Jesus is the truth. He says on another occasion to his disciples, you shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free.

Now, the person referred to here who has wandered away is someone who has moved from the doctrines of grace, someone who reckoned that they had espoused Jesus as their Savior, and now they're denying it, or at best, they're ignoring it for a time. They have wandered from the truth. They haven't fed themselves on God's holy word.

Do you remember that verse I referred to a moment ago in James 1, which talks about the word being the seed, which brings birth in our hearts, which means that we're born again? Now, the word of God, the gospel that we receive, in the first instance, what does it hit in our personality? It hits our minds, because first of all, the gospel is applied to the mind of a human being. It's by the hearing of the word of God that I make an emotional response to what Jesus has done for me on the cross. But first, it's my mind, and when I don't feed my mind, when I don't build myself up in the most holy faith, when I prefer emotion to my mind, and only cultivate my emotions, then I can go wrong.

Then it can be the case that I could stray away from the faith. You see, the first part of the Christian personality that needs to be developed is our minds. Our emotions are important.

I believe in religious experience as defined within the compass of the Bible, but my mind is something that always needs to be fed. This is why I get a little alarmed sometimes when people tell me they never really engage in Bible study. They never read devotional books.

They never read any of the helpful commentaries that we have today on the word of God. They're not feeding their minds. Some folks, if you had an option between a praise meeting and a Bible study, they'd go for the former, and they'd skip the latter.

And yet, it shouldn't really be a question of either or, it should be both and. But it's so important, first of all, to feed the mind. We are to walk, not as the Gentiles walk in the vanity of their minds, says Paul, as he writes to the Ephesians chapter 4 and verse 17.

We are to walk, as John advises his converts to walk, in the word of God, so that the word of God is something for which we have very frequent, to which we have very frequent recourse, indeed. So here are these people, and as I say, it's not a hypothetical situation. These are folks who have wandered from the truth.

They've wandered from the truth because they have not embraced it. They have not built themselves up in the most holy faith. They possibly have lost out on the mental, and maybe, though this passage does not necessarily indicate this, maybe they've only just fed the emotional.

And what is the net result? Well, they finish up like Cain. You say, what on earth do you mean they finish up like Cain? There's, there's no reference to Cain here at all. All right, let me remind you of something in the book of Genesis.

There we are in the opening chapters of the Bible, and do you remember the tragedy of Cain? Cain was a man who decided that he would respond to God, not on the mental level, but on the emotional level. His sacrifice would be equal to that of Abel. And you remember how eventually his jealousy led to the death of his brother, but that is not my point at the moment.

After that tragedy, what do you read of Cain? You read that he went into the land of Nod. What do you say, what on earth that got to do with this chapter, the land of Nod? Well, it has everything to do with this particular verse, because if you take that Hebrew and push it really back into English, it means that he went into the land of the wanderers. He went into the land, so to speak, if you spiritualize it, of people who were always going places, but never really arriving.

And that's the backslider. That's the apostate. They've left the truth as it is in Jesus.

They've left the mooring that there is in the Christ, and they love to go wandering. Some years ago, because my dear wife has such a generous heart, we fed a tramp up at Offington Lane, and she did him so proudly that he kept coming back. And we fed him for his Monday evening meal now for, I would think, the last seven years.

Always comes on our doorstep about five or six o'clock on a Monday. Anyone short of food just join the queue. But you know, when you see this fellow in town, or walking along the suburbs of of Worthing, you would feel that he's got the most important business to do.

He always walks with determination. He always looks at his going somewhere to achieve something. But having got to know him a little during these years, I can tell you just as on a, he does a circuit from the Methodist minister, to the Anglican clergyman, to the Catholic priest.

He's an ecumenical movement rolled into one. Wandering, no stability, and that describes the backslider. Do you remember the occasion depicted in John's Gospel, the end of, the end of the sixth chapter, where our Lord has been speaking to a lot of people, and they've melted away as he gets very, very stern as to the requirements of being his followers.

And then he turns to the disciples, and he says, will you also go away? And dear old Peter says, Lord, to whom should we go? If we go with them, we do a cane. We wander. We meander.

There's no purpose. We backslide. We become apostate.

To whom shall we go? We want to cling to you, because you're the way, you're the truth. I says, James, if any of you should wander from the truth, and I'm not speaking hypothetically, I'm telling you that that person's lust is mooring. If any one of you should wander from the truth, then what are the others to do? Well, having seen the tragedy of his situation, they are to engage in hot pursuit, in hot pursuit.

If one of you should wander from the truth, and someone should bring him back. What a wonderful ministry is this, to rescue the backslider. What a wonderful ministry is this, on a larger canvas, to bring the Gospel of Christ to those who are without knowledge of what Jesus has done on their behalf.

Oh, I can think of no more exquisite task in the whole of my life than to have led people to the foot of Jesus, and to have seen them come into a knowledge of salvation. Ah, but wait. When James says, let one of you, or someone should bring him back, he's not just referring to the pastor, he's not just referring to the elders.

He was referring, in that narrow sense, to the elders when he was speaking about offering prayer for the one who is sick, but now he's addressing the whole church. If you see your brother backslide, then let one of you go after him. I wonder to what extent do we do this.

I remember an evangelist who, I think on the human level, would have perhaps become the greatest evangelist in this country in the 1950s, late 1950s, early 1960s. And oh, that man was used by the Lord. He fell into deep sin.

He had homosexual tendencies, and he gave vent to his practice, and it was discovered. And as a result, his ministry just collapsed around him. Tragic situation.

God give us more sympathy for people of that ilk. And you know, the even greater tragedy was this, that his one-time Christian friends didn't want to know him anymore. He'd backslidden.

He'd let the Lord down. Very serious, very, very blameworthy in many respects. But the greatest tragedy was that his colleagues let him go.

And it was a dear older friend of mine, who's retired somewhere down here on the South Coast, who against the opposition of others, sought this brother out and ministered to him, and pleaded with him, and consoled him, and eventually led him back to the Lord so that ultimately he was helped and strengthened against his physical problems, and able at a lesser level, a lesser public level, to serve the living God. What about John, who when Peter has backslidden and denied the Lord, he goes and finds tearful, broken Peter, and he brings him back. This is the language of the parables that Andrew read to us.

This is an under-shepherd seeking one of the sheep who have strayed away from the flock. This is one of the coins sought after by the woman. She's got nine safe in her purse, but there's one that's lost, and so she ransacks the home until she's found it.

Oh, my friend, never let it be said of our fellowship here that because someone backslid, whoever they may have been, whatever their crimes may have been, that we turned them aside, that we didn't have that agape that prompted someone, some people to continue to love and to continue to pray. I have a covenant with God to pray until the day that He takes me home for some of the folks who have been through the ministries of this fellowship here. Says Pastor James, if anyone strays, then someone should bring him back.

And remember this, says James, as he as he stimulates us on this holy rescue ministry, whoever turns a sinner away from his error will save him from death and cover over a multitude of sins. Ah, this is fine and it's daring language. Says Charlie Spurgeon, I say ring the bells of heaven twice for the reclaimed backslider.

Ring them till the steeple rocks and reels. And this is what James is asking for us to do, as I say in a very daring fashion. He says, go after the backslider, bring him back, turn the sinner away from his error, save him from death, and cover over a multitude of sins.

But James, man, theologically you're askew. We can't do that. It's the Holy Spirit's ministry.

It's the ministry of God the Son to cover sin. Ah, but James has more theological understanding than you and I have. God uses the instrumentality of the body of Christ, men and women on this earth, to achieve his will.

It is true that only God can turn a man from the error of his ways. Only God can save him from death. Only God can cover over a multitude of sins.

But on the human level, we work and work as though the effort required were solely our own. Though we cannot convert them, says Alec Motyer, we must labor to do so. Though we cannot rescue them from death, we must strive for their souls as if their destiny rested with us.

Though we cannot cover their sins, we must follow the example of the Son of God, who can do so, and hold nothing dear to ourselves, and no sacrifice too great, if only they are saved. Oh, my friend, that we might all have, having referred to Mr. Spurgeon somewhat familiarly, and I trust you'll forgive me when I meet him in heaven. What about another, Charlie? C.T. Studd, if Jesus Christ begot and died for me, then there is no sacrifice too great for me to make for him.

To live out one's life, enriching one's soul with the gospel, to spiritually help in the recovery of the backslider, what bliss is this? Ah, says Ah, our author, remember this, or as it's put perhaps more forcefully in the authorized version, let him know. Let that successful soul win a soul restorer know that he which converteth the soul from the error of his way shall save a soul from death and shall hide a multitude of sins. But James, what do you mean, let him know? Well, the implication surely is this, let him know that he's doing the work of Jesus.

Let him know that he's combining with the holy office of God's own Son, because this is why the Savior came to this world. He came with two objects to destroy death and to put away sin, and if you convert a sinner from the error of his ways, you are like the Lord Jesus Christ. Let us know this.

James speaks not of reward. He speaks not of specific blessings. The greatest stimulus, says James, is just to know that if you're used in soul winning, then there's a whole multitude of sins which will be covered up because Jesus died, but also because you were faithful in your testimony.

Ah, says someone, you depress me preaching like this. You see, I'll never be a Whitefield. I'll never be a Wesley.

I'll never be a Moody. I'll never be a Finney. I'll never be one of those men who have brought thousands of souls to the Lord Jesus.

My friend, the value of one soul is infinite. It was a great Scottish preacher, Rutherford, who said when he went to heaven that if when he looked down on his native Anworth, where he used to be minister, and if one day he met a soul from Anworth in heaven as a result of his preaching, then his heaven would become two heavens. You led me to the Lord.

You brought me back. What an accolade this would be down the whole of the centuries of eternity to have been responsible in God's good grace for the restoration of a backslider, for the deliverance of one person from the bondage of sin. My time is spent and I must conclude, but I do so on a very practical note.

I specifically asked our stewards if everyone coming into the church this morning would be given a copy of this evangelistic leaflet, Chaotic World, which explains in very clear terminology—I can say this because I didn't write it, although my name's at the bottom of the leaflet—it explains the essence of the gospel. And I want to leave it with you, my good friends, this morning, to take this leaflet and perhaps this week to hand it on to somebody, maybe with one or two little words of explanation, and see if God might not use that simple little action as a means whereby someone is retrieved from sin and comes to a knowledge of Jesus as Lord and Savior. Brothers, I repeat, if one of you should wander from the truth and someone should bring him back, remember this, whoever turns a sinner away from his error will save him from death and cover over a multitude of sins.

Thank you, James. Thank you for spending those last two or three inches on your parchment, not telling us your personal circumstances, but bringing us this last pearl, so to speak, inciting us to an evangelism which many in the Christian church are defective in. And, James, we're going to respond as God helps us to communicate His message to someone who doesn't know or go after someone who did know and has fallen away.

And, James, if God be as gracious to us as He was to you, then many shall find Jesus as Savior. That's the concluding comment from James's epistle, and thank God, I say again, for its practical nature. Amen.