Stress Test Devotional May 4
May 04, 2024
JAMES 2:20-23|20 Do you want to be shown, you senseless person, that faith apart from works is worthless? 21 Was not our ancestor Abraham justified by works when he offered his son Isaac on the altar? 22 You see that faith was active along with his works, and by works faith was brought to completion.
23 Thus the scripture was fulfilled that says, “Abraham believed God, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness,” and he was called the friend of God.
ROMANS 4:1-2 | 1What then are we to say was gained by Abraham, our ancestor according to the flesh? 2 For if Abraham was justified by works, he has something to boast about, but not before God.
Luther hated the book of James, calling it “an epistle of straw.” These verses irked him because they seemed to imply that faith alone in Christ’s righteousness and sacrifice for us must be supplemented by our work, in the form of righteous deeds. Yet I think Luther misread James. James was raising the possibility of someone believing publicly and privately but not acting on this belief. Abraham’s faith in God was genuine and we know this because his faith guided him in the possible sacrifice of his only son. He trusted God in that crisis and that trust showed that his faith in God’s goodness was genuine. Paul and James, and Luther and James, are congruent and not in conflict.
What does justification by faith mean to you?
Does it motivate you with gratitude and relieve your sense of guilt and unworthiness?
