Now, if you read only the first part of this verse, which says that a pure religion is one that takes care of orphans and widows, and then you throw away the rest of the Bible, then you will end up with a humanistic religion, a social gospel that has no spiritual and saving power. Instead of a pure and faultless religion, you will end up with the antithesis of one.

There is a context, a background, behind all the charitable works that the church performs. and this background is faith in Jesus Christ. It is a grave error – a damning error – to suppose that Christianity is primarily a system of ethics, or that it is mainly a call to social justice and charitable works. To interpret the gospel of Jesus Christ as purely, or even mainly, a social gospel is to distort its message and rob it of its power. Good works do not make a pure religion, but it is the pure religion that produces these good works. This distinction must be maintained.

Some people are seemingly so eager to reach certain types of people that they would transform themselves so much to adapt, that there remains hardly any noticeable difference between them and the people that they are trying to reach. If they are so like those people, then why do they need to convert at all? If they go to these people and use the same slangs, wear the same kind of clothes, make the same kind of dirty jokes, sing and listen to the same worldly songs, and do pretty much everything that the unbelievers do, then these people have already been polluted.

James says that a pure and faultless religion does not only look after orphans and widows, but it also keeps oneself from being polluted by the world. This reinforces the idea that Christianity is not a social gospel. The biblical philosophy of ministry and of evangelism is to remove any unnecessarily entrances without going to ridiculous lengths to do it. What is ridiculous, you say? One actual example is to paraphrase the entire New Testament into "street talk." When a believer goes to the "street" with this, right from the start he gives the impression that God does not care about the purity of his words, or at least he does not care about it.

Again, the biblical philosophy of ministry is to remove any unnecessary hindrances, but the misguided philosophy that we are now talking about believes that the way to reach the world is to show the unbelievers that we are not so different from them after all. From the perspective of effectiveness in ministry, faithfulness to the word of God, and from the perspective of maintaining a pure and faultless religion, if this is our philosophy of ministry, then we might as well let the orphans and widows starve.

What I am saying is that we cannot let social concerns drive our faith and practice, and we cannot let our message become a merely social gospel; otherwise, our entire enterprise will become powerless and meaningless. Our work will become one that saves the stomach but starves the soul. In fact, if the church becomes a merely social institution, an organization to promote charity work and natural human welfare, then it loses its very reason for existence.

Now, the world would welcome such an institution, and it would love nothing more than for the church to become humanistic and powerless, rather than to hear it preach a message from heaven that also has ethical and social implications. Thus our social and charitable work must be driven by spiritual concerns and biblical principles. It must be a fruit of true faith and pure religion, and not the ultimate object, nature, or purpose of our faith.

(end of series)

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