Religion that is pure and undefiled before God the Father is this: to visit orphans and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unstained from the world.
James 1:27
Christian faith is much more than just a “personal belief system”... even if contemporary pressure wants to minimize it to this. As James emphasizes: Faith does something. Faith produces good in the person who believes in Jesus, and then that person produces good among the people around them.
The book of James is probably the oldest books of the New Testament. As such it gives us a glimpse into the first priorities of the fledgling Christian church. And the church was committed to living a faith that made not only a “personal”, spiritual difference, but a physical, societal difference. Followers of Jesus genuinely cared for people.
In this verse this kind of “working faith” was visible in two ways: active help and active holiness. The help was directed in loving physical, financial, and personal care for the forgotten people of the First Century social structure: widows and orphans. The Christian Church cared about people that the rest of the world marginalized. Visiting orphans and widows meant providing in every way, engaging in their lives, making them part of the Christian family when they had no family. This was gospel love in action.
The holiness part of the equation was more inward, but not exclusively. Its motivation came from a desire to “do the word and not just hear it”. This was also a radical and deliberate action. Christians who were devoted to loving the unloved kept themselves from the calloused, selfish, unholy preoccupation with the stuff of this earth. And that priority kept them in gospel holiness and gospel help. We still need these attitudes among us to lead to these actions today.
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