The Healing Community (not the judging)

Text: James 5:13-20; Numbers 11:4-29
Audio Recording

I don’t deal with change very well.  I have my little agoraphobic world that I subsist in where everything’s the way I’m used to it.  I may not like it, but it is what I’m used to.  Don’t change it.  Suggest the least little bit of change to me and I immediately construct the long list of reasons against it.  For example, I work at a very cluttered little desk in the corner of the kitchen.  Since I started working again last April Dana has often suggested that I would be happier if I moved my “office” back up to the attic.  It was up there initially when we first moved to Owen Sound but after a year it became her sewing space that rarely gets used.  The pro’s to this decision far outweigh the con’s.  A couple of hours and I’m up there.  Sure, there would be a few minor bugs to work out in the new routine.  So why don’t I just do it?  Well, my it don’t change.  Can anybody relate?  Do I hear an “Amen”?

Change…you know, the change itself, isn’t the real culprit when it comes to our reluctance to change things.  Change, whether good or bad, is a fact of life. It happens with regularity.  It’s not the change that’s difficult.  It’s the transition that occurs as we adjust from the way things used to be to a new reality, a reality that is a huge unknown.  When a change happens it inevitably means we have to let go of some thing’s in our selves and in our identity, and start doing things a different way, and at some point eventually accept a new it and a new identity.  If I were to move my office up to the attic the view that I would have from the widow up there would have me feeling like I was king of the world rather than a roach hiding in the woodwork of the corner of the kitchen.  You’d think I’d welcome that change.

Nevertheless, in the midst of the transition things are quite ambiguous and that makes us feel quite anxious.  The feelings associated with the stages of grief come up.  We enter the deep river of denial and isolation; feeling like we’re the only person to have ever gone through this.  We are perpetually angry or at least grumpy all the time.  We start to dwell on a list of regrets and “if only I had done this or that” in a futile effort to get what’s gone back.  We understandably feel sadness even to the point of depression.  We can’t seem to get it in gear.  But, in time the shock wears off and we feel like maybe taking a kick at this new can.  All those feelings and stuff, that’s the transition that comes with change and its why we naturally don’t want to go through change.

The Israelites are a good example of this.  They were slaves in Egypt.  Their workload was ever-increasing under cruel taskmaster’s.  They cried out. The Lord God freed them and in the process humiliated Pharaoh, devastated his armies, and showed the gods of Egypt to be impotent.  Then, God veiled in a cloud personally and powerfully led them to the Promised Land, the land of milk and honey, but they still had to go through the Wilderness to get there.  You’d think that they would have shouted “Free at last. Free at last. Thank God we’re free at last.” and danced their way to Canaan’s Land.  But all the way they were scared.  They complained.  They longed for Egypt and going back to the security of being slaves and, yes, worshipping those impotent gods of Egypt.  They didn’t trust they’re leaders or the ability of their leaders.  When they arrived at the Promised Land they spied it out but were too afraid to enter it.  There were giants in the Land.  Eighty years and two generations later finally they cross the Jordon.

The change was God’s delivering them from slavery.  The transition was what they went through in the wilderness.  The change was a powerful work on God’s part, but powerful works alone do little to build our faith and identity as God’s people.  The wilderness was where that happened.  Following the presence of the Lord in the cloud, listening to Moses, and living under (pardon the phrase) austerity measures changed the Hebrew people from being slaves.  You can take the people out of Egypt, but how do you take Egypt out of the people?…wandering in the wilderness.  They had to learn to trust and follow the Lord without reserve because that’s the type of people they needed to be to live in Canaan’s Land.  Otherwise, they’re just like the people of Canaan.

Looking more towards today, most churches today resemble God’s people in slavery in Egypt.  People who participate in a congregation such as ours today are likely to fell like slaves to an institution.  Fewer people means more work for fewer and fewer able bodies.  The financial burdens of full-time clergy and aging facilities necessitate greater giving by fewer and fewer people just to keep up.  Congregational self-esteem plummets.  Whole congregations get depressed.  There’s grumbling, complaining, and fighting due to real but unchecked anxiety about the future of “my church home.”  So many churches see their only option to be the either/or of staying open until someone pries the church key from Mr. Heston’s cold, dead hands or closing.  But, closing a church and forcing a church family to go elsewhere isn’t at all like moving an office up to an attic.  Leaving a church, a group of people, that you’ve been involved with for years to decades does not come without a truly painful personal cost to one’s own faith.  When people leave a church today they are likely to not go anywhere else.

The Pharaoh that congregations face today is the reality that the communities in which we are situated are not Christian anymore.  The people who live in our neighbourhoods are secular, post-Christian, and “spiritual” (whatever that means) and for the most part poised against participation in the institution of the Church and that’s if they have any inkling at all of what Christian faith is.  Something called discontinuous change has come to our land. 

Sometimes change is simply an adaptation in order for things to continue the way they always have.  This was the church from the 70’s to the early 90’s.  Praise bands, PowerPoint presentations, a sermon that sounds, feels, and looks like a self-improvement seminar that your boss sent you to in order to increase productivity in the workplace - the congregations who made those adaptations experienced institutional growth up until about 15 years ago and the growth was mostly from church swappers rather than new believers.  These changes within congregations were in-house adaptations to the change in media and technology that everybody has grown accustomed to since the advent of television.  But now, even the churches that made these adaptations are beginning to struggle.  Discontinuous change has truly become pervasive.  The people in our surrounding communities are no longer simply back-slidden or latent Christians who just need to find their way inside these doors.  

I think James here can help us gain a vision of the church, of our Promised Land, and its not a church that simply makes adaptations in style, but is rather a community that participates in Jesus' own ministry of healing, prayer, and forgiveness.  He sees the Church as a group of people where things of status like wealth and prestige or being poor and lacking privilege don’t define a person.  God does not discriminate against people when deciding whom to pour his Spirit upon and adopt as his child.  God wants to heal us no matter who we are.  The congregation that persists through this wilderness of discontinuous change will emerge as a community of healing in which God has poured his Spirit on everyone of us not just the elders as he did in Moses’ day.  This healing community is where people who are suffering the burdens of the world are prayed for and they indeed find relief from the presence of the Lord.  This healing community is where people come and share their weaknesses and own up to their short-comings and the pain they’ve caused and rather than judge them we pray for them so that they feel those burdens lifted up and born away by Jesus.  It’s a wonderful feeling of deliverance, if you’ve ever felt that.  The soul-healing that Jesus has to give is akin to resurrection from the dead.  Indeed, it is the proof and foretaste of resurrection from the dead.  What is even more amazing is that he uses our ears and our prayers in the process of bringing this soul-healing about.  The church that survives this discontinuous change will be the healing community that happens over the backyard fence or the cup of coffee in conversations where we love our neighbours, our actual neighbours, enough to sincerely ask them how they are and listen to them, really listen to them hearing the burdens they bear and praying for them rather than judging them; expecting nothing in return from them but from Jesus, expecting him to bring them soul-healing as he has done for us.  Amen.

God's Jealousy for His Spirit in Us

Text: James 3:13-4:12
Audio Recording

Three weeks ago we started looking at James and if you remember in that sermon I worked mainly with verse 1:21 which reads: “Therefore rid yourselves of all sordidness and rank growth of wickedness, and welcome with meekness the implanted word that has the power to save your souls.”  I think that verse is the key to unlocking the Book of James.  Everything he has to say deals either with the first part of ridding ourselves of the bad stuff or with the second part of welcoming or showing hospitality to God’s presence in and among us.

In that sermon I dealt with the implanted word and if I were to sum up its message a sentence or two it would be that God the Father has spoken into us the new word of the New Creation he wrought as Jesus Christ, God the Son become human, by implanting his very self, God the Holy Spirit into us, and because the Holy Spirit is in us we are therefore bonded to Jesus in such a living and dynamic way that we share with Jesus in his relationship with God the Father.  Thus, we are born anew and made be God to be his adopted children.  We have to welcome with meekness this new life-transforming relationship.  It saves us.  Indeed, it is salvation.

With that background, we come to James 4:5 where James says God is jealous for this new life giving relationship we have with him through Jesus in the Holy Spirit.  James writes: “Or do you suppose that it is for nothing that the scripture says, ‘God yearns jealously for the Spirit that he has made to dwell in us’?”  To let you in on little secret, that verse exists nowhere in the Old Testament.  James is either quoting from a book we know nothing about or he’s doing what we do quite often, stating a general theme of the Scripture as if it is an actual quote. 

In my opinion James is pulling this one out of the ether of the first and second of the Ten Commandments which say: “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery; you shall have no other gods before me.  You shall not make for yourself an idol, whether in the form of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.  You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I the Lord your God am a jealous God, punishing children for the iniquity of parents, to the third and the fourth generation of those who reject me, but showing steadfast love to the thousandth generation of those who love me and keep my commandments.”

  The Israelites were constantly turning away from the LORD God to worship other gods and so God would bring disaster upon them to bring them back.  I don’t want to sound like a Bible-thumping bummer, but I think James is bringing this warning to us.  God is a jealous God.  He wants this relationship that he has implanted into us to thrive and not be stunted by what James calls “friendship with the world”.  James even goes as far as to use hurtful words in verse 4 to make his point: “Adulterers! Do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God?  Therefore whoever wishes to be a friend of the world becomes an enemy of God.”  Adultery is probably the Old Testament prophets’ most pointed analogy for the Israelite’s idolatry. 

Friendship with the world is James’ term for idolatry.  His people would not have been making idols and worshipping them as did the ancient Israelites.  What James is referring to is the conflict and disputes in their midst that have arisen by their clinging to the values of the world rather than the gentle way of godly wisdom that arises from focusing on welcoming the implanted word and doing the work of making peace, of doing reconciliation.  James writes at 3:17-18: “But the wisdom from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, willing to yield, full of mercy and good fruits, without a trace of partiality or hypocrisy.  And a harvest of righteousness is sown in peace for those who make peace.”

If you remember from the sermon two weeks ago, James’ community was showing partiality to the rich and powerful and shaming the poor in their midst and this behaviour in the end was nothing more than a blatant display of a lack of faith in God’s promise to give his Kingdom to the meek and the poor.  They were to be making the ways of the coming Kingdom a reality in the midst of their Christian fellowship, but instead they were playing by the values of the world by exalting the rich and powerful at the expense of abasing the poor.  Therefore, their fellowship lacked righteousness, lacked “peace”, the peace of Christ.

James quite pointedly explains to his people where this conflicted-ness in their fellowship is coming from.  In 3:14 he points out that it is from bitter envy and selfish ambition, from people who have a mind to build a social ladder in the church so they can get on it and climb and covet the power of the people the believe to be above them and judge those they believe to be beneath them.  At the beginning of chapter four James asks where these conflicts and disputes come from.  He answers – one thing you need to know about James is that he chooses Greek words that exaggerate what he is saying in order to overstate his point so that we really get it – these conflicts come from the hedonistic pleasure we get from fighting amongst ourselves.  We get envious and crave the status that others have and so we act hatefully even bully others to the extent that open disputes arise.  That’s the way of the work place even for me and my work place is the church.  It was the way things were when I was in High School, and university, and seminary.  It’s called being liked or popular.  It’s striving for the promotion and feeling entitled to a raise.  It’s being the smartest, the prettiest, the fastest… the –est of everything.  It all boils down to me getting my way because I am powerful; i.e., I am a god.  To James this is the way of the world and it is enmity with God and thus has no place in the fellowship of God’s beloved children.

If I were to try to sum up what James is saying here in a pithy little saying in a way that sounds like James would sound today, I think he’d say, “Whenever people get together in groups they immediately set about establishing a pecking order in status – God hates that; especially in Christian fellowship where he’s caused his own Spirit to dwell.  Beloved, we are children of God, not a pack of dogs.  So let us draw near to God.  He really is here.  Let us be gentle with one another.  Let us be humble and serve one another.  Let us consider the needs of others before we go striving after our own.  Amen.”

What Are We Thinking?

Text: Mark 8:27-38
Audio Recording

Jesus’ disciples had a problem with respect to what it meant for Jesus to be the Messiah and for them to be his disciples.  They had come to see that he was the Messiah.  But they couldn’t see beyond their own expectations of what the Messiah was supposed to do and what it meant for them.  They knew the Messiah was to bring the kingdom of God which meant getting rid of the Romans and the corrupt Judean royalty and establish a fair kingdom in which they as Jesus followers would be his vice-regents.  Their problem is as Jesus says to Peter, “you are not thinking the things of God but the things of men.”

In Mark’s Gospel this passage comes on the tail end of Jesus having led the disciples on a mission of sharing the twelve baskets of crumbs that were left over from the feeding of the 5,000.  He had been up to Lebanon and then into Jordon both Gentile or non-Jewish lands and there he proved himself to be the Messiah who was bringing in the kingdom of God according to about every Old Testament prophecy you could think of.  He had caused the lame to leap, the blind to see, the deaf to hear, and the mute to speak.  He had freed those held captive by demons.  He had caused Gentiles to have faith and to praise Israel’s God.  He had truly manifested the kingdom of God in their midst and they had participated in it.  So it was not hard for them to confess Jesus to be the Messiah, the Holy Spirit Anointed King the people of God had been expecting. 

But, Jesus began to teach them of other Scriptures (like Isaiah 53) which said the Messiah would have to suffer at the hands of the religious and political authorities and be put to death and then on the third day rise again.  This was information the disciples couldn’t process.  According to their expectations, the Messiah was supposed to raise an army that included the angels of heaven and restore Israel’s independence and rule in God’s name just like King David did in the good ole days.  He would stamp out corruption of every kind.  His kingdom would be one of peace and justice.  No more of this rich and poor stuff.  Everyone was going to have their own vine and fig tree to sit under.  The Messiah they were expecting was not supposed to die. 

Then Jesus goes on to say that to be his follower meant renouncing claim to oneself and taking up the cross too.  They were expecting to be Jesus’ vice-regents.  But Jesus began to tell them that to be his followers they would have to renounce claim to their very selves.  No longer could they (nor we) think, “my life is my own to do with it what I want.”  Rather, they (and we) must deny themselves and think, “my life is not my own to seek my own goals, gain, and glory.  I now belong to Jesus for the proclamation and ministry of his kingdom which is at hand”.  And it gets more difficult.  To take up the cross is to share in Jesus’ suffering for the sake of the world through the task of proclaiming and ministering the kingdom of God being at hand.  It would not be worldly gain for them.  The disciples couldn’t get that.  James and John have the audacity a few days later to ask him which of them could sit at his right and at his left.  The disciples were not thinking the things of God but the things of man.

Now to turn this around to us, we suffer the same malady.  Though we call Jesus Lord and Saviour, Messiah, Christ, God’s Holy Spirit Anointed King, and Son of God we too misunderstand what it means for Jesus to be who he is as Messiah, as the bringer of the Kingdom of God and for us to be his followers, his heralds.  For most Christians Jesus is simply our moral example, our ticket into a favourable afterlife, and a bit of psychological help in times of trouble.  We tend not to think of Jesus being the King of the Kingdom of God and the Kingdom of God as something present in which we now participate.

Please tolerate me giving you a bit of history.  When the church spread into the West, it came with the fundamental flaw of having lost its knowledge of the Kingdom of God.  How did it get lost.  In the 300’s Christianity became the primary faith of the Roman Empire and the Kingdom of God became synonymous with the Roman Empire and the term ceased to be used.  After the fall of the Roman Empire is when the Church spread into Europe proper.  When it arrived it did not come proclaiming the Gospel that Jesus himself and the early church proclaimed about Jesus and the kingdom of God being at hand.  The Gospel that Jesus proclaimed was not “believe in me and your sins will be forgiven and you will go to Heaven when you die.”  It was, “The Kingdom of God is at hand.  Turn and believe the Good News.”  The Church had lost the early church Gospel of the Kingdom of God come with Jesus and so it came to Pagan Europe preaching a message that had served to religiously unify the Roman Empire, a message that said “Jesus is Lord and Saviour.  He died to avert God’s wrath for you and make Heaven possible for you.  So, be loyal to the Church and do good works and earn your salvation and you won’t go to Hell.”  In some cases they added, “and we won’t kill you.”  Rome the empire had fallen, but the institution of the Roman church was out to build its own empire.

I don’t know who said this but I heard it in a lecture by a man named Robert Webber, “When the church was in Jerusalem it was a Jewish sect.  When it moved to Rome it became an institution.  When it spread throughout Europe it became a culture.  And when it came to North America it became big business.”  He explained this saying that we in North America predominantly understand the Church to be the religious institution that has been the moral undergirding of our particular culture and now requires a lot of money for its continuance and therefore must operate like big business if it is going to succeed and be relevant in a culture where people pick and choose religion like consumers choosing steaks at the grocery store...the best looking for the best price. This church thinks the things of man, Church survival, rather than the things of God, the Kingdom of God being at hand. 

There is good news for this church and it is as Jesus proclaimed, “The kingdom of God is at hand.  Repent and believe the good news.”  A church is a Holy Spirit anointed community of disciples who know Jesus and who renounce claim to their selves and find their life in him.  It comes about when those who call themselves Christian gather together around the Bible and let themselves be challenged and recreated by its demands.   A church is a community where in the name of Jesus blind eyes begin to see with compassion.  Deaf ears begin to hear with empathy.  Mute mouths begin to speak the truth in love and the lame leap up begin to walk the way of the cross.  A church is the community where in Jesus name faithfulness, communication, kindness, and forgiveness are the way of life.  A church is the community where those who follow Jesus share their weaknesses and allow themselves to be prayed for and supported.  Indeed, a church is the community that prays without ceasing.  A church is the community that feels no shame in inviting others to come and share in the good news.  It is in and through this community that the “at hand” kingdom of God manifests itself.  It is the community where Jesus himself by the power and presence of the Holy Spirit is present and doing the things only God can do; healing the sick and disordered, casting out the evil that oppresses, and forgiving sins.  This is the church that thinks the things of God.  This leaves us with a question: “What are we thinking”; the things of God or the things of man?  Are we striving to know Jesus and participate in his kingdom or….?  I think Church would be less of a burden for us if we just got back to thinking the things of God.  Amen.

Faith without Faithfulness is Dead

Text: James 2:1-17
Audio Recording

When talking about what faith is we Christians have to admit that we are children of a philosophical movement known as the Enlightenment or The Age of Reason that began roughly with Martin Luther and the Protestant Reformation in the 1500’s and came into its own in the 1700’s.  Being overly simplistic, the Enlightenment understood faith as the opposite of reason, as intellectual assent to religious matters that cannot be proven by rational and objective methods.  In essence, to the thinkers of the Enlightenment faith was irrational and subjective and therefore should be kept a private matter for the individual.  And moreover, institutions such as the Church should not be telling people what to believe especially with an “or else” tacked on to it.  Though the Enlightenment had its roots in the Reformation, its idea that faith is the opposite of reason is not what Luther and Calvin and the other Reformers meant by faith.  I want to introduce Luther’s definition of faith as an example, but you need a little background first. 

The Roman Church of Luther’s day proclaimed a message of salvation by works of penitence and used the fear of Hell as a means of furthering the political and economic interests of the Church.  This dreadfully affected Luther.  He was inwardly tortured by it because he felt there was nothing, no act of penitence, he could do to take away his heightened sense of his own sinfulness.  Then one day in the midst of a tortured debate with the devil (which he had frequently), Luther came across Romans 1:17 which simply said “The righteous shall live by faith.”  Realizing himself to have faith he suddenly knew his eternal situation was secure.  His bouts with the devil ended that day only to be replaced by bouts with the church as he began to adamantly oppose the Roman Church’s anti-Gospel of salvation by works of penitence.

In his introduction to his commentary on Romans Luther defines faith as such: “…faith is God's work in us, that changes us and gives new birth from God. (John 1:13). It kills the Old Adam and makes us completely different people. It changes our hearts, our spirits, our thoughts and all our powers. It brings the Holy Spirit with it. Yes, it is a living, creative, active and powerful thing, this faith. Faith cannot help doing good works constantly. It doesn't stop to ask if good works ought to be done, but before anyone asks, it already has done them and continues to do them without ceasing.  Anyone who does not do good works in this manner is an unbeliever. …Faith is a living, bold trust in God's grace, so certain of God's favour that it would risk death a thousand times trusting in it. Such confidence and knowledge of God's grace makes you happy, joyful and bold in your relationship to God and all creatures. The Holy Spirit makes this happen through faith.  Because of it, you freely, willingly and joyfully do good to everyone, serve everyone, suffer all kinds of things, love and praise the God who has shown you such grace. Thus, it is just as impossible to separate faith and works as it is to separate heat and light from fire!  Therefore, watch out for your own false ideas and guard against good-for-nothing gossips, who think they're smart enough to define faith and works, but really are the greatest of fools.  Ask God to work faith in you, or you will remain forever without faith, no matter what you wish, say or can do.” [1]

So, for Luther faith is not something we of our own abilities to reason just up and decide to have.  Faith is something God creates in us as a response to his grace. If you remember a few weeks ago in a sermon on Esther I defined grace not as God’s courtroom judgement to be merciful to us guilty sinners on account of what Jesus has done but, rather as God’s bringing us into his presence, extending his favour to us, and acting for us for our good.  What Jesus has done is an extension of grace.  Indeed, God’s most gracious act towards us is adopting us as his own beloved children in Christ ensured by the gift of the Holy Spirit.  Thus, faith arises in us when God encounters us with his grace.

To push this a little further, Karl Barth in his commentary on Romans said it good when he wrote that faith is what arises when the faithfulness of God encounters the fidelity of men.  Fidelity is active loyalty – faithfulness.  God reaches out to us in grace and by this he rightly directs our innate ability to be faithful towards himself.  Indeed, we cannot talk about faith in a way that is biblically accurate unless we realize we are talking about faithfulness. 

Looking quickly at James, Luther thought that the Book of James should not have been included in the Bible because James’ emphasis on works played very well into the teachings of the Roman Church about earning salvation by works of penitence.  But as we read James we find that he and Luther were saying very similar things and it is unfortunate that James got unfairly pinned into the faith verses works-righteousness debate that defined the Reformation, a debate that has proven to be a seedbed of schism in the Church ever since.

In our passage from James here, what’s at play is not how one attains to salvation but how one lives out that salvation.  In the early church they believed that when Jesus came he inaugurated the Kingdom of God.  He, the Messiah, died to put to death sin and death in the old humanity and was raised to constitute a new humanity that eventually when Jesus returned would be ultimately free of sin and death.  Jesus’ act of righteousness fulfilled the requirements of the Law of Moses freeing the people of God from its requirements.  Yet, in Jesus’ Kingdom there is still a law, the law of liberty – It is to be lead by the Spirit to “love your neighbour as you love yourself.” When Jesus ascended he promised he would soon return and establish the Kingdom of God in its fullness and until then we do works.  What James means by works is doing things now in the present that exemplify the way things will be when Jesus brings the Kingdom in its fullness.  For James, true faith is living faithfully now in the power of the Holy Spirit according to the ways of Jesus’ Kingdom coming.

As we look at this passage in James we find that his point is that his people were not living in faith/fulness but rather in doubt.  You see, God promised the poor a special place in the Kingdom but in their fellowship James’ people were discriminating against the poor by showing partiality to the rich and powerful, who were incidentally persecuting them.  When they showed this partiality they showed themselves to be actually doubters of God’s promise for Jesus to come back and finalize the Kingdom of God.  They weren’t living now according to the ways of the Kingdom coming, which is what James means by faith.

James brings a hefty word to us too.  We the Western Church are very good at keeping to our Enlightenment faith.  We claim to have faith meaning we rationally/irrationally accent to privately held, subjective ideas about God things.  Sometimes in times of trouble we cling a little harder to this intellectual accent as some sort of emotional crutch.  But when it comes to faithfulness, to living boldly and publically now by the law of liberty, the law of the Kingdom, as living witnesses to the promise of truth that Jesus is coming with his Kingdom, as living witnesses to the fact that by the working of the Holy Spirit in us Jesus is now present with us extending his reign – when it comes to faithfulness, to living according to that promise we really fall short.  For example, we, the church in North America, show as much as if not more partiality on Sunday morning than James church.  Without a doubt the most racially, economically, and ethnically segregated hours in the world are the hours between 9 and 12 on Sunday mornings when Christians worship!

Friends, we are the beloved children of God.  God has acted graciously in and as Jesus Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit to adopt us as his own children. God does not call his children to live as the Enlightenment would have it, simply as good moral people who undergird good order in society because of our private beliefs.  God calls and enables us to live faithfully as his children, the bearers of his DNA so to speak in Christ Jesus by the gift of the Holy Spirit, as the heirs of the coming kingdom of God where the one law is love your neighbour as you love yourself.  Faith without faithfulness is dead.  So ask God to work faithfulness in you. Amen.

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[1] http://www.iclnet.org/pub/resources/text/wittenberg/luther/luther-faith.txt