Pure Religion

“Pure religion and undented before God and the Father is this to visit the fatherless and the widows in their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from the world.” — James 1:27.

The word “religion” is used but five times in the Bible. This is the only passage in which it is approved and commended. Paul says that he lived, “after the strictest sect of his religion, a Pharisee.” He speaks in two other places of the “Jews’ religion,” and in the verse just preceding this he describes a class of men whose “religion” is vain. Through a man’s religious instincts he may be degraded or elevated. The heathen are more debased by their religion than by any other force.

The only kind of religion that is worth

having is the “pure and undefiled.” The 19S Milk and Meat,

word “pure “describes its inward quality. It is the word used in the beatitude, 44 Blessed die the pure in heart,” and again in the Scripture, “Ye are clean through the word which I have spoken unto you.” It is a religion washed in the blood of Christ; our whole religious nature purified by taking Christ into it and making Him king of it. The word “undefiled” refers to the outward quality. It means primarily unstained, unvarnished. That which is washed white needs not to be whitewashed. A religion pure inside is apt to be undefiled outside.

This religion, “pure and undefiled,” is presented to us in two aspects: First, as helpful contact with the needy. Second, as guarded separation from the world.

I. Helpful Contact.

To visit means more than to drop in for a call, to talk about the weather. It means more than going from house to house as pastor and checking off the names which you have visited. It is the word used where the apostles are commanded to look out seven

Ptirc Religion. 199

men of good report. We are not to sit down and wait for people to come to us to be helped and saved, but we must look them out. And it carries with it the idea of ministry: “The dayspring from on high hath visited us.” The “dayspring” there certainly refers to Christ, so that just as Christ visited the world and ministered to it, so we are to visit the orphans and widows in their afflictions. The word “orphans” is the same that Jesus used when He said, “I will not leave you comfortless” (orphans). Imagine, if you can, the condition of the disciples if Jesus had left them without sending the Holy Spirit as guide, protector, helper in their bewilderment, their helplessness, their need! We are, therefore, commanded to keep ourselves in helpful contact with everybody who answers to the class of these disciples in that condition.

The word “orphan,” without father or mother, represents an orphaned world. There are needs of the soul as deep as the needs of the body, and people may have plenty of wealth while they are orphaned from God. “In their affliction” shows the condition of these needy ones. It is not my duty to seek out the fatherless who are wealthy enough not to need my help, and the widows who are not widows indeed, and independent of others’ assistance. I would thus keep the letter of the law, while I violated its spirit. The word “affliction” means primarily pressure. “Pressed above strength and beyond measure,” said Paul — the same word. Wherever a man, woman or child, under the pressures of life, crushed beneath its burdens, can be found, “pure religion and undefiled” will lead me to put myself in helpful contact with them. Simply sending a check does not suffice, nor standing above, and touching with kid gloves in a patronizing way, for “kid gloves are non-conductors.” As Jesus put Himself, a man among men, comforting, strengthening, feeding, helping, so “pure religion” wrould lead us to be among our fellows as a real helper to them under the burdens of life.

A little boy finding an old newspaper seller on a corner of a street in Chicago, so hoarse that he could not cry his papers, volunteered with his strong young voice to sell the old man’s papers for him. That was the spirit which helps the helpless, and to that boy the old man was as the orphan and the widow. A little girl heard her mother speak of Christ as very poor, not having where to lay His head. “If I had been there, mamma, I would have given Him my pillow,” said the child. Such is the spirit which “pure religion and undefiled” makes; and in helping the needy, especially of the household of faith, we help Christ. They are His representatives upon earth, and in helping them we help Him. The desire thus to help is certain to be gratified. Adoniram Judson prayed during his lifetime that he might be a missionary to the Jews in some way, and, while he was in his last sickness, his wife read from the Watchman of a Jew in Constantinople, who, having accepted Christ himself, had been translating the “Life of Judson” for his own people, and the effect of that little book among them had been to induce them to send for a missionary to lead them into the light. The news so agitated Judson that he could not control his feelings. “Wife,” he said, “who would have thought that God, instead of answering my prayers by using me in person as a missionary, should use my life?” His desire to put himself in contact with this needy people God answered by carrying him thus through the book to them.

That good Christian woman in New York who was not satisfied with simply paying the salary of a missionary among the poor, but went with her and came in contact with the needy, is a living illustration of this truth. The blessing that she received by contact with suffering was to her as great as the ministry she carried to others. This helpful contact with the needy reacts in blessing upon ourselves.

II. A Guarded Separation.

The word “keep” has in it the idea of guarding. It is the word used where we are told that the soldiers guarded Jesus: “They sat down and watched Him there,” Protection is the idea. Now if we have fulfilled the first condition of the text, we need not be careful about the second. The man who is all the time in helpful contact with the needy, striving to do good, seeking to save souls, is sure to keep himself “unspotted from the world.” This activity is his safety. In a very sweet sense, “the Lord is our keeper,” We commit ourselves to Him, feeling assured that “He will keep that which we have committed unto Him against that day.” But there is another sense in which we are to keep ourselves: “Keep thyself pure.” “Whosoever is born of God keepeth himself.” Faith is not presumption. The Lord Jesus would not cast Himself down from the pinnacle of the temple in order that the Father might simply display His power in keeping Him from harm. So we need the cautious spirit.

The word “unspotted” is very suggestive; it means not bespattered. Keep thyself in such relation to the world as not to be spattered by it. We can thus be in the world and not of it, and so deport ourselves toward it that the purity of our religion shall not be spattered by its pollution. I have known men who were good Christians, pure in heart, but in business and social relations had become spattered. They went into business determined to be honest; but the atmosphere in which they moved, the maxims oi men with whom they came in contact, so influenced them that their very honesty was spattered by the dishonesty thers. Oh, how many good men have had their characters spattered by doubtful actions, by some mistake they have made, by not being thoroughly and at all times true to their convictions!

I was hurrying across Fulton Street the other day, on my way to an appointment in the country. It was just after a rain. and. as I started across, a wagon came lumbering by. and spattered me with mud from head to foot. Imagine my feelings! Dare I go out to Orange to make an address, as was my purpose, before a thousand people, thus spattered all over with mud? Those who saw me in that plight might have thought that I was cleanly enough in my habits, but certainly I was spattered, and they would think more of the spattering, doubtless, than of what I was saying. I was therefore compelled to take the time, hurried as I was. to remove the spattered mud from my clothing. And so. Christian brother, good as you may be in your heart, pure as your religion is. if you put yourself in certain relations, the muddy wheels of the world will spatter you all over.

This kind of religion, pure and undefiled and unspattered by the world, stands the test of God’s inspection. “Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father.” I used to urge men to be careful as to their walk before men. My sermons on that subject I have laid aside. Be careful as to how you walk before God, and then you may be careless about your walk before the world. If we walk as we should before God, we are certain to walk right before the world. After all, God’s opinion is what we need here and hereafter, and His “Well done” is a foretaste of heaven upon earth. I should like to be, and have you all to be, just what James Russell Lowell said Clinton B. Fisk, the Prohibition candidate for President, was:

“He stood upon the world’s broad threshold; wide

The din of battle and of slaughter rose; He saw God standing upon the weaker side

That sank in seeming loss before its foes. Many there were who made great haste and sold

Unto the common enemy their swords; He scorned their gifts of fame and power and gold,

And underneath their soft and flowery words

Heard the cole serpent hiss; therefore he went And humbly joined to the weaker par:;

Fanatic named, and fool, ye: well cor.:::

S< he could be the nearer to God’s heart, And feel its - rises sending blood

Through all the widespread veins of endless good.”