Is Your Faith Real?

James is essentially talking to people who profess to be believers. These are Jewish believers in Jesus who have been spread across the Mediterranean world by persecution. James is aware that they're having a problem; that there is kind of an easy-believism that is afflicting many of these congregations of believers. That is, that there are people who are teaching and believing and maintaining that you can just have faith and it doesn't matter how you live; that you can have saving faith but you don't look any different than you did before you came to saving faith. And he's aware of that and his whole book is a polemic against that. In fact, what we're reading in chapter 2, 14 to 26, is just really an echo of what he said in James 1:22 to 27 when he said, "Don't be merely hearers of the word but be a doer of the word."