Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world.

James 1:27

This verse comes among three key instructions: listen to the word of God, do what God says and mind what you say.

There’s a deeply needed understanding of Scripture that is sorely lacking in many of our churches. Saying and believing the right thing is only one part of the practice of Christianity. If you leave out the doing, you leave out the part most people will actually experience. If we stand in the foyer or the pulpit and say all the right things but never look out for the “least of these”, we are failing to produce a religion our Father accepts.

So what does it mean to be polluted by the world? Sin, certainly, is part of the definition. But among those sins are selfishness and greed. We must not convince ourselves that being good is good enough. We must also do good. Pure religion does good.

Ethan Kirl