Together Like a Horse and Carriage

The New Testament letter of James tells us that faith isn't enough, that we need to do good deeds, too. What does he mean by that? Maybe my sermon will help you as you think about that question.

Some of you may remember a song from way back called “Love and Marriage.” I think that Frank Sinatra used to sing it. It went like this:

“Love and marriage, love and marriage,

Go together like a horse and carriage.

This I tell you, brother:

You can’t have one without the other!”

Campbell’s Soup even used it in one of their commercials. They substituted “soup and sandwich” for “love and marriage;” but the point is the same. There are some things that just go together; one without the other is incomplete. Faith and works are two of those things. One without the other just isn’t complete. Faith without works is like the horse unhitched from the carriage; and works without faith is like a carriage without a horse!

That may seem to be obvious, but most Christians seem to prefer one over the other. We don’t do a very good job of keeping both the carriage and the horse. We Protestants, for example, claim that “All you need is faith.” What we mean by that is that no one needs to do anything to earn their salvation. When you open those beautifully wrapped gifts on Christmas morning, you didn’t do anything to earn them; they were given to you out of love! Salvation is just like that. God loves us so much, that he gives us salvation through Jesus Christ, no strings attached! But many people misunderstand “all you need is faith” and take it to mean that if we have faith, we don’t have to do anything else. James must have been writing to a congregation who thought like that. He was careful to tell them, “Faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead. Show me your faith without deeds, and I will show you my faith by what I do.” (James 2:14-26) Can we show our faith without taking any action? I’m not so sure that we can. And some other religious traditions make the opposite mistake. These folks tend to forget about faith and concentrate on works. They believe that God gets angry if we don’t dress a certain way, worship a certain way, or believe a certain way. They don’t understand that we are already acceptable to God; and that we can’t earn God’s love by any works that we do! We behave as Christians not to make God happy with us, but because we are thankful for what God has already done.

So, how do faith and works fit together? How can we hitch the horse to the cart so that we can move through life with enough horse and enough cart? The answer is that we do good works because we are thankful for the salvation that God gives us as a gift; and we get the power to do those works through our faith in Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit. In other words, our faith is the horse that pulls the carriage of our works. Faith without deeds is like the horse unhitched from the carriage. It looks beautiful as it runs around. We can admire its beautiful color, its smooth gaits, and its flowing tail. But it isn’t any good to anybody, because it doesn’t do anything. And works without faith is like the carriage without the horse. It can’t go anywhere! Oh, we may try our best to push it along by our own strength; but without faith, we don’t have a chance of moving that carriage along very far. Without faith, we can’t possibly do the difficult works that God calls us to do: works like loving our enemies, praying for people who want to hurt us, and caring as much for others as we care for ourselves. Without faith, we don’t have a prayer of being able to give needy people the shirt off our back, the blanket off our bed, and the food off our table. Without faith, we can’t possibly take up our cross and follow Jesus. We just can’t do it by ourselves. But with faith – by calling on Jesus for help and trusting in the power of the Holy Spirit – we can do amazing things for the glory of God! If we hitch the horse to the carriage, there’s no limit to what is possible.

You may be thinking right now, “Well, that sounds good for spiritual giants. Of course, the saints did wonderful things. But that doesn’t work for somebody like me. I’m not smart enough, brave enough, or resourceful enough to do anything really important.” In response to that reaction, let me share what Corrie Ten Boom said about our natural talents: “It is not my ability, but my response to God’s ability, that counts.” Not my ability, but my response to God’s ability. God’s ability is the horse that pulls the carriage of our ability to places that we could never go on our own!

Let me tell you about Corrie Ten Boom. She grew up in Holland, in what is now the Netherlands, in the early part of the 20^th century. She came from a middle-class family of devoted Christians where faith in Jesus Christ and service to others were the twin foundations of their faith. In May of 1942, a well-dressed woman carrying a suitcase appeared at their front door. She told the Ten Booms that she was a Jew, and that the Nazi Occupation forces had arrested her husband. Her son had gone into hiding, and she was afraid to return home. Could she stay with the Ten Booms? Casper’s response was, “In this household, God’s people are always welcome.” With this simple act of hospitality, the Ten Booms began nearly two years of hiding refugees from the Nazis. Some were Jews, while others were members of the resistance movement. All of them risked being sent to the death factories of the concentration camps if they were caught. At any one time, there were usually 6 or 7 people living with the Ten Booms who fed them, clothed them, and gave them shelter. During that time, they saved the lives of an estimated 800 Jews.

In late February, 1944, the Gestapo raided their home. They arrested everyone who tried to enter it, seizing over 30 people. Corrie’s father, Casper, was an old man of 84. When the Gestapo asked him if he knew he could be executed for helping Jews, he responded, “It would be an honor to give my life for God’s people.” He died in prison only 10 days after his arrest. Corrie and her sister, Betsie, were sent to a concentration camp where Betsie died in late December. Before she died, she told Corrie, “There is no pit so deep that God’s love is not deeper still.” Corrie was freed just 12 days later as a result of a clerical error. The following week, all the women her age in the camp were executed.

Corrie devoted the rest of her life to sharing what she had learned about faith during those. She was able to do what she did, she said, only through the strength that God gave her through her faith. “Trying to do the Lord’s work in your own strength,” she said, “is the most confusing, exhausting, and tedious of all work. But when you are filled with the Holy Spirit, then the ministry of Jesus just flows out of you.” A challenge to that faith came just two years after the war ended. One of the guards who had been at her prison camp approached her and asked for her forgiveness. How could she forgive someone who had been responsible for the death of countless innocent people, including her own sister? Here are her own words about the encounter. “Even as the angry, vengeful thoughts boiled through me, I saw the sin of them. Jesus Christ died for this man; was I going to ask for more? Lord Jesus, I prayed, forgive me and help me to forgive him… Jesus, I cannot forgive him. Give me your forgiveness… And so I discovered that it is not on our forgiveness any more than on our goodness that the world’s healing hinges, but on His. When He tells us to love our enemies, He gives us, along with the command, the love itself. For a long moment we grasped each other’s hands, the former guard and the former prisoner. I had never known God’s love so intensely as I did then.”

Corrie Ten Boom died on her 91^st birthday after spending more than 30 years sharing her faith and her experiences with people in over 60 countries. If she were here today, she would tell us that she did nothing extraordinary. She simply did what God asked her to do using the strength that God gave her. She would assure us that “When I try, I fail. When I trust, He succeeds.” That’s a good thing to remember. “When I try, I fail. When I trust, God succeeds.” When we try to do good works in our own strength, we fail more often than not. But when we have faith in God who promises to fill us with the Holy Spirit, we can do works that are truly remarkable. “When I try, I fail. When I trust, God succeeds.” Now that’s hitching up the horse to the carriage and going somewhere!