James

James is a letter of intensely practical wisdom written to the twelve tribes which are scattered abroad, Jewish believers dispersed across the ancient world. Its author is traditionally James, the brother of the Lord and leader of the Jerusalem church, who calls himself simply a servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ. Often counted among the earliest New Testament writings, it reads like a Christian book of Proverbs, echoing the Sermon on the Mount in almost every paragraph and firing off dozens of direct commands in just five chapters.

James opens by telling believers to count it all joy when they fall into divers temptations, and to ask God for wisdom, who gives to all men liberally. From there he sweeps through hearing and doing the word, the sin of favoring the rich man with the gold ring, the famous declaration that faith without works is dead, the untamable tongue that is a fire, a world of iniquity, quarrels born of worldly lusts, the arrogance of boasting about tomorrow, warnings to rich oppressors, and the prayer of faith that saves the sick, with Elias as proof that the effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much.

James matters because it refuses to let faith stay theoretical. Pure religion, he says, is to visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction and to keep oneself unspotted from the world. Be ye doers of the word, and not hearers only: that single command is the whole letter in miniature.