(Please note the following transcript was partly automated transcription and therefore has not been reviewed for errors.)

Brethren, if you have your Bibles, please open them to James chapter one. One more message, I believe. Before I went to Manchester, we dealt with the first part of James 1:27 , and I would like us to take a look at the last part of that verse. James 1:27 .

Religion that is pure and undefiled before God the Father is this: to visit orphans and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unstained from the world.  

I just want to bring out those Greek words, but it’s those three words that I want us to train in on: pure, undefiled, unstained. Now it’s true that pure and undefiled also modifies visiting orphans and widows in their affliction, but we already dealt with that. What I’m wanting us to focus on is that aspect of pure and undefiled religion before God: to keep oneself unstained or unspotted from the world.

Father, I pray that you be a help to us now. In Christ’s name, I ask. Amen.

I just want to do a bit of a theology of purity, because that’s what we’re dealing with, keeping oneself unstained. I recognize pure and undefiled is at the beginning, pure and undefiled religion. And it’s got these two aspects. You visit the orphan and the widow in their affliction, and you keep yourself unstained from the world. It’s the unstained aspect…

Let’s just think about visiting the widow and the orphan. That doesn’t really, in and of itself, have this purity aspect to it. It is pure and undefiled because that’s how God defines it for us. But the purity aspect doesn’t immediately jump out like it does in “unstained from the world.” Unstained, there’s a purity aspect. So what do you, what’s purity? What are we talking about there?

We see pure as gold. I’m trying to think what kind of colloquial expressions we get. Pure is gold? I thought. Not that I have any gold. Well, I guess I have this. I don’t think that’s very pure. Pure is the driven snow. But we don’t get snow very often. But the idea of, like, a virgin on her wedding day in a white dress, white.

You know what, Daniel? Daniel is looking to our day at people just like us. And here’s what he says. You’re going to get three terms here, just like James gives us three terms: pure, undefiled, unstained. Listen to Daniel. 

He sees us Christians. He says this in Daniel 12:10 , “Many shall purify themselves and make themselves white and be refined.”

What I’m doing by going here is just collecting synonyms: purify, undefiled, unstained. Here you have white, you have refined. What’s refined? What do you do when you refine something? We refine gold or silver. What do you do with the impurities? Let the impurities out, slag. You basically heat it up until it becomes melted, and then impurities have a tendency to rise and they float on the surface and they can be skimmed off. And so if you refine it and you refine it and you refine it and you refine it, what you’re doing is you’re creating purity.

Now think about it. When you have pure gold, what do you have? What’s absent? You basically have anything that’s not gold, right? Here’s the thing. Now lay this down, just like Ryan gave us Stewart’s thing. One, two, one to two, three. Just get this: purity equals singularity. Now, that’s important as we seek, when we say undefiled from the world, we’re talking purity here, there is a singularity. Now singularity… You can probably start to imagine, undefiled from the world, you get unspotted from the world, you, your mind can grasp these things. Water’s pure if it’s singularly water and dirt; it’s not pure, it’s contaminated.

Here’s the thing. You take a woman, pure, a virgin. She gets married. We count her pure even when she loses her virginity to her husband, as long as she is a singular lady devoted to that man. See, this is the idea of purity. There is an aspect of singleness in it, singularity.

Now listen. Listen to this, because I’m going to introduce another word here, and it ought to make sense to you. We use this word, but do you recognize what it really has to do with, what the meaning is behind it? The Bauer, Arndt, and Gingrich lexicon defines purity this way: “Being clean or free of adulterated matter.” To catch that: adulterated. If something is impure, if a woman is impure, she’s an adulteress. She’s not singular in her affections. Or the sacred Greek lexicon: “Free from anything that soils, adulterates, or corrupts.”

Okay, you’re in James. Turn to chapter four, because this isn’t the only place in this letter where James is going to speak to us about the world and about the impurities associated with it. Notice James 4:4. So here’s the thing. When James says, how does he start it? What’s the first thing you heard? “You adulterous people.” Now, is he saying about these people that he’s writing to that they’re not being faithful to their spouse? Is that the issue? That is not the issue. You see what he’s saying? “Do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God?”

Now, here’s the thing. James 1:27 says, “unstained from the world.” You think maybe friendship with the world and being stained by the world are the same thing? I think there’s a good chance that’s reality. It’s so, what happens when you get spotted by the world? It’s adultery. And you know, God uses the same kind of terminology in the Old Testament. I’ve been reading Jeremiah. When the words “adultery,” “adulterous,” or even “whore” and “whoredom” are used in the prophets, oftentimes, folks, it’s not because they were unfaithful to their spouses, they were unfaithful to their God. They were not singularly devoted to him. This is, brethren, this is spiritual adultery. It’s it’s called adultery. Why? Because it’s like giving to the world the sort of thing that a man detests, that his wife should give to somebody else. That’s the idea here.

Now check this out. Go to James 4:8, because James isn’t done talking about purity here in this context. And he’s going to bring out two purity realities in here in verse 8, 4:8. And you see them: “Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you.” And here we get our purity terms: “Cleanse your hands, you sinners. Purify your hearts, you double-minded.”

Now here’s the thing. The first thing I want to draw out of this is, one, it’s a heart matter. In other words, you’ve got to look deep within for the purity on the level that God desires. And you remember how it was. What do you, scribes and Pharisees? And Jesus called them hypocrites, for they cleanse…what did they cleanse? The outside of the cup. And they neglected, they avoided the inside. That’s the issue. Jesus said it in the Beatitudes, “Blessed are the pure in heart.”

Now it talks about cleansing hands, but you got to believe that that cleansing of the hands has to do with the cleansing of the actions. And, of course, everything in the actions and everything from the tongue, it all flows from the overflow of the heart. We recognize that at the deepest level.

So there’s the first truth from verse eight that I want to draw out. But there’s another one here. Do you see the word “double-minded”? And that’s called “purify your hearts, you double-minded.” But remember I said to you, purity has to do with single polarity. You know what this literally says? You double-headed. When you’re double-headed, you need to purify. There’s no purity in double-headedness.

And he’s talking to religious folks here. He’s not talking to the worldly guy out there. He’s very specifically writing to his brethren. And the thing is, he’s not talking to the guy out there in the world that is absolutely committed to the world, singularly devoted to the world. He’s talking about people like, right in here, in this context, we’ve got some double-headed people.

You know what double-headed is? It’s like a Siamese twin. You ever remember there was a classic, like, Guinness Book of World Records picture of the Siamese twins? You know, the one, it’s black and white, and he’s got these two guys, and they’re kind of joined like, right? And so you got heads going both ways. Can you imagine that? Can you imagine if you’re joined with somebody else? What’s the problem? What if one head wants to go that way? There’s only two sets or one set of legs. One head wants to go that way, one head wants to go that way. That’s the kind of double-headedness. When you’re double-headed, you’re not pure. And that’s the kind of thing that we have here: these double-headed r