Useless religion

If anyone among you thinks he is religious, and does not bridle his tongue but deceives his own heart, this one's religion is useless. Pure and undefiled religion before God and the Father is this: to visit orphans and widows in their trouble, and to keep oneself unspotted from the world. – James 1.26-27

The Bible doesn’t talk about the word ‘religion’ a whole lot. Here is one few times and in just a couple of verses we read about religion in two contexts – useless religion and pure religion.

Let’s look at useless religion first. What would God call useless religion? Surely it would be something really serious like paganism or Satanism or some terrible cult to be called useless? Actually, on second thought I guess those would be worse than useless.

So what is useless? They have already been implied here.

To have an unbridled tongue

To deceive oneself by being a hearer and not a doer (as we have already seen) 

This unbridled tongue is going to get more coverage later but it is worth a mention here. Just think about how a few slippery unbridled words sneaking out can destroy or do serious damage to a testimony for Christ. Just think about the damage someone’s words have done to you. Even worse, think about the damage your (finger pointed inward to me) have done to others.

When I was younger I had a mean, biting, sarcastic tongue. That really makes me sad. I think about all the damage that did. Even worse I think about all the damage it did to others. If we define ‘religion’ as the ‘outward show of inward belief’ my religion was pretty useless. How can we expect our ‘religion’ to do any good if we can’t keep from running off at the mouth?

I’ll stop for now – more later on our unbridled tongue.