Pure and genuine religion in the sight of God the Father means caring for orphans and widows in their distress and refusing to let the world corrupt you.For while I have had some problems with this verse. The first part seems to be about engagement with the world, by ensuring that the most vulnerable in society are cared for. But the second part seems to imply that real religion is about separation from the world, in order to keep holy.
But the verse opened up for me new possibilities when I read it in context with the first part of chapter 2. Our Bibles come in artificial chapters and verses created to make the books easier to read, but sometime the context of verses like this become lost as we quote them, and it is a nice tidy quotable verse. I believe that the example James goes on to give the church in Chapter 2:1-4 is what he means by corruption. I am sure that James was not just telling story he had made up, but one he had heard of or witnessed, where the rich were being given privileged seating and priority over the poor. The world has an order that often places rich and important or famous at the top and the poor and ordinary people at the bottom. But James says the Kingdom of God is different - in that Kingdom the poor have been made rich (James 2:5).
Daniel 1:8 is a verse that could be read in the same way - Daniel resolved to be different - but Daniel was very much engaged in the world around him, he became one of the three chief Satraps and was all set to become the most important one in the country, before events turned against him (Daniel 6). His resolution to be different did not take him away from the world but into it.
So we must follow that example. Rather than being corrupted by the world, the church needs to be a corrupters of the world, and what should that corruption look like, we need to look no further than Matthew 5:3-12. Some churches remain oblivious to culture, some good at reading and responding, but for me the church should not be the place we are ambivalent to or followers of culture but instead leaders of culture.
I would love to hear comments on how we can be cultural leaders rather than cultural followers/ignores?



