Pure Religion - Devotional
“Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world” (James 1:27).
In today’s thinking, religion is bad, relationship with God is good. In fact, in an attempt to distance themselves from religion, many people have even replaced the term “Christian” by “Christ-follower”.
But according to James 1:27, there is one religion that God regards in his children as pure and faultless. The Greek word here for religion is “threskeia,” which, according to the Blue Letter Bible Reverse Interlinear Concordance means:
"Religious worship: especially external, that which consists of ceremonies, religious discipline, religion"
This external worship, this ceremonial, religious discipline is to care for orphans and widows in their distress. While many organizations are looking after orphans, very few have a systematic way of caring for the widowed among us.
What is the “Distress” of the Widow?
While every widow will have practical needs to address after losing her husband, The Widows Project is especially called to meet their emotional and spiritual needs.
What causes this emotional distress? When a man and a woman get married, the two become one. When one spouse dies, it can feel as though the one becomes one half. It’s not that the remaining spouse is not a whole person, dependent and incapable of living on their own; it’s that they have been ripped apart from the sacred “oneness” which God designed for marriage from the beginning with Adam and Eve. God gave us marriage to display the oneness that we see in Christ and His Bride, the Church.