Nine Out of Ten is. . .Bad

For whoever keeps the whole law but fails in one point has become accountable for all of it.  - James 2.10

We are accustomed to accepting pretty good, or even very good, as good enough. And sometimes it is. Ty Cobb hit .367 lifetime, or less than four hits for every ten trips to the plate, and he still holds the record. Read in this light, James' dictum seems a little harsh. After all, he describes a guy with a .900 batting average in the MLB - Moses League Behavior.

But if we shift our frame of reference, the statement makes perfect sense. I drive an '06 Hyundai Santa Fe. It's a great vehicle but after over ten years, nearly 200K miles, and some rough usage, it has a few, uh, quirks. For instance, the automatic door locks work. . .sometimes. On occasion, I hit the button and all the doors slam closed. Other times, up to three obey their orders while one resists. Say I park the car in a dodgy neighborhood, punch the device, and walk away. I return an hour later to discover that the local Visigoths have plundered the interior, making off with my broken CD player, a buck or so in spare change, and Hank Williams Greatest Hits. When I summon the local gendarmery to obtain a police report for insurance purposes, the officer admonishes me, "You should always lock your doors." I protest: "That isn't fair! I locked three out of four. I was batting .750, almost twice Ty Cobb's average!" Now the officer asks me to take a breathalyzer.

D. L. Moody, commenting on this passage, said that if you hang someone from the ceiling by a chain with ten links and one of them breaks, he falls. It's no good protesting that ninety percent of the string held fast.

In context, James means that sin matters and that there is no such thing as pretty good sanctity. Back up a little farther, and the particular sin he attacks is the mistreatment of the poor. In verse 11, he uses an analogy in which this sin equates to murder.

Holiness matters, and it embraces a good deal more than not going about the place killing people or sleeping with their wives. Yes, we're saved by grace; we're also expected to live it out. I'm reminded of a line from Peter Beagle's novel The Last Unicorn: "I always say that perseverance is nine-tenths of any art - not that it's much help to be nine-tenths of an artist, of course." Or a Christian.