A Faith that Loves Well

Let's do this. Let's go to the Word of God. If you would turn in your copy of God's Word of the Book of James. We're in our third message in our series, "A Faith That Works Well." Tonight we will see that a faith that works well loves well. I have an alternate title and we'll work with that alternate title. We will see that there is a sin that kills love in a fellowship. There is a sin that kills a loving fellowship. And this sin actually splinters off into other sins.

So let's open up God's Word and see what James has to say and how we might profit and benefit as a church and how we might be on the lookout for this sin that prevents or kills love in our fellowship. I'll read verses 1-13 of James 2. My brothers, show no partiality as you hold the faith in our Lord Jesus Christ, the Lord of glory. For if a man wearing a gold ring and a fine clothing comes into your assembly and a poor man in shabby clothing also comes in.

And if you pay attention to the one who wears the fine clothing and say, "You sit here in a good place," while you say to the poor man, "You stand over there," or "Sit down at my feet," have you not then made distinctions among yourselves and become judges with evil thoughts? Listen, my beloved brothers, has not God chosen those who are poor in the world to be rich in faith and heirs of the kingdom, which He has promised to those who love Him? But you have dishonored the poor man. Are not the rich the ones who oppress you and the ones who drag you into court? Are they not the ones who blaspheme the honorable name by which you were called?

If you really fulfill the royal law according to the scripture, you shall love your neighbor as yourself. You are doing well. But if you show partiality, you are committing sin and are convicted by the law as transgressors. For whoever keeps the whole law but fails in one point has become accountable for all of it. For he who has said, "Do not commit adultery," also said, "Do not murder." If you do not commit adultery but do murder, you have become a transgressor of the law. So speak and so act as those who are to be judged under the law of liberty. For judgment is without mercy to one who has shown no mercy. And mercy triumphs over judgment.

So a faith that works is a faith that is proven by love. Now I'm blessed that people have come into our fellowship and have said, "This is a loving fellowship." I'm blessed that people have come into our fellowship and have seen us to be compassionate and welcoming. But as we come over to this chapter two of this book, James General Epistles, this is a letter that he wrote to be circulated to the church. And he's writing this book to people who are facing both external trial and internal trial. They're facing persecution and they're scattered from their homeland. That's external. But the early church faced internal trial.

This was a message that was vital to every fellowship. And if we're honest, we've all been guilty of this sin. We all have found ourselves gravitating to perhaps someone that we relate to more. I teach sociology at a college and sociologists have long since discovered that people typically worship with others who have the same income level, the same educational level, the same racial and ethnic demographics. And most people socially and religiously gravitate to those that make them feel comfortable with who they are. But born again Christians ought to transcend what is normal and what is expected and what is natural.

And James is writing to people and he's saying, if you don't practice a transcendent love, a supernatural love, then you don't have a faith that works. He's even commanding, do not practice a version of faith that is not demonstrated by love. If you remember last week, I left you with a challenge to look at verses 19 through 27. If you remember the challenge, I asked you to meditate on these verses because James carries over themes from 19 to 27 into chapter two. He tells his readers to prioritize doing the word, be doers of the word in verse 22, show compassion on the helpless, obey the perfect law.

Verse 25 and tonight we will examine the sin that kills a loving fellowship, a sin that kills a loving fellowship. So the first sin that I want you to see is the sin of partiality because the sin of partiality has splinters and it has tentacles. And under the umbrella of partiality, we're going to see many other sins. And if we can address partiality, it typically will illuminate the problems that we will discuss. I will be in verses one through 11 and I will pick several verses and we will, as always, challenge you to go back.

We're reading Ecclesiastes this summer, we're reading James this summer, we're in the wisdom literature so that we could become a church that practices a faith that works. I want you to see that partiality. This is a word that also means favoritism. In the Greek it's prolo-sympsy, pro-syllimpsia. It means to show the face. It also means to judge one based on appearances. As we will see favoritism is also called partiality and it's deadly and it's even parasitic to the fellowship. Partiality is incompatible with Christ. It's incompatible with who Jesus is. Let's look at the example of Jesus who became poor.

Second Corinthians 8 and 9 says that though he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor so that you by his poverty might become rich. We see the example of Jesus' incarnation. We see the example of his birth. Was he not born in a humble manger stall? He was born in poverty. We see the example of his ministry. He ministered to the Samaritans. He spent time in Nazareth and in Galilee. These were rejected towns. These were not glamorous towns. We see the example of his life. The son of man had nowhere to lay his head. Matthew 8, 20. We also see the example of his death. Philippians 2, 7 through 9.

It summarizes how Jesus was the first of the slaves. He lived his life as a servant. Philippians 2, 7 says that he emptied himself by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men and being found in human form. He humbled himself and became obedient to death, even death on the cross. John MacArthur notes this and says the cross was the most humiliating of deaths. Jesus from his birth to his ministry to his death was the most humble servants. How did James open up his book? James, a doulas slave and we will never embrace trials with joy.

We will never endure temptations and we will never love well if we don't also embrace this servant, doulas slave mindset because servants don't think of themselves highly. Servants don't show partiality because partiality is incomprehensible to Christ and it's incompatible with Christ. Secondly, partiality is incompatible with the gospel. Listen to James 2, 5. You might want to highlight this verse as you turn there. Listen, my beloved brothers, has not got chosen those who are poor in the world to be rich in faith and heirs of the kingdom which he has promised to those who love him.

A preferential treatment towards one people, one class of people, whether it's race or whether it's income, whether it's social status or other demographics, is so alien to the gospel. Gospel recipients are those who are the poorest. How do we come to Christ as beggars? What does scripture say? Blessed are the poor in spirit. We can't come to Christ unless we come to him bankrupt, totally empty of our own good deeds and our own good works. Because God has chosen the poor to be recipients of his eternal riches, shouldn't we also show kindness to those in need of those riches? Listen to what Paul says to the Corinthians.

Not many of you were wise by human standards. Not many of you were influential and not many of you were of noble birth. And Paul makes an appeal to this divided people that they have no reason in the flesh to be boastful. And if we are gospel recipients, we've got no grounds for partiality. Partiality is incompatible with Christ and the gospel. It's also incompatible with the character of God. The word partiality means divided. MacArthur says, "Partiality is inconsistent with the purpose and the plan of God in choosing the poor of this world to be spiritually rich." Partiality is inconsistent with loving your neighbor as yourself.

Even if it were the only sin a person ever committed, partiality, like other sins, shatters the entire law of God. Brother Chris notes in his sermon series of James that impartiality is an attribute of God that we oftentimes overlook. And he states that we gravitate towards studying the love of God, the mercy of God. We also even talk about the immutable aspects of God. God's immutable doesn't change. Perhaps we don't talk enough about the Lord's impartiality. Because scripture says, Romans 2, verse 11, that God shows no partiality, and especially in judgment. He will judge the rich and the poor. He is no respecter of men.

We've seen how incompatible partiality is with Christ and with God the Father and with the gospel. It's also incompatible with the scriptures. Both Old Testament and New. Moses commanded Israel to show no favoritism. Deuteronomy 10, 17. And in the New Testament, Paul said, "There is now no Jew, nor Greek, nor barbarian." In Ephesians, we recently studied, as Brother Chris has been teaching us, that the boundaries between men were torn down in Christ, that Christ did that work. Christ cannot allow a fellowship like ours to give any preferential treatment over anybody. G.

Campbell Morgan says this, "The words of James make it impossible to show any respect of persons on the grounds of possessions, worldly wealth, and to show respect in this way shows that the faith of Jesus Christ is not held." So if we love one's possessions, we don't truly love like Christ loves. And as G. Campbell Morgan says, it would actually give us great pause to call one a Christian who showed such favoritism. So the sin of partiality is the sin that kills love and kills a loving fellowship. But we need to see that this sin then splinters into other grievous sins. And the second that we will look at is judgmentalism.

Let's look at verse 2. "For if a man wearing a gold ring and fine clothing comes into your fellowship or your assembly, and a poor man in shabby clothing," the original language says, "filthy clothing also comes in. And if you pay attention to the one who wears the fine clothing and you say, 'You sit here in a good place,' while you say to the poor man, 'You stand over here or sit down at my feet,' have you not then made distinctions among yourselves and become judges with evil thoughts?" And as I mentioned, this actually says, "flashy rings or vile clothing," in the original language.

And as you can see, James says that we move from being guilty of partiality to being guilty of wicked judgmentalists. He says, "You become judges with wicked thoughts." If we show favoritism towards someone, that's not an innocent sin. That's not even an excusable sin. It's not acceptable to think in ministerial terms, "Well, we could really build the ministry if we got this guy into our church." "Well, that would really help us with the building fund." I debated about whether or not to tell the story or not, but as you guys can tell, I'm quite the athlete. I'm 5'9" on my license. I like to tell my students.

Some of you will get that in a second. I'm actually kind of far away from 5'9". I think I'm 5'7", possibly with shoes on. But in spite of popular opinion, I actually have been quite the basketball enthusiast my entire life. I spent hours and hours playing basketball. In high school, I went out for the wrestling team only because the basketball team was not an option. The basketball team was my joy. Me and my dad went to see countless, countless games. On the weekends, me and my friends would play pickup games for hours. As I moved into college, I picked up other sports, mountain biking, running and whatnot. Then I get saved.

Then I go with my wife. We were in need of a church and we joined a church. I had been a member of this church for all of two weeks. Another friend of mine had joined with us about the same time. We had both came from another church. We mountain biked together. We ran together. He was 6'1". He was very muscular. The self-appointed captain of the church league basketball team approached us both. Before Sunday morning, I don't know that I had met him really. I don't know that I knew a lot of people. But he came to us, looked past me, looked to my friend and told him about the church league basketball. He said, "Hey, you play. I know you play.

You played in high school. You're in the area. You're really talented. Help us on the wing. Why don't you come out?" Now that's a funny comical story. But scripture says, whether it's something relatively innocent as church league basketball or whether it's trying to recruit someone wealthy, that when we are guilty of those actions, we become what? Judges with wicked thoughts. Is that a comical story or is that something wicked that we are all guilty of at some point? Sometimes we can spiritualize our favoritism and sometimes we can gloss it over in religious terms. But scripture says this leads to wicked judgmentalism.

I want us to see that judgmentalism is dishonoring. It says in scripture that you have dishonored the poor. It's dishonoring. It's dishonoring to the poor because these are individuals with real spiritual needs. And it is so far removed from the heart of Jesus. He himself became poor, that we might become rich. I want us to see that from partiality to judgmentalism, you could argue to dishonor and eventually to hypocrisy. The third sin, hypocrisy. Now if we move further into scripture, we see that this is extremely dangerous because in verse 8, this tells us that we become lawbreakers. Let's read verse 8.

If you really fulfill the royal law according to the scripture, you shall love your neighbor as yourself. You are doing well. Remember Jesus said the two greatest commandments. The first is to love your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength. And second, to love your neighbor as yourself. Let's look at verse 9. But if you show partiality, you are committing sin and are convicted by the law as transgressors. For whoever keeps the whole law but fails in one point has become guilty of all of it. For he who said, do not commit adultery also said, do not murder.

If you do not commit adultery but do murder, you have become a transgressor of the law. So speak and so act as those who are to be judged under the law of liberty. For judgment is without mercy to one who has shown no mercy. Mercy triumphs over judgment. I think it's important to see background here. This is a devoutly Jewish audience. James is writing to early converts to Christianity. They come from Jewish backgrounds and he's using Jewish language such as you blaspheme or you break the whole law. Rabbinical leaders oftentimes differentiated between the light laws and the weightier matters of the law.

And Jesus dealt with this in the Sermon on the Mount. And that's why commentators say James has many parallels to the Sermon on the Mount. But James is telling his readers that they violate the weightier matters of the law. He's saying this is actually sin. Some of the same phariseical attitudes that Jesus dealt with when he addressed the Pharisees or when John the Baptist called them a brood of vipers. He's saying that this phariseical attitude is permeating even in your trial. And he's saying you are even victims of this same attitude.

One writer says because James spends so much time talking about issues of poverty and being oppressed it's obvious that the wealthy were persecuting Jews who were scattered. They were being persecuted and instead of showing compassion on the poor they themselves were persecuting the poor by holding some sort of pecking order. In the ancient world it wasn't uncommon to have a seat of honor, the right hand. The Old Testament. Proverbs talks about this a lot. Proverbs says do not put yourself forward. And Jesus references this. He says take the lowest seat and have someone else call you to a higher seat. That's referencing to the pecking order.

And some scholars say that when they had love feasts, which is what they refer to as their communion meals, that the same social pecking order oftentimes existed. You know in the book of Acts, widows were being overlooked in the Lord's Supper, in the meal. And so we have to be careful that whether it is our worship, whether it is our small group, that we do not allow the seeds of a phariseical attitude to permeate in our life that we would give preference to someone is very un-Christ like. James 2.8 tells us if you break this law you are a law breaker. This is a warning.

An unmerciful person cannot receive mercy and a faith that does not love is a faith that does not work. So in application I wanted to return to something I do quite often which is just ask the big five questions. The who, what, when, where, why and how. Did that in our first message and I thought I would have some time. I want us to look at these questions. Now the what of favoritism I think we've covered so we'll skip that. But what is the who of favoritism at Grace Life Brookhaven? Who might be victims of favoritism or who might be guilty of favoritism? Well first let's look at the poor.

We're not just talking about economically poor because we have the poor economically. Do you know we also have the poor socially? Sometimes we have people who might be socially awkward come into a fellowship. People may not be easy to talk to. People may have their own individual hang ups. I think we all have our own individual hang ups. And in body life whether it's a small group and you got everybody we're a smaller church but we could very easily find ourselves skipping over to the people that we can communicate more effectively with.

We have to have great compassion for the poor economically but we also should have great compassion to the poor socially. I think sometimes we do this great and I think other times we may not do this so well. But we also have the poor intellectually. Can we love high school dropouts? If we can't then we're not loving well. Can we love those with intellectual deficits? Those with special needs? I'm asking this rhetorically. Can we love those who are poor physically? I made the joke about church league basketball but seriously people may come in with different limitations. What about the poor spiritually? And I thought about this.

From time to time we see people who come to faith in Christ that have no biblical knowledge. They don't know the theology. They can't discuss theology. They just know Jesus and they love Jesus. And I think of D.L. Moody. That D.L. Moody was a young shoe salesman who got saved who was basically illiterate. He read at a very very basic level and he was first not allowed membership of his church. He basically failed his church membership interview because he could not articulate his conversion. He could not articulate the gospel and the board of elders did not. They just didn't think he was ready.

Right or wrong what that shows is that he had some spiritual deficits in that he did not and could not clearly articulate his conversion. What we show is that God transcended his spiritual poverty. He was clearly gifted. He developed a Sabbath school or a Sunday school and he reached out to street urchins. They were called. These were kids who worked in coal factories and they worked in plants and they were homeless. Many of them many of them were the children of immigrants whose parents had died and he created what became a very growing thriving church. He became one of the great evangelists in American history. Can we show great compassion.

We see the who of poverty but what about the how of poverty. You know in the context that we see tonight in text these were Christians who were scattered in our day perhaps instead of preferential seating perhaps it's a matter of inviting others out to eat with insensitivity. You know I was in company of other people at a different church once and me and some other friends were talking to a pretty well-known popular couple at the church. Someone else walked up to that couple and said all right let's go to Wendy's we'll see you there right in front of me right in front of the friends I was standing with.

This kind of thing happens so commonly that I think that we just we think in a loving fellowship this could never happen. This could happen. This has happened when it happens it's a grievous sin. We can never be cautioned enough about this and we may say hey we're doing great here we're loving very very well here. I will reiterate James sent this letter to all the churches and there were some people in those churches that that man I'm doing okay here and there were some he sent the letter for a reason the why of favoritism. You know why does this happen we can really spiritualize this.

We may feel that we're in a discipleship group with people that are just closer to us and sometimes we can call spiritual fruit just people that have the same Christian convictions that we do. We have seen divisive language and divisive attitudes over schooling choice whether that be public school private school or homeschool. We have seen divisiveness and even I would say preferential treatment and partiality over a whole host of religious convictions. When we look at the why sometimes it gets really gray and murky and it becomes very spiritual and we have got to be constantly in our prayer closet and we need to ask the Lord to search us.

Lord am I loving well am I loving well could we welcome someone in love that might hurt our reputation. Now I want you to think about this because Jesus routinely was castigated for being a friend of tax collectors and sinners. Would we welcome people into our fellowship that could hurt our reputation. Jesus certainly did. What about the when when might this sin of partiality favoritism judgmentalism that dishonors the poor. When could it reach up and grab us and it could be at any time. It could actually happen right when we think we're most loving when Brother John O.

Sims comes in and says you're doing a great job you're very loving and we could just relax. And I think it begins in checking our own motives. How compassionate are we. You know you call somebody to go eat lunch. Who would it be. You call somebody to go to call on to have an accountability relationship with. Who would that be. I think we definitely need to be on guard against this on Sunday morning before and after church on Sunday evening small groups and on Wednesday nights. Let's do this. Let's just take some time.

Let's ask the Lord to bring this to the surface as we conclude and ask the Lord to show us if we have violated his law in this respect. We always need a tune up. We always need to rebuke our children when they don't love others well at skill at school. It could just be very well that the Lord has taught you this but you need some help in stealing this into your children because our children don't come out of the womb with James chapter 2. They come out of the womb with the sin of Adam. Let's go to the Lord in a word of prayer.