James 2:1-13
Notes
Transcript
Introduction
Introduction
We saw last week one of the key verses in understanding how James is telling us how to be whole
He has told us how the Gospel makes us whole when we see the difference between religion and the Real Jesus
Because if anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he is like someone looking at his own face in a mirror. For he looks at himself, goes away, and immediately forgets what kind of person he was. But the one who looks intently into the perfect law of freedom and perseveres in it, and is not a forgetful hearer but a doer who works—this person will be blessed in what he does.
What does a mirror do?
It tells you who you are before it tells you what to do
The Gospel is the law of freedom he is talking about
The bible tells us the story of reality and when we allign ourselves with how things are supposed to be we begin to be whole again
This is a wisdom book on how to live in ways that lead to freedom
One of my favorite authors says To be wise is to know and affirm reality, to discern it, and then to speak and act accordingly
That is the message of James
The wholeness we know we dont have when we are honest is free to us in Jesus if we humbly receive what he has done
And when we take it it changes everything
James is on a relentless roll from these verses and he is about to go into how 2 parts of the Gospel change everything for us
Glory and Mercy
So we are going to see both of those today
The Weight of Glory, and The Weight of Mercy
The Weight of Glory
The Weight of Glory
My brothers and sisters, do not show favoritism as you hold on to the faith in our glorious Lord Jesus Christ. For if someone comes into your meeting wearing a gold ring and dressed in fine clothes, and a poor person dressed in filthy clothes also comes in, if you look with favor on the one wearing the fine clothes and say, “Sit here in a good place,” and yet you say to the poor person, “Stand over there,” or “Sit here on the floor by my footstool,” haven’t you made distinctions among yourselves and become judges with evil thoughts?
Listen, my dear brothers and sisters: Didn’t God choose the poor in this world to be rich in faith and heirs of the kingdom that he has promised to those who love him? Yet you have dishonored the poor. Don’t the rich oppress you and drag you into court? Don’t they blaspheme the good name that was invoked over you?
James has gone to relentless pains to show us the difference between religious business and inward change that directs how we live
And right off the bat in verse one he unloads on religion verses the true christian message
Outward behavior verses heart change
This is the battle of the heart
Our looking for wholeness in people verses the word he specifically uses about Jesus
Glory
Glory means weight
What has the greatest inward weight in how you find wholeness
Especially when people seem so big and god looks so small in seasons of our life
Favoritism is a heart issue that has an outward expression
The word is actually plural in the greek
It is favoritisms for what we put our ultimate weight of wholeness in
That is why he introduces the word glory in this passage
When life isnt how its supposed to be what do you turn to
What on the scales of hurt and regret and anxiety holds the greatest weight
The Gospel or what man can do
People hold weight to us
What they think what they say what they think about us and what we do and how we parent
People with influence all around us influence us and they did in James church and everyday life
THey did life with these people
they had no category for gathering on sundays and not seeing each other on monday or wednesday
THis was a community
There were successful people
The wording for people with gold rings actually means Gold fingered
It conveys influence and weight
As we have seen seeking wholeness is a good longing
Seeking affirmation and hope and safety from pain are good things
But to who are you turning to find those longings fullfilled
What have you set as your ultimate love that will drive everything you do
We are wired for awe
We are made to pursue glory we long for
Someone to be bigger then what has hurt us and scares us and wounds us
We are made to be in awe
And sin at its core is a glory thief
It plays on our longings to be whole
Cornelius plantinga says evil must leech not only power and intelligence from goodness but also its credibility
It seems credible to look to man when we arent whole
To look to something I can do to heal my scars
To look to whatever religious activity we can to know we are ok
Even an athiest is religious
They believe rejecting the idea of God and living like it in certain ways will give them the longings of there heart
What holds the weight of your heart
What you can do or what God has done for you in Jesus
Inward change by humbly accepting the freedom of the Gospel
Or outward exhaustion looking to influencers and your popular neighbors and the people who think like you and vote like you so you never have to give
When we choose religion looking to man and ourselves to make us whole we go against the grain of how things are supposed to be
haven’t you made distinctions among yourselves and become judges with evil thoughts?
What he is saying is haven’e you chose places to put the weight of your wholeness of branches that can never hold up under the weight
Our sin is an awe thief
And it looks good
It looks golden fingered
Plantinga again calls this out - To do its worst, evil needs to look its best. Evil has to spend a lot on makeup
we are created and tasked with building shalom not destroying it
Things are the way they are supposed to be …are we looking to restore wholeness to the most broken which takes or surround ourselves with who requires nothing from us
Why do we go to the broken?
Because we know we once were then we encountered the mirror of the real Jesus and what he has done to save us
We become captivated internally by the Freedom of the Gospel and become as one author says one beggar telling other beggars where to find bread
Listen, my dear brothers and sisters: Didn’t God choose the poor in this world to be rich in faith and heirs of the kingdom that he has promised to those who love him? Yet you have dishonored the poor. Don’t the rich oppress you and drag you into court?
The overwhelming majority of Christians at that time were from poorer backgrounds.
Churches were not exactly rammed full of the well-to-do and influential.
It was the opposite. James is asking his readers to look at the sort of people who are responding to the gospel
To look in the mirror and not walk away and forget who you are
We see this today
I know a mega church back home that bases the worship team on how they look and actually didn’t allow a handicapped girl to be on stage to sing from her wheel chair
I know a celebrity pastor who preached a man centered sermon on easter in a 2000$ shirt
Follow preachers in sneakers and you will see this every sunday in arenas that are packed
Because a message that tells you that you cannot save yourself and you need what Christ has done upsets us
We flock to the popular and attractive because we hope it rubs off on us
Becuase that is where we have placed our weight of glory
James is saying this is horrendous and can never make you whole
But it is with the wisdom and love of the gospel he is calling this evil and self destructive sin
Plantinga again: Sin is the wrong recipe for good health; sin is the wrong gasoline to put in the tank; sin is the wrong road to take in order to get home. In other words, sin is finally futily
We take ugly realities put them behind our back put some makeup on it and turn around and sell ourselves the prettified version of what we know is broken
But there is another way
The weight of the Gospels beauty
And we are made for the awe of it
It is unmatched in the wholeness if holds out
It says you were once lost but you have been found
It says you are so loved He gave up his glory to give you freedom
It says you don’t have to perform He has already done what you could never do
He says hold up my mirror and never forget who I made you
Then you can live the life you long for in Him by His ways
“Come to me, all of you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, because I am lowly and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.”
What have you placed the weight of your longing for wholeness in?
Are you weary and burdened, is your soul restless
He is saying I have done it for you so come to me learn my ways to be who he made you to be and know wholeness and rest
That is the weight of glory
Don’t self swindle
Don’t settle for unfullfilling substitutes
As Saint Augustine said - You have made us for yourself Oh Lord. And our hearts are restless until they rest in you
Nothing man can offer will ever satisfy like the gospel
Come to me and live in the freedom that is the story of reality
He has laid out the weight of Glory and moves to the weight of what Mercy can do in our hearts
The Weight of Mercy
The Weight of Mercy
Indeed, if you fulfill the royal law prescribed in the Scripture, Love your neighbor as yourself, you are doing well. If, however, you show favoritism, you commit sin and are convicted by the law as transgressors. For whoever keeps the entire law, and yet stumbles at one point, is guilty of breaking it all. For he who said, Do not commit adultery, also said, Do not murder. So if you do not commit adultery, but you murder, you are a lawbreaker.
Speak and act as those who are to be judged by the law of freedom. For judgment is without mercy to the one who has not shown mercy. Mercy triumphs over judgment.
This is a hard section because it is full of words we hate to hear like sin and law
But its in here so lets talk about it
Like last week we see the beauty of it when we look backwards from the end of verse 13- Mercy Triumphs Over Judgement
James for You Part Two
Favouritism contradicts not only God’s choice, but also God’s law and God’s mercy.
Placing the weight of your wholeness on anything but the God who made you breaks you and the heart of God
Mercy is who He is
So with that lens lets look at what he is doing
He has quoted everyones favorite book Leviticus 19:18
Do not take revenge or bear a grudge against members of your community, but love your neighbor as yourself; I am the Lord.
Sam Alberry says James’s selection of this particular command is not random. It is the Old Testament verse Jesus quoted the most. It may not be going too far to claim it was his favourite Old Testament commandment. It was this passage that Jesus pointed to when asked to provide an executive summary of the whole of God’s law (Mark 12:28–31). Loving our neighbours as ourselves sums up everything God wants from the behaviour of his people towards others. It is biblical ethics in a nutshell—God’s law in a bullet-point
It is because Jesus put this front and center that James calls it the Royal Law …because the King said it
And he is showing how crazy we really are
They and we think the same
We tell ourselves its ok to do somethings because look how well I am doing at these other things
Specifically it was the way his readers were justifying there favoritisms
And James is saying if you play the choose your own adventure christianity you miss the whole thing
That is what James 2:10 means
For whoever keeps the entire law, and yet stumbles at one point, is guilty of breaking it all.
The bible is a coherent whole
To accept some of it and reject other parts makes it something it isn’t
We are like little kids who break a window but say look at how much we didn’t break
Why is this such a big deal
Because the law is about the one who stands behind it
He is in it
And behind it is the God of Mercy
Look at a random law in DT 22:8
If you build a new house, make a railing around your roof, so that you don’t bring bloodguilt on your house if someone falls from it.
Seems random how does this show me the God of Mercy
In those days people spent alot of time on there roof to cool off at night
And the at risk like little kids could fall
God cares about those who are most in need of protection and wants us to see his heart and adopt it as our own
So he is saying in a random law care about the most exposed because I do
The law of mercy is who he is
Doesn’t that change the way you see God and what is His law
If you have always thought of his law as a negative I hope this is a huge paradigm shift in how you see it
That is what James wants
He wants us to see it is not a bunch of no don’t because he is mean
it is a no don’t hurt yourself and hurt others
Remember James 1:25 it is the law of freedom
Not the law of the angry fun police in the sky
But the one who looks intently into the perfect law of freedom and perseveres in it, and is not a forgetful hearer but a doer who works—this person will be blessed in what he does.
That is why he adds James 2:12
Speak and act as those who are to be judged by the law of freedom.
How we view others and where we place the weight of our flourishing reveals our hearts and if we have truly taken the Gospel or simply adopted religious performance
When we see it he says we are blessed and that word means whole
Not broken by what religious performance keeps us grasping for
Obedience to the ways of the God of Mercy shows we have been gripped by what he has shown us in the gospel
We too all previously lived among them in our fleshly desires, carrying out the inclinations of our flesh and thoughts, and we were by nature children under wrath as the others were also. But God, who is rich in mercy, because of his great love that he had for us, made us alive with Christ even though we were dead in trespasses. You are saved by grace!
Paul is saying what James is saying
We all blow it
But God who is rich in what?
Rich in Mercy saved us by what?
Grace not our performance
James may talk about sin but don’t miss what he is saying
He isn’t saying I have some bad news and some bad news
he is saying there is something bigger you can’t about sin and miss
Plantinga changed my life with this quote: To speak of sin by itself, to speak of it apart from the realities of creation and grace, is to forget the resolve of God. God wants shalom and will pay any price to get it back. Human sin is stubborn, but not as stubborn as the grace of God and not half so persistent, not half so ready to suffer to win its way
Our regrets and scars and mistakes may seem tenacious in reminding us we aren’t whole
But they aren’t nearly as tenacious as the God who set his face like flint to save you
Sin is stubborn but not as stubborn as God’s resolve to make you whole and new
Let that be your mirror and never forget it
lets Pray
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