Would you please stand with me now for the reading of Holy Scripture, and as you stand, would you please turn with me first to Deuteronomy, chapter 15, as we read verses 7 through 11. Deuteronomy, chapter 15, verses 7 through 11. Beginning in verse 7. if there is among you a poor man of your brethren with any of the gates in your land which the Lord your God is giving you, you shall not harden your heart nor shut your hand from your poor brother. But you shall open your hand wide to him and willingly lend him sufficient for his need. Whatever he thought in your heart, saying, the seventh year, the year of release is at hand, and your eye be evil against your poor brother, and give him nothing, and he cry out to the Lord against you, and it becomes sin among you. You shall surely give to him, and your heart should not be grieved when you give to him. because for this thing the Lord your God will bless you in all your works and in all to which you put your hand. For the poor will never cease from the land, therefore I command you saying, you shall open your hand wide to your brother and your poor and your needy in your land." May God add a blessing to the reading of His Word. Would you turn with me now to 1 Corinthians 13. 1 Corinthians 13 as we read verses 1-10. Paul writes, Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I have become sounding brass or a clanging cymbal. And though I have the gift of prophecy and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and though I have all faith so that I could remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, but have not love, it profits me nothing. Love suffers long and is kind, love does not envy, love does not parade itself, is not puffed up, does not behave rudely, does not seek its own, is not provoked, thinks no evil, It does not rejoice in iniquity, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never fails, but whether there are prophecies, they will fail. Whether there are tongues, they will cease. Whether there is knowledge, it will vanish away. All flesh is like grass, and all of its glory is like the flower of the grass. The grass withers, and the flower falls, but the word of the Lord abides forever." And all of God's children said, Amen. Would you please be seated? Would you join me one last time in a word of prayer? Gracious Heavenly Father, we ask very simply that as Your Word goes forth, You would give us ears to hear and eyes to see, that we might behold the glory of the Lord as revealed in Your Word. Let us abide in You and let us obey You for Your glory. For it is in Christ's name we pray. Amen. Would you please join me and turn with me in your Bibles to James chapter 2, verses 1 to 4. James chapter 2, verses 1 through 4. And I have, as it's indicated in the bulletin entitled, This Sermon, Faith Does Not Show Favoritism, part 1. By way of introduction, one of the issues that people have as depraved, sinful people is that by nature, we pigeonhole, meaning we put people into a particular group or category. We see someone, we look at the way that they look, we look at the clothing that they wear, perhaps their race, their ethnicity, their social status, their perceived intelligence, their wealth, what kind of car they drive, the type of house that they live in, and the condition that house, or rather the condition of the neighborhood that their house is in. And we almost automatically conclude things based on those things about that particular person. None of those things are an issue for God because as we read through Scripture, we see of God that He is perfectly impartial. That is, God is absolutely impartial in His dealings with people. It's clear by Scripture that God does lavish people whom He has called in His electing purposes for salvation. He has a particular love for them, but generally speaking, anyone who is made in His image, God also loves and provides for. Where do we see that God is impartial in His Word? In the first place, what we read this morning, Deuteronomy 15, verses 7-11, God tells His people rather emphatically not to harden their hearts towards one another. He says, instead, freely open your hand and generously love those within your midst who are in need. And to be clear, what we're talking about here is that this particular love that the church ought to have is designated for others in the church. But he says something through Moses to the people, that if someone who has a real need comes to you and asks you for help, We're not talking about people who are using you. We're not talking about people who are going to squander what you give them. We're talking about men and women within the body who come to you who are in need, and He says, if when someone comes, you harden your heart against them and refuse to give it to them, For whatever reason you might have, if that person cries out to God because a real need wasn't met, was ignored, perhaps laughed at, God says to the person who wouldn't meet that need that He would call what they did a sin and hold it against them. We see it in Deuteronomy 10. Verses 17 through 18. The Word of the Lord says, For the Lord your God is God of gods and Lord of lords, the great God, mighty and awesome, who shows no partiality nor takes a bribe. He administers justice for the fatherless and the widow and loves the stranger, giving him food and clothing. In 2 Chronicles 19, verse 7, it says, We see God's impartiality in the New Testament. You turn to Acts 2.44-46, right after Pentecost, you see this church that is being called by God's electing purposes together, and what they do automatically, without even thinking about it, is meet one another's needs. In fact, the Scripture tells us that there was not a need that wasn't met amongst them. It was done naturally as a need came up. Galatians 3, verse 28, Paul tells us that salvation is no longer pointed to or directed towards the Jew only, but it is extended to both Jew and Gentile. In 1 John 3, verse 16, we're said, By this we know love, because He laid down His life for us, and we also ought to lay down our lives for the brethren. So the issue here is out of love. We just read about it in 1 Corinthians 13, and you may not know it, but in the original text, the Greek, everything that Paul describes as love to be is a verb, meaning these are things, specific things that we do to love. but he just got done describing it to us. The idea is that because we have been elected unto salvation, we've been given the effectual call, we've been regenerated, justified, sanctified. All of this work that God the Holy Spirit does, apart from anything we've done to earn that salvation, preserved and caused to persevere by God's grace. The idea is that through faith, because of that love, we now love, through action, our brethren. In Matthew chapter 5 verse 45, Jesus Christ says that you may be sons of your father in heaven for he makes his son rise on the evil and the good and sends rain on the just and the unjust. So the idea here as we're marching through the book of James is that our faith in Jesus Christ, our being saved according to His electing purposes, leads us to do certain things by faith. James repeatedly tells us what these things are. He says from verse 1 all the way to verse 13 that our faith shows itself by our impartial love for one another. Our layout this morning is very simple. Verse 1, James shows us the principle. Verses 2 to 4, James shows us the example. Let me read for you our text from verse 1 to verse 4. James writes, Do not hold the faith of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Lord of glory, with partiality. For if there should come into your assembly a man with gold rings and fine apparel, and there should also come in a poor man with filthy clothes, And you pay attention to the one wearing the fine clothes and say to him, you sit here in a good place. And you say to the poor man, you stand over there or sit here at my footstool. Have you not shown partiality amongst yourselves and become judges with evil thoughts?" We begin in verse 1 where James describes the principle to us. Again, he says, do not hold the faith of our Lord Jesus Christ and the Lord of glory with partiality." Notice as he begins here in verse 1 that he refers to the church as my brethren That's an important thing to notice because he uses that same expression back in chapter 1 verse 2 and again in verse 16 he uses it here and then again in verse 5 of chapter 2 and verse 14 of chapter 2 and chapter 4 verse 11 and chapter 5 verse 7. I think that's a total of seven times that he uses the expression, my brethren. But the reason that this is a noteworthy beginning, my brethren, is that James, the apostle, the brother of Jesus Christ, doesn't begin this topic that needs to be discussed amongst the brethren as if he's somehow superior to them, but he actually begins addressing this and teaching the church this with affection and love. In other words, the way to deal with things needing to be discussed isn't argumentatively, but from a place of humility with a desire to see our brothers and sisters grow according to the Word of the Lord. We don't approach one another as if we are somehow superior to them intellectually, but rather because we are walking this walk together with a goal of achieving both a righteousness through Christ and a mutual accountability for one another, that we are doing it together. And he begins the principle with referring to them as my brethren. He starts humbly with love. But next he gives the command, or the principle. He says, do not hold the faith of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Lord of glory, with partiality. The idea of partiality, we're going to look at that here in just a second, but James' point is that partiality, that looking at somebody as being more desirable than, say, another, he writes very simply, is not compatible with our being in Christ. that we are to follow Christ even in the example of loving the unlovable about people. Now, let's be clear, Jesus, or rather the brother of Jesus, James, isn't telling us to somehow overlook sin. The word of the Lord is full of examples that when our brother and sister falls into sin, that the church needs to lovingly go to them and show them, according to the Word, that they have sinned. But what James is actually talking about is in the day-to-day life of the church, we cannot choose people, or who to love, or who to like, based on how they dress. Or, as it were, don't dress. that gives us a command based upon how Christ lived. We see that Christ was impartial because of His genealogy. You see notable people both in Matthew and Luke in the genealogy of our Lord, including Abraham and David and Solomon, those people who are notable to us. But you also see Tamar. You see Rahab the prostitute and Ruth. You know, in Tamar's story, she is King David's daughter. And David's half-son Amnon, Tamar's half-sister, raped Tamar. We're told that the other brother killed Amnon. You see the story of Rahab, who's a prostitute. In other words, Christ's genealogy is not made up of people who are the glorious champions of the faith, but common people that the Lord matured in their faith as they lived this life. Did you see Christ's impartiality where Christ grows up? He grows up in the Galilean town of Nazareth. And to sum up what people thought of Nazareth at the time, Nathanael meets Jesus Christ. And in John 1, verse 46, Nathanael goes and he gets Philip and he tells him about this Nazarene who is the savior of the world. And Philip asks him, Nathanael, can anything good come out of Nazareth? You see it in the people that Christ ministered to. He ministered to Jewish leaders, to common beggars, to prostitutes, to high priests. He cleansed a leper. He healed a Saturnian servant. He freed demon-possessed men and a Samaritan woman at the well. Jesus did not care where you came from. Well, the question is, what did He care about? We look at Luke chapter 13, a very interesting story. We're told of Galilean Jews who are in the temple worshiping God, and they're offering sacrifices to Him. Did you know that Roman soldiers came into the temple, slaughtered most of the people, and then to defile the sacrifice that they offered in worship to God, took the people who were slaughtered and then poured their blood in with the sacrificed blood? The people who were left ran to Jesus and they say, Jesus, how could God allow these good people to die in this way? You know what He told them? Verse 3, unless you repent and believe, you will likewise perish. So to put it succinctly, the thing that Jesus cares about is not the way in which you and I are going to die under the sovereignty of God, but rather whether or not we know Him as Lord and Savior. But then in addition to that, this group of people known as the church, it says in Hebrews 10, verses 23 to 24, the author says, let us hold fast the confession of our hope without wavering, for he who promised is faithful. And let us consider one another in order to stir up love and good works. So as we gather together, our concern, like Christ's, is that we would know Jesus Christ as we ought. And then we're to consider one another in order to stir up love and good works. That's a vision, if you will, of what the church ought to be. We aren't a group of individuals that simply gather together on Sunday, but we are the church corporate. We gather to give glory and honor to Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior, and we look to encourage everyone here, brother and sister, that we grow into Christ's likeness. We stir one another up to love and to good works. But we do so without being impartial. You notice this word partiality here, the end of verse one, the Lord of glory with partiality. James uses a very interesting word. He uses it again in verse four. The Greek word is prosolempsia, literally means to lift someone's face to give special favor or respect. The idea here is not honoring someone because of their Christ-like character or because they have in some way served the church faithfully. It's a respect offered that we are told is incompatible with being a brother or sister in Christ and offering respect simply because of the way someone looks. The principle that James describes to us here in verse 1 is one of the heart. In other words, that we would stop loving those who are like us or fit into a category of being good like us, and that we would be about calling sinners to faith and repentance in Jesus Christ, and that those who consist or make up the body grow in love and that we would disciple one another to be like Christ. In other words, what is our role as the church? How often do we look to encourage one another, to pull someone off to the side to simply encourage them or to offer prayer for them or to understand how their walk is going and to encourage them in the word, but what James is talking about here is very simply as a church, what have our relationships look like? What do they entail? What are they geared towards? Ephesians 4, verses 1-3, Paul says, "...I therefore, the prisoner of the Lord, beseech you to walk worthy of the calling with which you were called, with all lowliness and gentleness, with longsuffering, bearing with one another in love, endeavoring to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace." Do you have any idea what it means, what Paul writes here, bearing with one another? It is a simple description that our growth from where we were at the beginning to where we need to be is a process that takes a while. Amen? We don't just go to church and then wake up on Monday being significantly more mature. It's a process that it takes time. That the idea that you cannot love one another and not sit with one another, holding each other up so that we might grow together for the glory of God. He says, we cannot be in Christ with partiality. Secondly, verses 2 to 4, James gives us the example. Will you follow along with me as I read? Verse 2, For if there should come into your assembly a man with gold rings and fine apparel, and there should also come in a poor man in filthy clothes, and you pay attention to the one wearing the fine clothes, and you say to him, you sit here in a good place, And you say to the poor man, you stand there, or you sit here at my footstool. Have you not shown partiality among yourselves and become judges with evil thoughts?" James now gives us an illustration or an example of what he's talking about. It's interesting because some of the commentaries that I was able to read through said that You know, this is a specific example of what happened. Some say that these are people coming into the church, some who may know the Lord and some who do not. But the context of the passage is very simply that they're coming into the church. What James is describing to us is the way we treat other members of the church. But he uses this illustration to point something out to us. The illustration is this. Two people come into the church. One of them, it says, verse 2, wears gold rings and he has on fine apparel. The idea of fine apparel and gold rings is literally that this person comes in and he looks nicer than the average person. He's wealthy, him or her, as it were. And he comes in and it says, verse 3, he says, you pay attention to that one. The idea of the Greek word translated, pay attention, is the idea, not simply of a glance, but that you'd be impressed with them in your heart, because this person coming in is someone that you want around. You're impressed by them. They look good. They speak educatedly. They look nice. You want them around. You pay attention to them. You notice in verse 3, it says of this person who dressed so well, it says, you pay attention to the one wearing the fine clothes and you say to him, you sit here in a good place. The idea of you sit here in a good place is simply that in the New Testament church, there weren't many places to sit. There were people who brought footstools that we see here in the text, but most people, if they were able to get in here early enough, would sit at the front rows, or they would stand, or they would sit on the ground. If you can imagine a sermon lasting three hours at the time, I cannot. But the idea here is that when a person came in and they looked so well and the church rallies around them because they're so impressed with how this person looks, that you would encourage a person who's sitting here to move out of the way so that this fancy person can sit in the place of honor. But we're told about a second person. Verse 2, he says, and there should also come in a poor man in filthy clothes. We can read this literally. The idea of filthy clothes is someone who comes in and they smell bad. You can tell by looking at them that because of the way they look and our partiality that these people are not the type of people we want to be associated with. They smell. Notice this, you tell the rich guy to sit here at the front in the seat of honor, but you tell this poor guy who smells, who the majority of people don't want around, he says, you stand back there or you sit here near my footstool on the floor. In other words, because this person who comes in who doesn't look the way most of us might want them to look, You disregard them. They're not as important as the person who's wearing the gold rings and the fancy outfit. The sin that James is addressing here is not being rich and it's not being poor. Notice what James says, verse 4, that the issue is He says to the church, have you not shown partiality among yourselves and become judges with evil thoughts? There are three Greek words in James used to describe evil and wickedness. The first we saw in chapter 1 verse 21, that is kakia, that is moral corruption. We see it again, or the word evil, in chapter 4, verse 16. That's the Greek word phallos. It's evil. But the word that James uses here describes how what they're doing is evil. The Greek word is panaros. It's the strongest word he uses. It describes a sort of viciousness, a destructible intent. See, the idea in showing partiality at the heart, as James is describing it to us, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, is not simply calling someone who's got beautiful rings and a nice outfit to come and sit down at the front, and then the poor person you tell to go off to the side and stand or to sit at your feet, it's that without saying, we don't want you around, you're saying, we don't want you around. You're just pushing them away. You're letting that person know without telling them, we'd rather not have you around. James says again, verse one, do not hold the faith of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Lord of glory with partiality. Do me the favor of turning with me to Romans chapter 15, as we read verses 5 through 7. Romans 15. Romans 15, verses 5 to 7, Paul writes, May the God of patience and comfort grant you to be like-minded toward one another. According to Christ Jesus, that you may with one mind and one mouth glorify the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. Therefore, receive one another just as Christ also received us. to the glory of God. What is Paul saying? The God through Christ loved and continues to love the ugly within our own hearts. Therefore, together with the Spirit's sanctifying power, so should we. The Bible says that love covers a multitude of sin. What that means very succinctly is that we have or should have, because of the Spirit's work within us, according to our faith in Jesus Christ, there should be within us a certain inner strength that even though so-and-so might not act the way we hoped that they would, that we can love them because I was first loved by Christ. That even though so-and-so might say things that just literally gets on my nerves. When I was younger, this says something about my heart, that I would get into conversations with people and their breath always smelled like coffee. And you know, I hate coffee. It doesn't mean that it led me to hate them. It just means that in my heart, I thought to myself, here's a mint. That was a joke, I'm sorry. But anyway, the point is that because we love Christ and because Christ has so loved us, that I don't have to be critical of people. Amen? I don't have to look over the glories and the virtues of my heart and then examine people in light of who I am. I don't look at people as somehow being beneath me because I've been to seminary, or I've memorized these things about the text, or I sing this beautifully, or I do this or that. The idea is that Christ saved me in spite of how I lived. One day, a married couple goes to a very intimate conference. They're going to hear this particular preacher who they have been impressed with over the years. They're not really fans, but they enjoy his preaching and they're looking forward to going. In fact, they're viewing it as somewhat of a vacation. they're going, and they finally get there, and their excitement is through the ceiling, and there's only about 50 people who are able to attend this thing, and everybody is excited, and there's this meet-and-greet time, and everybody goes up to this famous preacher, and they introduce themselves, and they kind of chit-chat, and then more people come up, and so on and so forth, and this married couple finally gets up to this preacher, and they say, You're like us, but man, do we love your ministry. We love when you expound on God's Word, and we are just blessed and fed by your ministry, and this has been a vacation for us that we're looking forward to, and we're just so thankful that we get to come. And the pastor, as he's standing here and he's listening to these things, frankly, in his heart, he's humbled by them. And he thinks how unworthy he is, and he's touched. Well, after so many days, there's only two sermons per day, and the thing goes on, I think, for three days, and this guy gets up there into the pulpit and he begins to preach and share what God had laid upon his heart from God's Word. And he looks down, and what he sees is this man who just a day or two before came up to him and thanked him for this conference and what he sees is this man falling asleep. It just doesn't happen that once, it happens every time. The guy preaches and this man falls asleep and the preacher, his pride's hit. Why in the world would you come down and meet me and tell me how wonderfully you've been looking forward to this only to fall asleep? was hit. He didn't appreciate this brother falling asleep. Again, a couple of days of this goes past and the man's wife comes down to him and she says, she says, Pastor so and so, she says, I just want to thank you. See, my husband has terminal cancer. And he takes this medication that takes the pain away, but he falls asleep. There's nothing he can do about it. But he'd been looking forward to this so much. Thank you so much for being faithful to the word, even though he can't hear everything. He wanted to hear everything you had to say. Pastor preaches his final message. He says afterwards he felt like crawling under a rock. He made an assumption about this man. He thought the guy was lazy. He thought the guy didn't get enough rest. He thought, he thought, he thought, he thought, and at the end all he did was assume. When his bride finally told him, the pastor, what was going on, After making all of these assumptions, he felt like an inch tall. Here's the point. We have the unique task of loving one another in a very particular manner. Amen? What I mean by that is we're not just two ships passing one another on the sea. We're actually called to engage one another, to love one another, to pray for one another, to encourage one another, to, as it says in Ephesians, you know, board up under one another for the glory of God, something that the world doesn't understand. The world doesn't understand why in the world you would have everything on your plate that week, but carve out one hour just to sit down with somebody as they confide in you about what's going on so that you can pray for them or with them and point them to God's Word. People don't understand why in the world the church would want to love one another sacrificially so that if something is broken in their home, we go and we help them. If there's a bill that needs to be paid, the world doesn't understand our supplying the money that would help take care of that. And we do it for no other reason than the glory of our Savior, Jesus Christ, who has first loved us. Let me tell you something that's scary, and it should scare us. It should scare us if the church ever begins to look down on people as being less than anyone else. And why should that be scary? Because in no way does that reflect Jesus Christ, who suffered and died, that we might live. God help us. We need to be careful of something else. Sometimes we might think of ourselves and all of us fall prey to this. but we need to be careful that just because we serve someone when it's convenient for us to serve them, that we conclude that we are servants. Being a servant doesn't necessarily mean that we cut out everything that we have to do to simply help, whether it causes us distress or not, but being a servant is a mentality that I'm going to love you with my time. and the gifts that God has given to me for his glory. Flip back with me to James chapter 4. James chapter 4, a passage we've read many times since we've started this. Verse 10. James 4 verse 10 says, humble yourself in the sight of the Lord and he will lift you up. Every single one of us struggles with feeling partial towards others at times. Do you know what the solution to this is, if it's something that we see in our life? The solution, chapter four, verse 10, is to humble yourself in the sight of the Lord, and he will lift you up. Isn't that beautiful? Yes, the Word of the Lord is hard. It causes us to deal with the true condition of our hearts. But in the Scriptures, it doesn't give us a list of ten things that we need to perfect before we're good with God. To be good with God as a believer, all we need do is humble ourselves. In other words, you come across a passage like this where James from verse 1 to verse 13 tells us not to be partial towards people, people that you struggle with, people that you don't always get along with, people that you don't understand. You see that about yourself. Perhaps you've even given to the flesh more times than you would like to admit The Bible says that there is therefore no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. So the idea here is not that we would walk away in shame because at times we show partiality. The idea is that you would readily acknowledge it before the King of kings and the Lord of lords and he will forgive you because he's faithful to his name. Amen. Let's pray. God in heaven, we thank you for your word. We thank you, Heavenly Father, that it is practical and we can apply it. And I pray, Heavenly Father, that none of us would leave this place feeling any guilt or shame. But actually, we would run to your grace and your mercy. I pray God that if need be, we would call our brother or sister and we would confide in them if we need to. I haven't loved you as I've been called to. I pray that the Lord would help me. I pray that it would be for his glory. Lord, help us because we so need you. And we're in a culture, Lord, that says when somebody is annoying for you, you just throw them off like water off a duck's back. You don't like this. You don't have to talk about it. Talk to them. You don't like that. You don't have to see them. Lord, help us. we look to honor and glorify you as the Church of Christ Reformed Church in Minot, North Dakota. It is in your precious name we pray. Amen.