When I was in the Navy, my ship spent several days on the French Riviera. We were stationed in Naples, a very poor part of Italy, so the Riviera was a big change for most of us. A friend of mine from New York City was looking at the yachts and saw one from New York, so he yelled to the man sitting on the deck, “hey, I’m from New York!” Being in a foreign country, there’s often a sense of identification between people who normally wouldn’t have much in common. But this man made no response at all. Mike thought maybe the man hadn’t heard him, even though he was only a few yards away, so he tried again. But the man just looked straight ahead and pretended no one was there. After a few tries, Mike said something more, to let the man know what he thought of him, and walked away. This man, sitting on his boat in the Riviera, refused to even acknowledge the presence of someone who obviously belonged to a different class. He thought having lots of money made him a better person. A similar problem was plaguing some of the churches of the first century. The rich and powerful were expecting to receive certain privileges in the church. They were expecting to be treated differently than poor people, and some in the church were giving in to them.
We saw, in the last sermon, that faith is more than a sense of inner conviction. Faith in the gospel brings us into fellowship with the living God, who then sets out to transform every area of our lives in preparation for the day when we will see Him face to face and live in His presence forever. Believing the gospel is the beginning of the process of purification and transformation into the image of Jesus Christ. By faith we become followers, disciples, of Jesus Christ. This means that we’re in the process of becoming more like Him. We've been bought with a price and our lives no longer belong to us. We’ve died and been raised in identification with Christ. For the rest of our time on this earth, the central focus of our lives is to live in ways that please Him and bring Him glory.
In chapter two, James is concerned with the tangible outworking of our faith. This letter has a different feel than, for example, Paul’s letter to the Galatians, and people have often drawn the wrong conclusions from this difference. Paul was addressing a specific problem in Galatians, the problem of legalism. The churches in Galatia had come under the influence of false teachers who were telling them that in order to be saved they needed to obey the Law of Moses. The foundation of their acceptance with God, these teachers were claiming, is obedience to the law. So Paul spends much time in that letter talking about the centrality of grace, that we are saved by the mercy and grace of God, which come to us through faith.
James is addressing a different problem: the problem of antinomianism. James is addressing those who say, “as long as we believe the gospel and are saved by faith, it doesn’t matter what we do.” He sets out to show people like this that they’ve accepted a counterfeit; their religion is worthless. They’re self-deceived. Genuine faith leads to transformation. Faith can’t be contained to our inner lives. The emphasis is different than Paul’s, but there’s no contradiction. Even in Galatians, with all its emphasis on salvation by grace alone, Paul has some very strong things to say, in chapters 5 & 6, about the fact that faith is not something that exists only in our minds. So Paul and James are in complete agreement; they’re just addressing different problems.
James is concerned, in this chapter, with the idea that faith is more than a sense of inner conviction. Genuine faith leads us to act in ways that are consistent with the gospel of Jesus Christ. In verses 1-13 he’s focusing on the ways we treat others in the church: we need to beware of treating others in ways that are inconsistent with our identity as followers of Jesus Christ. As Christians, as followers of Jesus Christ, we are called to treat all people with love, even – especially – those we’re tempted to despise and look down on.
The first thing to notice is that he wants his readers to become imitators of God. When we begin talking about transformation, there are always those who will respond, “alright, just tell me what to do and I’ll get started.” They’re serious, and they fully intend to follow through. But they have the wrong idea. Our greatest need is not a list of things to do, but a model to look at. The place to start is not with a to-do list, but with a picture of the kind of people we’re to become. Christian discipleship is not following a set of behavioral principles, but following and imitating a Person. The transformation we’re seeking as Christian disciples is inherently personal. Paul says the same thing in Ephesians: “Be imitators of God, therefore, as dearly loved children and live a life of love, just as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us as a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God” (Ephesians 5:1-2). We’re not following a legal system. We’re following a Person. God has adopted us as His children, and we need, more and more, to bear the family likeness.
James, in urging us to be imitators of God, is confronting the problem of favoritism in the church: “My dear friends, don’t let public opinion influence how you live out our glorious, Christ-originated faith. If a man enters your church wearing an expensive suit, and a street person wearing rags comes in right after him, and you say to the man in the suit, ‘Sit here, sir; this is the best seat in the house!’ and either ignore the street person or say, ‘Better sit here in the back row,’ haven’t you segregated God’s children and proved that you are judges who can’t be trusted?” (The Message). That’s the problem: people are being treated differently in the church because of their status in the world. So the first thing James says about this is that it’s in conflict with the way God acts: “Isn’t it clear by now that God operates quite differently? He chose the world’s down-and-out as the kingdom’s first citizens, with full rights and privileges. This kingdom is promised to anyone who loves God. And here you are abusing these same citizens!” (The Message). He’s saying, “when you act in this way, you’re not imitators of God; you’re valuing things that He’s treated as unimportant.”
James is telling them that they’re judging by appearances; they’re evaluating peoples’ worth on the basis of how they look. They’re saying, “this man is worthy of honor in the church; just look at him! And obviously this other man is a second-class citizen.” About six months after I got out of the Navy, I stayed in Norfolk, Virginia, for a few days and visited some of the guys I’d known onboard ship. One of them was a new believer who’d been very hostile to the gospel when I’d known him, and we decided to go to church together, to the church I’d attended for a few months while I was in Norfolk. I, having just returned from California, dressed in casual clothes, and he wore a suit. The interesting thing was that even though I’d been part of this church just six months earlier, people assumed he was bringing me to church with the hope of converting me. They assumed I was an unbeliever and that he was witnessing to me, purely because of the way we were both dressed. James is saying, “become imitators of God in the way you look at other people. Don’t judge by outward appearances, and don’t evaluate people using standards that are used in the world. In the kingdom of God, everything is different. God has chosen the poor in this world to be rich in faith, and He’s more concerned with the condition of our hearts than He is about the way we dress."
The second thing to notice is that love is the most important part of God’s law. “You do well if you really fulfill the royal law according to the scripture, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’” The “royal law” is the law of the kingdom, and at the very center of that law is the command, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” James is saying that when we show partiality in the church, we’re violating the most important part of God’s law. We’re adopting an unloving attitude toward others who come into the church because we don’t like the way they look; they look like the kind of people we don’t want to associate with, so we treat them in an unloving way.
He elaborates on this idea in verses 10 & 11: “For whoever keeps the whole law but fails in one point has become accountable for all of it. For the one who said, ‘You shall not commit adultery,’ has also said, ‘You shall not murder. Now if you do not commit adultery but if you murder, you have become a transgressor of the law.” Notice what he’s saying here. He’s not saying, “the whole law is a unit, and if you break one part you’ve broken the whole thing.” He’s saying, “the law expresses the will of God, and when you break any part you’ve violated His will.” That’s the stress in verse 11: “For the one who said... also said.” The law is not an abstract principle. As we saw earlier, God isn’t just giving us a list of things to do. Christian discipleship is inherently personal. Even obedience to the law is not following an impersonal list of demands, but conforming to the will of God, our heavenly Father. “God is love,” and the command to love one another is at the very center of His law.
The third thing is that James urges his readers to live in the light of the coming judgment: “So speak and so act as those who are to be judged by the law of liberty. For judgment will be without mercy to anyone who has shown no mercy; mercy triumphs over judgment.” It’s clear that James often has the Sermon on the Mount in the back of his mind as he’s writing. These verses are very similar to, “Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy” (Matthew 5:7). In the coming judgment, are we going to be judged by whether we’ve perfectly fulfilled the law? No, the New Testament is clear that we’re accepted by God on the basis of Jesus’ perfect fulfillment of the law. But that doesn’t mean what we do is insignificant.
The gospel sets us free from the destructive patterns of life in this fallen world. Believing the gospel leads us to a transformed life. This isn’t the first time James uses the expression “law of liberty.” He used it in chapter one, in verse 25: “But those who look into the perfect law, the law of liberty;” this is the same as “the implanted word that has the power to save your souls” (v. 21). In all these expressions, James is talking about the gospel, the message of deliverance in Jesus Christ, which transfers us from the kingdom of darkness into the kingdom of God’s beloved Son (Colossians 1). In believing the gospel, we become new creatures, and if we have no evidence in our lives of a new creation, we have reason to be concerned about the genuineness of our faith. The law we’re going to be judged by, James says, is this law of liberty, the law that sets us free. He’s saying we need to live in the light of the fact that one day we’re going to be examined by the one who knows our hearts and who will be asking whether we lived as members of His kingdom or whether we were self-deceived, mere hearers of the Word who never acted on it.
The basic message of these verses is this: genuine faith in Jesus Christ will transform the way we treat others. Seeing the truth about ourselves, knowing that we come to God in poverty, will affect our perception of others. Think about the Pharisee and the Tax Collector. The Pharisee was, in many ways, the spiritual equivalent of that man on the French Riviera who refused to acknowledge my friend’s presence. The Pharisee judged the other man by his appearance and had no idea what was going on in the spiritual realm; he was not an imitator of God. He looked at the man, not with love, the most important part of the law, but with disdain. And because of all this, he put himself in danger of the coming judgment, when God will judge the secrets of our hearts.
Jesus said, in the Sermon on the Mount: “Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust consume and where thieves break in and steal; but store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust consumes and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also” (Matthew 6:19-21). The Pharisee in the Temple, the man on the yacht on the Riviera and the people in the church who show favoritism are all people whose treasure is on earth. They show it by their actions, by the things that matter most to them: “For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” Having treasure in heaven will transform the way we look at others.
James is saying, “don’t act like people whose treasure is on earth. Imitate God, who loved you and gave His Son to rescue you when you were His enemies, when there was nothing about you to make you worthy of His attention. Seek, with the help of God’s Spirit, to show love to those who don’t seem to deserve it (just as you didn’t deserve God’s love).” You don’t need to feel love for them; act toward them with love. C.S. Lewis said: “Do not waste time bothering whether you ‘love’ your neighbor; act as if you did. As soon as we do this we find one of the great secrets. When you are behaving as if you loved someone, you will presently come to love him” (Mere Christianity, Bk. III, ch. 11). And do all this in the light of the fact that you will one day be called to give an account: “Speak and act as those who are going to be judged by the law that gives freedom.”
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