The Royal Law

Text: James 2:1-13

Focus: Loving one another

Function: To help people see the connection between love and faith.

Form: Story telling.

Intro:

I have always wrestled with the irony of verses 11-12 when he points out an example that should convict his audience. He says: “if you think you are pure just because you don’t commit adultery you better watch out. Because even though you don’t commit adultery, you are likely a murderer and that is just as bad.”

Now, when I read this I think to myself, I am not sure anyone in this room is a murderer. Was murder so common in those days?

That certainly changes the fact that we are a much more just and loving society.

I mean: what kind of people were they back then?

Why, didn’t he say: “if you think you are pure because you haven’t committed adultery, but have lied at some time or another?”

If he said that, he would have nailed everybody because all of us were children at one time and back then, a lie seemed to be the easiest way out of trouble.

For years, I used to read this passage and wonder to myself if something got messed up in the translation!

Well, look at the context of those verses. He again speaks of “The Royal Law” which is “To love your neighbor as yourself.”

And in that context, he uses an example, the sin of showing partiality toward someone because they are rich.

In Peterson’s paraphrase The Message he says: (SHOW) 1-4 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 takes it as far as showing the sin of dismissing someone because they are a homeless.

That is easy to do. They frighten us. They may be crazy. They may smell badly.

And his point is that we cannot justify ourselves by works because while we are obedient in one area, we ignore others.

We cannot justify ourselves by the law at all.

If we fail in any one of its points, then we have failed it all.

(SHOW) The only way we are going to stand before God is to fulfill the Royal law, “Love one another.”

I remember a fine Christian woman who was having a hard time forgiving someone else and I said to her, you are going to be awfully embarrassed when you get to heaven if you don’t forgive her.

She answered me, “I won’t even forgive her in heaven.”

I answered: “Then you won’t have a chance to meet her.”

So, I don’t know why James would use such an extreme example, the example of murder, unless we remember that to be angry without a cause, or to call someone a fool or to curse another places us in danger of hell fire.

But verses 12 and 13 make it clear: (SHOW) 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.

We will be judged by the law, but not the code that no-one could manage to perform. Our judgment will be by the law that was designed to set us free. (repeat set us free)

And the basis will be this, if we show mercy, we will be given mercy.

So, James is not a book about earning our salvation by our works, but about learning how to fulfill the Great Commandment that Jesus gave us: “Love your neighbor as yourself.”

I remember a new convert to Christianity as God was working through his life and was weeding out the sins that were distracting him. He was getting free and was really enjoying the relationship with God because God was so real to him.

And this older Christian in the church started mentoring him. This older guy was kind of confused about the Jehovah Witnesses –which is a Christian sect that teaches that one has to earn their salvation after all- and he was mixing in the legalism that kept the Pharisees from believing in Jesus with his Christianity.

One day they were concerned and came to me and said: “But Pastor, you make it sound as if there is no law at all. The kind of faith you are preaching is too easy, all you have to do is love other people. You must be a liberal, because all the liberals want to talk about is: “Loving others” and “God is love” and “They are afraid to mention sin. You know, Pastor, we gotta be pure and holy.”

He was still living in fear and he didn’t understand that I was trying to show him how God sets us free.

I understood that young man’s passion to do everything he can to please God. He was so happy that God had forgiven him that he became very zealous for the Lord. But the problem is this: we can’t do it ourselves: (SHOW) This law of loving one another came to set us free, not to place us back into the bondage of shame again.

I heard a Christian minister speak on Tuesday night about how the Lord set her free. She spoke about her freedom from her weight problem. Her speech, titled: “Eat Freely” told us that when she focused on dieting, she focused on food and when she focused on food, it gained more control in her life. She realized that the Bible tells us that the law makes us more aware of our sin and keeps us focused on our sin instead of grace, Romans 7 tells us that in a very clear fashion.

The Lord set her free and food isn’t her god anymore.

So, this parishioner was focusing on the purity aspect of our Christian faith, but he didn’t understand how it is tied into the loving aspect. (Remember: Pure religion…?)

I am not a “sin light” kind of preacher. I am not that kind of classic liberal he was accusing me of being.

You hear people say: “I don’t like the terms `liberal’ or `conservative,’ they place us in categories whereby we judge each other and then we stop listening and loving each other.”

And I agree with that. But I do like the words, Liberal and Conservative. Bill Farrell reminded me of what the Bible says in Ecclesiastes (SHOW): There is a time and a season for everything… …There is a time to hold back and a time to give away.

The root word or mindset behind Liberal is “generous.” The root word or mindset behind Conservative, is “conserve.”

The BIBLE says there is a time and a season for both. Our Country is fighting about one side verses another, but we are called to both.

The whole book of James is summed up in that last verse in Chapter 1: “Pure religion…”

And the last verse of this passage is about mercy. When I think of mercy, I think of generosity. I know that sometimes the best kind of love we can show someone is “tough love.” It is important to be strong, especially when our generosity enables them to continue hurting themselves.

But Jesus continually preached about giving back the mercy we received from Him.

We obviously cannot give it back to Him because He paid a price that we can never pay, but we can pay it forward.

We do that first by forgiving without condition, just as we have been forgiving. But it is also going to play out in tangible areas. We cannot out give God. The Bible says, the one who lends to the poor, lends to the Lord.

I have heard good Christians quote Jesus, “The poor you will always have with you.”

And then, use that as an excuse to not help them. But the rest of that verse is this: “But whenever you wish, you can do them good.”

More than that, Jesus is quoting from Leviticus 25 and that verse says, “They are your responsibility.”

Listen, the bible says that the poor are the responsibility of the rich.

(SHOW) Pay forward the mercy that God gave you.

Now, am I getting into the danger of preaching that we earn our salvation by our works?

Nope.

James talks about faith verses works but we have to understand something about faith.

(SHOW) Faith is also a verb.

It isn’t just a noun. It is an action word. I place my faith in you. I do something with it.

Do a little exercise with me. Stand up for a second. Now, sit down. You just placed your faith in that pew. You didn’t stop before you sat down to see if someone moved it so that you would fall on the floor.

You didn’t get on your hands and knees and inspect that braces and supports to see if they were intact. You just sat down.

You exercised your faith in that chair.

Faith and works are like two sides to a coin. There can’t be a front without a back.

Brother Alex Stevenson said it this way: "Faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead." He says, "What good is faith without works?" Can faith by itself save you? Can faith alone feed the hungry or cloth the naked? Does your faith do any earthly good if you are so pious you can't sit with a sinner for an hour and share God's love? And specifically to the people to whom James was writing he said, "What good is it if you say you have faith but show prejudice against those with less income."(James 2:1-7)

Faith, you see, becomes something you act on.

If you don’t act on it, then you don’t have it.

The action we are called to do here is to be merciful.

God loves mercy and He loves merciful people.

Sometimes, we get so wrapped up in legalism that we forget about the importance of mercy.

Remember that young man who was all full of zeal? He eventually left the Church. He got all upset because we were having a Christmas pageant. He said that Christmas was a false holiday that is not commanded in the Bible, we really have no way of knowing what time of year Jesus was born and that it actually had pagan roots as the Church was merely trying to appease the pagans who celebrate the winter solstice and if we really loved Jesus we wouldn’t celebrate His birthday.

He moved on, and I eventually moved to another state to continue my ministry somewhere else.

Our church took a bus trip to Washington DC just to enjoy the museums. And there in front of the Holocaust museum was that man and his wife. They ran up to me and gave me a big hug.

After several years, mixed both with failure and success, they found that God’s grace was still being poured out on them; they finally understood that they weren’t yet perfect.

Because God kept on giving them mercy, they finally understood the importance of “paying it forward.”

We will be judged by the way we show mercy. We will be judged by our generosity.

We aren’t approved by the sins we don’t do, that is expected of us. The proof is in the good that we do.