The Triumph of Mercy

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Introduction
James 1-2

We are in James 2 and part two of a passage dealing with the sin of partiality. You will recall from last week that the literal translation of the word partiality is to “receive the face”.

It’s the idea of looking merely on the outside. Man looks on the outward appearance. God looks on the heart. It’s a warning of being compromised by the superficial.

Partiality has a positive and a negative aspect to it. Positively, it’s favoritism. It’s gravitating TOWARD someone on the basis of their looks, their wealth, their social status, their race or whatever else it might be. Favoring someone is treating them extra special.

Negatively it’s discrimination. It’s gravitating AWAY from someone and withholding blessing. It’s a decision to bypass, a decision to overlook and move on, it’s an actual decision to restrain kindness toward someone because of some external feature. If favoritism is treating someone extra special, discrimination is treating someone extra worse.

And God in this passage despises partiality on both fronts.

Why? Because partiality compromises the very heart of the gospel. It eviscerates the power from the gospel. You know what the word eviscerates means? Point to your viscerals? It’s your guts. So to eviscerate the gospel is to take the guts out. To take the heart out and all you are left with is a lifeless shell.

Here’s does being partial eviscerate the gospel? Here’s the reson: partiality is an evidence of being in love with the world. It’s an evidence that you love exactly what the world loves.

Therefore, partiality only confirms to a watching world, that they are on the right track. It confirms that what really matters is money, power, talent, beauty and prestige, the very thing they are already worshiping.

This is what James was getting at in verses 5-7 from last week. He says, as Christians we don’t value wealth and pride. We value poverty and humility.

James says, “Why are you valuing earthly values instead of kingdom values?” God values the poor. Why are you valuing the rich?

James here is accusing the church of being no different than the world. You so want to be loved by the world. You want to be so accepted, so applauded, so normal that you sell out. You shame your brother by cuddling up next to the very people who belittle and dishonor the name of your God.

This is the same psychology that is experienced between the abuser and the abused. The abused goes back to the abuser because they have this deep, deep desire to be accepted.

Is that not what the church does when they honor the world’s wealth? The church so wants to be seen as cool, intelligent, culturally relevant, the church so wants to be accepted that she sells out to the abuser, the very one who is mocking them, abusing them, dragging them into court.

It’s insanity. Here’s what James is saying: offer him something different, something real, something that truly has life.

You want to confuse a rich man? How do you baffle and fluster the wealthy? Show him a poor, powerless man who is truly happy. Or even more, show him a community where the poor and widows and powerless are honored and respected and revered; now that’s interesting.

Any true seeker is coming to the church to find something different. That’s why they come. They are seeking something better than what they have. The rich already, have money, power, influence and it’s not working for them. So they come in seeking, "Perhaps there is something better." As soon as this rich person peeks his or her head in the door to see what’s going on and they see that they get the red carpet rolled out and the poor are marginalized they recognize in one second that the church is after the same thing the world is after they instantly loose interest in the church as an institution because, after all, the church is a terrible place to find money, power or influence.

But on the other hand, the more foolish we become in the eyes of the world, the more interesting we become. The more we live according to God’s values instead of the world’s values the more likely we are to peak their curiosity.
Our need to be seen as relevant must die. We are fools. We are weak. We are not cool. We have nothing to offer. It’s all about Christ. The marginalization that comes from being followers of Christ is not something to run from; it’s something to love and embrace. It’s the very thing we must embrace to even show them who Christ is. The reason Christ is so cool is that he takes people who are worth nothing and makes them something.

We are supposed be the counterculture. So here’s the question that gets answered in the text today: What does that counterculture look like?

There are three points in the outline today and the key word in all three points is all. ALL. What’s unique about the Christian, what’s particularly attractive about the Christian is the word ALL. Most people love some. Most people treat some people with respect. But to treat all people, all your neighbors as yourself, to love ALL people without discrimination according to the royal law, THAT is impossibly difficult. Why? Because PEOPLE are impossibly difficult. So to love ALL people means you must have some impossible power residing within. That’s what he’s saying.

How do you tell if you are being impartial. Easy. You just have to love all people like you love yourself. Usually the poor love the poor and despise the rich. The rich usually love the rich and despise the poor. Impartial people love not just the poor, and not just the rich. They love ALL people.

What does this look like. Loving other people has a lot to do with meeting their needs. And if we are supposed to meet other peoples needs the way we meet our own needs, then we need to ask the question, “how do we meet our own needs?”

Our needs get priority don’t they. All sorts of pressures and obligations can be competing, but somehow our needs always get met. If we need to eat, if we need to go the bathroom, if we need sleep, if we are freezing cold, if we are bleeding we do something about it. Our needs don’t get ignored or forgotten. Even if we can’t tend to our needs immediately, there’s a plan to meet them. There’s always a conscious awareness. It’s a nagging, ticking awareness. We can’t shut it off. There’s almost a panic of those needs go unmet.
Our painful needs are met at any expense. If you can’t afford a surgery on the appendix, but your appendix is bursting, what do you do? Break out the credit card, we’ll figure it out later. No price tag is too high to silence the pain of a bursting appendix.
So to love your neighbor as yourself is to simply think about the needs of others the way you think about your own needs.

To love according to the Royal Law is easy. Just ask yourself, “If I was exactly like that person, what would I need? What would I lack? And if I lacked those things, how would I like to be treated?”

One of the reasons it’s so hard to fulfill the Royal Law is we spend so little time thinking about what it would like to be other people. I just keep thinking what it’s like to be me. In order to love others as you would love yourself, you have to imagine what it would be like to be them.

Picture in your mind, someone who you have a hard time loving as yourself.

Imagine being that person.

What would it be like to look like them. If you did look like them, how would you like to be treated?
Imagine being a person who was overweight and embarrassed and embarrassed by their acne, embarrassed because of a deformity or a handicap, embarrassed by their financial situation, how would you like to be treated?*

Imagine being a refugee who went through just awful suffering to get to this country and then not speak English and have no friends? Nobody knows you or what you’ve been through. How would you like to be treated?

What would it be like to be the opposite gender?
What would it be like to be a different race?
What would it like to be adopted?
What would it be like to not have the schooling you have?
How would you like to be treated>

Imagine being a person who struggled picking up on social cues; what would it be like if you couldn’t do that? How would you like to be treated?

If you struggled with basic math, or basic English skills, or basic life management skills, or basic computer skills, and you awkwardly fumbled in some way how would you feel and how would you like to be treated?

If you struggled athletically and there was a social event that required those skills, how would you like to be treated? If you struggle jumping into social situations and you need people to draw you out, how would you like to be treated?

If you were the minority race in a social setting, how would you like to be treated?

Every Christian operates in some social group - a school, a neighborhood, a workplace. Those groups have values.

And because of those values, when someone doesn’t measure up, the group doesn’t know what to do with them. They end up being social misfits - the ones who are looked down upon, ostracized or neglected. The Christian living according to the royal law is being asked to treat EVERYONE without partiality - period.

Well what about the church. Imagine being a person who comes to church and doesn’t quite fit in.

Imagine coming to church truly curious but you discover really quickly, you don’t fit in. You aren’t wearing the right clothes. You don’t know the right lingo.
What if you weren’t sure about Christianity, how would you like to be treated?
What would it be like to be a single person among a church with lots of families?
What would it be like to have an eating disorder?
What would it be like to be depressed or have a marriage that is falling apart?
What would it be like to have kids who are not walking with the Lord?
What would it be like to be struggling with pornography or SSA?
What would it be like to walk around with the stigma of divorce in a Christian community?
What would it be like to struggle with drugs or alcohol or tobacco and show up to church?
Imagine it, how would you like to be treated. Now treat them that way!

Most of the time what we do with the weak is we say, “Well, that person needs to get a grip. They need to figure it out if they are to be successful in our world. Get with the program or suffer the consequences.” Or we say, “Too bad for them, nothing I can do about it.” Is that loving your neighbor as yourself? What if that were you? How would you like to be treated?

Here’s what I want you to do: Pick a person you are tempted to look down on. Pick a person who you’d be tempted to overlook. Spend 10 minutes writing down what it would be like being them. Literally write it down. Then go talk to them and see how it goes. I bet you will be amazed!

It’s called the Royal Law because if you love this way, you’ve found the heart and essence of what our Royal King Jesus asks us to do. You’ve become like the Royal King. If you want to please the heart of God, love like this. To love your neighbor as yourself.

A true counterculture begins by loving not some but ALL of God’s children. Secondly, it involves loving not some but ALL of God’s laws.

A law is warning. Don’t do this or else there will be consequences. It is not less than that, but it it is more than that. Every warning is also an invitation into something better. If I say don’t eat too much turkey at thanksgiving, it’s a warning against the short and long term consequences of overeating but it’s also an invitation into the joy of being healthy.

All of God’s commands are like this. The warning to not be partial is an invitation into the joy of selfless living. Self-centered living, having relationships that only benefit you, are, in the long run, soul destroying. But living for others, is soul-healing. In not showing partiality, you enter into the life of our King.

So heeding ALL of God’s laws is really important. James has a pretty deep concern in verses 9-11. He detects that we don’t think this sin is of favoritism or discrimination is a very big deal. It’s almost like we don’t even think it matters. We are acting like, it’s not even a law. He’s going to crash right into how we justify our sins of partiality.

What he’s trying to do is help us see that partiality is a big deal. Don’t gloss over it. It doesn’t deserve a Meh, emoji. It deserves panic, fear, terror. Most of us are blind to our impartiality and if we do see it, we barely see it and it doesn’t feel like a very big deal. We tend to justify it in some way. James is confronting that.

He reminds us that God’s angry with lawbreakers. He’s angry with the wicked. He’s angry with the evildoers of this world. We hear that and we think, I didn’t kill nobody. I’ve didn’t commit no adultery. I didn’t break any major law.

You see we are always so proud of the laws we didn’t break.

We hear the law, don’t commit adultery. Don’t murder. And we puff our chest out and say, "They ain’t me." I don’t know who those fools are, but I’m glad I’m not like those sinners.

What God is saying here through James is this: Murder is breaking the law. But so is partiality. “So what if you didn’t murder? If you commit partiality, you are a lawbreaker.” There’s not a no-big-deal list of laws that you can break where God is ‘understanding’ and winks and says, ‘that’s cool if you ignore that.’

Jerry Bridges once wrote a book entitled "respectable sins." These are the sins we allow in the church. Self-pity, materialism, vanity, or not sharing your faith. These are the sins that are respectable and sometimes even get praised. Partiality is one of these kinds of respectable sins.

James has us in his sights. Don’t think you can get away, friend. You can’t get away. Are you partial? Then repent. Don’t pride yourself in your selective law-keeping hoping that it will all kind of average out with your law breaking. You discriminate? You broken the law. You a racist? You broke the law. You can’t stand certain kinds of people? You’ve broken the law.

You can’t stand those people who go those kinds of schools. You’ve broken the law.
You can’t stand blacks or whites or asians or hispanics?
You can’t stand Californians
You can’t stand native Idahoans
You’ve broken the law.

What’s your Pet Peeve. Can’t stand people who:

talk too much, who come all disorganized,
don’t ask questions,
aren’t educated,
don’t manage money well,
can’t control their coffee or alcohol consumption,
can’t control their eating,
rely on others too much….
You’ve broken the law. It’s a heart of superiority and arrogance that the Lord wants you to repent of. So what do we do when we’ve broken the law? We repent. I think the best passage to illustrate this is the parable of the two men who went up to the temple.

In many ways this is a parable of partiality. It’s a parable of the one who doesn’t think that discrimination and a superiority complex is any big deal. He doesn’t even know he’s doing it.

And the point of this parable, that if you break the law at any point, if you keep the law perfectly, but you have this one little area of prejudice in your heart, you can be assured of nothing. The condemnation of God hangs over your head.

Luke 18:9 He also told this parable to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous, and treated others with contempt:

There it is. There’s the partiality. I can’t stand people like that. Prejudice. Discrimination. Treating others with contempt. So he told this parable to speak to people like this.

And the first thing he does in speaking with those who are partial is to point out their self-righteousness. Notice the link between partiality and self-righteousness.

“He told this parable to some who TRUSTED in themselves for their RIGHTEOUSNESS…” These he says are the same people who inevitably will treat others with contempt. Why? Because they reason, I worked hard for my righteous and they have not.

Notice the partiality. Who are they treating with contempt? Others - other’s not like them. There are people like me who work hard, and then there are OTHERS. Those who do not deserve the title righteous. Here’s the parable.

Two men went up into the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector.

Two men go up to the temple. They are socio-economically very different. PHarisees were educated. They were respected. They were known for their pious law-keeping. You could recognized a Pharisee a mile away from their purple robes and their fastidious law keeping.

Then you had the tax collector. Known for his unashamed sell-out to Rome. Despised. He was disrespected.

How did these two people approach God.

The Pharisee, standing by himself, prayed thus: ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other men, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even like this tax collector.12 I fast twice a week; I give tithes of all that I get.’

So what is he doing here? He’s making lists of reasons he has value. Here are all the reasons I’m so amazing. This is the sin of the self-righteous. We selectively compare ourselves to others.

This person is lazy. I’m not like that.
This person hurt me in this way. And I don’t do that kind of thing.
This person loves money. I’m not like that.
This person is arrogant. And I’m not like that.
We have our list. So the Pharisee looks at all his lists and lists of law-keeping and finds his value in that. My lists prove that I am righteous. Now let’s see about this other guy.

But the tax collector, standing far off, would not even lift up his eyes to heaven, but beat his breast, saying, ‘God, be merciful to me, a sinner!’

The tax collector sees himself accurately. You know the tax collector realized, I have no worth. I look at all my righteousness and I see nothing that I can offer.

Yeah, I may not be lazy like that person, but I’m greedy.
I may not have hurt this person the way they hurt me. But I’ve hurt them other ways.
I may not be arrogant like that. But I’m arrogant in my self-pity.
So what’s he do? He beats his breast saying, “God be merciful to me a sinner.” I have nothing to offer.

I tell you, this man went down to his house justified, rather than the other. For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, but the one who humbles himself will be exalted.

The Pharisee “kept the law” at all points but one, partiality. And in failing in partiality, in failing at just one point, seeing himself superior to others because of his self made righteousness, he failed at all points.

LISTEN CLOSELY: remember we said that partiality eviscerates the gospel. Here’s why. Partiality reveals that you trust in your own righteousness, not the righteousness given to you by Jesus Christ. It reveals that have trusted a false gospel of self-righteous.

In saying, I have value over OTHERS BECAUSE OF MY PERFORMANCE, you have denied where our value comes from. And your “righteousness” becomes for you a noose upon which you will hang yourself. It’s evidence against you on the day of judgment.

You don’t come to God with your lists of why you are better than other people. You come to come to God beating your breast saying, be merciful to me a sinner.

God be merciful to me a sinner. That’s the mark of the counterculture. I may have kept some of your laws, but breaking even one makes guilty of breaking all. God be merciful.

The world says, “Here’s all the reasons I have value and worth.” Here’s my resume of accomplishments. I’m so glad, I’m not like those people over there who have nothing to show. me. me. me. me. And the more that is on the list, the more honor and dignity we feel we deserve.

The world says, build you resume. Build your list of accomplishments. Here’s the justification for my worth. Out comes the resume. Pages and pages of things you are proud of. Your degrees, your net worth, your athletic, musical accomplishments. And what do you do with that list. You use it to compare. You measure self against others and you compare and you justify your worth by comparison.

But this man never stops to ask the question, “What does God think of my list?” God looks down and says, “All I see on your list is the basics of what I expect breathing humans to do. I see that you’ve kept my law in very narrow ways. That doesn’t earn you any points. That’s the bare minimum expectations I have for existing. That’s like asking for a raise because you showed up to work on time. I just expect that.”

You get nothing, my friend, because I see partiality. I see ego. I see superiority. I see sass and pride. I see arrogance. I see favoritism and discrimination.

You see that’s the problem with the self-righteous.

But you ask a man of God why he or she has worth? What does he say? God be merciful to me a sinner. I’ve broken your law. I am partial. They beat their breast. I have no worth. I am so unworthy of the mercy of God because I sees so clearly that all of my accomplishments are as filthy rags. God be merciful to me, a sinner.

This is why the third mark of of the counterculture is to be in AWE of God’s mercy. All of it. Look how it’s stated.

Judgment is without mercy to those who show no mercy. In other words, if you treat others by the standard that merit is earned not received, then you will be treated by that standard. If you treat other people as inferior because they have not performed, then you will be judged on the basis of your performance and non-performance. Keep in mind that God is the judge, and if you fail at even one point, you are guilty of it all.

If you don’t realize that mercy is the basis for anyone’s righteousness, then you don’t understand righteousness. You are still in your sins.

How you treat others is an indicator of whether or not you get it. Again it’s a test. Those who are truly children of God have been changed by mercy. They get mercy. They get how God’s mercy relates to their justification.

He says it another way. “Speak and act as those who are to be judged under the law of liberty.” What is the law of liberty. What is a liberating law? I’ll give you an example of a LIBERATING law. I now decree a new law, everybody in the room, before you go to bed, you have to eat ice cream. A liberating law is a law you want to obey.

So if we are being judged according to the law of liberty, we are really being judged in accordance with how much God’s law to love people parallels our own desire to love people. Is God’s law to love the very thing we want to do? Is the law of liberty, which is the same as the royal law - is that a wonderful thought or a hateful thought?

That’s how you will be judged because it reveals how you see yourself. Do you want to love and serve all God’s children. Not just the poor and not just the rich. But all equally.

Loving all people naturally will only be a automatic for us, if the gospel has rattled us.

Do we have a sense of our own spiritual stench?
Do we have a sense of how gracious God was to us in that state?
Do you have a sense of how utterly spiritual homeless you were?
Do you have a sense of how bad your breath was?
Do you have a sense of how rotten your teeth were, how dirty your clothes were?
Do you see and have a clear picture of this and do you beat your breast and say, “God have mercy on me a sinner.”
And when you prayed that prayer, do you remember when Christ came and gave you a hug? Do you remember how long that embrace was? Do you remember how he smiled at you? Do you remember how he gave you new clothes and cleaned you? Do you remember how he cared for the wounds? Experiencing that rattles a person.

It transforms. And because you’ve experienced it, you want to share it with everyone else. You wants to treat other people in that same way! For you, it becomes both the Royal Law and the Law of Liberty.

It’s the royal law in that when we act like that we act royally, like our royal king Jesus. It’s the law of liberty in that nobody has to tell us to do that. No law is needed. We are doing exactly what we want to do.

That’s the great test of how much mercy of God you have seen. This mercy has touched down in your heart. Or, as James says, it becomes implanted.

This law of liberty, the royal law, becomes for us, in James words above, an “implanted word,” “written on the heart” which is able to save our souls.

The word IMPLANTED is a hapax legomenon, which means it is the only place in the whole Bible where this particular Greek word is used. But there are lots of other examples in Greek literature of the first century so we can get a sense of how it’s used. And the word implanted always has the sense of something that is naturally there versus acquired. Something that’s planted is natural to you rather than acquired.

So for example, let’s say I don’t know anything about identifying edible plants in the wilderness. And I go on an adventure with Bear Grylls, you know a survival expert. And he teaches me all about the bugs and plants you can eat. Which ones are safe and which ones will kill you.

That’s acquired knowledge.

And you might think, okay that makes sense. But tell me an example of something that isn’t acquired knowledge. Isn’t all knowledge acquired.

No, some things are natural. Everybody naturally hates high pitched screechy noises. You don’t have to be taught that. That’s implanted. Everybody feels it’s wrong to kill other people. No school necessary. That’s implanted.

So the claim is that when you become a Christian, the royal law, the law of liberty becomes implanted. That’s a startling claim. It’s something that’s NATURALLY there vs. ACQUIRED.

When you become a Christian you are given a new nature. The Bible calls it a new heart. You are a new creation with new things that are implanted.

For example, Before you’re a Christian, the Bible can be extremely interesting. It’s information. After you become a Christian, it’s food. It’s air. You relate to it, your system relates to it, the way a hungry person relates to food, the way a suffocating person relates to air, and the way a thirsty person relates to water. It’s not just intellectual anymore.

It’s spiritual drink. That’s something new that’s been implanted.

When it comes to people, what the gospel does it changes you from looking down on people to looking up to Christ. And when you look up to Christ, everything changes. In fact, all three of our points from the message become implanted.

How you view self, how you view him, and how you view others. That desire to love all people becomes implanted. That desire to receive mercy from God and not find righteousness in self, that becomes implanted.

Prayer of Repentance: