Whose Side Are You On? - James 2:5-7 Series

James 2:1 My brothers, as believers in our glorious Lord Jesus Christ, don’t show favoritism. 2 Suppose a man comes into your meeting wearing a gold ring and fine clothes, and a poor man in shabby clothes also comes in. 3 If you show special attention to the man wearing fine clothes and say, “Here’s a good seat for you,” but say to the poor man, “You stand there” or “Sit on the floor by my feet,” 4 have you not discriminated among yourselves and become judges with evil thoughts? 5 Listen, my dear brothers: Has not God chosen those who are poor in the eyes of the world to be rich in faith and to inherit the kingdom he promised those who love him? 6 But you have insulted the poor. Is it not the rich who are exploiting you? Are they not the ones who are dragging you into court? 7 Are they not the ones who are slandering the noble name of him to whom you belong? 8 If you really keep the royal law found in Scripture, “Love your neighbor as yourself,” you are doing right.

Introduction

Values

Imagine someone asked your best friend to describe you and they said, “Tell me what he/she is all about. What defines him/her?” What kind of a description would it take to really capture who you are? If they gave your height and weight and eye color and hair style, that wouldn’t really do it, would it? If you were a different height or weight or you changed your hair, but everything else stayed the same, you would still be you. Those kinds of things are out on the fringes of who you are. What is at the core? If someone really wants to get to the core of who you are and what you are all about, where should they look? What about your values? I think if they looked at what you value, that would be about as close to the center as you can get. If a person could describe exactly which things are most important to you, and how important they are compared to other things in your heart, I would say that person’s got you pretty well pegged. If you changed your hairstyle, probably nobody would say, “He’s a new man! He’s a whole different person!” But they probably would say that if you had a wholesale change in which things you consider to be treasure and which things you consider to be trash. If you had a complete reversal in which things you desire enough to run after and which things you don’t mind being without, if those things radically changed, people would say that you are not the same person you used to be.

If you ever find yourself asking the question, “Who am I?” - this is the place to look. What do you value? That is what determines what sort of person you are. That is why when Paul gives the qualifications for an overseer in 1 Timothy 3 and Titus 1, he talks about what the man loves. He must not be a lover of money (1 Tim.3:3). He must be a lover of the good (Tit.1:8). If a person loves the right things and desires the right things and hates the right things, you won’t have to worry about his behavior.

So what are the right things? That’s easy – whatever God loves and desires. The closer your feelings get to being like the feelings of God, the better you are as a person. The definition of an evil person is someone who values different things than what God values.

So how can you tell how close your values are to God’s values? One of the most accurate indicators is how you treat people. Which kinds of people are on your “A” list, and which ones you don’t care much for. And so in today’s passage, James is going to talk about that – which types of people you tend to favor. And the example James gives is set in terms of the way you treat different kinds of visitors in church on Sunday morning.

Visitors in the Church

Some people might be surprised to discover that the Bible even talks about the issue of visitors in church. There is a lot of talk these days about getting back to the early church. People want to get back to doing things the way they did them in the book of Acts, when they didn’t have all the structures and systems, and there were no paid pastors, and there were no church buildings… - no formal worship services; they just got together in each other’s homes and had fellowship. There is a popular book by Frank Viola and George Barna titled, Pagan Christianity that is promoting these ideas. They say things like church buildings and organized structure like we have today – it all came from pagan roots, and we need to get back to the New Testament church.