New Year’s Renovation |01.21.24| Blessed Year Ever pt.2
James 2:1-13
Pastor Erik Anderson
Well, good morning everyone. My name is Eric, I’m one of the pastors here. If you’re worshiping with us online, wanna offer you a special welcome as well. We can go ahead and open up our scriptures this morning. If you have a Bible with you, you can open up to James chapter two. If you don’t go ahead and grab the Bible that’s in the seat in front of you, the black one, James is right toward the end of the Bible. So it’s one of the last few books that we have here. I think it’s page 178, I think is what I remember. So kind of jump all the way to the back, page 178 in the New Testament. We have James chapter two.
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James is a letter written by a church leader named James to several churches at this point. And this is what we read beginning in chapter two, verse one. My brothers and sisters, do you with your acts of favoritism really believe in our glorious Lord Jesus Christ? For if a person with gold rings and in fine clothes comes to your assembly, and if a poor person in dirty clothes also comes in, and if you take notice of the one wearing the fine clothes and say, have a seat here, please. While to the other who is poor, you say stand there or sit at my feet. Have you not made distinctions among yourselves and become judges with evil thoughts? Listen, my beloved brothers and sisters, has not God chosen the poor in the world to be rich in faith, to be heirs of the kingdom,(…) that he has promised to those who love him? But you have dishonored the poor. Is it not the rich who oppress you? Is it not they who drag you into court? Is it not they who blaspheme the excellent name that has been invoked over you?(…) You do well if you really fulfill the royal law according to the scripture. You shall love your neighbor as yourself. But if you show partiality, you commit sin and are convicted by the law as transgressors. For whoever keeps the whole law but fails in one point has become accountable for it all. For the one who said you shall not commit adultery also said you shall not murder.
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Now, if you do not commit adultery, but if you do murder, you have become a transgressor of the law.
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So speak and 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. This is the word of the Lord.(…) Thanks be to God. Well, we are now three weeks into the new year, which means those of you who made resolutions, in fact, right now, go ahead and raise your hand if you’ve made a resolution this year. Small, big, something in between. All right, we got a handful. We got a few of you who have made a resolution. But you know what, I’ll tell you what.(…) I think that there’s more people in here who made resolutions than raised their hand. So here’s what I’m gonna have you do. I want all of you to close your eyes right now. We’re gonna do this again. Go ahead and close your eyes. If you made a resolution this year, raise your hand.
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Okay, now, keep your hand raised(…) if after three weeks, 21 days in, you have broken your resolution.
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All right, everyone, open up your eyes and see how much better you are. No, no, okay, don’t open up your eyes, don’t do it.
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Well, lots of us have made resolutions. And 21 days into the new year, many of us, maybe even most of us have already broken our resolution.(…) There are many of those around us who made promises to ourselves to be better, to look better, to try harder.(…) And a lot of us have broken it. In fact, in our staff, we went through, at the end of the year and beginning of this year, a personal growth plan for 2024. And we set some goals. Each individual on staff set our goals. And we kind of decided, hey, what am I gonna learn this year? What books am I gonna read? What podcasts am I gonna listen to? What am I gonna start? What am I gonna stop? All these kinds of good things. And in one of my goals, one of my top four goals, is to finish my house projects. Now I have some housing projects. I do what I like to call 15 minute projects, which means you do all of the projects, no matter how big and small, except for the last 15 minutes. You know what I’m saying? Like there’s like a little bit left and you’re like, ah, I’ll get to it when I get to it. And most of the time that ends up actually just being when you clean up the tools and put everything away, right? So then things sit out for a little while. Well, I have a project that I started in the middle of the COVID pandemic. Way back in 2020, when we were all in lockdown, did any of you do a house project during that, right? I was like, I’m gonna go to Menards. I wanna get some flooring. I wanna change our flooring in kind of our kitchen, dining room. We have a bathroom area. This is gonna be great. And I got most of the way there, like probably 95% of the way there. And right now there’s two things that I haven’t done yet. I haven’t done our bathroom downstairs and I haven’t done any of the finished work. All I need to do is spend the three hours finishing the bathroom and then the hour and a half to put quarter round around our trim. That’s it. And it hasn’t been done in four years, right? Or am I the only one who’s done that? Anyway, so you can ask my wife all about the projects that I have left undone and the tools that sometimes get left out afterwards. But we make lots of promises to ourselves around this time of year. And I’m not a pessimist, but I am a little skeptical sometimes about New Year’s resolutions. Because promising ourselves to do things, like fix our housing project, or finish our housing projects, or eat less sugar, or whatever our New Year’s resolution may be, that’s great. And we opt to try to do those things. But I’m just like a little skeptical about how much time and effort and guilt we put into those things. Because I don’t know if you know this, but it is 2024 and that means towards the end of this year it’s a presidential election. And if you’re like me who’s kind of a politico, kind of enjoys keeping up with politics,(…) you know it’s kind of nasty right now. You know that the discourse and conversation isn’t very good. You also know that the economy’s kind of bad too right now. And things feel kind of tight.
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And even just in our society in general, there’s lots of disagreement.(…) There’s lots of conversation around culture wars and those kinds of things. And I know that eating less sugar, or finishing your house projects, whatever your resolution may be, it’s good. It’ll make you better. But it’s hard really for me to believe that it’ll make our world a better place.
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And so my conviction is, and I think what the scripture tells us what we’re gonna see today, is we need a radical change. In fact probably what we need is we don’t need resolutions but we actually need a complete renovation of our hearts and minds. And that’s what this passage is about.(…) It’s all about the renovation of our heart. The renovation of how we think and how we feel. And we’re finishing up a sermon series called Bless Your Ever where we’re examining the Beatitudes, which is this set of teachings from Jesus where he says things like blessed are the poor.(…) Blessed are the peacemakers. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness. He’s talking about what it means to be blessed. And in his culture to be blessed meant that you have the good life. It means that you’re living the good life. And today, this is what we’re hearing about. Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy. In this teaching and in the whole, it’s called the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew five through seven,(…) Jesus is teaching us how to be a renovated kind of person. How to be a completely different human being. A whole new way to live in our skin and on the earth and deal with other people.
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And in order to dive in deep,
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in order to dive in deep to that, we’re looking at James chapter two. And this is what we read there. “My brothers and sisters,(…) do you with your acts of favoritism really believe in our glorious Lord Jesus Christ? For if a person with gold rings and fine clothes comes into your assembly, and if a poor person in dirty clothes also comes in, and if you take notice of the one wearing the fine clothes and say, have a seat here, please. While to the one who is poor, you say, stand there or sit at my feet.(…) Have you not made distinctions among yourselves and become judges with evil thoughts?” You see, James is addressing this problem that happened in the early church. And it wasn’t just the churches that James was writing to, but Paul also writes in his letters to the Corinthian churches about this same issue. So back then, when the church first was getting started, they had a meal every time they got together. And communion was actually part of this meal. We don’t know exactly how it happened. Some scholars think that they passed around communion before the meal. Sometimes they thought it was afterwards. But the Christians would gather together. Everyone who believed in Jesus Christ would gather together. Sometimes they’d have to gather together in secret, but they would all bring food. They would bring something for everyone to share. And so if you have the poor, if you have the widows, if you have those who don’t have a lot, they would bring what they could, which was not very much. And if you had those who were wealthy, they would bring what they could, which was quite a bit, a lot of food and very decadent food. And there was a problem where the church leaders were favoring and giving more respect to those who had a lot, who brought a lot of food and they contributed a lot of money to the mission. They favored those people than those who could do very little. They would give the best seats and they would give the most honor to those who had money. And this revealed a favor for the powerful
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and were commanded in scripture, both here in James and also in Paul’s letters, not to do this, not to show partiality and not to show favoritism. Now in our lives, certainly this still happens sometimes.(…) Those who have lots of money and those who have lots of resources to leverage oftentimes get the best end of the deal. They oftentimes get treated with respect and honor. But I think that we can even expand this to beyond just money, because we also do this in other areas in our life. Remember, it is a presidential election this year. And I think that oftentimes we give honor to those who agree with our political opinions more than we give honor to those who don’t. And if you just listen to some of the discourse right now, you can hear the evil and the vitriol by which we talk about each other and it’s specifically about people who disagree with us. This is also true with kind of social ideals and social differences on what people wear and how they speak and these kinds of things. And we tend to think less of those who maybe talk differently than us or dress differently than us or have different social mannerisms than we do. Or sometimes it’s even personal decisions. We look down on others for their decisions. Maybe it’s our neighbor who doesn’t wear their shirt as often as they should when they go out to pull the trash out to the driveway, right? And you’re like, “Why don’t you just do, “just put a shirt on.”
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Maybe they leave their grass too long or they don’t take care of their house like they should or maybe you hear them, the spouse is fighting in the house next door and you tend to look down on and disparage those who are different than you. We all do this, right? Can I just like lift the veil? Like we all do this. Sometimes Sarah and I will be talking and we’ll be like, “Oh, I can’t believe “those people do that,” right? And sometimes Sarah will say, “Well, not to judge.” And I go, “Well, I’m judging. “I’m judging right now. “I can’t believe that they said that.” So we all do this, we can lift the veil. This is kind of how we operate. We show favor to those and we show partiality to those who we think have more power or more capital or are more aligned with us. And we are challenged here not to do this. And here’s the reason why.(…) As we continue on in verse eight of James chapter two,
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James writes, “You do well if you really fulfill “the royal law according to the scripture. “You shall love your neighbor as yourself. “But if you show partiality, you commit sin “and are convicted by the law as transgressors. “For whoever keeps the whole law but fails at one point “has become accountable for all of it. “For the one who said you shall not commit adultery “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.”
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So speak and so act as those who are to be judged by the law of liberty.
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James here shows us that to break any single law of the Lord is to break all of them.
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Jesus, in fact earlier on, James talks about the royal commandment. This is a quote from Jesus where he boils all the law down to love your neighbor as yourself. And if we are honest with ourselves, we know we don’t do that. We know that we don’t love our neighbors as we love ourselves. We know that we treat ourselves better. We look out for number one and James brings that out even more and says if you break even one little law at one point, you’re guilty of the whole thing.(…) Jesus later in the Sermon on the Mount where he begins with the beatitudes, the blessings,(…) he says that you’ve heard it say do not murder, but I tell you even if you become angry, you’ve already murdered that person in your heart.(…) Jesus tells us that even anger is a transgression. Even becoming upset and losing our cool, that’s a transgression.
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And so this is the hard reality that we have to face is that in God’s sight, any folly, any mistake, any lapse in judgment at all separates us from him. And it puts us in a different category than God himself.
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God is completely and utterly holy and good.
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Never makes a mistake, never gets it wrong. He is completely and utterly holy and good. That’s his category. And if we break even one small law,(…) even one little, even just one little transgression, one lapse in judgment, one crossword, one wrong thought, and we are in a completely different category than God.(…) We are separated from him. We are shown to be completely and utterly, unholy and good. There is no spectrum.(…) There is no keeping most the laws, but missing on a couple. There is no some sins that are better than other sins. If you fail at any, you are in the same boat as everybody else, transgressor, sinner.(…) You’ve done it wrong. And everyone gets put into the same bucket. Everyone gets put into the same boat. We have all failed. We have all fallen short of God’s glory.
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But James reminds us that God responds to us this way.
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James says, “For judgment will be without mercy for anyone who has shown no mercy.”
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Mercy triumphs over judgment.
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We have all fallen short. We have all transgressed the law. We are all in the same boat as everybody else who’s gone anything wrong, big or small, but God has looked on us with mercy.
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And mercy triumphs over judgment.
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God looks upon us and rather than casting a totally fair judgment on us, that we are sinners and that we are separated from Him,(…) God does the unfair thing,(…) the unfair but good thing.(…) And He gives mercy instead of judgment. Because mercy triumphs over judgment. And maybe we can say it this way. God has judged you and He has found Himself merciful.
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He has found you worthy of His mercy.(…) He has found you belonging to His family despite what you have done wrong.
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And in response to this, James tells us, “So speak and so act as those who are judged by the law of liberty.”(…) And this does not mean, liberty here does not mean that you can just do whatever you want and you shrug at anything anybody else does, even if it’s evil.
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What the law of liberty tells us is that we are free from the burden of guilt and shame.
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We are free from the burden of guilt and shame of being people who, even though we make the simplest New Year’s resolution. You know what, I’m gonna drink soda less. We break it right away.
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Even though we transgressed so quickly and we are so unable ourselves to be able to follow through on making our lives better or the lives people around us better,
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God forgives us and He takes that burden and He takes the guilt and He takes the shame away from us. The law of liberty allows us to live as forgiven people,
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free,(…) completely free from guilt and shame.(…) One thing that I do like to say and in our life group last week, we said it a couple times, you know, there’s that whole idea of there’s no such thing as win or lose, there’s only win or learn. Have you heard that before?(…) That’s what it’s like on the other side of the cross.
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Completely and utterly free from losing.
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Now, even our own transgressions get to bring us closer to God and in response, we get to offer forgiveness and kindness to others.
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We need a renovation of our heart and the renovation that Jesus offers us is to live fully and abundantly(…) and in a way that is merciful and good. Mercy allows us to understand and even enjoy those who are different from us, who think differently from us, who act differently from us, who have different political opinions and social opinions and personal decisions. Even those that we think are deceitful and rude and not worth the time of day,
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mercy,(…) this renovation of the heart allows us to love and understand and enjoy those who we couldn’t before(…) and it gives us a leg to stand on, to proclaim the gospel to them, to offer the same freedom, the same unburdened life,
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the same freedom from guilt and shame.
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Mercy allows us to live at peace with people even when they mess up, even when they hurt us, it allows us to live at peace with them because God has first forgiven us, we can actively forgive others.
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We don’t need a resolution this year.(…) What we need is we need a renovation.
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We need to be fully renovated to love and serve others and to proclaim the gospel of Jesus to them so they can have a full abundant life, both in this life and in the next,(…) amen.