Impressed by What?

Taken from James two one through seven.

My brothers, show no partiality as you hold the faith in our Lord Jesus Christ, the Lord of glory.

For if a man wearing a gold ring and fine clothing comes into your assembly, and a poor man in shabby clothing also comes in, and if you pay attention to the one who wears the fine clothing and say, You sit in a good place here, while you say to the poor man, you stand over there, or sit down at my feet.

Have you not made distinctions among yourself and become judges with evil thoughts?

Listen, my beloved brothers, has not the God, God chosen those who are poor in the world to be rich in faith, in heirs of the kingdom, which he has promised to those who love him?

But you have dishonored, dishonored the poor man.

Are not the rich ones who oppose you and the ones who drag you into court?

Are they not the one who blaspheme the honorable name by which you were called?

Thank you, Joyce.

The choir and the praise team, thank you.

Today is Sunday, the 27th of February, and you know what comes next?

God is still on the throne.

He was all week long this past week.

He really was.

Really was.

He is today, and he shall be in the week to come.

Our God is good.

He is sovereign.

He's gracious.

He has a kind heart.

He's involved with this, his creation.

And I never get tired of talking about that, and I never get tired of repeating that to you.

You may get tired of hearing it.

We'll leave one of these days.

That's alright.

Ever since, I think it was around the year 2000, when I was serving in a particular church, I started saying that every week.

I recently got an email from somebody in that congregation about something else, and at the end of the email, she said, and Walt, don't forget, God is still on the throne.

The day I had a massive cerebral hemorrhage and should have died, the first thing that went through my mind, truly, was it's okay.

God's in control.

I repeat that because I desperately need it, and I repeat it to you because you desperately need it.

Our view of who God is needs to absolutely be the very glasses, not dirty ones like these, but the very glasses that we look through and go through life experiencing, shaping what we see, shaping how we respond to it.

James, chapter two.

I don't know why I have such a hard time remembering to turn this on.

I did the same thing in the first service, and it reminded me of how much I hate technology.

I don't know about you.

This morning I got a text just as I was coming to church that the garage door in our home in Indianapolis was just had just closed.

I didn't know it had been open.

You know, there's things that we're better off not knowing.

But there are things that we desperately need to know.

In this section, James is continuing to do what he does so well and what actually all of Scripture does.

It gives us truth, but it does more than just giving us truth.

It calls for a life response.

Truth is more than just knowledge.

If all we do is gather facts about the Bible and not live things out, then then we might as well learn all kinds of silly other things.

Truth that is not lived out is not what God is interested in.

I don't know about you, but I don't need more knowledge about God.

Oh, believe me, there's lots of questions I have, and someday when we stand before the Lord, if it's even appropriate, boy, I've got a whole long list of things that I'm curious about.

It used to bother me that there were all these things about God I didn't know.

What an arrogant attitude.

Who am I to know all there is about God?

You know what bothers me now?

What I know and don't live out.

Or what I know and I don't live out consistently.

You see what James does, what the scriptures do, is meddle with us.

Meddle with us.

They press into our lives.

The words of God, the word of God, God Himself, the Holy Spirit, presses in and stimulates in the heart of a believer a desire to be different, not out of guilt, not because we're lousy people.

That's a given.

We're lousy people.

No big surprise about that.

The purpose is not that we feel guilty, but the purpose is that the child of God, as we understand more what God says, we are longing for a greater and a deeper transformation of our lives.

See, that's a characteristic of a true believer.

You can have people who have all of the Bible knowledge that you could imagine.

And if there isn't something within them, a new nature, a new heart, a new inclination, a new disposition that really wants to be more and more like God wants us to be, not because I have to, but because I long for that, that's a characteristic of someone who has been truly born again.

And for that, for those people, God's word is this horrible, wonderful thing.

God's thumb comes down on us.

And while I squirm a bit at times when God's divine finger starts pressing in, yet at the same time there's nothing I desire more.

So it's this wonderful, horrible kind of experience.

And the end result is joy and growth and transformation.

I hope that's why you come.

I hope that's what's in your heart.

If not, you're going to have problems with the book of James.

If you haven't had problems already, you'll have more problems than they may come yet.

And today's passage is a very penetrating one.

He asks us if we could interpret this and apply it to our situation, as you will see as I try to unpack this.

He's asking us to ask ourselves, what are you impressed with?

Because the matter of the fact is that we treat people who are impressive differently than people who aren't impressive.

That's what this passage is all about.

And what impresses us with most people is all of the wrong things.

So this is going to cause us to do some self-reflection.

That's a good thing.

It's what God intends.

So we're just going to walk our way through these seven verses.

We're going to use a simple three-step process that many of you have heard about before: observation, interpretation, and application.

It's real simple.

There's more to the studying of the word than that, but there's no less than that.

And in this passage, it's really pretty simple because in verse 1, James makes a statement, and then in verses 2 through 7, he explains very clearly what that means for his first readers.

So we're going to observe what he says in verse 1.

We're going to then see what the application of that was for the early church, and then we're going to recognize that that has something to say to us as well.

So let's just go ahead and begin.

What is he saying?

You know, usually what a Bible writer is saying in a given passage is connected to what he's already said.

And in this passage, we could be deceived because there's this big chapter division between chapter 1, verse 27, and chapter 2, verse 1.

And yet he is simply continuing on with very much, and actually exactly the same thing he's been saying, just applying it in a different area.

Just so that you're aware, I trust you understand that the chapter verse or the chapter divisions are not part of the biblical text.

They have been added by editors, especially during, I think it was the early Middle Ages, where most of our chapter divisions came.

And sometimes they're helpful, sometimes they're not.

You just need to be careful that you don't assume, because you've turned it to a new chapter, that there's a new topic.

And in this case, he is continuing on, just as he said.

Living out the truth in real life.

So we saw in chapter 1, verse 22, be doers of the word and not merely hearers.

See, that's really where he's going.

He's wanting us to recognize there's a difference between just hearing and then having that accomplish something in our lives.

So we've seen that kind of verbiage before here.

Verse 27.

We didn't spend a lot of time on this last week, but at the very end, you remember last week he was talking about what happens in here has to be evaluated by what happens out there.

And you can have a great worship service.

And if it doesn't lead to something else out there in your life, then it's not a good worship service.

And so he made it very clear that a good worship service ought to be judged by what it, how we live differently as a result.

Do we bridle our tongue?

Do we care for the most vulnerable and the helpless?

And do we seek to keep ourselves undefiled, unspotted from the world, unstained from the world, not being worldly.

As I said, we didn't spend much time with this last week, but the picture there is walking through a field, kind of maybe a muddy field.

The image that comes to my mind, uh Jane has uh caused me to watch Pride and Prejudice far too many times.

I've even come to love it, guys.

It's it's a great, and I'm not talking about the the wimpy one or two hour version.

I'm talking about the six DVD set.

All right.

It's all right, so here you have Elizabeth Bennett going over to Mr.

Darcy's house.

And so she's walking, she climbs over the fence and she walks through the fields and they're muddy, and by the time she gets there, this flowing formerly white dress is all spotted with mud.

That's the picture here.

As we walk, uh, don't picture me walking in a dress, please.

As we walk through the world, we get impacted by it.

The mud, and we have muddy hearts to begin with, so it's not hard for the world to get its mud on us and for us to get the mud of the world on us.

And what he's saying is that's that's kind of the definition of worldliness.

And he's now going to be asking us, he's giving us a litmus test, another example of what not being spotted by the world is.

And he asks the question: what are we impressed with about people?

And how does that affect us?

And when we're impressed with a certain person, how does that affect our response?

Some people we're impressed positively with, and that that has an impact.

Others we're impressed negatively with, and that has an impact.

That was true in the early church, that's true here as well.

So what he's doing is he's taking and he's talking to the first church, uh, the church and churches to whom he was writing in the first century, and he's saying, look at folks, there's something we need to deal with here because we are being impacted by the world, we're spotted, and uh we need to deal with it.

So the main idea of verse one is really pretty simple.

Um, living out the truth and in the area of not showing partiality.

My brothers, and he would say to us if we were writing today, sisters, the term that is used there does mean brothers, but it's used more generally for siblings.

So this isn't a political or a gender statement.

He's just saying, folks, dear brothers and sisters, and I love the way James presses in and says hard things, and he does it with such love and such.

He's just, we're just all simple people, folks.

And he says, now listen, show no partiality as you hold the faith in our Lord Jesus Christ, the Lord of glory.

So we have this glorious Lord, and we are continuing on, we are holding on to the faith, and as we do this, show no partiality.

No partiality.

Um that word partiality is an interesting one.

It's a compound word, it's comprised of two words, one referring to the face, and the other to lifting up the face.

So partiality is lifting up the face.

Now, there's two ways that could be understood.

They're probably both true.

One is elevating someone for purely external reasons.

The other, and there's just something about this phrase that gives me the picture of a man, and there is a beautiful young woman standing or kneeling before him or whatever, and he reaches down and he puts his hands under her jaw and lifts up her face and marvels because she is so beautiful.

All of the externals, focusing on that, whichever way it is, uh, it's a it's a powerful picture.

Um we are not to be impressed with the externals.

That's what the world does.

Um, showing special favor because of external issues.

Now, we're gonna go there, but I just want to say there is an appropriate respect that we are to give to people, but we are not to be respecters of person.

And I'll try to explain that.

Respectors of persons means you treat different people differently because of external reasons.

And God doesn't act that way, and we're not to act that way.

That means there is no, that does not mean there is no place for respect and honor of people, but for all of the right things.

So Romans makes very clear honor to whom honor is due.

And in the context, the one to whom honor is due are essentially dishonorable people, but for the reasons that you would find in that chapter, uh there is an appropriate way to even honor dishonorable people.

I don't want to get lost on that.

Several examples.

Um, Leviticus 1932 says something that is very foreign to our culture, and yet it's applicable.

It says, Rise in the presence of the aged, show respect for the elderly, and in so doing, revere your God.

There is something about those who are older and wiser that we ought to value and cherish and show respect to.

Our culture doesn't do that very well.

We look at old people and we see wrinkles and flabby skin and we put them down, and we elevate the young and the beautiful and the firm of skin and firm of belly.

We cast older people off.

We, if we're not careful, it's not because our hearts are intending to do this.

We look at people who are old and we say they've had their time.

Um we'll be nice to them, but they're really not very important.

We don't honor the elderly in our culture.

But I think we need to learn to.

We honored a 70th what?

Birthday or an anniversary?

73rd.

73rd.

Must have been 10 years old when you got married, right?

There's something beautiful about that.

We need examples of people who have cherished and loved their spouse through thick and thin, imperfectly as they have, and that ought to call out to us and encourage us.

We need to learn to honor and respect those who are older and wiser.

1 Thessalonians 5, verses 12 and 13 says, Now we ask you, brothers, to respect those who work hard among you, who are over you in the Lord, and who admonish you.

1 Thessalonians 5:12

Hold them in the highest regard in love because of their work.

We need to learn to esteem and value the spiritual leaders God has placed over us.

Are they perfect?

No.

Do they always agree with you?

Unlikely.

Are they always exemplary?

No.

But the Bible makes clear that God has asked certain people to give leadership in a spiritual realm, and we owe honor and respect to them.

We owe honor and respect to pastors, although pastors as we know it in our culture are hard to find in the New Testament.

Elders who exercise spiritual authority and who have the responsibility at times to make some decisions that you're not going to agree with.

It doesn't mean you have to agree with them, but there ought to be a respect and a credence given to the men who do their utmost to try to be good spiritual leaders.

It's so crazy that God entrusts to people like me and people like our elders the spiritual welfare of his family.

That is an overwhelming at times sense of responsibility.

Do we do it right?

Not always.

Now, you, if you've been around very long, you've heard me say various times, you know, for my sake, you could just call me Walt.

I really don't need to be called Pastor Walt.

It makes me feel like I'm a third sex or something.

I'm just Walt.

But we need to, at the same time.

And take me out of the picture, I'm not going to be here forever.

At the same time, we recognize that there is a special role and a special responsibility.

And we can be non-pretentious.

Okay?

I have no desire to be pretentious.

We can be non-pretentious and still exercise weighty spiritual responsibilities, and there's an appropriateness to give respect and honor to spiritual leaders.

It's just that simple.

Same kind of thing to government officials, and that's more difficult.

The government officials that were spoken about in Romans 13, where that is referred to, were incredibly worse than our government officials have been or probably, Lord willing, will be.

They were much harder to respect.

And so when I have a tendency to want to pick up the book next to me on the coffee table and throw it at the television screen, I'm wrong.

If I'm just so irritated at those that I'm wrong.

Honor to whom honor is due, God has established authorities.

And in our culture, there's an antitopy towards people in authority.

It's born and bred into us by our culture.

And when we continue to do that, we're being worldly.

It's all there is to it.

It doesn't mean they're perfect, it doesn't mean they always get it right.

But they have responsibilities that you don't have.

And maybe we can give our government authorities the benefit of the doubt instead of immediately attacking them.

You see, James keeps pressing in when he talks about things like this.

That is clearly something that he goes into in this book.

But what he's really talking about is what we shouldn't do, and that's to show partiality to certain people, or favoritism, when it says show no partiality, it's the word discrimination, or we shouldn't discriminate, or we shouldn't show favoritism to people based on external things.

Treating certain people differently than others because of their social standing, their ethnic background, their economic situation in life, because they have special abilities that we think are phenomenal, so suddenly we elevate them.

That's all partiality, that's discrimination.

That's inappropriate.

And God says, don't do it.

The word James uses here in verse 1, the way he expresses it very simply is show no partiality.

It's actually richer than it tends to come out because he's making it clear that the believers were not doing this.

So it would be over-translating this imperative to say stop doing this.

But that's kind of where this goes.

It's almost that way.

It's not, okay, start doing something that you're not doing, but no, stop doing something you are doing.

In other words, it's very clear that the churches to whom he was writing have a problem in this area, and he's saying, stop it.

Just stop it.

And I believe he would say to us very much the same thing.

That's what the world does.

That's not what God does.

Okay?

So that's what he is saying.

That's what we observe.

That's it's very clear.

It's very simple.

We don't have to look very hard.

What he then does in verses two through seven is he explains to them very clearly what this should mean to them.

Sometimes the Bible is difficult to interpret, sometimes it's very simple to interpret.

In this case, we don't even have to interpret it.

He interprets it for us of what he meant in verse 1, what that is to look like.

And so he first of all gives an illustration in verses 2 through 3, and then he gives a gentle but very pointed correction.

Okay?

So the illustration, it's kind of, you might think it's a bit of a hyperbole.

It's almost a caricature, you know, kind of like a political cartoon where everything's exaggerated to make a point.

So he tells the story of one person walking in and they're very impressive people, and and so the the usher, they didn't have ushers in those days, they were greeted and they were shown the best seats in the house.

Yeah, that's funny.

The best seats in the house are empty.

Um maybe they're not the best seats.

Um and then somebody else walks in who is shabbily dressed and unimpressive and maybe smelled, and certainly wasn't someone that you would think highly of by looking at him, and he was told to stand in the back or maybe squat at my feet.

That sounds like a bit of hyperbole, and maybe it is meant that way, but there is just something about this uh this passage uh that suggests that this was not just an overstatement, that this was the kind of thing that was happening.

Um walk two people, and the fact of the matter is they were treated very differently.

The first person was described as someone who, well, as it says, a man wearing a gold ring and fine clothing.

Uh the expression wearing a gold ring is actually a little bit more vivid than that.

It's gold-fingered.

And if we get into the culture at the time, uh impressive people sought to impress others by wearing jewelry.

And it wasn't just wearing a ring, it was wearing multiple rings so that they were gold-fingered.

Uh Seneca, the Roman philosopher, said that we adorn our fingers with rings and we distribute gems over every joint of our fingers.

So multiple rings on multiple fingers.

Interestingly enough, in that day, with the exception of the middle finger, it was not adorned with rings.

Now, I have no idea what that means, and please don't uh put back on that uh our meaning for the middle finger, all right?

Doesn't necessarily mean that.

But the fact of the matter is that you just saw them.

It just glittered.

Just glittered.

Um Clement of Alexandria in the second century taught that believers, in contrast to their culture, should only wear one ring.

And that that that's not part of Scripture.

It was a century later.

In the New Testament, uh, it's very clear, 1 Timothy 2, there's a warning against extravagant, uh, going to extravagant efforts to look good.

Uh and in that case it had to do, among other things, with elaborately braided and bejeweled hair, or gold, or pearls, or expensive clothing.

The word here, uh, where it's described as the one who wears fine clothing, or he comes in wearing fine clothing, uh, the image is kind of it's it's sparkly, it's lustrous, it's shiny, it's impressive, it's intended to draw our attention to it.

I got thinking of what that looks like in uh in our world.

And uh some of you have seen the Hunger Games.

Um, and in the capital city, when the crowds are gathered together, did you notice how extravagantly people were dressed?

I mean, it was it was unbelievable, bizarre hairstyle, bizarre to me, uh, makeup, clothes that were just extraordinary.

And that's just uh it's a dystopia.

It's it's a it takes our culture and just takes a little bit further into a ridiculous extreme.

Uh just utmost attention given to how to impress people by the way we look.

Uh, you may not like Hunger Games.

I don't know if you ever paid any attention to uh Louis XVI's uh Palace of Versailles, it's a fantastic place to visit.

And then in various movies they show the kinds of parties and the way people were dressed in the Palace of Versailles, and it looks a lot like the Hunger Games.

I mean, rented wigs, uh pink wigs, by the way, so this matter of dyeing your hair pink is nothing new.

Uh borrowed or rented jewelry to attend uh parties at Versailles.

That's just what the world does.

We're drawn to try to be impressive people and to look like impressive people.

I thought of the Golden Globe Awards.

I didn't think much about it, but um did you see how people were dressed?

I mean, or undressed as the case may have been.

Uh, and the whole purpose was to draw attention to themselves.

That's the kind of thing that we're talking about.

So in walks somebody with a splendid, radiant, very impressive attire, and he's treated as a very splendorous, radiant, impressive kind of person and given the best seat in the house.

The second person is dressed in rags, perhaps a beggar, um, not attractive, um, may not have smelled good, and probably the people who were well dressed in those days didn't smell good to us.

Rather off-putting.

And so that person was shown a very different scene.

The correction that is given is stop doing it.

Stop doing it.

And the way James talks to us is very interesting.

The first thing he says is, okay, stop doing it.

Um he says, you know, this isn't the way God is.

God doesn't differentiate based on externals.

God doesn't use two scales to measure and evaluate people.

We treat people differently because of externals.

Um what James says is, have you then not made distinctions among yourself and become judges with evil thoughts talking to the believers?

Have you not been discriminating?

Have you not been making dishonest judgments when he talks here about becoming judges with evil thoughts?

The picture is of a court, a judge, who doesn't judge fairly, but judges based on something besides the law, judges out of his own being, out of his own sense, out of his own thoughts about what's right and wrong instead of using the law.

It speaks volumes to our world today with the whole legal system and the judicial system, and I'm not even going to get into the Supreme Court, but that's a problem with judges, and it always has been, that judges are not impartial and they have evil intent or they have some private agenda.

And he says, that's not like God.

Don't be like that.

That's not what God does.

That's antithetical to his character.

That may be the world's way, but that's not God's way, and don't have the world's way, what being what defines who you are.

Have God's way of valuing and viewing people.

So he makes it very clear in verse 4 that God has an attribute of impartiality.

When we make these kinds of judgments, we're not being impartial.

And one of the attributes of God is that God himself is impartial.

He treats all people the same.

And he looks not to the outside but to the heart.

He is not a respecter of persons.

And what that means is he doesn't look on the outside to evaluate someone, but he looks on the inside.

Deuteronomy 10, 17 says it's typical, speaking about God, says, For the Lord your God is a God of gods and a Lord of lords, the great God, mighty and awesome, who shows no partiality and accepts no bribes.

No partiality, and you can't sway his opinion by bribery.

Matthew 22, 16, the Pharisees came up to Jesus, whom they were opposing and were trying to get rid of.

But this is what they said about Jesus.

We know you are a man of integrity and that you teach the ways of God in accordance with the truth.

You aren't swayed by men because you pay no attention to who they are.

So why do we?

That's really what he's saying.

How unlike God it is for you to be a respecter of persons and be impressed with the externals and treat people differently.

A second point that he makes in verse 5 and the first part of verse 6, he says, Listen, my beloved brothers.

And again, I love the way James softens his hard speech.

He's saying, Friends, dearly beloved, I love you.

But there's something I need to say.

Has not God chosen those who are poor in the world to be rich in faith and heirs of the kingdom?

And he's promised a kingdom to those who love him, not those who are impressive.

But you have dishonored the poor.

You've dishonored the poor person by making these kinds of distinctions.

How inappropriate it is for believers to treat people differently, to treat the impressive and the powerful and the lovely when we, by definition, are unimpressive, unlovely, and in great need.

You see, believers who come to faith in Christ have to bow down.

We have to be willing to recognize that we are just little guys.

We are not impressive.

We have nothing to offer God.

We come needy.

If you don't, if you aren't someone who acknowledges his need, then you cannot possibly be living out the Christian faith.

You can't get into the kingdom unless you bow down and repent and turn and recognize that you're a mess.

That's just who the gospel reaches, is messes like you.

And you're still a mess.

I'm still a mess.

I'm not all the mess that I once was by God's grace.

But there's a lot of stuff that ain't right with us, isn't there?

So we are not big, we are not impressive.

And we don't get into God's family by being big and impressive.

Quite the contrary.

It's the poor, the poor in spirit.

And the reality is that in terms of salvation, God treats all people alike.

There's one set of scales, and that's righteousness, and you don't have it, and I don't have it.

It is given to us by the work of Christ on the cross.

He who knew no sin became sin for us that we might become the righteousness of God in him.

It's a foreign righteousness.

It's given to us, it's not innate, it's not your nature.

You're just a little worthless, unimpressive, helpless individual.

And if you think the moment we think we're more than that and we're getting impressed with ourselves and we're starting to look down on others, we are forgetting the gospel.

Absolutely forgetting the gospel.

And he says there's no place for that in our hearts.

The problem is there is a place for that in our hearts.

But he's saying, stop it, stop it.

That's not.

That's how inappropriate for you to be impressed with impressive people when you're not so impressive yourself.

And God has showered his blessing and his grace upon you.

Not because you were anything special, but because Jesus is someone special and he paid a price.

So it has to do with when we forget who we are, then we begin to get into trouble.

And he's saying, when we're treating impressive people differently than we are unimpressive people, we're forgetting who we are.

How inappropriate.

Stop it.

God has one set of scales.

God gives grace to the humble.

We'll see this if we ever get to chapter 4.

God gives grace to the humble.

There is no proud, arrogant, self-satisfied person who receives the gospel.

You may raise your hand, you may make a decision, but if you're if you aren't recognizing your need and your lowliness and your utter inability before God, then you can raise your hand a thousand times.

But that doesn't get you into the kingdom.

Faith recognizes your need.

And many of us are frankly too self-impressed and self-sufficient to live out the reality that we are needy.

We are just sinners saved by grace.

And to repent and to be so thankful that God has patience with a jerk like you and me.

How inappropriate to not live that out in how we treat other people.

Not many wise, not many rich, not many noble, Paul says.

Now there were a few in the early church, and there's a few uh in today's world as well.

But by and large, you you get out of our comfortable circle where we're all really pretty well off.

I'm not, I mean, I know there's differences, but you ought to get in touch with the world out there, if you're not.

Um I arrived a couple of years ago on an airplane in India to uh scout out uh working in the sub-Himalayan areas for the mission organization I was with.

And I realized that anybody who could gather enough money together to buy a ticket and land in Delhi was incredibly wealthy to almost everybody in India.

It just, I mean, I didn't consider myself wealthy, uh, but I had money for a ticket.

We just don't understand.

If you look throughout history, it has been the poor, the oppressed, the subjugated, the helpless who came to faith in the gospel.

If you look throughout the world today, most of the people who come to faith are needy, are hurting, and are aware of it and acknowledge it, and they find in the gospel not an affirmation of how great they are, but salvation.

And if we're not careful, we begin to think that Christians are all kind of like us.

You know, we've more or less got it together, and we've got food on our table, and we've got cars we can drive, and we've got jobs.

Yeah, there's difficulties, I get it.

But we are not typical, my friend.

You are not typical of believers throughout the centuries.

Or around the world.

We served overseas for many years and we were involved in church planting, among other things, in this case in Europe, and most Europeans are not all that hard off.

But what we found is that the people who responded to the gospel were marginal to their society.

They were marginal to their society.

And at first it kind of ticked me off.

Where are the normal people?

It's all of these people who are coming to faith.

What an idiot.

It's the marginal ones who acknowledge their need.

And the church is built on unimpressive people.

We just kind of forget that and then we try to impress each other.

How irrational for believers to look up to those who look down on God.

Stop and think about that.

American idols?

Really?

Is that what we want?

People who have no place for and no esteem for God and the things of God.

And I'm I'm I know there are individual exceptions.

Don't get me wrong, I get that.

When we're impressed with the people on the walkway at the Golden Globe, what is that saying about us?

What is that saying about us?

I'm not saying what does it say about them when that's a big deal to us.

What is that saying?

Are we impressed with the right things?

How irrational to elevate those who slander God's name and abuse God's people.

The very term Christian was not originally given as a badge of honor.

It was a derisive, caustic term.

Those Christians.

Those little Christs.

It was not something to wear on your earlobes.

A cross and a fish symbol.

I'm not saying that's wrong.

I'm just saying.

Do we understand that the people of God are not the movers and the shakers and never have been?

And then when a mover or shaker walks in, do we treat them differently?

What's with that?

All right, two simple questions.

What does this mean to us?

What it meant to the first believers, that was very clear from verses 2 through 7.

What does it mean for us?

Well, two questions.

To what extent are you and am I guilty of discrimination and partiality?

Now when we think of discrimination, we tend to think of racial discrimination, and maybe we should.

Maybe we actually should.

This word is the same word as discrimination.

Grand Forks is something like 85% white and 15% other.

And the other is primarily American, Indian, and black and a few percentage points of others all around.

Most of the evangelical churches, including ours, do not reflect even that 15%.

Now, why is that?

Is it because we're intentionally discriminating?

I don't think we are.

I don't sense that.

But do we realize that maybe the way we gather together and the way we look and the way we worship is a turnoff or a hindrance for other people?

I was thinking about black churches.

Boy, do they have a different style of worship.

And you know, we talked last time about worship has nothing to do with style.

Our style is purely our personal preference.

You go anywhere else and it'll be different.

And you may like it or you may hate it, but that is not important.

But you go into a black church service, and boy, is that alive.

I preached one time in a black church and I could hardly get through my message because there were so many interruptions.

I was uncomfortable with that.

Oh well, does that maybe mean that those people value that?

And is there anything wrong with that?

No, it just makes me uncomfortable.

Maybe our way of doing things unintentionally makes others who are not like us uncomfortable.

Again, I don't think that we have a heart that's trying to do that, but I think we, in fact, probably subconsciously do.

Certainly, if a visitor walks into our congregation, and the visitor is attractive and articulate and confident and obviously successful, we're more inclined to go up and greet them.

If somebody walks in our congregation who is quite the opposite, who stutters, who is self-confident or self-conscious, obviously a loser, we are less inclined to go up and greet them.

I'm not saying we never do.

I'm just saying, isn't there something that's true about that?

We are drawn to those who on the outside are people that we value, maybe because we think they look like us and we value ourselves far too much.

So this matter of how we communicate and how people enter our congregation or don't for various reasons, could it be that this matter of externals is getting in the way in a way that is not godly and is not the way it should be?

I don't think this congregation has an evil heart in this regard.

Don't get me wrong.

I think we subconsciously are drawn to certain kinds of people.

I find it easier to go up and greet someone that I don't know where I conclude they look like they've got it together, they're competent, they are sharp, they're probably successful.

Hey, I can communicate with them.

Somebody just the opposite, it's harder for me.

I try to do it, but it's harder.

And I'm wrong.

And you are too.

Finally, what are we impressed with about people?

To whom are we drawn?

And what does that say about our values?

I've touched on this in various ways, but you get a grip on what you really value when you think about what impresses you or what you spend your time focusing on.

The things that you're impressed with or the things you focus on are the things that you value, even if you declare something quite the contrary.

I don't remember if in second service last week I got in as much trouble as I did in first service or vice versa.

I started talking about House Beautiful Magazine.

Now, I don't have a problem with House Beautiful Magazine, and I don't have a problem with beautiful houses.

The point that I was making is the stuff that is on our coffee table or on our bedside table says something about us.

Okay?

Now, I could talk about the same thing with Field and Stream magazine or ammunition monthly or whatever, you know?

And I'm not saying those things are wrong, I'm saying, what do we really value?

And that's evident in small ways like that.

Do you find yourself driving through neighborhoods and you really like to look at the big and fancy houses?

Is there anything in your heart that responds that way?

You know, there's a great app you can buy.

In fact, I think it's uh Zillow, you get it for free.

It's got geolocation, so it knows exactly what street you're on, and it will show you the house values of all of the homes up and down that street.

And for many people that's very important.

It's not just because they want to sell their house.

Um it gets very.

Do we really care what Oprah Winfrey thinks?

And if we do, why?

Or Ellen de Generis or Taylor Swift or Glamour magazine's list of the hundred sexiest men in our culture?

You see, that's what our culture is consumed with.

And if we're not careful, we get drawn into that, we get spotted by those things.

Have you ever thought about, have you ever caught yourself looking at an incredibly gifted athlete?

Maybe he's the guy that catches this one-handed pass and then runs into the end zone, or maybe it's the guy who shoots the penalty hit last night and wins the game.

Okay, have you ever thought, boy, wouldn't it be great if that guy came to Christ?

Well, yes, it would be great if he came to Christ.

But why do you pick that person out?

Why?

So we have to ask all kinds of unpleasant questions.

I've served on a lot of different Christian organizations and on the boards, the board of directors of probably a dozen different organizations over the years, and I've observed the fact that I rarely find a Christian organization that doesn't have wealthy men on the board and successful pastors.

What does that say?

Now, does that really mean that wealthy men who have been successful in business are better able to run an organization?

I'm not saying you get people who have gone bankrupt six times.

I'm just saying, why is it filled with impressive successful businessmen, although as though that is what the kingdom of God really needs?

Or stellar pastors, I have never, never seen or been on a board that had pastors of little tiny churches on it.

Why is it that when somebody finds that I'm a pastor, very quickly they ask, well, how big is your church?

Okay.

You see, we no, we don't have a problem with this.

You know, we do.

Who are you impressed with?

Jesus was impressed with the inner person.

It's really that simple.

He saw Nathaniel from afar and he said, Behold, a man who is without guile, a man who has integrity.

He looked at him and he saw the quality of the person.

Jesus looked at an impoverished widow who was bringing her offering to the temple, and she had two little worthless coins, and she put them in the offering, and they were worth less than a penny.

And Jesus stood in amazement at that woman's sacrifice.

What are we impressed with?

Perhaps the best thing that I can do this week as a result of this message, and the best thing that you can do this week, is to um to just ask God to keep meddling in our lives.

And and when there's something that speaks to us that we'll, by God's grace, be able to deal with it in our own heart.

The only response I know to uh to this is um the response of the man that Jesus looked at and spoke so highly of in Luke 18 and said, Oh God, have mercy on me as sinner.

Oh God, have mercy on us as sinners.

By your grace, may we be different.

Let's pray.

Heavenly Father, it's easier to talk about this than it is to do it.

I confess that.

I fall short in this area.

Father, I ask that by your grace, by your infinite mercy and compassion for us little wretched messes that we are, that you would keep going with us and persevere with our growth and development so that we may more and more reflect the glory of Jesus Christ.

For that we are in desperate need.

And for that we pray.

In Jesus' name.

Amen.

Let me ask you to stand for the benediction.

It's the one I use every week, it's incredibly pertinent.

Now, my friends, and my friends, go into the world in peace.

Have courage, hold on to that which is good, and honor all men.

Comfort the grieving, help the suffering, set the wandering back on the path, comfort the grieving, and share the gospel.

Love and serve the Lord in the power of the Holy Spirit, and may his grace and his peace be ours.

Amen.

God bless.