James 2:8-13 - Relating to the Law

"If you really fulfill the royal law according to the Scripture, you shall love your neighbor as yourself, you are doing well.

But if you show partiality, you are committing sin and are convicted by the law as transgressors.

For whoever keeps the whole law but fails in one point, has become guilty of all of it.

For he said,'Do not commit adultery,' also said,'Do not murder.' If you do not commit adultery, but do murder, you have become a transgressor of the law.

So speak and so act as those who are to be judged under the law of liberty.

For judgment is without mercy to one who has shown no mercy.

Mercy triumphs over judgment." The grass withers and the flowers fade, but the word of our God stands forever.

Let's go before him now and ask His help.

Gracious, heavenly Father, we do plead with you and ask that you would pour out your spirit upon us now.

That we would understand your word, that it would be applied to us, that you would convict us of sin and of righteousness.

Father, we pray that however we have come through these doors this morning, you would lead us all to the same conclusion, which is we truly are far more broken than we could ever imagine.

And so together we stand in need of your mercy, in need of your grace.

We need to be reminded this morning that it can be true, that we can both at the same time be far more broken than we could ever imagine, but because of Jesus person in Jesus' work and his life, death and resurrection, it can also be true of us that right now, at this moment, we are far more loved and far more secure, far more delighted in and approved of than we could've ever dared dream to hope.

And so, Father, we pray that you would take us to this good news in Jesus and that you would change us with it.

For it's in Jesus' name that we pray.

Amen.

One of my favorite scenes in movies comes from this movie a lot of you've probably seen- Shawshank Redemption, an old movie.

If you haven't seen it just leave your tv on TBS or whatever for a while and it'll show up.

But in that movie, Morgan Freeman played this character named Red, who lived in this prison for 40 years of his life.

And when you first meet this character Red in the movie, he is completely in his element in the prison yard.

He's comfortable, he's relaxed.

He's sitting on the steps with a bunch of his friends around him, hanging out with his friends.

He's in his element.

He is completely learned how to adjust his life to this prison, into this system.

And so he runs the show, right?

He knows how to survive.

And if you're a prisoner and you want to get something or you need something, you go to Red.

He's your connection, right?

Well, near the end of the movie, Red was set free and released from his incarceration.

And it's genius, I think, how the director depicts this painful process in his life of being set free because he gets this job bagging groceries when he leaves the prison.

And he keeps getting on his manager's last nerve because he's constantly asking for permission to do things like go to the bathroom, right?

But that's the only world he's known for the past 40 years where you have to have permission for absolutely everything you do.

And there's this one scene where Red in the grocery store, all of this activity and noise and people brushing past them and moving along, it's just, it's too much for him.

And he has this panic attack in the store.

And so he runs into the bathroom and he shuts the door behind him.

But he's still panicking.

He's just not used to all this chaos and this disorder.

Right?

And so he's in the bathroom still panicking and it's like the bathroom itself is too big for him.

And so he runs into the stall and shuts the door and kind of puts his hands out like this.

So you can feel the walls, the siding, right?

And for most of us, you know, tight spaces make us feel trapped or claustrophobic or whatever.

But to him in that moment, the director is saying this is what was familiar to him.

It was like reaching out, touching the walls of his cell.

I feel safer here.

And here's the thing, this character Red, he, he really was truly free.

But he was struggling to relate to the world as a free man.

Now listen, James wasn't writing these verses that we're looking at this morning to tell his readers how to be free.

For James, that's an assumption.

He's assuming that his readers have found real and true freedom in Jesus.

That is that Jesus came and he died the death I should have died.

The penalty that was due me from my sin fell upon him completely, fully, and finally.

He died in my place and he lived the life I should have lived, but couldn't live, right?

He kept the law perfectly.

He was perfectly righteous, right, where I wasn't.

And he came and he did that in my place so that I'm free and I'm accepted because of his righteousness.

James assumed his readers had found this freedom in Jesus, but he also assumed that there would be a real struggle for us to learn how to relate to God's world now as freed men and women under the Gospel.

You know, how do you think and view God's law now that you're set free in Jesus?

How does God's law shape you?

How does it shape your relationships?

How do you live out your freedom in Jesus as you relate to God's law?

So these are some of the things that we're going to look at.

And here's what I want to do.

I want to show you three things that I think James wants to show us in these verses.

And here they are.

He wants to tell us about the loving focus of God's royal law.

And that's the first thing.

And then second, he wants to tell us about the unity of the whole law.

And then third, he wants to tell us about the demands of the law of liberty.

So the loving focus of the royal law, the unity of the whole law, and the demands of the law of liberty.

So first, let's talk about the loving focus of the royal law.

There's enough for a whole sermon I know in verses eight through nine, but I'm going to try to keep us on the main point here.

Here's the royal law.

James gives it to us.

"You shall love your neighbor as yourself." Paul wrote in Galatians chapter five that the whole law is fulfilled in one word.

"You shall love your neighbor as yourself." Here's this law, James is telling us, that's of special and unique importance to God, the King.

He calls it his royal law- it's the King's Royal Law.

And it's a summary of a lot of laws, but all those laws, James is telling us, our focus on one thing: loving your neighbor.

Loving your neighbor as yourself.

This idea of a law of love or legislated love- it feels, at least initially, I think uncomfortable to us.

And I think a big reason it feels like that is because most of us think of love or we tend to think of love as primarily a feeling where the Bible thinks about love primarily in terms of action.

Let me try and explain like this.

In my role as a pastor, I've been lucky enough, privileged enough to play a role in a lot of weddings and officiate a lot of weddings.

And occasionally when I'm getting ready for a wedding, I'll have a bride and groom tell me,"We want to write our own vows." And I'm going to give you the quick and dirty.

I'm really nicer about it than this.

But I say, you know,"That's fine.

If you really want to say something to each other, I'll find a time in the service for you to do that." But I always tell them, if I'm doing your wedding, we're doing these old traditional vows and we're not, we're not going to veer off from that.

And the reason why is because whenever a couple writes their own vows, they're almost never vows.

What they want to say to each other is usually just a bunch of cheesy, romantic stuff.

And I like cheesy romantic stuff.

It's fine.

But what they're telling each other in front of their friends and family is they're telling each other things that are always in the present tense, right?

They want to say,"You are so beautiful.

I love you so much.

You're the greatest.

You make me so happy." And all the other sappy things you can think of, right?

But real vows are in the future tense, right?

Not,"I love you," but"I promise to love you.""I will love you," right?

"I promise to be your loving and faithful husband or wife" is how the vows go, right?

And then you get those wild extremes that you've heard if you've been to a wedding, right?

"In plenty.

And in want, in sickness and in health, in joy and in sorrow." And here's what they're saying.

They're saying,"No matter what happens, whether life is falling apart or we're doing great, I promise to love.

No matter what happens to you, no matter how much you changed, no matter how much I change, whether you're sick, right, or you're in a wheelchair for the rest of your life or you're out running triathletes, I promise to love you." And listen to this: The vows are saying no matter how I feel at any given moment, in joy or in sorrow, whether I'm happy or whether I'm hurt or whether I'm depressed, no matter my feelings, I promise to love you.

That's what the vowels are saying.

Listen, you can only make promises like that if love is an action first and a feeling second.

And so I don't think it's too hard for us to understand this, that to have the security of unconditional promises, of loving action, that is what gives the feelings of love space to grow and flourish and run wild right now.

Now listen, James was saying the essence of the royal law is that whenever there is a need in your neighbor's life, there is an obligation towards you to act, to meet that need, an obligation for you to act upon your neighbor's needs, with the same intensity and speed and energy and desire and urgency and practicality that you would move to meet any need in your life, right?

You shall love your neighbor as yourself, and I'm telling you, James wants you to know that if you commit to loving action like that, you're going to create space in your life for the feelings of love to follow because the Royal Law tells you how to love and love fulfills the Royal Law.

In verse nine, James talks about if you show partiality or favoritism for one person over another person or for one group of people over another group of people, you have violated this king's royal law to love your neighbor.

Last week if you haven't been here, we talked a lot about favoritism and partiality.

And so instead of rehashing it all, I just want you to think about, this morning, who your neighbor really is.

According to the Bible, your neighbor is anyone who is in need.

So there's a lot of great ways we could apply this.

And I want to give you one very specific way this morning.

You heard this in the announcements last week and this morning that the outreach committee of this church has seen a need in the Gardere neighborhood and that neighborhood, if you don't know, it is rapidly been transitioning into a Hispanic population and there's a need for learning English there.

And so the outreach committee has decided to start ESL classes, English as Second Language classes.

And how do we know that's a real need?

Well, there's probably a lot of ways I can talk about, but let me just give you one very practical way.

Typical classes I was asking about last week for an English as a second language class, usually six to eight people.

So two weeks ago when they had their first ESL class or offered it, they had 26 people show up for the class and then the second week they offered it, which was the last week, they had 48 people show up for the class.

There's a need there.

Your neighbor is anyone in need.

And the Royal Law is that we love our neighbor as ourselves and we move to meet their needs.

We take action upon their needs.

There are lots of ways to fulfill this royal law, but the outreach committee I think is giving all of us a very clear avenue to love your neighbor.

Right?

And you might say, but I don't have anything in common with these people.

It doesn't matter.

I mean that's James' whole point: Show no partiality! They're not like you.

So go love them.

That's what James is saying.

But you say," But I don't know Spanish." We're not looking for Spanish speakers! We're looking for English speakers.

Right?

And I think that, well that's most of us in this room.

You say,"But I can't lead a class." But we need help with administrative kind of things.

Right?

Can you serve that way?

"But I'm busy when the classes are happening and I just don't have the time." Right?

There's a need for people to make flashcards and and other things in order to help the teachers.

Right?

All you gotta do is come see me.

Come see Jerry and Becky Parker.

Go see Ashley and say, I want to help meet my neighbors needs.

That's what we've got to do.

I mean, this isn't the only way of course to apply this royal law, but it's one thing that's very, very clear and I don't want anybody to come and say,"Well, you didn't give any specific application today." This is very specific, right?

And I've got to move on but let me encourage you just to like commit to loving action in your neighbors' lives and you'll create space for the feelings of love to follow.

God is calling you to loving action this morning in his royal law.

All right, let's move on.

Second, let's talk about the unity of the whole law.

Verse ten says,"For whoever keeps the whole law but fails in one point has become accountable for all of it." James is saying, break one law and you've broken the whole law.

He saying there's this indivisible unity of the whole law.

That's James' point, and so I want you to think about it like this.

James is saying that God's law isn't so much like a pile of stones as it is a sheet of glass.

Okay?

If God's law was like a pile of stones, you could come up to it and you could remove one stone from the pile and you would still have a pile of stones intact, but throw a rock through a sheet of glass and the whole sheet of glass is fragmented or broken, right?

The fissures and cracks, they spread over the whole, the entire last and that entire sheet of glass is no longer whole.

The law is like a sheet of glass.

To break one law is to break the unity of the whole law.

Now, why do you think James found it necessary to say this, when telling free men and women how to relate to the law?

Because I think James knows you and I pretty well and he knows that we have a tendency to play favorites with people.

He's been talking about that for a number of verses, but you know what else we have a tendency to do?

We have a tendency to play favorites with God's laws, right?

We we have a tendency to play a game of cut and paste with God's will.

We say,"I liked what the Bible says about forgiveness, but I'm not sure I can accept what it says about sexuality" or maybe we say,"I like what the Bible says about sexuality.

But all that stuff about costly love for people who are not like me?

I don't really get into that stuff." I think a big reason we do this is because we tend to relate to God's law as if it were a pile of stones, arbitrary abstract code of ethics, right?

A checklist, but James wants us to see that God's law is not like that at all.

God's law always comes in the context of relationship.

This is why James wrote in verse 11,"For He who said.." He's drawing our attention, not just to the law, but to the giver of the law.

He wants us to see that God's love is never an abstract to do list.

It always comes in the context of relationship.

God's law shapes and it creates the terms for how we relate to him and how we relate to everyone else.

Listen, if that sounds strange to you, I don't mean to be condescending, but it's probably just because you haven't been paying attention in life because law shapes and creates the terms for all of your relationships in life.

There are terms of agreement between husband and wife, and if you refuse to respect certain boundaries, there can't be a relationship, right?

If you repeatedly violate your spouse in some way, what happens?

The relationship suffers.

It's broken and eventually it dies.

There's the relationship of parents and children.

There are laws and expectations and terms that shape that relationship both ways, right?

Parents are responsible for clothing and feeding and providing for their children, and if you can't do that, someone is going to come into your life and take your children away from you and it goes the other way too, right?

If children's say well, I really want my parents to trust me, they have to tell the truth and obey, right?

To not do so isn't just breaking some abstract code or checklists.

It's breaking the relationship.

There are terms spoken or unspoken laws in all your relationships with your employer, with your employee, with your grocer, with your friends, with your banker, even with your pastor, right?

Like you keep showing up here on Sundays and you expect me to have something to say to you when you get here, right?

There are expectations.

Law creates the turns and shakes.

All of our relationships, that is woven deeply into the fabric of our humanity in reality, so I want to ask you this question.

What would happen to your relationship with your spouse or your children or your friends or whoever, if you said to your spouse or your kids or whoever,"I've decided not to love you as you are.

know this or that's important to you, but I've decided that those things won't be important to me anymore.

I just kinda wish you were someone else." What would that do?

It would kill the relationship.

It would be abusive to say something like that.

God's law comes in the context of relationship.

His whole law is telling you who he is and what he's like and that's why there's a unity to the whole law, why it's like a sheet of glass and not like a pile of sons.

He's telling you,"This is who I am and this is what matters to me." And you say I'm fine with the sexual ethic, but I don't really care what you say about greed or my lack of generosity or I'm fine with the generosity thing, but it's way too much for me that you would expect truthfulness and integrity in my work.

Right?

Do you realize what you're saying at the end of the day?, You're saying,"God, I don't love you for who you are.

I refuse to love you as you are." If you're going to learn to relate to God's law and more importantly to the lawgiver himself, you need to see the unity of the whole law.

Alright, finally, let's talk about the demands of the law of liberty.

There's a lot packed into these last two verses in our passage, and I can't get to all of it in detail, but James is saying you need to live, you need to act, and you need to speak in light of coming judgment, right?

He's saying even when you think you're all alone, you're not really all alone because God is always watching you and your whole life is visible before him and there's a coming judgment.

But listen, what's most fascinating in verse 12 is that James talks about being judged under or by the law of Liberty.

By law of freedom, and that's the most curious thing.

How can laying down my life in costly sacrificial service for my neighbors' needs actually be freedom?

How can being obligated to my neighbors needs be freedom?

And how is it freedom that God expects obedience, not just from the parts of his law that I like or that I understand, but all the parts, even the parts I don't understand, right?

Coming under the whole law doesn't sound like freedom to us.

So here's what I want us to think about as we finish this morning.

I want us to think about this a little bit more.

David Foster Wallace was an incredible, incredibly gifted author and in 2005 he was asked to give a commencement speech to Kenyon College and these are the opening words of that address.

He started,"There are these two fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way who nods at them and says,'Morning boys, how's the water?' And the two young fish swim on for a bit.

And then eventually one of them looks over at the other goes,'What the heck is water?'" This is a joke- you're supposed to laugh.

But anyway, Wallace explained the point of his story.

He said it, and the point of his story is that the most obvious, ubiquitous, important realities of life are often the ones that are the hardest for us to see and talk about.

It's a genius way to start his speech because all of a sudden now everyone's thinking,"What are the obvious important realities of life that I might not be seeing at all?

Being completely blind to?" So what was it that David Foster Wallace saw?

What was this obvious reality of life?

Here's what he said to this graduating class, getting ready to leave academia and enter the real life, adult life.

He said this:"In the day to day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism.

There is no such thing as not worshiping.

Everybody worships.

The only choice we get is what to worship." And then he said that an outstanding reason for worshiping God is this.

He said,"Anything else you worship and life will eat you alive." Listen to him.

"If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough." It's the truth.

"Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly and when time and age start showing you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you.

Worship power and you will feel weak and afraid and you will need ever more power over others to keep that fear at bay.

Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, and you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out." He's right, you know?

My kids hate that I like to listen to Bob Dylan, but Bob Dylan sang about it years ago.

"You're gonna have to serve someone.

Yes, indeed.

You're gonna have to serve someone," right?

And of course the Bible was saying it long, long before that.

You can choose not to worship God, but you cannot choose not to worship.

Everybody worships.

It's who you are, and that's why Paul wrote in Romans chapter one, that the moment we rejected God, we didn't stop worshiping.

We just exchanged the truth for a lie and started worshiping the created things rather than the Creator.

Everybody worships.

You're going to have to serve somebody in this life.

Two or three years after Wallace gave that commencement speech, he hung himself, committed suicide.

Who knows what it was he was serving or worshipping in his life.

I certainly don't know.

Power, intellect, popularity, I don't know, but whatever it was, his words were prophetic.

It ate him alive, right?

There is, listen to James- James is saying, there is only one law that is a law of liberty because like the fish swimming in the water, you are made for a law that fits your nature.

A fish doesn't know what water is but the moment you take it out of the water, it's missing the water and it's dying, and the moment you step away from God's law, which is the law of liberty, you begin to die a million deaths.

Listen, we hear it all the time in our culture in a thousand different ways.

Our culture is hungry for freedom, for true in real liberty.

"Be true to yourself," the culture says, but James would ask,"Fine, but what is your true nature?" Right?

Around every corner, freedom seems to be promised, but it only leads to deeper and deeper bondage in our lives.

Your freedom depends on discovering how to give expression to your true nature, and that's why James calls this law, God's law, a law of liberty.

It's demands are true freedom.

Now listen, we've covered a lot of ground this morning.

Let me briefly in with a note about verse 13.

James wrote that judgment is without mercy to one who hasn't shown mercy, right?

He's saying, if there isn't the fruit of mercy in your life, if you aren't growing to love those who are unlike you, if there's no fruit of moving out to act upon the needs of your neighbor and those sorts of things, if there's no fruit of mercy in your life that should tell you something, right?

The fruit never gives the tree life right?

You can't work your way to life.

The fruit doesn't give life, but it tells us that the tree is alive and James is getting into this section of his letter that requires a lot of self examination and it's hard and he's beginning to ask these questions: Are you alive?

Are you growing?

Are you learning?

Are you learning to be someone who is set free in Jesus to relate to his law in a whole new way?

Now, listen, this is just a guess, but I'm guessing some of you are a little bit like me and I read these verses in James and I began to feel a lot of conviction about what he wrote, right?

How easily we become just so self-consumed with meeting our own needs and we meet those needs with tremendous speed and power and urgency and practicality, but we have often ignored the royal law in meeting our neighbors' with the same speed, urgency and practicality, or maybe we see very clearly this morning how we played favorites with God's law.

We've treated his law as abstractions rather than a reflection of who he is and what he's like, his character and we failed to love him for who he is.

Or maybe we've seen the ways in which we've exchanged the truth of God for a lie and we're worshiping all these things in life.

They're eating us alive.

Here's what James would say to you.

This is what James did say.

This is the end of verse 13.

Mercy triumphs over judgment.

How is that possible?

How does mercy triumph over judgment?

Because there was one who came and he took action upon your needs with great speed and urgency and practicality.

That one was God's own son, right?

Who came to live and die in our place.

He perfectly kept his father's royal law and he kept the unity of the whole law and he embraced the demands of liberty and he did it all for you.

Every bit of it, to really and truly set you free so that now you're free to relate to God's law in a whole new way.

Not to earn God's favor or to earn his love, but to obey because you already have his favor and his love through his son Jesus who did all of that for you.

You know our hearts are like buckets of a freezing water, right?

And left alone they constantly freeze over, in coldness and hardness, and we have to use the gospel of Jesus to constantly chip away at that ice to keep the water from freezing over.

Remember this good news: mercy triumphs over judgment because Jesus came and he triumphed over sin and death for you, His treasured possession.

Let's pray together.