05: A Beautiful Indifference

Please stay standing with me while we read the scripture from this morning.

We're going to be in James chapter 2, verses 1 through 13.

James 2:1–13

My brothers and sisters, believers in our glorious Lord Jesus Christ, you must not show favoritism.

Suppose someone comes into your meeting wearing a gold ring, fine clothes, and a poor person in filthy clothes also comes in.

If you show special attention to the one wearing fine clothes and say, Here's a good seat for you, but you say to the poor one, You stand over there or sit on the floor by my feet, have you not discriminated amongst yourselves and become judges with evil thoughts?

Listen, my dear brothers and sisters, has God not 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?

But you've dishonored the poor.

Is it not those rich who are exploiting you?

Are they not the ones who are dragging you into court?

Are they not the ones who are blaspheming the noble name of him who you belong?

If you really keep the royal law found in Scripture, to love your neighbor as yourself, you're doing right.

But if you show favoritism, your sin, and you are convicted by the law as lawbreakers, for whoever keeps the whole law yet stumbles at one point is guilty of breaking it all.

For he who said you shall not commit adultery also said, Do not murder.

If you do not commit adultery, but you do murder, you have become a lawbreaker.

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

Because judgment is without mercy for those who have not shown mercy.

Mercy triumphs over judgment.

This is the reading of God's word.

Please be seated.

Well, good morning.

Thanks for the round of applause.

Appreciate that.

As Zach mentioned, I've been a member here for about nine years with my wonderful family, and I've been grateful for the way that this church has shaped my life and my faith.

And uh I also need to shout out to my wife because she has spent so much time and heard this sermon preached at least six times this week.

So thank you to Whitney for your tremendous sacrifice on behalf of that.

Um this scripture has so much in it, I'm thrilled to unpack it because I've learned just a ton as I've been working through this myself over the last couple weeks.

So he starts out and he says, My brothers show no partiality as you hold the faith of our Lord Jesus Christ, and then he qualifies it and he says, the Lord of glory.

And we see this whole passage is about partiality.

It's all about how we might view or be partial towards one group of per people versus another.

And so right at the beginning, James is setting up for us that it's a matter of perspective, that how we view things is going to influence how we treat people.

And yet we know that God views people radically differently than we do.

He says in Isaiah 55, My thoughts are not your thoughts.

Neither are your ways my ways, for as the heavens are higher than earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts higher than your thoughts.

And so it got me thinking, what's the highest human perspective we could possibly have?

And then I realized we have recently sent some people to the space station.

Anyone get to see that?

Rocket ship sending human beings up into orbit.

I see little Lucy raising her hand.

That's amazing.

That's the best perspective as a human we could get is to go all the way out to space and look down on the Earth.

And what's amazing is when they interview people that are astronauts that come back, psychologists have found this thing they call the overview effect.

It's a cognitive shift and awareness that happens when the astronaut or space tourist, I don't know what a space tourist is, experiences firsthand the view of Earth from the orbit.

And they experience euphoria and an altered view of planetary conflict.

So here's what two astronauts had to say.

Edward Gibson said, you see how diminutive or exceedingly small, how tiny your life really is in comparison to the other things in the universe.

Edgar Mitchell, who was on Apollo 14, says, you develop this instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the way the world is, and a desire to do something about it.

And so even a human that gets far enough away to have the perspective to look back at Earth all of a sudden realizes the things that we've used to divide us are really, really small in light of viewing it from that far away.

And that's the perspective that I think that James is encouraging us to get to today.

And so he he drills down on partiality and he gives us a specific example of money or wealth.

And he says, if a man wearing a gold ring in fine clothing comes into your assembly and a poor man comes in and you pay attention to the one in fine clothes, have you not become evil judges and made distinctions amongst yourselves?

Eugene Peterson, who wrote a version of the Bible called the Message, it's kind of a modern day translation, says it this way Haven't you segregated God's children and proved that you're judges who cannot be trusted?

Because from God's perspective, it's really clear that there are only two categories Jesus, everybody else.

It's that simple.

And we see that in in Psalm 14, he says that the Lord looks down from heaven to see if there's a single person who does good, and there's not one.

None seek God.

We know that all have fallen short of the glory of God, according to Romans 3.

And so we see that God's perspective on humankind is that there is perfect Jesus and there is sinful humans.

That's it.

And then he sees us as sinful humans, further subdividing ourselves in these categories based on arbitrary distinctions, and it infuriates him because it's us making ourselves better than others, and sometimes even making ourselves worse than others.

And both are a travesty to the imputed image that God has given us by the fact that we are made in his image.

And so there are lots of categories that we could use to create partiality towards, but I'm going to cover a couple.

And I think that partiality, a lot of times, doesn't quite communicate the seriousness of this issue.

If you look at Google and the definition of partiality, what you'll see is back in like the 1900s, it was used a lot, and then over time it doesn't get used a whole lot.

When I think of partiality, I think of it more like a preference.

That is not what James is talking about here.

James is talking about something that today we might call isms.

What do I mean by that?

Sexism, a preference for one gender over the other.

It might be elitism and a preference for education.

It might be racism, a preference for nationality or color of skin.

And the list goes on.

It could be power, it could be educational attainment, it could be beauty or strength or athleticism, it could be race or nationality.

And we can find almost an infinite number of ways to distinguish between ourselves, who's above us and who's below us, based on our own estimation as if we were God.

And the Bible gives us a couple of wonderful examples of how this practically fleshes itself out.

We see in the story of Genesis, if we go back to the very first book of the Bible, you remember that there was the founder and father of our faith, Abraham, who, because of his faith, was going to be the father of many nations.

And Abraham had Isaac.

And Isaac, or Abraham.

Somebody help me out here.

Blink.

Yeah, Abraham, Isaac, and Isaac had Jacob, and Jacob became the nation of Israel, and Israel had twelve tribes, and they were sons, so he had twelve sons.

Well, one of his sons was named Joseph.

And many of you know this story.

So we see in Genesis 37 that Israel loved Joseph more than others.

He was partial to one of his children.

And he made him, he made Joseph, a robe of many colors.

And when his brothers saw that their father loved him more than all the other brothers, they hated him, and they could not speak peacefully.

And what we see is that just the fact that a parent might love one child more than another, and that the children would feel that, it would break their heart and would cause them to hate their brother.

And if you keep reading the story, what you find out is that the story gets worse and worse because his brothers then plot to kill him and end up ultimately selling him into slavery.

Those are the ripple effects of partiality in a family.

It's a powerful example of the way that through man's eyes, partiality can destroy something that is a beautiful thing, and that's a family system.

But we see another story when we look through God's eyes that I think is a great example of this.

If you remember, Israel at one point wanted a king.

And so they said to the prophet Samuel, who was the intermediary before God, they said, We want a king to rule over us.

And so the people of Israel found a man that by external appearances looked like everything you'd want for a king.

This is what was said about a man named Saul who was selected to be king.

He was handsome.

There was not a man among Israel more handsome than he.

From his shoulders upward, he was taller than any of the people.

And he looked the part.

And so, based on external appearances, they looked at Saul and they said, Let's make him king, and they did.

The problem was he had terrible character.

He was dishonest, he lacked integrity, and he was prideful.

And that led to this tremendous downfall of his nation and his personal life.

And God says, I'm going to begin a new work, I'm going to do something new and raise up a new king, but he's going to be different than Saul.

He's not going to be the guy that you pick by physical or external appearances.

It's going to be something else.

And so Samuel is sent to the house of Jesse.

And Jesse has all of these sons, and so Jesse brings his sons out.

And Samuel is kind of talking with God and saying, Is it going to be this one as they bring out the oldest?

And God says, No, not that one.

The next one.

No, not that one.

The next one.

Not that one.

On down the line.

And before they know it, Samuel has looked at all of the sons, and God has said no to all of them.

And Samuel's confused because he's like, You sent me to this house to pick the next king of Israel.

And so he says to Jesse, Is there anybody else?

And Jesse says, Well, there's this silly little shepherd, boy, he's my youngest son, he's ruddy, he's tiny, you don't want him.

He's not much to look at.

Samuel says, Bring in.

And God says, That one.

Turns out that's King David, who was not a whole lot to look at.

And as Samuel's talking to God about this in 1 Samuel 16, verse 7, he says to Samuel, don't look at his appearance speaking of Saul or his stature, because I have rejected him.

1 Samuel 16:7

Instead, look as man, look as the Lord sees, not as man sees, because the Lord looks at the heart.

We see that there's this transparency that God actually pierces through all of the things that you and I might create as arbitrary distinctions between each other today, that the Lord can see into each of our hearts right now, and He knows our character and He knows the value that we have that He gave us, independent of what other people think or the judgments that they might make of us.

I'll give you two kind of fun examples from my own life.

So I lived in Los Angeles for a couple years, and that is a that is a world of celebrities.

And so fame is a huge issue.

It's intoxicating in our culture.

So my wife and I were having dinner with an older couple at this little restaurant in Santa Monica, and we walk out of the restaurant, and uh our host says to us, Man, I can't believe who we were just sitting behind.

That was amazing.

And I was like, But who were we sitting behind?

He's like, Well, that was Tom Hanks.

Tom Hanks! So I did what any Forrest Gump loving man would do.

I marched right back in there and pretended to have lost my credit card and crawled around on the floor just so I could ask Tom Hanks if he'd seen my credit card.

And I'm guessing God was not super impressed by that action.

I'm guessing he doesn't think Tom Hanks is kind of on the same par as he is.

And that's a foolish example, but it was a time when I acted with a lot of partiality towards a man just because he happened to be a movie star.

I had another experience that I think was a little bit more favorable in terms of how I handled it.

I was in uh Las Vegas last year with my wife for a wealth management conference, which is what I do for a day job.

And my wife came out Friday, Saturday, and then the conference started on Sunday, and we had uh had an okay time, but Las Vegas is a very dark and depressing place.

It's full of just a lot of depravity.

And I felt kind of grieved as I put my wife in an Uber to the airport thinking I had four days in Vegas by myself, and I wanted to kind of center myself, so I really wanted to go to church.

And my father-in-law had told me about this church on the outskirts of Las Vegas.

So I hopped in an Uber and I went about 25 minutes outside the city.

And I went out there and I got into the church and started talking with people, and they said, Big news, we have a guest speaker today.

It's gonna be really exciting.

And I thought that'll be great.

I'm sure he'll have profound things to say, and I'll learn, and it'll be really encouraging.

Well, we went in, we started worship, and the pastor brought out two chairs, and the pastor came out and sat down, and out came a man named Pete Rose.

Some of you may know who that is.

I didn't I didn't happen to, but Pete Rose was the most winningest or the highest hitting Major League Baseball player in all of history.

He had the most hits of anybody that has ever played Major League Baseball.

He also had kind of a sordid history as he got kicked out of the Baseball Hall of Fame for betting against his own team.

I'd never heard of him, uh, partly because he was a little bit before my time, and partly because I'm not a huge fan of baseball.

But Pete Rose was sitting up there, and I was thinking he was going to talk about a testimony and some of the redemption that God had brought in his life despite these incredible experiences, and talk about the way that God had shaped his life, and I was excited to hear about that testimony.

And time started to tick on, and it was all about baseball and baseball and baseball and baseball.

And about 20 minutes in, I realized I had no value to get to hear about baseball.

I had come to church to commune with the living God, to write my own heart and spirit, and I didn't care about batting averages.

So I got up and I left the service, and ironically, I sat right next to his Bentley in this parking lot and just read my Bible.

And I had a great connection with the Lord, just reading my Bible.

Because I had no partiality to this man.

But part of these stories help illustrate that partiality is going to slightly reveal our own hearts.

It's going to show us the things we value.

It's going to map to the things that we find identity and purpose in.

Because if it had been Matt Fraser, who's a CrossFit champion, he's won the CrossFit games, I may have stuck around, even if he wasn't a Christian, just because I love CrossFit.

But Pete Rose wasn't that interesting to me.

And so I think it helps show us that the way we show partiality in our lives is actually a map to our own desires and our own hearts.

And God can use that in powerful ways to reveal to us issues that can become idolatry and identity issues.

And so James dives in with this specific example because we've talked about partiality, but he wants to give a specific example.

And so he dives into wealth in particular.

In verses five through seven, he says, Listen, my brothers, has not God chosen those who are poor in the world to be rich in faith and heirs of the kingdom, which he promised to those who love him?

But you have dishonored the poor man.

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

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

And what James starts to do, which is amazing, is he starts to flush out that there might be two types of currency here at work.

There's money, which is easy to think about.

We all know what money is and how to spend it and what it can buy you, but there might be another type of currency that we're not thinking about, and that is faith.

And he says a lot of times, people who have material possessions in this world oftentimes are lacking or even bankrupt in faith.

They don't have this abundance of faith that is God given.

And James is talking about a specific type of wealthy people.

He's talking about the unrighteous rich.

And so, as I mentioned, for a living, what I do is wealth management.

So every single day I watch the stock market, I deal with dollars and cents, I help people with retirement planning, and I have a lot of pretty affluent clients, and so money is something that I spend a lot of time with and around.

And so I want to make sure we don't run off into this ditch that I think is tempting if you read this passage the wrong way, and that is to believe that it is wrong to be rich.

I think what's more important is to establish this line and realize that there are two categories up top, and that the dividing line is righteousness and unrighteousness.

And up top we have the righteous rich, and there are examples in Scripture like Boaz, like David, like Job, and then there are the righteous poor, like Jesus, like his disciples, like Ruth, like the poor widow.

And so when you go below the line of righteousness, you get unrighteous rich, and you get unrighteous poor.

And so it's not about how much money you have, it's how you handle that wealth.

But there is a clear propensity that happens, especially in the world, to believe that wealth is sufficient so that you don't need God.

And God has given us this beautiful paradigm of realizing that a lot of times it's very difficult to simultaneously hold wealth, especially abundant wealth, and hold faith in Jesus Christ.

And I was trying to figure out how do we understand this paradigm of value that they're giving us, that there are different values, that there's a value to money and there's a value to faith.

And I came across this really interesting quote by this smart old dead guy named Adam Smith.

And Adam Smith was kind of the founder of modern economics.

And he said that there are two kinds of value, and it's illustrated by the diamond water paradox.

There's value in use, and there's value in exchange.

And he says a lot of times the things that have the greatest value in use frequently have little value in exchange.

And on the contrary, the things that have the greatest value in exchange frequently have little or no value in use.

And he gives an example because I got dizzy just saying that, and I'm sure it's difficult to follow.

But he says, nothing is more useful than water.

But it doesn't really purchase anything.

But a diamond, on the other hand, can scarcely be of any use.

But it can be exchanged for so much.

And the gospel is kind of like this.

Faith in Jesus Christ is a lot like this because you can't come in today and buy salvation.

You cannot buy your faith.

And by the way, that salvation has unbelievable, undescribable use in your life.

It will give you hope and peace.

It will see you through hard times.

It will secure for you eternal salvation.

The use of the gospel is uncountable.

And I could give you a billion dollars today, and you couldn't buy a single one of those things.

You could exchange it for anything you wanted in the world, and it wouldn't get you any closer to rightness with God.

There was a great missionary named Jim Elliott who gave his life trying to minister to indigenous people, and he has this profound quote.

He says, He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose.

What he's saying is all this stuff that we exchange for value, like money, it's not really worth that much.

Because you're not going to keep it.

First Timothy says, Godliness with contemment is great gain, for I brought nothing into this world and I'll take nothing out of this world.

There is limited value to the material possessions and money that we can accumulate.

But godliness, that is of infinite value.

You can't lose that.

Salvation is imperishable.

And Jesus said the same thing in Matthew 13.

He says, The kingdom of heaven is like a treasure that a man discovers hidden in a field, and in his excitement, he hid it again, and then he sold everything he had to buy that field.

And what he's saying is, when you properly esteem the gospel and you have the faith to see it as as valuable as it is, the exchange and the monetary side of it will diminish in importance.

But when we walk back out of these church doors, we live in a world that finds it very easy to prioritize human life value based on economic worth.

It's easy.

The dollar methodology to human value is easy.

Because it allows us a clear hierarchy.

You're more valuable than this person and this person and this person.

And it's easy to think that you're valuable if you have a lot of money.

The temptation is to believe that that somehow means you don't need God.

And the danger in that is that if God is real, what he's saying here is that that will not save you.

That is insufficient.

And I looked at my anecdotal experience, my own life, and I thought of the people that have made a really big impact on my spiritual life and my faith and development, have they been really affluent people, or have they been people that the world might not even look twice at?

And with maybe one notable exception, nine times out of ten, they were people that were not super impressive.

And I won't tell the stories of these people, but here's a couple that I thought of uh an Uber driver, um, an elderly neighbor, a hotel bellman, a college intern.

Those are the people that were rich in faith that bless my life.

Life.

And so James is saying you need to have a different perspective, not only on people, but on the currency of faith that God either has or hasn't given you.

And God will give it in abundance if you ask for it.

And so, as we started a partiality and zoomed down to look at money specifically, he zooms back out to talk about how significant and important partiality actually is.

And he says, if you really fulfill the royal law according to Scripture, starting in verse 8, you shall love your neighbor as yourself, then you're doing well.

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

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

For he who said, Do not commit adultery also said, Do not murder.

If you do not commit adultery, but you do murder, you have become a transgressor of the law.

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

James is showing us here that partiality is not like a small sin.

And this forced me as I as I wrestled with this over the last couple weeks to realize that just like we prioritize people based on categories, we do the same thing with sin.

And that's not to say the consequences of sin or the punishment for potential sins are all the same.

Even under the eyes of the law that we live under.

Right?

If you get a speeding ticket, you're not going to the electric chair.

But what he's saying is that the law is a system, not a spectrum.

And I think that's such a profound concept because in my mind, even I kind of think of sin on the spectrum, like there's the little white lies maybe you tell that aren't so bad, you know, telling your kid where bacon comes from, and then you know, right on up to like the more serious sins that are a little bit more intentional and maybe have premeditation and they get kind of bad.

And then there's like the unforgivable sins, the ones that are unthinkable, murder and adultery.

And what James is doing here is he's saying, there is no spectrum.

The law is a system of human living and human flourishing, and if you mess up one piece of it, it messes up all of it.

And when I started to think about it as a system, it was it was easy to find analogies that made sense because all of you are probably gonna get into a car when you leave here.

And that car is this modern marvel of engineering, and it's a system.

And if I take out this one$24 part called a spark plug, all of you are staying in the parking lot.

Because your car is a system, it has to work together, and the law is exactly the same thing.

If you're not a big car person, I'll use uh baking as an example because my wife is a phenomenal baker.

If I take a tablespoon of dog poop and put it in the brownies and then invite you over for dessert, you don't want those brownies.

Because it's supposed to be perfect, it's supposed to be everything that needs to be in it, and nothing more.

No outside influence and nothing good removed and nothing bad put in.

That's what the law is.

It's this system.

And so we have to read partiality is as serious as any part of the law.

It's not a spectrum, it's a system.

And here in church, this is the one place where we need to evidence and live a beautiful indifference to one another.

Because that's a ministry to the outside world, because they live, all of us go back out to a world that will find lots of ways to judge us and tell us our worth based on external factors.

Our age, our money, our beauty, the color of our skin, any plethora of issues.

But here in this building, these people, we need to love each other with a beautiful indifference.

And I think that this text clearly screams that the issue of race has to be addressed.

And so, it as we get towards our close today, I'm gonna tell you why I was afraid to even bring this up, why I decided to do it anyway, and what I think the answer is.

Uh so first, the the reason I was afraid to bring this up was because I'm a white male.

And somehow, in my own mind, that seems to make me think I'm not legitimate or valid to speak on issues of conflict and race and what it's like to be a black person in America because I haven't experienced that.

So therefore, I have no right to speak on this issue.

And the reason I am gonna say something about this anyway is because a dear brother of mine, a very close friend who's black, said, Chris, you don't have to be a child to fight for the rights of children.

You don't have to be a woman to love your wife well and talk about her inherent dignity and love her as a woman.

And you don't have to be black to talk about the value that I have as a human being and a brother in Christ.

And so with that, I started what was a challenging process for myself to jump into exploring what that looks like, what does race and partiality look like?

And we're not gonna spend much time in this, but I want to point out one example that was that the founding of our nation that is the clearest example of partiality I could possibly fathom.

It was called the Three-Fifths Compromise.

Now, in 1787, shortly after our nation was founded, they were getting together and for taxation and legislative representation, they were trying to figure out how are we going to count slaves?

And so these people began to debate the issue, and what they decided and where they came down was that we will count three out of every five slaves.

They literally defined a proportion of humanity that was going to be put on other people.

You are worth 60% of a human being.

That is the definition and the egregious nature and the evil of partiality.

And I think right now, Andy Stanley had a great quote.

He's a pastor in Georgia, he said, it's not enough to not be racist right now.

We have to be anti-racist.

He compares it to a child abuser, and he says, You don't see someone abuse a child and think, well, I'm not a child abuser.

You have to confront it.

You have to oppose it, you have to evaluate the system that allowed it to happen and tear it down and rebuild something that was more just.

He said that the church must be reminded that we're not the master or the servant of the state, we are the conscience.

That we must guide the state, never be its tool.

Because if the church doesn't recapture its prophetic zeal, then it will not participate, or if the church does not recapture its prophetic zeal, it will become an irrelevant social club without moral or spiritual authority.

If we don't participate actively in the struggle for economic and racial justice, it will forfeit the loyalty of millions and cause men everywhere to say it's atrophied, it's will.

Martin Luther King was spot on, and it's relevant today.

It's relevant tomorrow in your place of employment with your friends, with your family, in your neighbor, and with the people that live around you.

If we don't confront this issue of race and partiality in general, the church will just drift to the wayside as a social club.

And that is not Jesus' place.

Jesus is about his work in this church, and I believe he has a lot to say to us about partiality.

And so, in conclusion, I'll encourage us to collectively repent of the ways that we have partiality in our hearts, to embrace the seriousness that God shows that he feels towards partiality, to love one another with a beautiful indifference to all external facts except for the fact that we share the same Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, who gave his blood so that we could be brought back to him and one another.

So, with that, we're gonna take communion.

And communion is where we celebrate the broken body and the shed blood of Jesus Christ.

We have interesting COVID communion cups.

I've been told to give a little explanation.

There's a top layer, there's a little wafer under there, and then another layer of plastic you peel off for the wine itself.

And so Zach's gonna come up and lead us in worship as we participate in a time of uh of communion.

So let me pray.

Father God, thank you for your perfect heavenly perspective that puts us all in the same plane as sinful man.

Thank you that you send your son Jesus Christ to elevate us, that we might be equal with one another and stand in righteousness before you.

Lord, I pray that you would individually help us search our own hearts for the ways and areas that we might be partial to other human beings created in your image.

I pray that you would give us a prophetic zeal as a church to address these issues in our church and in our communities, that people might see your bride, the church, in her beautiful and glorious appearance, in a way that is reconciling all people to yourself.

Jesus, thank you for your sacrifice.

Thank you for this church and every person in here.

In your name.

Amen.