The Sin of Partiality

If you would turn with me to James chapter 2. We're going to be looking at verses 1 through 13 as we continue our study of this very short, but very practical book in the New Testament. James has just warned us against the tendency of hearing the Word without doing the Word, listening but not obeying, and so now he gives us an example of what hearing without doing might look like. James 2 verses 1 through 13.

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 here in a good place, while you say to the poor man, you stand over there, or sit down at my feet, have you not then made distinctions among yourselves and become judges with evil thoughts? Listen, my beloved brothers, has not God chosen those who are poor in the world to be rich in faith and heirs of the kingdom which he has 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? 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 who 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 the one who has shown no mercy, mercy triumphs over judgment. That's the word of the Lord. Let's pray. Holy Spirit, You are the one who searches everything, even the deep thoughts and counsel of God the Father. You indwell us that we might understand and believe and obey the truths that have been freely given to us by the Father in Jesus Christ. So Holy Spirit, would You teach us tonight, give us Your perfect wisdom that we might walk in a manner worthy of the calling to which we have been called in Christ Jesus. In whose name I pray. Amen.

You can be seated. James' message in our text tonight is very simple and straightforward. It's that there is no place for partiality in the church because partiality is antithetical to the gospel. I think it's interesting that the sin of partiality is very much front and center in the current cultural moment in which we find ourselves today. It seems that the loudest voices are telling us incessantly that the most egregious vices, the worst offenses being committed, the most common sins of the age are all rooted in some underlying expression of unjust prejudice partiality. Whether it's racism or social justice, gay rights, feminism, all of these causes have at their root the accusation that one group is unjustly judging and mistreating another group.

And so depending on whether you are the accuser or the accused, you're either hyper passionate about your cause or you get hyper annoyed that you're being unjustly accused of being unjust. I never cease to be amazed at how relevant and timeless God's Word is. Here we are living in the 21st century dealing with cultural tensions that to us seem unprecedented and yet in the normal course of events we come tonight to a text written 2,000 years ago that addresses this very contemporary current issue of the sin of partiality.

And so what we're going to do tonight is what sincere Christians have always done. We're going to go to God's Word and we're going to let that Word rather than the culture around us instruct us and shape our thinking and our beliefs and our behavior. The devil has spent all of history trying to redefine sin on his own terms and to redefine how sinners are to be redeemed from sin and so we need the corrective of God's Word. We need to get both our definitions and our solutions with regard to sin from God. So that being said, we have before us tonight the Word of God, a Word that gives us the definitions, that gives us the solutions. In fact, it answers all the questions that we need to have answered to be able to fully identify and be redeemed from the sin of partiality.

Three questions I want us to consider tonight. First of all, what is partiality? How does Scripture define this sin that everyone seems to be talking about? Secondly, I want us to ask what makes partiality so wicked?

Is it really all that bad? Does it warrant a sermon tonight? And then finally we're going to ask how do I rid myself of the sin of partiality? In other words, what is God's solution? Three questions and three answers from the Word of God.

So let's begin. First of all, what is partiality? The word partiality in our text here is a compound word from two Greek words, the verb to receive or to accept and the noun face. So to show partiality is to accept the face. This is an expression, a figure of speech that describes the way people tend to size each other up based solely on what is visible.

An English idiom that might mean something similar would be our saying to judge a book by its cover. Now when we say that, we mean a person is making a value judgment about something based solely on external, immediate impressions rather than on a thorough, fair analysis. Someone who is partial is a respecter of persons. They assess other people based on outward circumstances rather than intrinsic merit. If someone, for example, is rich or maybe physically attractive, well then they must be smart and talented. If someone is poor and ugly, they must have a character flaw that made them that way.

This is partiality. It's judging from appearances. Now in James' example, he describes a well-dressed man entering a room where the church is gathered, perhaps for a worship service like this one, and following this well-dressed man there enters a very shabby, poor-looking fellow. The usher greets the well-dressed man.

He offers him a seat of honor while he disregards the shabby man and even tells him to sit on the floor at his feet. This usher has made value judgments based solely on what he can see. It's the sin of partiality.

Now I'll be honest. I've gone to church all my life and never to my recollection have I seen a service in which the ushers reserved the best seats for the well-dressed and the wealthy and forced the poor to sit on the floor. I think something culturally specific to James' time frame is going on here, something that must be lost to us in the year 2021, but that doesn't mean the sinful tendency to be a respecter of persons is lost on us.

Surely we can understand the attitude behind this action. There are other ways that we today share in the sin of partiality. In fact, the apostle Paul expands the categories a little bit beyond just rich versus poor. In Galatians 3, Paul says that in Christ Jesus you are all sons of God through faith, and then he mentions several categories that were evidently matters of partiality in his day, and I think we can identify with these. In Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek. That has to do with ethnic distinctions. When it comes to membership in the church of Jesus Christ, ethnicity does not add or subtract an ounce of value or credibility or clout to anyone. Paul says that in Christ there is neither slave nor free, and I think broadly this has to do with socioeconomic status. We don't have slaves in our culture anymore, but certainly there are distinctions of social class. Some people are white collar professionals who manage huge corporations and make millions of dollars a year.

Others are blue collar laborers whose bodies and bank accounts reflect a hard-earned wage. Neither of those statuses adds to nor subtracts from one's value in the body of Christ. Next Paul says there is no male and female, and this obviously has to do with gender distinctions. Neither gender adds to nor subtracts from a person's union with Christ. Paul continues his list in Colossians 3, and he includes a couple more categories.

Let's look at those real briefly. He says that there is neither circumcised nor uncircumcised. This is a reference to the Jew-Gentile distinction, but with special emphasis on religious practices of each. We might apply this categorical distinction to maybe the denominational differences that we have today. Some Christian circles observe a formal liturgy while others an informal liturgy. Some Christian groups enforce a very strict ethic when it comes to things like dress or music or dating, while others are more lenient with these things. Within the scope of the church, these external differences don't determine any individual Christian's value. And then there's one more category that Paul mentions.

There is no barbarian or Scythian. And I think these would be distinctions of cultural taste or cultural refinement. The Christian who is maybe comfortable way high up on the refinement scale is no less or no more in Christ than the Christian who could care less about the scale.

Why? Because it's not ethnicity or gender or social status that gives moral and spiritual value. It's Christ. So at its most basic level, partiality is about basing our value judgments and treatment of other people on superficial grounds, artificial categories. But there's more to this sinful attitude than just that. James goes on to point out that partiality involves not just a shallow, superficial judgmentalism, but it's a shallow judgmentalism that's accompanied by wicked motives.

He says in verse 4 that in their shallow judgmentalism, these Christians were actually making themselves judges with evil thoughts, with wicked motives. You see, there's nothing wrong inherently with showing honor to the rich. What James's readers were doing wrong was that they were only showing honor to the rich to the neglect of the poor. Their motive was wrong. This exposed the fact that their motive was not one of love for the wealthy, nothing wrong with loving rich people. No, their motive was wanting to benefit from their pandering to the wealthy, to the rich.

If love for other people was their concern, they would have shown equal honor to the poor man, but they didn't. And so their inconsistent behavior exposed a wicked motive, evidently some sort of vain desire of attaining favor from the wealthy. You may read these verses and be thinking to yourself, well, I don't pander to rich people, so I'm not guilty of the sin of partiality. But you know, some of us are probably more comfortable around poor people, and so we end up showing partiality but in the opposite direction.

Perhaps we feel inferior around wealthy folks or we resent the fact that they have what we don't have, and so maybe we ignore and spurn the rich, telling ourselves they're just hoity-toity, and we hobnob with the down and out because it makes us feel better about ourselves. It's the same root sin of partiality. It's a shallow judgmentalism that's grounded in selfish motives. I think we all have a tendency to redefine the sins we're guilty of so as to minimize our guilt.

We all do that. When I think about the sinful attitudes and thought processes that lead to partiality, I find myself downplaying the seriousness of it all. Sinclair Ferguson said that he would much rather have had James describe partiality in terms of having more of an affinity towards certain people than others or getting along with certain personality types better than others. I mean, that makes it sound all so palatable, doesn't it? I'm not really judging others unfairly.

I'm just naturally drawn to people that are, you know, pretty much like me. What's wrong with that? What is it that makes partiality so wicked? We need to wrestle with this question because until we come to terms with the seriousness of our sin, we really won't be motivated to deal with it like we should. So this brings us then to the second question that our text answers, and it's this, what makes partiality so wicked? What makes partiality so wicked?

There's several answers. The first is that it dishonors genuine brothers and sisters in Christ. Look at verses 5 and 6. Has not God chosen those who are poor in the world to be rich in faith and heirs of the kingdom, but you have dishonored the poor man?

Now, we need to be careful here. James is not saying that a person is saved simply because he is poor nor that a person is condemned to hell simply because he is wealthy. These statements are generalizations. James doesn't mean that only the poor and none of the rich are chosen by God for salvation. Scripture has plenty of examples of both rich Christians and poor heathens. James is simply stating a principle, a general truth, that many of the poor and few of the rich are chosen. The Bible tells us why this is the case, and it has to do with God getting the glory for saving sinners. 1 Corinthians 1 says that God chose what is low and despised in the world so that no human being might boast in the presence of God. So it has nothing to do with some inherent virtue in poverty or some inherent vice in wealth.

That's not what's going on here. It's important for us to understand this because it corrects the world's notion that the sin of partiality is always and only in one direction. The world would have us believe that partiality is a sin that only the rich and powerful commit against the poor and powerless.

And that's not true. It's not power and wealth that make partiality wicked. Partiality is wicked because it is a demeaning and a dishonoring of fellow bearers of the image of God, some of whom have even been redeemed by the blood of Jesus Christ. And that dishonoring of another person can happen in both directions, the powerful toward the powerless and the powerless toward the powerful. When we become respecters of persons by favoring the rich to the neglect of the poor, we're treating someone for whom Christ died as if they're worthless.

That's what makes it wicked. When we pander to the rich for the sake of personal gain, we're acting as if the rich person's spiritual need for salvation is inconsequential so long as we can benefit from their material abundance. That's what makes partiality so wicked. So partiality is wicked because it dishonors the rich by ignoring their spiritual need.

It dishonors the poor by ignoring their physical need. Not only does partiality dishonor the rich and the poor, it also dishonors the honorable name of Christ. Verse 7 says that the rich, to whom James' readers were evidently pandering, were by their treatment of the church blaspheming the honorable name by which believers are called. When we honor those who dishonor Christ, we are indirectly dishonoring Christ. To be so easily enamored with the enemies of God simply because they dress well or are highly educated or can pad your pocket is to bring reproach upon the Christ whom they blaspheme through their ill treatment of the church.

John Calvin said this, he said, When the palms of the world become preeminent so as to cover over what Christ is, it is evident that faith has little vigor. To be enamored with trinkets is to demean the real treasure. To honor that which Christ despises is to despise Christ. This is what makes partiality so despicable.

But notice a third reason why partiality is so wicked. It's because it is a transgression of the second great commandment. It's a transgression of the second great commandment. We see this in verses 8 and 9. If you really fulfill the royal law according to the scripture, which is you shall love your neighbor as yourself, you're doing well. But if you show partiality, you are committing sin and are convicted by the law as transgressors. So James tells us here that the opposite of partiality is love for one's neighbor.

Now that raises the stakes, doesn't it? In fact, Jesus was asked, which is the great commandment in the law? And he answered, You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment.

But then Jesus added, and a second is like it. You shall love your neighbor as yourself. And that's the royal law that James quotes in verse 8. But then Jesus concludes by saying, On these two commandments, love for God, love for our neighbor, depend all the law and the prophets. Theologians have pointed out that every command in the Bible can trace its ethical moral grounding back to the Ten Commandments. The Ten Commandments are sort of a shorthand, a summary of all of God's commands. And the Ten Commandments themselves can be summarized by these two great commands that Jesus highlights in His answer about which command is the greatest. The first four commandments in the Ten Commandments are explicitly about our relationship to God. And they're summarized by this command to love the Lord with all our heart, soul, and mind. And then the last six commandments of the ten are explicitly about our relationship to our neighbor with each other. And they are summarized by the second great command to love our neighbor as ourselves. Paul makes this very point in Romans 13 when he says, For the commandments, and he starts to list the Ten Commandments, you shall not commit adultery, you shall not murder, you shall not steal, you shall not covenant, and any other commandment, are summed up in this word, you shall love your neighbor as yourself.

So let's follow this through. James equates the sin of partiality with a breaking of the law to love your neighbor as yourself. And loving your neighbor as yourself is a summary of over half of the Ten Commandments, which is itself a summary of all of God's moral law. Folks, this means that when we show partiality, we are breaking the law of God on a grand scale.

This is no minor offense. We can hardly excuse this sin away as just a personality quirk or an affinity for certain dispositions. No, partiality is a failure to love people, and ultimately a failure to love God's law. But then James ups the ante even more in verses 10 and 11. Not only does partiality dishonor our Christian brothers and sisters, not only does it dishonor the honorable name of Christ, not only is it a transgression of the second great commandment, but partiality also incurs a comprehensive guilt.

It incurs a comprehensive guilt. Verse 10 introduces a principle regarding God's law. It says, whoever keeps the whole law but fails in one point has become guilty of all of it. You see, God's law is a perfect unity. It bears no inconsistencies, no contradictions.

And so to break even just one part of the law, even if the rest of it is externally kept, is to incur guilt. It would be like an athlete who keeps all the rules of the game except one. It doesn't matter if he kept every other rule and excelled in every other way. He would still be disqualified. As they say, close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades, right?

But with certain things, close doesn't cut it. It's got to be all or nothing by definition. You can't be sort of male or female. By definition, it's got to be one or the other.

You can't be mostly dead by definition. It's got to be one or the other. So it is with the law of God. You can't be generally law abiding. You've either kept the law or you've broken it. And if you're a law breaker at any point, you really have no grounds for saying, you know, I may have stumbled here and there, but deep down I really do love God. Calvin said that would be like a judge who condemned nine thieves and acquitted the tenth.

His inconsistency exposes the fact that he really doesn't hate crime, he hates men. In the same way, to obey parts of God's law while neglecting other parts exposes the fact that it's really not God's law that we love. A partial obedience is a pretend obedience, not a real one. Now the reason this instruction is necessary is because of our tendency to rank sins according to greatness. In fact, an entire book has been written on this very tendency. I think most of us here at Grace are familiar with the book Respectable Sins. We tend to rank our sins based on their respectability. Now don't misunderstand, different sins have varying levels of consequence or scandal attached to them. In fact, the Westminster Confession points out that some sins are indeed more heinous than others, and that's certainly true.

We don't deny that. Jesus himself speaks of some sins being greater than other sins, John 19.11. Certainly to look lustfully at a woman is to commit adultery with her in your heart, but it is even more heinous, more scandalous, more consequential and damaging to commit adultery with a woman in the body.

We understand that, right? So James' point is not that all sins are equally heinous or consequential or scandalous. His point is that all sins equally incur guilt before God. The smallest, most unheinous sin contains enough wickedness to condemn us to hell. Evidently there was a tendency among James' audience to think of partiality as a light sin, a respectable sin, and they used that thought process to excuse away their partiality. They failed to realize that even if it were a light sin, it is a sin that made them full-fledged lawbreakers, comprehensively guilty before a holy God. But what we need to also see is that James' point in verses 8 and 9 is that partiality doesn't even qualify as one of the light sins. It's a heavy sin. It's a big one.

It is a heinous offense that strikes at the very heart and purpose of God's law. So we've seen what partiality is. We've seen the depth of its offensiveness to God. The urgent question then is how do I rid myself of partiality?

How do I get rid of this? What is God's solution? As I'm preparing my sermons, I'll often try to find a recording of a good preacher that I can trust who has preached the same text that I'm preparing. And I'll listen to that sermon at some point in my preparation process just so that I can have God's Word preached to me before I go and preach it to someone else. This past week I chose a sermon from Sinclair Ferguson, this very text. It was so helpful and convicting. But he said something in the sermon that amused me.

I want to share it with you. He said, tongue in cheek sort of, that Christians go to the Bible to learn what they should do and then they go to the local Christian bookstore to learn how they should do it. I think there's some truth in that to our shame. He said that what we tend to overlook is the fact that the Scripture text usually gives us both the what and the how. Now we may not like the how. We may think we need a little more specific direction than Scripture gives, but Christians we need to get into the habit of depending on and looking to the Bible not just for doctrine but also for application.

Let's take the sin of partiality for example. The world as well as the church in many quarters has all sorts of ideas and suggestions for how we can go about ridding our culture of prejudice and discrimination and racism, essentially of partiality. And the general consensus seems to be that the path forward is through some sort of penance or reparation, some kind of amends that need to be made in order to redeem ourselves from this vile cultural sin. And so they say the powerful need to forfeit their power, the wealthy need to forfeit their wealth, the privileged need to forfeit their privilege.

Now hear me out. There are contexts and situations where deference and sacrifice and generosity are beautiful expressions of love. And frankly Christians ought to be the first ones in line to offer such expressions of love. But church, doing these acts of love and making these gestures of personal sacrifice and condescension cannot and will not ever redeem us from our sin. We cannot make enough reparation to remove our guilt. This works-oriented endeavor that the world tells us will solve all of our partiality problems is not the solution to partiality or to any other sin for that matter.

So what is the solution? Folks, it's so simplistically beautiful. Verse 12, James says, 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.

I rid myself of partiality by looking to Christ as the remover of my sin and as the remover of my enemy's sin. You see, as long as I'm artificially judging everyone else for their faults and flaws and infirmities and annoyances, I'm oblivious to my own need for repentance. But the minute I realize I'm just as guilty before God as the next person and my only hope in life and death is for God to have mercy on me, then suddenly everyone else's issues are not the issue. And I'm liberated to show to others the same mercy that I have been shown by God. So speak and so act as those who are to be judged under the law of liberty.

Not condemned by the law to an eternal hell like we deserve. No, speak and act as those who have been shown mercy. We are to give that same forgiving mercy to others. And realize this mercy extends in both directions.

It applies to the one who is stronger than I am, who oppresses me, and it applies to the one who is weaker than I am, whom I oppress. We are to treat and speak to others as we have been treated and spoken to by God. If God's disposition towards us is one of mercy, even though we deserve judgment, our disposition towards others, particularly as it relates to bearing with their infirmities, demands mercy. I love how one preacher said it. He said, except ye wish to undergo the rigor of the law, ye must be less rigid towards your neighbors. We ought so to act that we may not through too much severity underestimate the indulgence or mercy of God of which we all have need to the last.

And that's really it, isn't it? Partiality at its root is an underestimating of God's mercy and indulgence for sinners. Are you struggling to love that high maintenance energy taker who wants to be your best friend? Take a moment to contemplate how high maintenance you are to God.

Are you struggling with bitterness toward that wealthy self-absorbed colleague who seems totally unaware of his curt roughshod treatment of those around him? Remind yourself of God's disposition toward you and how he bears with your blind spots and stubbornness. So while the world is busy trying to fix its partiality problem in all the wrong ways, church, let's show them how to do it God's way. Partiality melts away when we confess it for the sin that it is and repent of it by loving as we have been loved, by forgiving as we have been forgiven, by letting the mercy we have been shown triumph over the judgment we are tempted to show. Jesus said, just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another, and by this all people will know that you are my disciples. Let's pray. Father, you have given us instruction on how to love each other. You have given us your Holy Spirit to empower us to follow that instruction, and you have even credited us with the righteousness of Christ to cover our sin when we fail to follow that instruction. Now help us, Lord, to go from this place speaking and acting as those who have been shown divine mercy. I pray it all in Jesus' name. Amen.