Sermon Tone Analysis
Overall tone of the sermon
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Overview
Last week we covered and discovered this idea of Selective Obedience.
How in today's society we're expected to pick and choose, to customize our order in almost every situation.
And that attitude has wiggled its way into our churches.
We are not to have anything to do with favoritism.
We also delve into the Royal Law, "Love your neighbor as yourself," and what that entirely means.
For someone to be a Good Samaritan, they don't need to be from Samaria.
A Good Samaritan is someone who helps a person they don't know.
Or better yet, someone who loves their neighbor.
Then, we looked at the word love.
What does the "love" part of love your neighbor really means?
Love is the best word we have in the English language to translate this concept too, but it doesn't hold the complete meaning.
We need a word that combines other meanings like charity, compassion, mercy, grace, kindness, etc.
Now on to .
Please follow along.
Verse 9 is connected to verse 8.
You are guilty of breaking the royal law.
We are sinning when we show favor to some people over others because we do not love our neighbor.
Have you ever thought about that?
Showing partiality to one of the other is a sin?
That's scary because our culture sees that behavior as the norm; it's accepted.
We are to extend love to our neighbor, including those who are different from us.
This means that we enthusiastically welcome outsiders into our church meetings, regardless of nationality, ethnic makeup, age, or income level.
We should treat them with the same amount of excitement that we would if a famous politician, actor, or athlete walked through our doors.
Most would say that's absurd.
It is.
We are part of an upside-down kingdom.
Here is a quote that I read and really liked.
"In obedience to their king, Jesus, Christians are to build among themselves a genuine counterculture, in which the values of the kingdom of God rather than the values of this world are lived out."
This reminds me of where Jesus is teaching about the law.
I once heard someone say, "If you break one link in the chain, you break the chain."
James develops this idea a little more in verse 11.
If you break one commandment, you've broken the law.
We don't get to pick and choose which ones we obey and which ones are okay to break.
You break one; you break all.
But James is not referring to 613 commandments in the old testament.
If that was the case, we're all in trouble.
James is urging complete compliance with "the royal law," the kingdom law, the law of liberty.
He is looking a the old testament law through the lens of Jesus' fulfillment of it.
James is claiming that Christians who show favoritism are transgressors fo the royal law! James jumps back to this thought in verse 12.
Believers should regulate their actions in light of the judgment to come.
We need to validate our faith by doing the word, not just hearing the word.
"God’s gracious acceptance of us does not end our obligation to obey him; it sets it on a new footing.
No longer is God’s law a threatening, confining burden.
For the will of God now confronts us as a law of liberty—an obligation we discharge in the joyful knowledge that God has both “liberated” us from the penalty of sin and given us, in his Spirit, the power to obey his will.
To use James’s own description, this law is an “implanted word,” “written on the heart,” that has the power to save us ()."
Mercy gets mercy
This is related to the parable that Jesus tells about the unmerciful servant.
But James ends this verse on a positive note, Mercy triumphs over judgment!
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