Showing Partiality

You are listening to a message from Thrive Community Church, a church located in Southwest Florida. For more info, visit us at thrive-fl.org. So we're in the second week of our Grace series on how grace changes everything. As you can see, we kind of talk about the framework of grace. That's what the frames are on the back here. Our creative arts team does a great job in bringing out visual aspects of each worship series and sometimes each week as we gather, and we're looking at the book of James through this framework of grace, how grace changes everything. And so I want to start with that this morning because the topics that I'm going to speak on this week and then in a couple of weeks again are kind of seems like James is saying, he's pointing a finger and saying, don't do this, okay? We want to make sure we look at this through the lens, the framework of grace. What James is really saying here today is the main point is wrapped around verse 8 of James 2, okay? And he says, if you really keep the royal law found in scripture, which is love your neighbor as yourself, you are doing right. He says, if you keep this royal law, now why does he call it royal? He calls it royal because if it's the law that we keep, all the rest of the laws can go away. Because first, if you remember, as Jesus has said this in the Great Commission, in the Great Commandments, he said, what's the first one? Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength. And then he said, the second is like this. Love your neighbor as yourself. Love is the key. And so what James is saying here is, because of this grace, because Jesus so loved us, and he gave us this great commandment to love him and to love others, if we keep this royal command, this royal part of scripture, this royal law, then we're going to be doing right. And so how many of you just want to live right? A couple that still don't know, but we all want to live right. So the principle we're going to look at today is favoritism. We find it in the first verse. James says, my brothers, now anytime James says my brothers, you better perk your ears up because he's going to say something that's important. He says, my brothers, believers in our glorious Lord Jesus Christ must not show favoritism. The Greek word that he used is actually a compound word. And as we break it down, it means to receive and to face. So it means to receive someone's face. What he's saying is, don't show that favoritism. Don't be that superficial to receive somebody's face. Stay away from that. You see, there's so many ways in our world today that we can find ways of discrimination, right there. We discriminate in a lot of ways. When we want to think of favoritism, and I'm going to tell a story here in a little bit. Actually, James tells the story, I'm just going to kind of expound on a little bit. But when we look at people's lives, don't we sometimes look at their appearance and make a decision about them? What they look like, how they dress, what their hair looks like, their grooming practices. Their appearance, many times, will become a discriminating factor. Their ancestry, their race, their religion. You know, in today's country, we've seen so many different things, and we talk about lives matter. This life matters, that life matters, this life matters. What Jesus and God says is, all people matter. That's what James is trying to reiterate here, that all people matter. Don't show favoritism, because all people matter. The third area of discrimination is achievement. We gush over winners, don't we? Now, I like watching winners, too, you know? LeBron James, you know, hooray for LeBron. He won a title for Cleveland, you know, but we gush over those winners sometimes because of their achievements. And we might show him a little more favoritism if he was to show up at our worship experience. I hope not, but... Age. We're either too young or we're too old. When I started church planning, I was in my 40s, and I thought to myself, I'm just too young to do this, I'm too young to do this. And now, I'm almost 60, and I'm saying, I'm too old to do this, I'm too old to do this. And I think that's a perception that I have when I look at others, too. And then maybe the most common form of discrimination is affluence, where people live, what they drive, the amount of money they give, or if they're philanthropic enough, and we look at their affluence. James gives us an illustration of some discrimination that took place, and I want to call this the case of the nearsighted usher, okay? So as you look at this, it's the case of the nearsighted usher. Suppose a man comes into your meeting wearing a gold ring and fine clothes, and a poor man in filthy old clothes also comes in. If you show special attention to the man wearing fine clothes and say, here's a good seat for you, but say to the poor man, you stand over here, or sit on the floor by my feet, have you not discriminated amongst yourselves and become ...