James No.5 Rich man, Poor man

1 Corinthians, chapter 1, beginning at verse 10. I appeal to you, brothers, in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you agree with one another, so that there may be no divisions among you, and that you may be perfectly united in mind and thought. My brothers, some from Chloe's household have informed me that there are quarrels among you.

What I mean is this, one of you says, I follow Paul, another, I follow Apollos, another, I follow Cephas, still another, I follow Christ. Is Christ divided? Was Paul crucified for you? Were you baptized into the name of Paul? I am thankful that I did not baptize any of you except Crispus and Gaius, so that no one can say that you were baptized into my name. Yes, I also baptized the household of Stephanas.

Beyond that, I don't remember if I baptized anyone else. For Christ did not send me to baptize, but to preach the gospel, not with words of human wisdom, lest the cross of Christ be emptied of its power. For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved, it is the power of God, for it is written, I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, the intelligence of the intelligent, I will frustrate.

Where is the wise man? Where is the scholar? Where is the philosopher of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since in the wisdom of God, the world through its wisdom did not know him. God was pleased through the foolishness of what was preached to save those who believe. Jews demand miraculous signs and Greeks look for wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to the Jews and foolishness to the Gentiles, but to those whose God has called both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.

For the foolishness of God is wiser than man's wisdom and the weakness of God is stronger than man's strength. Brothers, think of what you were when you were called. Not many of you were wise by human standards, not many were influential, not many were of noble birth, but God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise.

God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong. He chose the lowly things of this world and the despised things and the things that are not to nullify the things that are so that no one can boast before him. It is because of him that we are in Christ Jesus, who has become for us wisdom from God, that is our righteousness, holiness, and redemption.

Therefore, as it is written, let him who boasts, boast in the Lord. My brothers, as believers in our glorious Lord Jesus Christ, don't show favoritism. Suppose a man comes into your meeting wearing a gold ring and fine clothes, and a poor man in shabby clothes also comes in.

If you show special attention to the man wearing fine clothes and say, here is a good seat for you, but say to the poor man, you stand there or sit on the floor by my feet, have you not discriminated among yourselves and become judges with evil thoughts? Listen, my dear brothers, has not God 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 have insulted the poor. Is it not the rich who are exploiting you? Are they not the ones who are dragging you into court? Are they not the ones who are slandering the noble name of him to whom you belong? If you really keep the royal law found in Scripture, love your neighbor as yourself, you are doing right. But if you show favoritism, you sin and are convicted by the law as lawbreakers.

For whoever keeps the whole law and yet stumbles at just one point is guilty of breaking all of it. For he who said, do not commit adultery, also said, do not murder. If you do not commit adultery, but do commit murder, you have become a lawbreaker.

Speak and act as those who are going to be judged by the law that gives freedom, because judgment without mercy will be shown to anyone who has not been merciful. Mercy triumphs over judgment. There's a dear brother in North India who Richard and I know and love a great deal.

By the name of Bhagave, he's a very intellectual fellow with a couple of degrees. On occasions of conducting conferences and taking up speaking engagements in that part of India, he's invariably acted as my interpreter. I have a photograph which is rather remarkable of Bhagave.

He has his hands around another brother, an Indian who doesn't come from the social class that Bhagave does, for Bhagave is a Brahmin. The other comes from the mass of the Indian people who are known as untouchables. And the disharmony within the relationship of those two groups, the high class and the low class, was well illustrated, if tragically so, two weeks ago in Delhi, when in the Indian parliament the untouchables had a punch up with those of the Brahmin caste.

I love the photograph of Bhagave with his arm around this untouchable brother, because it illustrates what the gospel does, it unifies, it brings differing personalities, differing classes together, fuses them and makes them one. One of the tragedies of South Africa is that the coloureds and the so-called whites are kept apart to a large degree. You can go into the beautiful shopping centre of Cape Town, even to this day, and if you've got an African with you, or a coloured man with you, that's one of mixed blood, you can't take him or her into a restaurant, officially, and have a meal.

Because whether the government will agree to it or not, it is obvious to any outsider and I've visited that land sufficiently enough to make the judgement that if you're coloured, if you're African, you're second class. A tragic situation. Well you say, what's India got to do and South Africa got to do with James chapter two? Well to quote the apostle Paul in the A.V., much every way.

Because, you see, in this particular epistle, the principle that emerges as we go through this generous passage of scripture this morning, is that in Christ Jesus there is no such thing ideally as partisanship, as discrimination, as segregation. Within these thirteen verses, there are three connecting facets to the argument. And I want to share with you, from one or two headings that I'll give you, not arbitrarily imposed but helpfully selected to direct our attention, I want to share with you the teaching of what James has here in mind.

In the first four verses, there is an illustration of disharmony and segregation in the church. From the fifth verse to the seventh verse, there is an outworking of principles embodied in the illustration. If you please, in those verses, there is application.

And from the eighth verse, right through to the thirteenth verse, there is some warning sounded, there is some advice given. If you like, in a word, there's admonition. In the opening verses, one to four, there's an illustration.

From the fifth to the eighth verses, there's application. From the ninth to the thirteenth, there's admonition. Or put it another way, you start off with a picture, you're taken into principles, and you finish up with some prohibitions.

That's what's contained within those verses. So with those headings, as I say, not as watertight compartments, let's address ourselves to the message that we have in front of us right now. Come to the illustration which James gives in the first four verses.

There's a familiar scene. It's not difficult for us to project it on the screen of our imagination. You've got two men coming into church.

I'm starting at the second verse, I'll come back to the first in a moment. Two men come into church, and they're very, very different indeed. One is rich.

He wears a gold ring. The display of wealth in the Orient sometimes became almost crude, because it was so ostentatious. At times you get wealthy men wearing rings on every finger, and showing off the fact that they'd made it in the world of finance and economics.

Well, you have this sort of man who has been to the equivalent of Savile Row to get his suit, and he comes into a church community, and there's an usher, there's a steward at the door, and when he sees such an outstanding character, he's very attentive, and he takes him down to the front of the meeting place, and ensures that he has a good seat. But says James, as he continues working out his application, there's another fellow who also comes in, and his suit, his clothing indicates the lifestyle that he has had to follow. He's so poor that his clothes are described as shabby, or perhaps even more accurately in the AV, he's clothed in vile raiment.

There the word vile indicates in the original something that's smelly and unpleasant. And when the steward sees this fellow coming to the church, he's not so pleased. He is not so patronizing.

He wants the smelly man to squat there by his feet, and not in any way to cause distaste, distress, feeling of uncomfort, of discomfort to any of the other worshippers. Now, says James, as he depicts this scene, in the fourth verse, as he comes to make a conclusion, have you not discriminated among yourselves, and become judges with evil thoughts? Isn't that practice of showing good manners to the rich man, and being insensitive to the poor man, contradictory to the whole of the gospel of Christ? Why is it wrong? Well, there are two reasons, it seems to me, that James works out in the first verse. And it is this, and they are these.

This particular piece of behavior conflicts with the example of Christ, and what's more, it contradicts the gospel of Christ. It conflicts with the example of Christ. Look at James, as he writes in the first verse, at least, look at what he has to say.

My brothers, as believers in our glorious Lord Jesus Christ, don't show favoritism. Or as it's expressed in the authorized version, my brethren, have not the faith of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Lord of glory? How did Jesus behave when he was on earth? James says he behaved in such a fashion that it was glorious. Why does he use the word glorious as an adjective to describe his brother, the Lord Jesus? He does so because there's a glory in humility.

There's a glory in lowliness. You remember how the Apostle Paul says of our Savior, have this, let this mind be in you which was also in Jesus Christ. He goes on to tell us in Philippians chapter two how the Lord Jesus Christ stepped out of the glory of heaven and how he entered himself.

So many of the privileges that were his, how he humbled himself, how he submitted himself even to death by crucifixion. Why did he do all this? So that you and I might be saved, so that you and I might have sins forgiven, and when God the heavenly Father is confronted by the sight of his Son on the cross, offering his life as an atonement for all of us, on the third day he reacts to the lowliness of Jesus. He reacts gloriously.

He raises him in the power of an endless life. The highest name which heaven affords is his, that of Jesus Christ's by sovereign right. How is Jesus glorified? What is glorious about the Lord Jesus? The way that he treated ordinary people when he came on this earth, and for us to be prejudiced or partial is to conflict with the example of Christ.

And what's more, such partisan treatment contradicts the gospel of Christ. Do you remember how the religion that is pure and undefiled is defined for us in the last verse of the first chapter of James? Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this, to visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction. It's to minister to the underdog, and of Jesus it is said he was a man who had no respect of persons.

Racialism was so embedded into the Jewish nation that it was the hardest lesson for Peter to learn, that he was to preach the gospel to the Gentiles, and God had to give him a vision, a dream, to correct his racial bias, you recall. And in the 10th chapter, the Acts of the Apostles, Peter comes out with that great declaration that he realizes that God has got no favorites. And when the apostle Paul writes to the Romans, that great theological treatise, he comes to the conclusion in the opening chapters that with God there is no respect of persons.

And when Paul writes to the Ephesians and he writes to the Colossians, he says that in their treatment of one another, they're not to be partisan, they're not to engage in discrimination. Here is an illustration of something abhorrent in the sight of God. Two men coming into the church and being handled differently simply because of their backgrounds in life.

Well, move on a little, and come from the illustration to the way that the apostle James rubs this in, the way that he applies his teaching, and this is worked out for us more from the 5th through to the 7th verses. He takes up the point, and he's going to talk in the 5th verse about the membership role of the church. And he's going to talk in the 6th and the 7th verses about those who harass the members of the church.

If you like, in the 5th verse, as he applies his illustration, he's going to speak about the constituency of the church. And in the 6th and 7th, about the activity of those who are hostile to the church. Well, what was the membership like of the church at Jerusalem? What was the membership like of most of the Christian churches in the Roman Empire at the time of James's writing? Well, listen to James as he tells us, as he generalizes upon those whose names are on the roll.

Listen, my dear brothers. Verse 5, has not God 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? The average church member came from a very poor class indeed. This becomes perhaps even more obvious in the reading that we had earlier from 1 Corinthians and chapter 1 and the 26th verse.

Brothers, think of what you were when you were called into church fellowship. Not many of you were wise by human standards. Not many were influential.

Not many were of noble birth. God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise. God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong.

The average church member came from a very, very poor background indeed. Look, my friend. If it is true that the gospel is first of all to be preached to the Jews, then the second priority is to preach it to the poor.

Because when Jesus in his first address in Nazareth admitted the fact that he had been called to be the Messiah, he said that his charge was to preach the gospel to the poor. And when John the Baptist has doubts about Jesus and the doubts are recorded in Matthew's gospel and the 11th chapter, Jesus sends John a telegram and he says, man, let your faith remain intact. The gospel is being preached to the poor.

The gospel has always had an application in the first instance to the underdog. It's not, says one commentator, that the Christian church does not want the great and the rich and the wise and the mighty. We must be wary of an inverted snobbery.

But it was the simple fact that the gospel offered so much to the poor and demanded so much from the rich that it was the poor who swept into the church. It was the common people who heard Jesus gladly and the rich young ruler who went away sorrowful because he had great possessions. Listen, my dear brothers, the constituency of the church is taken up largely with those who are poor and underprivileged.

But what about the activity of those who are hostile to the church? From which rank of life does the harassment generally come? Those who are rich, those who socially have standing, those who politically have power. James accuses them of three things, of exploitation. You have insulted the poor.

It is the rich who've exploited you. It's the rich who are vindictive, who drag you away into court. It's the rich who slander the noble name of him to whom you belong.

Perhaps James had in mind the experience of his brother Paul when he was at Philippi. You remember how the demons were cast out of one devil-possessed girl. And as a result of that, those who owned her and who were getting wealth as a result of her difficulty were hostile and had Paul dragged before the magistrates.

And when Paul's preaching was becoming effective in Ephesians, Demetrius, the shop steward of the silversmiths, hoisted Paul in front of the magistrates and said, we'll be without our livelihood if this man continues to preach. The gospel of Christ has always been on the collision course against those who exploit the poor and the oppressed. So the absurdity of a rich man with all the trappings of his wealth coming into the church and being given preferential treatment.

Now mark you, James is not against the rich man as such. He is against a man being given better treatment than another just because of his social class. This then is the way that James applies the scripture as he denounces those who exploit the Christian community, those who slander the noble name of Jesus.

And the reference there in the seventh verse is probably to the act of baptism when candidates were baptized into the name of Christ as they were immersed in water. So then you see the point of the illustration. He has to start off by projecting it.

He shows the absurdity from the fifth to the seventh verse of giving preferential treatment to one man over against another, but he's not through. He's going to admonish. He's going to warn Christian people because James feels that this practice is a very serious one.

You see, when he defines pure religion as taking care of the underdog, he's not mincing words. The person who is insensitive to the needs of the other betrays the Christian gospel. So James comes to grasp the whole principle of the law and our responsibilities to the law of God as Christian folks.

Look at the eighth verse. If you really keep the royal law found in scripture, love your neighbor as yourself. You are doing right.

Just stop there for a moment. Why does James call this the royal law? Well perhaps because it's the law that the king of kings, even Jesus, underlined. You remember how they came to him, some of his critics, and said, Master, which is the best law? Which is the greatest commandment? And Jesus enunciates this.

He lays it down in Matthew 22 and verse 37. And when Paul writes about this in Romans 13.10, he says that a man who loves God and his neighbor has fulfilled the law. So the royal law is that which James defines in the eighth verse.

Loving your neighbor as yourself. But let's imagine that I fall down on that law. Let's imagine that I'm partisan.

Let's imagine, as is indicated in the ninth verse, that I'm showing favoritism. Then what? Then says James, you're breaking the law of God. But James, it's not very serious, is it? I mean, after all, I'm only being human in preferring one person, one type of personality to another.

No, says James. There's a connection, you see, between one part of the law and the next part. So verse 10, whosoever shall keep the whole law and yet offend in one point, he's guilty of all.

So you never committed murder. You've never committed adultery, but you're guilty of bias. You're guilty of prejudice.

Then even in the latter instance, you are responsible for breaking God's law to such an extent that you're in a very unfortunate position. Let me take the argument more slowly in case you've missed it with the profusion of words. Some of us tend to put a category to sinfulness.

We've got our list. For most evangelicals, the first priority is sexual misdemeanor. That's the gravest sin, the sin of adultery and all its ramifications.

And then perhaps we slip down to murder and theft and so forth. And true enough, these are all great crimes. They offend the holiness and the majesty of God.

But you see, we allow ourselves what scripture will not permit. We say that the sins of the flesh are more important, are more disastrous than the sins of the spirit. But what James is saying here is simply this.

That if you transgress in the business of relationships, if you despise someone in the church because of their social standing, because of their personality, because of their peculiar characteristic, if you despise them, if you don't show to them the love of Christ, then you're as bad as the adulterer and the murderer and the thief. Hard teaching. But I defy anyone here to contradict me on the basis of James's argument.

You see, the law of God is like a glass or is like a mirror. It doesn't matter where you throw a stone and hit the mirror. When you puncture the glass, it's all shattered.

So if you break the law in the area of relationships, you've still broken the law. So as though you're an adulterer or a murderer, James's teaching is powerful, but James's teaching is practical and necessary today. We are to consider the law of God as a whole.

I am to love my neighbor as myself. So, James logically goes on in the 12th and 13th verses to put down certain injunctions, speak and act as those who are going to be judged by the law that gives freedom. Because judgment without mercy will be shown to anyone who has not been merciful.

What does he mean by that? Well, it's obvious if you think of the Lord's prayer, forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. We're not to harbor resentment for if we do that, that we indicate that we've never really been forgiven in the first place. We're not to show prejudice.

We're not to show partisanship. Why not? Well, because God never showed that towards us. He's no respecter of persons.

You see, my friend, this easy believism that sometimes plagues evangelical Christianity has got no warrant from the scripture. What do I mean by easy believism? Well, you believe in Jesus and you live just how you like. If you believe in Jesus and you don't live how Jesus lived, there's no attempt on your part for the reproduction of the characteristics of the Christ in your life.

Then the gospel you're committed to is not the gospel of the New Testament. That is the plain, somber, sober teaching of James. You can't differentiate, says James, as he gives us the illustration right at the beginning of the chapter between the rich and the poor.

Your relationships are vital to the whole of your Christian conduct and testimony. Pure religion is to have an open mind and an open heart to anybody in the body of Christ or coming into the body of Christ. Now I've got a couple minutes longer left.

So let me develop this a little further. You see, the illustrations I gave you from India and from South Africa are hardly directly relevant to us today. I use them because it shows how relevant scriptural teaching is to a political and a sociological situation.

But James in the first verses is only using an illustration of a principle. What is the principle? Because this is important. We may not be guilty in the tabernacle, I don't think we are, of differentiating between the rich and the poor.

The ushers have got no instructions to give any special person a special seat, from me at any rate. And I've never known in 10 years any problem in that area at all. But you see the principle of discrimination, it goes deeper than that.

The principle of discrimination. That's why I got Brother Richard to read from 1 Corinthians chapter 1. What was the matter with the Corinthian church? Well this was a matter. There was a tendency within this church to group into different sects and cliques.

And Paul, when he writes, is as devastating in his criticism as is James. You see, there's to be no partisanship, there's to be no splitting within the church community, otherwise you defy the very definition of the gospel which brings broken humanity into relationship with God on the basis of a family, making us all brothers and sisters. Well, what could be a factor that caused division and distinctions within the church of Christ today in the 20th century, admitting that the perhaps financial problems and the racial problems that attended the early church are not with us on the south coast of England? Well, what about the distinction between young and old? How difficult sometimes to keep young people relating to older people and older people relating to younger people, and sometimes I think our very church structure mitigates against that.

Instead of building the church of God, we build a block of flats and we put everyone, you in your small corner and me in mine. Now to some extent, that's reasonable, to some extent, but when there is no exposure of the personality of the younger person to the older person, then the whole thing moves out of a New Testament orbit and can bring us into little groups and little factions. That's why I'm concerned about area meetings in our church life.

That's why I'm concerned about a group of younger people and older people coming together and relating one with another, because those who are 80 have got something to contribute to those who are 18, and vice versa. So necessary that there aren't marks of discrimination, even in age groupings in church. What about, and alas, time won't allow me to develop this very fully, what about that other tendency to discriminate within the church these days between those who are for a more demonstrative type of worship and those who like a more sober, conservative style of worship, the so-called charismatic and the non-charismatic.

Now it seems to me that here you've got a problem. If the one grouping is talking down to the other grouping or the other grouping is talking down to the opposite one, here is something that militates against the unity of the gospel of Christ, and anything that does that brings dishonor to the name of Jesus. We need that loving ability to take one another as we are.

We need that loving, selfless spirit to curb criticism on what we do not understand, and to respect those who may differ from our own particular opinion. On secondary areas within the church of Christ, there will be differences of opinion, but the challenge of the Christian community is, despite the differences of opinion, to love and to help, to pray and to encourage, not to talk down, not to criticize, not to group, not to form ginger groups in any sense at either extreme, but rather to maintain the unity of the faith as it is in Christ. We have here no place for those who have a flexible approach, an inflexible approach, at any extreme position, on any issue, apart from our persuasion that the gospel, and only the gospel, is the power of God unto salvation.

Rich man, poor man, educated man, uneducated man, old man, young man, demonstrative man, non-demonstrative man, it doesn't really matter what the secondary aspect is, my friend. The basic thing is, those who are in Christ are to enjoy Christ. Those who are brothers one of another are to enjoy the fellowship of each other.

And to that end, James comes as a salutary reminder to each one of us, it doesn't matter what area you're thinking in, if you have a respect of persons within the Christian church, you are unbiblical. I go so far as to say you are anti-biblical. So learn from James, no partisanship, no rich, no poor, all one in Christ, to live and to love for the honor and the glory of our Savior.

Amen. Love like death hath all destroyed, rendered all distinctions void, names and sects and parties fall, thou, O Christ, art all in all. Father, may Wesley's words be prophetic in a description of our generation and help us to achieve and maintain that unity and that love, one towards another, which honors and glorifies the Christ of glory.

Amen.