My brethren, have not the faith of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Lord of glory, with respect of persons. James 2:1
There is a fairly large religious organization nearby, one where the Gospel is frequently preached, that has a number of wealthy members. Although efforts are made to avoid any outward show of favouritism toward those rich folks, those efforts don’t really work. Everybody there knows that the people with the money pull most of the strings. The real problem is not that those well heeled people are leading the others astray, it’s that the rest of the congregation have grown to depend on the wealthy ones to produce the wherewithal for their various projects. They are trusting the rich folks instead of trusting the Lord.
Our text would remind us that there is a direct connection between favouritism and faith, or lack of faith. The verses that follow our text speak of an Assembly’s different attitude toward one man in goodly apparel and another man in vile raiment. In fact, verse 9 declares that showing respect of persons is a sin, that it is a violation of what James calls the royal law: ‘Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself’. Because the poor man can do very little in terms of support, the poor man is treated as an inferior person, just somebody who the others can feel noble about for having around and giving a hand to. That is so unlike the gracious attitude that our Lord Jesus displayed when He lived on our planet.
In our text, James points to the Lord Jesus Christ, in Whom we place our faith, noting that when we have respect of persons, we are not displaying faith in the Lord of Glory. We were saved by faith when we first trusted our Lord; we are saved by faith each day as we continue to trust our Lord, but we display a lack of faith when we shower favouritism on some Christians at the expense of others. Whether it be our material needs or our spiritual needs, God is able to supply through the humblest among us just as well as He is able to supply through those with the most money and spiritual development.
The Lord Jesus was just as gracious and accepting of the most humble and wretched that He encountered as He was of the most exalted. It is a display of our faith to be just like Him. – Jim MacIntosh