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This sermon was preached for Capital Pres Fairfax on Sunday, September 27, 2026, as a part of our Summer series “Faith that Works.” James is a practical book, describing a faith in God that results in works. In a world full of conflicting advice about how to live, James provides much-needed clarity about living a life that makes a difference. This week we discussed the sin of partiality as we walked through James 2:1-13. This post features an extended meditation on wealth and faith which didn’t make it into the sermon. You can listen to a recording of the sermon on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.
1 My brothers, show no partiality as you hold the faith in our Lord Jesus Christ, the Lord of glory. 2 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, 3 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,” 4 have you not then made distinctions among yourselves and become judges with evil thoughts?
5 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? 6 But you have dishonored the poor man. Are not the rich the ones who oppress you, and the ones who drag you into court? 7 Are they not the ones who blaspheme the honorable name by which you were called?
8 If you really fulfill the royal law according to the Scripture, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself,” you are doing well. 9 But if you show partiality, you are committing sin and are convicted by the law as transgressors. 10 For whoever keeps the whole law but fails in one point has become guilty of all of it. 11 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. 12 So speak and so act as those who are to be judged under the law of liberty. 13 For judgment is without mercy to one who has shown no mercy. Mercy triumphs over judgment. (James 2:1-13)
Our passage today is all about the foolishness of partiality, or favoritism, in the church. James is using his wisdom to help his church see what they are doing makes no sense. And lest we think this is just something for people back then or out there, we here in Fairfax in 2026 are at risk of contracting the exact same foolishness. So we’re going to James speak to us today through three points:
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- The problem of partiality
- The proverbs that answer it
- The practice we should do
The problem of partiality
The passage opens with a clear identification of the problem: “My brothers, show no partiality” (Jas 2:1). The term James uses for “partiality” is a really interesting word in Greek, its most literal translation is “receiving the face.” You know our expression “Don’t judge a book by its cover?” That’s the same idea behind this term. It’s judging people’s value by their outward appearance, and then treating them according to that shallow judgment. And then he gives an example of what that looks like.
This book was written to the very early Christian community in Jerusalem who were predominately Jewish believers, so they’re all doing what they normally do: they’re at their synagogue. Two men walk in. One is dressed to the nines, with his gold jewelry on, looking sharp; the other is not, clearly because he can’t afford it. When the rich guy walks in, he’s treated like a celebrity. Everyone jumps to their feet “Here, take this good seat! Let me take your coat! Can I get you anything? Water?” When the poor guy walks in, crickets…nobody moves, nobody helps—if anything, he’s treated like an obstacle. “Either stand in the back or sit on the ground in front of me; just get out of the way.”
James uses this example to ask a few questions, all of which are inviting his church to consider “Why are you showing partiality in the first place?” The text doesn’t give us a clear answer, and scholars debate different possibilities. It could simply be old habits. We know from Jesus’ rebukes that wealthy and well-educated people were given places of honor in the synagogue and at dinner parties, so maybe that’s continuing in this Christian synagogue. That cultural norm was grounded in a theological belief that material wealth was indicative of God’s favor: if you’re rich, God loves you; if you’re poor, not so much. It could be a more conscious effort to attract wealthy people. They might be reasoning, “if we cater to the rich, that’ll improve our reputation; that’ll give us more status; and you know what, they might want to start bankrolling some projects around here!”
One possibility is that this was more so out of a “survival instinct.” James says that the rich (probably Jewish elites) are suing poor Christians as a form of oppression and religious persecution, so maybe this church is thinking “If we can kiss up enough to these people, if we stroke their egos enough, they might leave us alone.”
It could be any of these, or could be some combination of all of them. It could be the church isn’t even fully aware of how or why they’re showing partiality. So James hits us with a wake up call when he says outright “That’s evil.” In verse 11 he even compares it to murder and adultery. We’ll unpack that more in a minute, but let’s just pause and ask ourselves: is that how you would judge the sin of partiality? Is this something we take that seriously? Is it something we’re even aware of?
That’s one of the dangers of the sin of partiality, it can be subtle and hide behind good intentions. James wants us to see it out in the open for all its ugliness. How about us? Surely we’re not guilty of showing partiality! I hope and pray that’s the case, but our DC culture has its own favorites. Who are we tempted to be partial toward?
Still definitely wealthy people. we’re impressed by nice cars in the parking lot, we admire the massive houses. Maybe you’ve heard someone say “I don’t want to own a boat, but I want to be friends with someone who owns a boat”? So money still tends to draw some partial treatment. Maybe more so in our DC area, it’s power. People with connections, people in public office; executives, bosses—these are the people we want to align ourselves with. Kids, where do you see favoritism in school? Maybe your classmates show favoritism toward the funniest classmates, or the cutest, or the most athletic; maybe your teachers show favoritism to the quietest, the smartest, the hardest working?
Can we get a little closer to home? Can we dissect our own Christian sub-culture? Some of these examples can still affect us. We might be tempted to think wealth or a strong resume are the qualifications for church leadership, rather than character and care for God’s flock. Some Christian communities are infatuated with charismatic personalities—the most extroverted, the most emotionally expressive, the most gifted at public speaking—and tend to look down on those who are more introverted, more reserved or muted in their expression, more awkward up front. I’m reminded of stories about Jonathan Edwards, arguably the greatest American theologian in history -> he would read his sermons quietly straight from his manuscript, a weak voice and little emotion, and yet the truths he was expressing were some of the clearest and most beautiful articulations of the gospel that have ever been said.
I have to be self-aware in saying all this, since our church’s tradition tends toward an opposite favoritism. We can be suspicious of emotional expression and disproportionally value head over heart. It is also worth noting that the church broadly, and our denomination specifically, has a history of showing partiality along racial and ethnic lines. Our denomination created a study report a few years ago that detailed that history and guided us in repentance and reconciliation. It’s good for us to know that history so we can learn from our past and humbly admit that this sin never too far out of reach.
James wants us to wrestle with these questions so that we can see clearly how partiality doesn’t make any sense. We also have to wrestle with the answers he gives us.
The Proverbs that Answer the Problem of Partiality
We’ve said this every week so far: James is wisdom literature. That’s the genre we’re in, and one of the defining features of wisdom literature is the use of proverbs. Think of a proverb less like a mantra and more like a riddle—not something to thoughtlessly repeat, but something to put all your focus on, tinker with it, chew on it. A proverb is like a really cold piece of gum, you have to work for it if you’re gonna get the flavor out of it. James gives us three riddles in our passage, we’ll briefly cover them together but I’d encourage you to keep on chewing them with your CG or your friends or family.
Our first proverb is in verse 5 “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?” Here James sounds a whole lot like his brother Jesus. “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.“ Luke 6:20 is even clearer “Blessed are the poor, for yours is the kingdom” (Mt 5:3). This also sounds like Paul, who will later write to the Corinthians “not many of you were wise according to worldly standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are, so that no human being might boast in the presence of God.” (1 Co 1:26–29)
So let’s chew on this a bit. Is God saying that he loves the poor more than the rich? Is this a sort of divine reverse discrimination or karma? No, we can rule that out for a few reasons. First, God makes it abundantly clear that he hates the sin of partiality and he himself is not guilty of it (Rom 2:11, see Dt 10:17-19). Second, the Bible has tons of examples wealthy people being praised and celebrated: Lydia, wealthy business woman and founding member of the church in Philippi; Barnabas, one of the first Christians whose money helped establish the church; and many more. Third, James clarifies in the proverb that God promises an inheritance in the kingdom to all who love him, whether rich or poor. What matters is being rich in faith.
Why, then, draw specific attention to God’s choice of the poor? Again, I think James is hearing the words of his brother Jesus echo in his head. “The first shall be last, and the last shall be first” (Mt 19:30) and “it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God.” (Mt 19:24)
Friends, we in northern Virginia, surrounded by wealth, need to feel that. When we talk about faith, we’re talking about trusting in God for our whole lives; Jesus teaches us to pray for our daily bread and trust that God will provide it. With a good job and a healthy bank account, it can be easy to forget how real that prayer is.
For those who don’t have steady finances, the exercise of faith isn’t academic—it is the most immediate and important of practical concerns. Faith in God’s provision in the midst of financial strain is the most important lifeline we have to maintain a grip on our sanity and our integrity. So it shouldn’t be a surprise that those who have to exercise the muscle of faith every day with their material needs will have a much stronger, “richer” faith.
Again, though we need to remember that those who are poor in spirit will inherit the kingdom of God. As Luther said at his death, “we are all beggars.” There is no lasting value in worldly wealth. You don’t have to be poor to believe that, and poverty is no guarantee that you do believe that. But it makes sense in light of the gospel that the poor be heirs of the kingdom. The people we most easily discriminate against are the exact people Jesus prioritized in his ministry, so we should be like Jesus!
Let’s consider our next proverb in verse 10 “For whoever keeps the whole law but fails in one point has become guilty of all of it.” Again, echoes of Jesus’ sermon on the mount in Mt 5:19 “Therefore whoever relaxes one of the least of these commandments and teaches others to do the same will be called least in the kingdom of heaven, but whoever does them and teaches them will be called great in the kingdom of heaven.”
Let’s chew on this one: is James saying that partiality is as bad as murder or adultery? In one sense, no of course not. But in another sense, yes! Think about it like this, who here has ever had a cracked windshield? There’s a lot of ways you could have a broken windshield: you could have a small crack off in the corner, barely noticeable; you could have a single crack clear across the whole windshield, which is obvious but doesn’t really impede vision; you could have the whole windshield covered in cracks. But there’s only one way to have a perfect windshield: no cracks at all.
When it comes to our own sin, it’s usually our instinct to describe the size of the crack in the windshield. James is pulling us back to reality in having us recognize that we are broken. But even more than that! James points us to what Jesus says is the most important commandment of God concerning how we relate to other humans: “Love your neighbors as yourself.” That is the foundational law of the kingdom of God. If we get that foundation wrong, it’s not possible to keep any of the law. Obviously partiality isn’t as severe as murder or adultery, but because it strikes at the vitals of Jesus’ royal kingdom law, it compromises the integrity of our whole community.
Finally, let’s look at Verse 13 “For judgment is without mercy to one who has shown no mercy. Mercy triumphs over judgment.” Let’s take this in two parts. Once again, James borrows from Jesus. This is straight from the parable of the ungrateful servant (Mt 18:21-35). There’s a master whose servant has somehow accrued a debt equal to the size of the annual GDP of the entire Roman Empire, and because he begs for mercy, the master’s heart has compassion on him and he forgives the debt. But then that same servant turns around, finds a guy who owes him a couple grand, grabs him by the throat and demands he pay him back. No mercy, no pity. He has him sent to debtors prison.
The master gets word of it, and I’ll let Jesus tell the rest. “Then his master summoned him and said to him, ‘You wicked servant! I forgave you all that debt because you pleaded with me. And should not you have had mercy on your fellow servant, as I had mercy on you?’ And in anger his master delivered him to the jailers, until he should pay all his debt. So also my heavenly Father will do to every one of you, if you do not forgive your brother from your heart.” (Mt 18:32–35)
That’s a sobering statement from the righteous Judge and King. How then can we say that “Mercy triumphs over justice?” What does that mean?
Well most fundamentally, it points to the gospel. Mercy won out over justice because the heart of Christ was filled with compassion for us. The reality is, you and I are like that unforgiving servant in that we’ve accrued a massive debt to God. We owe him our lives—it’s his breath in our lungs—and rather than using that breath as he intended for us to, by loving him with our whole hearts and loving our neighbors as ourselves, we’ve acted as our own judges with evil thoughts. We’ve broken the law not just in one small way, but in more ways that we can count—we’ve fully earned God’s judgment.
But God’s heart is overflowing with mercy. As great as our evil was, his mercy was greater. And see just how great it was. Friends, the Lord of Glory Jesus Christ came down from the riches of heaven and took the form of a servant. He literally became poor. If partiality means “to receive the face,” Jesus was “as one from whom men hide their faces; he was despised and we esteemed him not” (Isa 53:3). He bore the shame of poverty to show us the shame of our sin, and at the cross, he bore that guilt and shame in our place. “For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor, so that you by his poverty might become rich” (2 Cor 8:9). And at his resurrection and ascension, where our humble king now sits on his throne in full glory, we can truly say that mercy has triumphed over justice.
The practice we should do
So what does all this mean for us? Let’s close our time by considering the practices we should do to counter partiality. What does it look like for us to “hold the faith” and to “love our neighbor?”
Here at Capital Pres Fairfax, we like to say “Grace Changes Everything.” When we experience the transforming love of Christ, it becomes our greatest desire to meet that love with our own. If we share in Christ’s death and resurrection, we want to share in his life just as much. And what was Jesus’ life on earth full of? Good works. Showing mercy, forgiving his enemies, speaking the truth in love, caring for the needs of others, feeding the hungry, healing the sick—a thousand other examples. We commit ourselves to turning our backs to the sins we used to face, and instead we follow Jesus with joyful obedience.
One of the first things we can do to guard against the sin of partiality is to simply be aware of it. Often preferential treatment or discrimination are not intentional, mean-spirited decisions; they’re habits and structure we set up to make life easier for people like us, and harder for people we care less about. The example James gives of the rich and poor man? The church treats the rich man like an idol, or a celebrity, while they treat the poor man like an obstacle. Who do you treat like a celebrity? Who would you go out of your way to serve or accommodate? Who do you treat like an obstacle? Who do you treat as if they are in your way?
We could broaden that out to all of life, but let’s just stay focused on here at church. Who is the kind of person you hope you don’t see at church? Be honest with yourself. Who would you turn your face away from and avoid and make you feel uncomfortable? The gospel is for everyone who is poor in spirit (and that is everyone, period). For all those who trust in Christ, he not only gives us his own mercy to wash us from our sins, he gives us a new heart to love what (and who) he loves.
This week, as you’re meeting in your CGs or talking with your friends, continue to chew on this wisdom. Who does Christ love who I’m tempted to show partiality against? How can I grow more and more after Jesus’ own heart?
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For my brothers and sisters who are well off, we should not be offended at the simple reality that those who must practice this level of faith and dependence will have a deeper connection to God, appreciation of his mercy, and longing for his kingdom This isn’t some kind of karmic balancing the scales of the universe; God is not saying “you had it rough in the first half of life, I’m gonna make up for it in heaven.” It’s more like the normal experience of working out. If you exercise a muscle, it will grow stronger. Those with greater financial need have to exercise the muscle of faith more intensely, and so they will develop a stronger and richer faith than those who don’t exercise it.
Here’s the wonderful thing: all of us can exercise the muscle of faith regardless of our circumstances. Some of us have to because our circumstances force it, you don’t have to wait for that external pressure. So how will you exercise the muscle of faith?
Here’s one way to think about it when it comes to finances. Everything you spend can be categorized into two areas: what you need, and what you love. Every single purchase goes to one of (or potentially both) of those categories.
Sit down and look over your purchase history from the past month. Organize those transactions in this grid. Then ask yourself “Do I really need what I think I need?” And “Is what I love in line with what I want to love?”
Here’s some personal reflections I’ve had in analyzing my own finances over the years.
I do need food, but do I need to eat Chipotle six times in a month? No, probably not. That was a real reflection I had in premarital counseling. My habits of eating out have changed significantly since then.
Do I need a car? Yeah, I could reasonably argue that I need a car. Does my family need two cars? Life would be a whole lot more complicated with just one. We might be able to make it work, but honestly, the cost of not having two cars might be higher than buying a second car. Does my family need two brand new cars? Definitely not. I really like Ford Mustangs. I think Audi is a really cool car brand. But I don’t need a Mustang or an A7, and I don’t even love them. Certainly not enough to drop several thousand dollars on.
I was looking back over my family’s budget spreadsheet for the year; back in February, I spent $78.37 on Pokémon cards. You might not know this about me, but I really love Pokémon. I could talk your ear off about why I still love it as a grown adult. Do I love it enough to spend almost $80 on cards? Admitting that in writing puts it into perspective. I don’t think I do. I don’t think that was worth it. I certainly have enough money left over at the end of the month to afford to waste $80 and not have it change our finances. But that’s not the question at hand. There are things I love a whole lot more than Pokémon I would have felt way better spending $80 on. I love my family.I love my friends.I love my church. I love helping people.
My church and FCPS pay my wife and I well enough that every month, we have more money coming in than what we need. That means every month I have a new opportunity to love what I want to love—to be thoughtful about what I’m spending on. And as I spend my money thoughtfully, I have the opportunity to remind us that the Lord’s Prayer is not rote. It is God who provides this wealth. It is God who gives us our daily bread. That frees us to not horde our money, but to be generous instead. And as we meditate on the generous heart of Jesus and fall in love with what (and who) he loves, we’re increasingly inclined to give our money to those ends.
Not to boast in the slightest, but just as a point of example: my family is committed to giving 10% of all our income to our church. That’s pre-tax, and that includes cash gifts or money made from side hustles. We also have a designated budget category for generosity and hospitality, for which we have a monthly spending goal. We’ve also settled into the habit of giving one large gift (in the ballpark of $1000) every year, either to a charity we’re passionate about or a friend or family in need. Some years that is easier than others. But this practice is grounded in the abundant generosity we have received in Christ.
How might you exercise the muscle of faith with your finances? I’d encourage you to chat with your family, friends, community group, or pastor.
