Sermon Cloud

We began this series, Fit Faith, two weeks ago in order to advance in our journey as Christ followers. To be challenged to work out what God has worked into our lives through a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. We have seen from James that there are going to be tests that challenge us as we live out our faith in Jesus Christ, that going to cause crisis of belief in our lives. Do we really believe that God works all things to the good of those that love Him or is this whole thing a lie? James argued that those that have a Fit Faith will remain steadfast and actually excel as they face these trials of various kinds in their lives. Their faith will be strengthened. Last week, James moved us further down the path to having a Fit Faith by show us the right response to the Word of God for those who follow Jesus. If our faith is genuine, we have been enabled to hear God’s word, equipped to do God’s word, and exhorted to apply it to every aspect of our lives. That is where we pick up this week; James is going to spend the rest of his writing showing us what it looks like to apply God’s word to our lives. Like any good workout it is going to get personal, it is going to get physical, and it is going to challenge our preconceived notions of what is best for us. We continue today in James 2:1-13.

The BIG IDEA of James 2:1-13 is that: Faith in Christ is fundamentally incompatible with partiality. Partiality means that you base your treatment of someone—or your attitude toward someone—on something that should not be the basis of how you treat them. This is what is more commonly known to us as prejudice or favoritism. This is something that bleeds into every aspect of our lives and is rooted in a prideful, sin filled heart. Do you show favoritism? Are there some people in your life that you avoid either by your actions or your attitude towards them? This is a common flaw in our human hearts that has come through the hardness of sin, the deception of our enemy, and the corruption of the world in which we live.