Continuing our studies in the letter written by
James, the brother of our Lord, we come
now to chapter 4 and the passage that
begins with verse 11.
I would like you kindly to turn to
the passage in the Bibles before you.
I'm sure you will find profit as you
make sure that the person who is in
the pulpit is not going astray or attempting
to lead you astray.
Keep your eyes on the book.
James has made it crystal clear already in
this fourth chapter that the ongoing battle of
the Christian life against sin and its ramifications
in one's life and experience is considerable and
unremitting.
It is a battle that we dare not
abandon for a solitary day, indeed for an
hour.
It is an ongoing, a constant affair.
The believer, according to this particular chapter, must
strike at the very rule of his most
natural desires.
They must not be allowed to reign because
wars, word battles, divisions, and strife all emanate,
says James, in chapter 4, verses 1 to
3.
All the battles and the quarrels that crop
up among the Lord's people come from within
ourselves, not fundamentally from the circumstances in which
we find ourselves or from what other people
do, but basically, fundamentally, from within our own
nature.
Now, we may have a quarrel with what
James is saying, but this is what he's
saying under inspiration, and I'm quite sure that
he has said it for our profits as
well as for the learning of other generations.
The Christian also must avoid such friendship with
the world as would automatically imply that he
is an enemy of God.
Oh, the Christian is to love the world
in one sense.
Ruth Thompson is going to Brazil not because
she hates the world, neither because she loves
the world, but because she loves men and
women whom God in Christ would bring into
his kingdom, and she loves the God who
has commissioned her.
There is a sense in which our love
for the world or our friendship with the
world means that we are at loggerheads with
God.
If we are more content to please the
world around us than we are to please
the God above us, then we prove that
we are on better terms with the world
than we are with God.
That is, our friendship with the world means
that we are at enmity with God, and
we've got to see that this is not
so.
It's a very hectic battle.
It's a battle in which we need to
be diligent, all day long and unremittingly wherever
we are.
Not only that, the Christian must learn to
submit to God from the vantage point of
humility.
We are to submit ourselves to God and
not to try to put ourselves above God
and to coerce him.
We can't, of course, but we are not
to attempt to coerce God to come our
way and to do our thing for us
and to obey us and to be our
little servant.
As the creatures of God and as the
redeemed of Christ, we are to submit ourselves
to God and to take the humble position
before us, and in due season, if we
do that, he will lift us up and
he will honor us and he will use
us to fulfill his purpose.
The battle is unremitting, but even when James
has come that far, he has still much,
much, much more to say and all so
very practical that really it's difficult to take
it.
My problem with the book of James is
not so much in understanding it.
I'm not sure that I understand everything it
says, but my most basic problem with the
book of James is not understanding it, but
it's obeying it.
And there are two passages that were brought
together in the subject that we meant to
take tonight.
I put it that way because we shall
only deal with half of it, and we
leave the other half for another time, not
next Lord's Day, but nearer Christmas, or perhaps
nearer the end of the year.
There are two passages brought together here in
which James deals with two major issues again,
and they're very much related.
He warns us in the verses, verses 11
to 17, he warns us against the self
-righteous arrogance that presumes to malign and judge
our brother, our brother Christian, and our brother
Christian who is seeking to do God's will
and to obey God's law.
And then against the self-opinionated brashness of
the same basic nature that sometimes expresses itself
in the simple matter of planning our lives
and our business programs.
We plan as if God were not God,
but we are.
Did you know, my friends, the way you
fill in your diary, the way you book
your appointments can express a view of God
that is unworthy?
Now you chew that one over.
And in chewing it over, read these last
few verses of the book of chapter 4
of James.
There is a way in filling up your
diary which is a basic denial of the
Godhood of God.
There is an honorable way of doing it,
but there is a dishonorable, and the dishonorable
way of filling up our diary, planning our
life for tomorrow and the day after, is
one which puts God on one side and
treats life as if we were the captains
of our own fate, which we are not.
Now, it's to the first of these two
main issues, namely the issue that we have
between verses 11, rather in verses 11 and
12, that we are going to look at
tonight, and we must confine ourselves to this.
Here, what James is telling us is this.
Put quite prosaically, we must avoid arrogant presumption
in our relation to God.
The brotherhood of the Christian church.
We must avoid arrogant presumption in our relations,
the one with the other, as Christian men
and women.
Let me read verses 11 and 12 again.
I don't think we can read these verses
too often.
Brothers, and I'm reading again from the NIV,
do not slander one another.
Anyone who speaks against his brother or judges
him, speaks against the law and judges it.
When you judge the law, you are not
keeping it, but sitting in judgment on it.
There is only one lawgiver and judge, the
one who is able to save and destroy.
But you, asks James, who are you to
judge your neighbor?
Now, I was almost going to apologize.
Apologize, I can't, because this is the word
of God.
But I must warn you, unless you're going
to sleep tonight, you're going to find that
this word is a way of getting under
the skin.
Because this is a word that rarely comes
very close to us and asks us some
serious questions about our attitude toward other people,
and especially about other Christians.
Now, the presumption envisaged here is brought out
very clearly in the opening words of verse
11.
Brothers, says James, do not slander one another.
He's talking to the brethren.
He's talking to Christians.
He's talking to brothers, all right?
He's not talking to outright pagans in the
world who've never been humbled by the grace
of God, who've never seen themselves as sinners,
lost and undone and cried for mercy.
He's not talking to them.
He's addressing the saints of God.
He's addressing the brethren, the brotherhood, the Christian
brotherhood.
And I trust that I'm addressing the brotherhood
tonight.
There could well be someone among us who
as yet is uncommitted to the Lord Jesus
Christ and does not acknowledge him as Savior.
I trust, if so, that tonight may be
the night of acknowledgement.
But I'm quite sure that basically, generally speaking,
I am addressing tonight the brotherhood, the Christian
church, the Christian community.
And this is a word to you and
to me, to us.
The RSV translates it, do not speak evil
against one another, brethren.
James is still thinking, I believe, in measure,
of the wars and the battles and heated
words which can mar a Christian's fellowship and
testimony, to which he referred a way back
in verses one and two of chapter four.
What causes fights and quarrels among you, he
says.
Don't they come from your desires that battle
within you?
You want something, but you don't get it.
You kill and covet, but you cannot have
what you want.
You quarrel and fight and so on.
And James is still thinking in some measure
about that.
And then he comes back to the Christian
brotherhood and he says, brothers, brothers, brothers, don't
slander one another.
When you're wanting things that you can't get,
don't say evil things about one another.
That's the temptation, to get your own way,
to justify your own case, to try and
wring something out of the hand or out
of the heart or out of the pocket
of an unwilling brother.
James may also be still thinking, of course,
of the uncontrollable nature of the human tongue.
He's described that in the most glaring language.
Earlier on, you remember in chapter three, can
I remind you of these words?
It was Mr. McLeod who took us through
this passage and I sat where he's sitting
tonight.
And I must say, I could hardly take
it all in.
I thought I'd read this rather well before.
All kinds of animals, birds, reptiles and creatures
of the sea are being tamed and have
been tamed by man.
But no man can tame the tongue.
It is a restless evil, full of deadly
poison.
With a tongue we praise our Lord and
Father, and with it we curse men who
have been made in God's likeness.
Out of the same mouth come praise and
cursing.
My brother says, James, this shouldn't be so.
There is this basic contradiction in the hearts
and lives of so many of us Christians.
James says it shouldn't be so, but it
is so.
And all that is unquestionably in his mind,
in his memory, to some extent as he
comes to these words before us tonight.
Brothers, he says, don't slander one another.
Don't speak evil of one another.
Be careful how you talk of one another
within the brotherhood of the redeemed community.
In verses 11 and 12 then of chapter
4, James thus strikes forth against the underlying
arrogance and presumption which all too often explodes
in a tirade of offensive words against our
fellow Christians and even, even, even against those
that are nearest and dearest to us.
And it is all because we have not
grown in grace and in the knowledge of
our Lord Jesus Christ.
But if we are redeemed, we are but
babes and carnal to a very large degree.
Now, there is something very basic here that
we need to understand.
There is a judgment that is right and
there is a judgment that is wrong.
A judgment of people and of things.
Now, if we don't understand this and if
we don't recognize this in Scripture, we shall
miss so much and we'll become floundered.
I know people, for example, who very rarely
have a negative word to say about anything,
however bad it is, however corrupt it is,
however despicable it is.
Everything is nice.
Everything in the garden is lovely.
You know, you can always say something nice
about it.
Nice is the word, is the appropriate word.
And you know why they talk like that?
Because they have never seen that in the
Scriptures there is a judgment that is necessary
and proper and legitimate and there is a
judgment that is absolutely condemned as the plague
as here in James.
The entire New Testament, let me say in
the first place, the entire New Testament with
its emphasis upon separation from the world to
God requires a value judgment.
If you want to separate from the world,
you've got to choose what is worldly and
what is of this world and what is
not.
You've got to judge.
You've got to assess.
And you've got to decide this is wrong,
this is right.
The whole Christian calling to holiness of life
and service of God requires that we judge
things to be right or to be wrong,
to be for God or against God, to
be friendship with the world or to be
enmity with God.
The very passage in which our Lord Jesus
Christ tells us, do not judge or you
will be judged.
You remember ends in verse 24 by telling
us what?
Now, I won't tell you.
But I know that many of you remember
John Matthew 7 and verse 1, don't judge
that you be not judged.
And unfortunately, that's the only verse in Matthew
chapter 10 that many people know and many
people have heard, or the only verse that
has stuck.
Don't judge that you be not judged for
with what measure you judge, it will be
judged to you again.
You know how our Lord says in verse
24, he says, judge righteous judgment.
And before he comes to verse 24, he
makes it quite clear that we've got to
judge.
He says, don't throw that which is holy
before the dogs.
Well, you've got to make an assessment.
What is holy?
Who are the dogs?
So there is a judgment that is necessary
for growing up in the Christian life.
There is a kind of assessment that we
must learn to make of things and of
people and of circumstances.
We must be able to judge between right
and wrong.
But on the other hand, this is what
James has got before us tonight.
There is a kind of diabolically inspired censoriousness
of others that is to be avoided like
the plague.
It will ultimately, it will ultimately dwarf your
own spiritual life to a point of non
-existence.
And it will decimate the fellowship to which
you belong, and it will dishonor the God
whose name you bear.
There is a censoriousness of your brother Christian,
which is absolutely strangling in its effect upon
the spiritual life.
It grieves the spirit of God, and you
might as well write over the church that
is involved in this, if a church is
involved in this.
Now, this evil kind of judging and speaking
about people may well betray both the psychological
thickness and the spiritual malice.
I tell you that for this reason.
It may be basically, it may be, and
the line may be, it may be basically
a matter of an outrageous superiority complex, which
needs to be dealt with by the cross
of our Lord Jesus Christ and the Holy
Spirit.
When a man has got the wrong view
of himself, or a woman has got the
wrong view of herself, and he or she
has never seen herself to be hell deserving,
condemned by God, a cast out, a rebel,
without hope in the world apart from grace.
And there are such people in the church.
They've never seen themselves as worms of Gehenna,
sinners in the hand of an angry God
who is just, and because of that they're
proud and arrogant and they go about strutting
as if they've got the right to judge
everybody and put everybody in place.
They've never seen the greatness and the glory
of God.
They've only seen the glory of their own
selves in the mirror, and they're going around
saying, aren't I a jolly good man and
a great woman, a marvelous person.
Listen to me.
Watch me.
I'm king.
I'm Lord.
God have mercy upon me.
You know the Greek verb used here, kata
lalai, brings out the nuance of a man
who is talking down at his brother.
Now that's all you need to say really
to get the kick of it.
Now I'm unfortunately talking down physically to you
good people because you're sitting down in the
pew and I'm up here in the pulpit,
but I do trust I never give the
impression that I'm talking down at you spiritually.
But this verb implies that there is a
person you see or there are persons that
can come within the brotherhood and they presume
to be higher than the rest and to
be nobler than the rest and to be
wiser than the rest, and when they say
a word, period, you don't question.
You just obey.
And they have the right to say exactly
what they want to say.
They're talking down as if the person who
assumes the right to judge his brother were
on a higher spiritual plane and he has
the right so to do.
From that imaginary platform of self-exaltation, he
or she presumes to have a God-given
right to defame others.
I don't know whether I ought to say
this, but you know, a lady once said
to me in all seriousness, now she wasn't
joking, she was talking about the gifts of
the Holy Spirit.
And in all seriousness, she said, now I
don't know, she says, whether I have the
gift of tongues.
I've had some marvelous experiences and I'm not
sure whether I've spoken in tongues.
And I'm not sure, she says, whether I
have the gift of healing because I have
prayed for people and they've been healed.
But I know the gift that God has
given me, she said.
The gift that God has given me is
the gift of judging people.
I said, let me hear that again.
Now, you know, I'm very slow on the
uptake.
I'm very dull sometimes and I said, beg
your pardon.
Yes, she says, my gift, the gift of
the Spirit to me is the gift of
judging people.
She says, my judgment is infallible.
Well, I said, my dear lady, I was
only reading the other day in John chapter
5.
There must be some mistake somewhere.
I was only reading in John chapter 5
and verse 20 that God has committed all
judgment into the hands of his son.
I said, when did he take it out
from there?
Now, in all seriousness, this good lady believed
that she had the right to adjudicate on
all issues that caused entanglements and worries and
problems in the church and in the lives
of individuals.
She thought that this was the gift of
the Holy Spirit to her.
She had no more doubt about it than
I have about the fact that I'm actually
standing before you now.
There then is the presumption envisaged, the presumption
to have the right to speak down to
our brothers and sisters in Christ as if
we were above them and in and of
ourselves have the right to judge them and
to mold their character and to determine how
their consciences act or react.
But now, fortunately, James goes forward and we
have the prohibition explained, and it's just as
well he does.
James helpfully explains himself, otherwise our view of
his meaning might be seriously at fault.
And here we have, in this passage, here
we have a clearly defined pattern for this
aspect of Christian living.
If we really want to be obedient to
the word of God, James gives four crucial
reasons for his prohibition against our defaming and
maliciously judging our fellow believers.
We'll deal with them briefly tonight, necessarily so.
First of all, this attitude towards the brotherhood,
towards Christian men and women, contravenes the bond
of Christian brotherhood itself.
Brothers do not slander one another, says James.
Anyone who speaks against his brother or judges
him speaks against him.
The law judges the law.
Do not slander one another.
Now, actually there in the English and whatever
translation you have, there are very few of
the versions that bring up this fact, which
is found in the Greek language.
Three times over, the word brother comes in.
It comes in twice, probably, in most of
your translations, and there's a pronoun that makes
use for the noun in other versions.
But three times over, James uses the word
brother.
It doesn't make good grammar, but it makes
sense because this is the point he wants
to get across, you see.
He's addressing people as brothers, brothers and sisters.
Brother includes sister here.
It's a generic term.
It is inconsistent with our whole faith and
experience as Christians for anyone to assume the
kind of alleged superiority over another that presumes
the right to mold that other person's behavior,
to muzzle that other person's conscience, and to
render infallible judgment upon that other person's actions.
You see, within the brotherhood, we all have
the same Heavenly Father.
We are children of the same Father.
We are redeemed by the same blood.
We have the same Jesus Christ as our
Lord.
The Spirit of Christ indwells each member within
the brotherhood.
And as the chiefest of His gift to
the church, the Holy Spirit has given His
word, His sword, His word to the church
to guide the whole church in the way
that we should live.
Now, you see, it is quite incongruous for
any individual, therefore, or any group of individuals
within the church to assume that we have
the right to boss other brothers and sisters
around.
We haven't got the right to do it.
It would mar the very brotherhood, the very
fellowship, the very kynomia that God the Father
has brought into existence through the blood of
His Son and the indwelling of His Spirit
and the proclamation of His word.
When we mar the unity of the body
of Christ, we run counter to everything that
God the Father, God the Son, God the
Holy Ghost has done and desires to do
and has planned.
And if that is not a sin, then
I'd like to know what is a sin.
Consequently, you see, the Old Testament and the
New Testament both denounce censoriousness of any kind.
Angered, backbiting, whether it be towards God or
towards man.
Now, have you noticed this?
If you haven't, you please check when you're
reading through the Old Testament and when you're
reading through the New.
You check up and see whether I'm right.
I'll just give you one or two illustrations
tonight, just one of each.
Think, for example, of that incident back in
Numbers chapter 20, where the Israelites have been
speaking against God.
God has brought them out of Egypt that
they should die in the wilderness.
You remember their complaint?
And God sent among them fiery serpents.
You know, God literally slew them through the
serpents.
They died unless they looked to the provision
that he had also made available.
But it was as serious as that.
They were backbiting.
They were criticizing the Almighty God.
Now, God won't have that.
It is inconsistent with our creatureliness and with
our profession as if people to be doing
that kind of thing.
And if he does not judge us summarily
today, as he did in Old Testament days,
that doesn't mean to say that he is
any the more pleased with this kind of
behavior.
And sooner or later, we shall have to
answer.
But you see, the same kind of thing
happened also in Numbers chapter 12, when when
God when, for example, Miriam and Aaron spoke
against Moses for marrying a Cushite woman.
Now, I don't want to go into the
family affair and why these two didn't want
Moses to marry a Cushite woman.
I don't want to go into all that
argument and the reasons for and against.
But the fact of the matter is that
they were angry with him.
You remember what happened?
God was angry with them.
They have no right over Moses.
Moses is the Lord's servant, and the servant
is answerable to his Lord and not to
his brother and his sister.
And whilst he's doing what is pleasing in
the eyes of the Lord, his brother and
his sister, according to the flesh, ought to
keep their mouths closed.
Be careful what you say, how we judge
one another.
And Paul tells the Philippians to work out
their own salvation with fear and trembling.
He goes on to explain a little of
what that means.
Well, he goes, he explains quite a lot
of what it means, but among the lot
that he explains later on are these words,
do everything, he says, without complaining or arguing.
What did he really mean by that?
Is this important, you think?
Do everything without complaining or arguing, so that
you may become blameless and fewer children of
God without fault in a crooked and depraved
generation in which you yourselves shine like stars
in the universe.
You are the stars in the universe.
The world around is black and dark.
How are you shining?
You're doing everything without complaining and arguing, no
bickering with one another, no finding fault with
one another.
One commentator says how slander was denounced among
the pious Jews of ancient times.
And was called, quote, the third tongue.
Let me repeat this in case you think
I said it wrongly.
The third tongue.
Now you may ask the question, why was
it called the third tongue?
And here is the answer.
Because it slew three persons at once.
Slander slays three persons at once.
The speaker, the spoken to, and the spoken
of.
Even though the content of our criticism may
sometimes be true, though generally exaggerated if not
false, but it may sometimes be true, we
are still not in a position to exercise
the kind of censorious judgment of our brothers
and sisters that James so clearly condemns in
this passage.
Paul says if you keep on biting and
devouring each other, watch, he says, watch out
or you will be destroyed by one another.
Galatians 5.15. There is a way for
your spiritual life as an individual to be
destroyed because you keep on biting and other
people bite you back.
The same goes for the Christian congregation.
We can be a congregation of biters and
back biters.
Scripture has a far better method which Paul
in his letter to the Galatians goes on
to goes on to expound.
And let me just read to you two
or three words, two or three verses.
Brothers, he says, Galatians 6, beginning with the
first verse.
If someone is caught in a sin, you
who are spiritual should restore him gently.
Have you got the lovely picture?
You who are spiritual should restore him gently,
not go in like a judge with all
your robes on to cast judgment and to
put him in prison and get rid of
him.
Go in to restore him with gentleness as
the shepherd takes the lamb in his arms
or the physician takes the babe into his
hands.
But watch yourself at the same time, says
Paul, or you also may be tempted.
And then he puts it like this.
Carry each other's burdens.
Carry the burden of the one that you're
going to try to put right.
Carry his burden.
Understand his burden.
Understand his need.
Get to know what's oppressing him and get
under his burden.
If you want to help him, if you
want to put him right, you've got to
get under his burden.
And when you're under his burden, then you
can minister to him and help him to
get back into fellowship.
Don't stand up there looking down.
Get under his burden.
From that vantage point, you can help.
If anyone thinks, says Paul, if anyone thinks
he is something when he's nothing, he deceives
himself.
Each one should test his own actions.
Then he can take pride in himself without
comparing himself with somebody else.
For each one should carry his own load.
Why then is it wrong to have this
kind of censorious attitude towards a fellow Christian?
Well, first of all, because it contravenes the
bond of brotherhood.
I'll tell you in simple words what it'll
do.
It'll break the brotherhood.
It'll break the kynonia, the fellowship.
It may leave us as an aggregate of
individuals that come to the same church, to
the same building, and we sit in the
same pew, but the cohesiveness, the ligaments that
bind the body together, the heart that throbs
within us and the spirit that should be
uniting us, it's all gone, you see, so
that we're all just like units sitting in
pews.
But there's no bond.
There is nothing which is more disastrous in
the whole world tonight than people who call
themselves individually Christian, but there's no bond between
them.
Be careful how you deal with another Christian
and what you say about him or about
her, because it is inconsistent with the brotherhood,
and it will destroy the brotherhood to insult
or to slander your brother or your sister.
Secondly, it contradicts the law of God.
The second part of verse 11, when you
judge the law, you are not keeping it,
but sitting in judgment on it.
Now, malicious judgment of a fellow Christian, as
if he were our inferior, and an attempt
to sit in infallible judgment upon him in
such a summary manner, not only contravenes the
bonds of brotherhood, but contradicts the law of
God our Father.
God's law, as revealed in Scripture and exemplified
in his Son, requires us to be careful
how we deal with all God's creatures, every
creature of God.
This is something that has been brought home
to me in a new way recently.
I won't tell you how nor why, but
it has been brought home to me very
forcibly in recent days.
It doesn't matter what a man looks like.
It doesn't matter what a person looks like
or is dressed in.
If that person is a creature of God,
I owe him respect.
So do you.
So do we all.
But having said that, God requires special respect
for special classes.
Oh, you say, I didn't know that.
Well, you read your Bible.
God tells us to be very careful of
our attitude towards the poor.
Read your Old Testament as well as your
New.
He asks us to have special respect for
widows and orphans.
And he will even bring his judgment upon
nations because they don't deal right with their
widows and their orphans.
And he will even come to help a
nation to be saved from the tyranny of
a greater nation because it is kind to
widows and to orphans.
You read your Old Testament.
God especially requires us that we should honor
his law in the way we behave towards
one another.
The Decalogue embodies this, that we should not
steal, we should not lie, we should not
covet and so forth.
But it's written into the whole of the
Old Testament, and I would go so far
as to say it is written into the
warp and woof of the New Testament.
God requires that we do, that we obey
the principles of his law in this sense,
that we should be very careful how we
deal with other people, especially his own redeemed.
To act censoriously and arrogantly in relation to
these is to contravene his law.
It is to break the Lord in smithereens
and represents one of the most arrogant things
that any man can ever do.
A comment comes up here, and I've got
it before me.
I thought I might read a few lines
to you.
It's from someone whose name would not be
known to you.
Good Scotsman that he is, great man of
God that he is, he's not as well
known as he might be.
But he's commenting on this passage, and he
says something like this.
It is God alone who makes the laws,
and for any member of that family to
start legislating for the brother who displeases him
is not only to find fault with him,
but with a law which is not as
hard with him as he would be.
What the critic is really saying is this.
Now, if I were God, see, if I
were God, I would deal differently with that
person.
It's such a pity, says this man of
God, when we criticize one another that we
do not go on to talk out all
the implications of what we are saying.
We would then be shocked to realize that
we are setting ourselves up in the place
of God.
See how shocking this is.
We are really saying that I, a sinner,
would be a better God than he whose
law suffers leniently with this erring brother of
ours.
Yes, we would be a better God, that
is to say, a harder God than God
himself.
Except, of course, on ourselves.
It would seem, therefore, that the chief difference
between a sinner God and a sinless God
is that the sinner God would exclude mercy,
forgiveness, except, of course, for himself by special
dispensation, from which we draw the conclusion that
sinfulness is harder on sins than sinlessness.
And, my friends, this is the heart of
the matter.
Some of us can be harder on the
sins of our fellow believers than God is.
We can be more critical, and we can
be more arrogant, and we can be more
condemnatory, and we can be more ruthless.
Beware of sinful little gods, I mean gods
in their own eyes.
How surprising is the Christian religion, the comment
ends in this way, how surprising is the
Christian religion, so reacting and rebounding, indeed, that
we had better leave it as it is
and let God and his law be the
law, and learn to bear with our brother
as God does with him.
Besides, he has not only the superior knowledge,
he also has the power, and in due
course he will act as is best in
his sight.
And as is perfect.
Now, our place is not to judge God's
law, but to do it, James.
And in doing what the law requires, we
shall not scandalize our brethren or our sisters,
for that would be a contradiction of the
law itself.
Let's take this to heart.
Hurriedly, let me mention the other two things.
Why should we not be contradicting one another
and scandalizing one another?
It contravenes the bond of Christian brotherhood.
It contradicts the very law of God.
Not only does it contradict the law of
God, but it condemns the law of God.
Anyone who speaks against his brother or judges
him speaks against the law and judges it.
When you judge the law, you are not
keeping it, but you're sitting in judgment upon
it.
Now, you see, he who criticizes his brother
who is keeping the law, and that is
understood here all the time.
The person who is being criticized is not
the person who is breaking the law, but
he is a law keeper.
He's honestly doing what he believes the law
requires of him, what the will of God
is for him.
But the allegedly superior Christian disagrees with him,
and because he disagrees with him, he speaks
evil about him.
He who criticizes his brother who is keeping
the law is setting himself up as a
superior to the very law itself, as well
as to his brethren.
He is virtually challenging the law by whatever
innovation of thought or action he deems it
requires, and such arrogance is the very opposite
of the humility that James has already demanded
of the saints of God in verse 7.
Submit yourselves then to God.
Resist the devil.
Submit yourselves to God.
That is the way.
Fourthly, the attitude against one's brother envisaged in
this passage not only contravenes the spirit of
Christian brotherhood, contradicts the law of God and
condemns it, but finally it also reveals a
basic confusion between the divine and the human
prerogatives.
God says through his servant James, there is
only one law giver and only one judge,
the one who is able to save and
to destroy.
But you, says James, who are you to
judge your neighbor?
Now, it is basic, it is fundamental to
our Christian faith to believe this, that there
is only one law giver and there is
only one judge.
Isn't that so?
If you and I were questioned about our
faith tonight, we would have to say that
there is one God and there is one
law giver and the law giver is the
judge.
There is only one who is capable of
legislating right and wrong for all men, namely
God our creator and judge.
Moreover, James would have us remember that as
such, he has the power both to save
and to destroy.
He knows no rival to himself in this
respect.
There is only one God who is Lord.
And whenever you have one man or a
group of men or people in a Christian
community who assume the right to sit in
total judgment upon other fellow believers when they
are apparently doing what they believe is right
in the sight of God, those men have
overstepped the limits and they're presuming to be
God.
This is very, very serious stuff.
And it requires us to look into the
mirror of God's word.
And before the final question of James in
verse 12, I think we would all blush
with shame.
You, he says, who are you to judge
your neighbor?
There is only one God, one law giver,
one judge, only one, one only.
Where did you come from?
Your place and mine, dear brother and sister
in Christ, your place and mine tonight is
at the feet of the one God.
It's at the behest of the one God.
It is like the Virgin Mary to say
to him, behold your handmaiden, do what you
want with me.
I don't understand all about it as we
were seeing this morning.
But if this is your way and if
this is your will and if this is
your plan, well, here I am.
Here's my body.
Here's my mind.
Here I am.
Here's my character.
Whatever people will say about me, whatever people
will think, here I am.
As I sometimes hear men and women criticize
others, criticize others who out of their unquestioned
loyalty to the word of God stand for
such things as respect for human life, for
the marriage bond, for sanctity, who stand and
plead for respect between the different sexes and
for differences between the sexes to be acknowledged
according to the plain word of God.
I feel I would like to take them
to this book of James and say, start
reading, brother.
Start reading, sister.
There are differences of which God speaks in
his word.
When you hear men standing for these differences
and pleading for them, don't presume to be
greater than God and judge those who are
obeying the word of God and who live
and preach and live according to these precepts.
As we conclude, let us not think that
this passage applies only to those who are
absent from us tonight.
That's always a failure with us Christians, isn't
it?
We can apply the word of God to
those who are not with us.
But this word applies to me and it
applies to you.
I said at the beginning, this word is
a penetrating one.
We too are heirs to our inbred rebellion
against God, which sin has set a going
within our human natures.
And we too would all too easily stand
in judgment of all and sundry and not
just say, I think that is wrong.
Pardon me, but I think you're going the
wrong way about it.
But to sit in final judgment upon it,
to condemn it outright without knowing all the
facts and oftentimes on the basis of hearsay
and to pass on what we've heard with
a little bit embellishment so that we forget
all about the value of character.
And if we ever come into confrontation with
a person concerned, we try to bully people
to do things when their consciences as yet
have not been enlightened by the word of
the spirit of God.
And we try to steamroller people to do
what they doubt is right.
God has great respect for men's consciences and
he takes an awful lot of time in
teaching some of us.
Have you noticed that?
All the patience that God takes with me,
all the patience of God with all of
us.
And he doesn't hang us over the pit
every night because we haven't learned the lesson
of the day.
But he brings us on through life year
after year in his infinite mercy and so
many of the lessons we haven't learned.
And he gives us yet another chance and
yet another chance.
And he forgives us and he cleanses us
and he says, come back to me and
I'll give you more grace.
And James assures us he does that.
He gives more grace.
That's God's way.
Oh, to be like our father.
Or to be a little more like the
God whose name we bear, whose children we
are.
And that is the cry with which I
close tonight.
Because our need, your need, and mine is
basically this.
It is a need to grow up according
to the likeness of our heavenly father, as
that is revealed in the person of his
co-equal son, who became man among men
and lived and died and rose again, the
Christ of Nazareth.
May the spirit of God create within us
the capacity for the kind of assessments and
judgments that we need to make in order
to live the godly life, whilst at the
same time give us a wholesome hatred of
this crippling, divisive, censoriousness that stands in a
kind of judgment upon others, which is decimating
to the fellowship and damning to the testimony.
Let us pray.
Oh, Lord, our God, your word forever is
settled in heaven.
And we ask of you, oh, Lord, to
forgive us.
Yet we do not always recognize that.
And the way in which we judge ourselves
is so often less radical and realistic than
the manner in which we would judge some
of our nearest and dearest.
Men and women in the brotherhood of the
redeemed.
And we judge others far more harshly, though
we pretend that we live under the judgment
of your unchanging word and truth.
Forgive us.
Give us, we pray, oh, Lord, give us
that true charity, that holy love of yours
in our hearts, that will enable us to
love one another.
And when needs be, that we should admonish
one another in love and with the deepest
affection, as the shepherd would teach the straying
lamb how to follow in his footmarks.
Spirit of God, dwell richly in our hearts
and lead us out into this new week
in love with one another, respecting one another
and all men, and manifesting something of the
dignity and of the beauty and of the
glory of our heavenly father to a world
that is lost in the mists of the
tortury and the trivial and the passing.
In Jesus' name.
Amen.