Do Not Show Favoritism

James chapter 2, verses 1 through 9. It says: My brothers, let your faith in our glorious Lord Jesus Christ be—and here is the key to this segment—without partiality. We are going to be Pentecostal; tell the brother or sister next to you, “Do not show partiality.” Say it to someone there.

Do not show partiality. What does showing partiality mean? We are going to look at it because the book develops that idea. The expression here, showing partiality, is a very elegant way of saying “discriminating.” Let there be no discrimination. Let there be no racial, economic, ethnic, or national discrimination among the children of God. There must not be; there cannot be. It is a contradiction that the Lord abhors when the people of God discriminate against one another, or against people who have all been created in the image and likeness of God. For if a man comes into your congregation, let us say, wearing a gold ring and splendid clothing, a three-piece suit, and a poor man also comes in wearing ragged clothes.

Think of that rich man and Lazarus in Jesus Christ’s parable. And you look favorably upon the one wearing splendid clothes and say to him, “Come, young man, sit here in a good place,” while you say to the poor man, “You stand over there, or sit here beneath my footstool. Move aside, man, because preference must be given to respectable people, decent people.” Do you not make distinctions among yourselves and become judges with evil thoughts? In other words, you are making a distinction, a judgment about that person’s worth, and you are distinguishing between the worth of one person and another, and we have no right to do that.

We have all been created in the same image of the Lord. We bear God’s imprint in our hearts, in our lives, in our spirits, and we cannot go around discriminating or passing judgment, saying, “This one is better than the other.” That is not for us to do. Then it says: Listen, my beloved brothers. Has God not chosen the poor of this world to be rich in faith and heirs of the kingdom that He has promised to those who love Him? But you have dishonored the poor. Is it not the rich who oppress you, and are they not the very ones who drag you into court? Do they not blaspheme the good name that was invoked over you?

If you truly fulfill the royal law according to Scripture, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself,” you do well. But if you show—there is the term again—if you show partiality, you commit sin and are convicted by the law as transgressors. That word is definitive. James does not mince words. James is a pastor, and that is something we need to understand. Sometimes—I was thinking about that this morning too—nowadays... I am already starting to go off on another subject, but that is all right; it is part of this. I was thinking this morning that in this country we have something like an epidemic of niceness in the pulpit, where people come to church and demand from pastors a kind of preaching that neither offends, confronts, nor makes anyone uncomfortable. And we pastors—many of us—have fallen into that trap.

We have fallen into the trap in which the walls around what we are allowed to preach and the things we may address from the pulpit seem to grow narrower and narrower every day, because it is considered something like poor etiquette, poor pastoral ethics, or a breach of protocol to speak about things that will make people uncomfortable over lunch after they leave church on Sunday; and that is a trap of the devil. When I look at the style of Scripture, I first see that prophetic word—clear and direct. When I hear Paul’s tone, for example, when he speaks to the Corinthians, I hear that clarity. When I hear Jesus Christ as well, speaking directly to His disciples and to the crowds, saying: You seek Me because you want to eat the loaves and fish that I offer you.

And the disciples say, “Look, they all left.” “Do you also want to leave? Go ahead.” It is not that we should be aggressive or abrasive in our preaching, but I believe our churches must train themselves to come, sit there, and receive the unadulterated Word of God, no matter where it goes or what it breaks. Whether it touches us and splits us in half, or passes us by and touches the person behind us or beside us, we must become accustomed to it as a church. A mature church, a spiritual church, is a church that comes and gives its pastors and leaders the right to speak the Word of the Lord, even if it goes against the prevailing culture, the rumors, the current culture, or the nation—it does not matter.

The church must preserve the pastors’ right to speak clearly. And we pastors must fight for and retain that right. The moment we sacrifice the right to speak clearly to the people of God, we have abdicated our calling to be watchmen, O people of the Lord. And that is why I so greatly appreciate Pastor James and his way of writing. When you read it, the tone of this book is eminently pastoral, down-to-earth. There is clarity, there is a direct style, and there are subjects that have to do with daily life, such as this matter of the congregation. And James does not care who is offended, although it is not as though he has deliberately set out to offend.

But he simply declares the Word of the Lord, come what may, and if the shoe fits someone, let that person wear it. My brothers and sisters, I ask that we, as a church, always become accustomed to having that manner, that ethic, that understanding. We come to the house of the Lord to hear the Word of God. And if we leave uncomfortable, glory to God. We conform ourselves to the Word of the Lord. And if the Word of the Lord offends us, then that is my problem, not the problem of the pastor preaching it. If he is preaching the Word of the Lord and is not taking personal shots, expressing his carnality, or venting because his wife burned his food before he came to church, then we must receive it however it comes and conform ourselves to it.

And may the Lord grant that this church always retain that commitment to the Word of God, whether people like it or whether those who do not like it dislike it. It is a commitment we make before the Lord, and that is my first sermon of the evening. There is a little extra for you, but I like the way he speaks. He speaks clearly, and that is so important, because the Epistle of James, as I have always told you, is a pastor’s letter. And so he deals with many different subjects, many different topics, as we pastors do when we address all sorts of subjects about life. And as it says, there is a passage about a person who brings treasure out of a sack and brings out old things and new things. And that is what we do with the Word of the Lord.

So James is taking up a very, very important subject here, namely discrimination, and evidently he is speaking about something he has seen and experienced, because in verse 6 he says: But you have dishonored the poor. You have dishonored him, treated him without consideration, embarrassed him, neglected him, and despised him. I do not know to whom he is speaking. Evidently, he is writing to a specific community. Some say it was a Jewish Christian community. But it is also, as it were, a universal letter to the entire Church of Jesus Christ, wherever it may be and throughout all ages.

But he is speaking about something he had experienced. I imagine—you have to picture the church at that time. I imagine it was before the end of the first century; it has to be. He is writing about things he himself had seen and heard concerning Jesus Christ, but James is a brother—he is a brother of Jesus Christ. He is a brother, one of Jesus’ brothers. So he is speaking about a transitional period in the church when, yes, the church was composed mostly of poor people. If you read, for example, in First Corinthians, where... let me see if I can find it quickly, where the apostle Paul speaks about how not many of you are wise or rich or important, but... What is it?

1:26, that is it. “For consider your calling, brothers: not many of you were wise according to the flesh, not many were powerful, not many were noble; but God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; and God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong; and God chose the lowly things of the world and the despised things, and the things that are not, to bring to nothing the things that are.” Who were the first to accept the Gospel in the first century? It was the poor.

In the beginning, the church was made up of poor, simple, uneducated people, according to the values of the world, because the poor have always been the first to accept the Word of God: those who have nothing to lose, those who need the good news of the Gospel—that there is a God who shows no partiality, a God who loves us just as we are, a God who wants to lift us up, a God who takes the weak and makes them strong, who takes the poor and makes them rich, prospers them, and blesses them.

Those are the people. The rich are still in love with their money, which is why the Lord said, “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven.” Why? Because the rich have so many things—and I do not mean only rich in money, but rich in knowledge, prestige, influence, and sophistication. A university professor, for example, may not be rich, but he is rich in influence, sophistication, and intellect. So there is that intellectual wealth the person possesses—an artist, a writer, or whatever the person may be. Perhaps the person has no material wealth but does possess intellectual capital, sophistication, influence, and prestige.

Everyone who has something tying them to this world, who possesses some form of capital in this world, has difficulty entering the kingdom of heaven, because entering the kingdom of heaven requires you to leave behind a great deal of baggage. That is why Christ said to the rich young man, “Look, get rid of your money; go to that ATM of yours, withdraw everything, and give it to the poor. Then follow Me, and you will find the rest you need.” The rich man could not do that. The young man could not do that. He could not strip himself of his influence. So throughout the centuries we have always seen this. It is the humble, the simple-hearted, who first embrace the Gospel. They are the sediment God uses, the foundation God uses to build the church and to build any movement.

That is what happens in all our countries. In the Dominican Republic, where I come from, who were the first to accept the Gospel? The poor. Not the rich. When the poor converted, the respectable members of the family kicked them and threw them out of the family. Those poor people were the ones who then, little by little, established the foundation. They were the weak, thin sticks used to start a fire. And then the large logs come afterward: the artists, the rich—but only when it is easier to enter the Gospel, after the poor have paid the price. Then they begin to come, saying, “Oh, so-and-so. Yes. Colonel So-and-so is there.”

After he robbed half the world and harmed people, now he comes and sits there, but he has not returned the money he stole from them. That is another subject; forgive me. The judges who took money from the people, the contractors who robbed the people through construction projects—now, yes, now they come because it is easy. Do you understand? Amen. Glory to God that they come, but those who paid the price were the poor, the ones who first introduced the Gospel. Then the others come when they see the blessing. Of course, who would not like that? As the merengue song says. So they come too.

So I believe that, at that time, James was seeing a church that was perhaps beginning to attract people, and every so often a rich person would come whom God had touched—like those first women involved in Jesus Christ’s ministry, like a Nicodemus, like a centurion. Every so often, someone whom God has touched in some way comes in: Cornelius, people of distinction and power. Something happens in their lives, and they decide to visit a living church. Now, what happens? When that person arrives, evidently dressed in an Ives Saint Laurent suit or wearing an eighty-five-dollar tie—or a five-hundred-dollar one—the pastor sees him from the pulpit. A rich man! An important person! Glory to God! Hallelujah! How wonderful!

And immediately what they do is look for a way to remove the poor man from his seat. Let the rich man sit there so that he will return, so that he will feel comfortable. It is one of the things from which we pastors suffer: low self-esteem. So when important people come to church—businesspeople, this person, that person, the theology professor from the seminary; I hope there are none here so no one thinks I am taking a personal shot—right away, we... there is a kind of tendency to want to please them and then, as it were, diminish the anointing, lower the church’s temperature, and bring the congregation’s style down to a moderate level so that more of that kind of person will come.

It is one of the terrible dangers of this time. There are many intellectual people out there, many cultured people who want to enter the Gospel, but they say, ‘Before entering the Gospel, you have to change your message. That style of worship there, where you take too much time and people cry at the front and raise their hands and throw themselves on the floor—I do not like that. So if you want...’ They do not tell you that directly, but that is the idea. Little by little, the culture takes it upon itself to rob the church of its choice. And because we want to please those people and have them come to our pulpit—or rather, come to our church—and we pastors suffer from low self-esteem, we love seeing those people in our churches. Because it is a reflection of our ministry.

Oh, you have so-and-so, you have the mayor, you have the councilman; that means you are an influential man. So it is a matter of psychology; it is a psychological problem among the leaders of a congregation, who see themselves reflected in important people. So our tendency, subconsciously, is to tone down and remove everything that bothers those people, and that is one way the devil seduces the church: he kills its anointing, robs it of its message, neutralizes it, and then checkmates and destroys it.

We pastors, leaders, and congregations have to be very careful. We must continually engage in a great deal of self-analysis; we must give ourselves therapy through the Word and discern when that seed of corruption is entering our hearts and minds, and say, ‘No, Lord, I am not going to change what belongs to God in order to please a man or a woman or a culture or a segment of the city or whatever it may be, brothers and sisters.’ And that is a battle. Here I am perhaps expressing the thoughts I wrestle with every day, because so much is happening in this world today; this country is going crazy, honestly.

And there is pressure on pastors, on churches, on congregational leaders, to go along with the culture out there. Because the people of that culture want to come in; they need what we have. But they say, ‘Yes, but for us to come in, you have to remove a number of things we do not like.’ And we must firmly resolve that we will never, ever negotiate away the revelation once delivered to the saints, Lord. It does not matter who dislikes it. If President Obama wants to come and visit us here, he will have to accept the consequences. Because if the Lord speaks a word that day, it will cut wherever it cuts, and we must make that commitment.

I believe that is why James is discerning this process of the Church’s acculturation, because ever since the church began—or if you study the history of the Church—you can see it. You see that church, poor and insignificant according to the world, filled with the power of God, with the Lord’s anointing, beginning to manifest the blessing and prosperity God gives to those who seek Him with a sincere heart.

And then comes the gradual process of growth, and then another layer of society, another stratum of society—more prosperous, more ‘advanced,’ in quotation marks—begins to enter the Church’s sanctuary. The Church then begins to feel it, and the leaders tend to give preference to those people at the expense of those who paid the price at the beginning. In fact, in the history of the Church, this culminates in the conversion of Emperor Constantine. This was in the fourth century, when the Roman emperor—when Rome had persecuted Christians so much—Constantine the Emperor converted to the Gospel, and with him, whether by force or however it happened, his entire court, the Roman army, and much of Roman society converted; unfortunately, the corruption of the Church followed.

Then that immense influx of people who were important and influential according to the world came about, and it overwhelmed the Church and overwhelmed the Church’s purity. And that is a process that has repeated itself through the centuries. It has happened in every country in the world. Our countries in Latin America are now going through that process. Forty years ago, once again, the evangelical Church belonged to the poor: the Pentecostal women there with their hair in buns and their extremely long skirts, and the men without beards or mustaches. They had to be very holy. And now, little by little, there is another layer. The Juan Luis Guerras—glory to God—and seeing that a sincere and precious man; I was listening to him on the radio while I was coming here. My car was going boom-boom-boom. Glory to God!

I love, I love all that music, and glory to God for every artist who converts, and all the important people. I want them in my Church. Let a few rich people come and give me two million dollars to pay for the church building. Glory to God. We welcome them, but let them sit in the back, and if there is no other seat, let them remain standing back there. Unless we choose, because they are new and as a courtesy, to tell them one Sunday to sit down. But after that, you already know what to expect. But no, I do not mean to say that they are hypocrites or anything like that either. What I mean is this: we are now seeing movie stars, governors, presidents, and political candidates who want the Church’s votes coming into the Church.

And we must have great discernment from the Lord and make a commitment. We—our values—are from another world, another dimension. And one of those values is a commitment to the equality of every human being, to the imprint of God that is in the person’s heart, to that spirit that knows nothing of rags or fine, luxurious clothing. It is the God who is within that person, the Holy Spirit who is in that person. That is what we must see. You must look past the bad smell and the hair matted from lack of soap and see the Spirit of the Lord, the soul within that man or that woman.

That does not become dirty; that is, it is valuable. Now, one day it will go either to hell or to heaven, but what is there is the very essence of God. That is what the devil always wants to soil and destroy and kill and send to hell. Because he knows that it is the heart of God Himself. And we must always fall in love with the God who is in every man and every woman, sincerely—the Spirit of the Lord who is there. And when you speak to someone, whether that person is poor or rich, give yourself therapy: strip away those clothes—ragged, rich, luxurious, or ragged and poor—and simply see that being, the naked being, the being God created, the person’s soul. And love that person, respect that person, revere that person.

That is why I always believe that, whoever it may be—the person at McDonald’s who serves you hamburgers, brother or sister; the one who takes your ticket on the bus; the waiter who serves you your food—that person is simply doing a job, but is a child of God. And you must treat that person with that preference, that honor, that respect, because that is how you would treat the owner of the restaurant or the owner of the bus company, or whoever it might be. Because it is a son of God, a daughter of God, who is serving you, performing a function; that is all. But that person’s soul is untouched by their low or high position. Before the Lord, that means absolutely nothing.

So I want to transfer that value to us, brothers and sisters, as a congregation, as a Church. That is true diversity, which this world talks about today without understanding what it is saying. They have perverted the idea of diversity, of pluralism, but I believe the Church should be the place of greatest diversity on the whole earth, where the white person and the black person and the red person and the yellow person are all seated there as equals before the Lord, reflecting the image of God and the beauty of all races and all kinds of people and all cultures. And we are honoring the Lord and rejoicing in our diversity.

The Central American seated beside the Caribbean person, beside the Anglo-Saxon, beside the European, beside the South American, the Indian, or whoever it may be, and rejoicing that we all have the image of God in our hearts, in our spirits. Amen. Brothers and sisters, this must always be the value upheld by this congregation, and we are not going to change that. I rebuke anyone who would say otherwise about our Church, because the value this Church officially espouses and upholds is a value of equality, of love for one another. Here I hope there will never be any distinction among people, any partiality of any kind, sincerely. Because I adore the idea of our Church being an egalitarian Church, a Church that loves cultures and races and kinds of people and nationalities and ethnic groups.

We must learn to give thanks to the Lord. I believe one of the great blessings God has given this Church is its diversity. In fact, we have dozens of nationalities here. And how beautiful that is. When I look around me and see the colors of all God’s people, the different kinds of people—the Indigenous person still bearing those beautiful Central American features, and the black person, and the Caribbean mulatto, and the pale white person from Europe and England and the United States and North America, and the Asian person—glory to the Lord for that beauty, that diversity. We must rejoice in it; we must celebrate it. And may no one ever dare to think that because someone else is different from me, I am better than that person or that person is inferior to me. That is a lie of the devil, and that is what the devil has used to destroy so much in this world, to bring about so much oppression, so much persecution.

The German against the Jew, the white person against the black person, the Baptist against the Pentecostal, the Anabaptist against another person who believes something else, the Lutheran. And those are distinctions of the devil; they are not from God. And we must make a radical commitment always to respect and see the beauty of every race, every social group, every socioeconomic and educational stratum, and to see once again the God who is in each one of us, the Holy Spirit who dwells in every person, the beauty of God in the diversity that they have caused to dwell among us. Churches should reflect the diversity of the world. I do not believe in middle-class or upper-middle-class churches.

There are pastors who bend over backward because they want to minister to the middle class and the upper class. May God rebuke the devil. I want to minister to the poor and the rich, and to North Americans and Latinos and Afro-Caribbeans and white people, whoever they may be, and it is the greatest privilege one can have. Churches should be as diverse as the community in which they are located, as diverse as the human race. That is how we must be as well: a representation. And we have to—it takes work and effort to learn to live with one another. It takes work. The Colombian who speaks with a very distinguished accent has to learn to understand the Caribbean person who drops his R’s and turns them into I’s. And ‘why,’ instead of saying ‘why.’ And when you hear him, make a translation right there in your ear and appreciate him for who he is.

That is what we must do in every respect, in every respect. The Dominican who likes his food with garlic and spice has to learn to enjoy the Central American’s delicious food. It may be a tostada or a pupusa or whatever it is; those are delicious things. Okay, Colombian sancocho—sometimes they add, what is it, cream. One says, ‘Cream? How could they do that? They ruined it.’ No, learn to enjoy the sancocho of the Colombian from northern Colombia, and let the Colombian also learn to enjoy the Dominican’s sancocho with cassava and plantains and yam, and let us learn to minister to one another and love one another in our diversity. That is something special.

And I believe that part of what James is saying here is that value, the value of appreciating races and socioeconomic levels, of showing no partiality. May the Lord grant tonight that this serve to strengthen our commitment to the Church, to always be a Church of great diversity, of love among ourselves, and of acceptance from all the different groups. And let us consecrate ourselves, consecrate ourselves to preserving that as a value and doing the work it requires, because it is not natural; it requires effort, and it requires something like an ethic that you put into practice. Every time you come to church or socialize, do not look every day for the person who looks like you and talks like you so that you can sit beside them. No. Look for someone different.

Say, ‘Today I am going to add another different person to my collection, someone from another stratum, another culture, another race, with another accent, and today I am going to—today I am going to commit myself to cultivating this, brother or sister.’ The Lord says: if you invite only your friends, those who can invite you afterward, then there is no merit in that. Invite the person who cannot invite you to their home. Invite someone different from you; make yourself uncomfortable in order to affirm the values of the kingdom of God. Make yourself uncomfortable. And that is why we often do not grow: because we like what is comfortable; we like that lukewarm water of our own people and our own culture. But from time to time we must step outside of that, because that is how we grow and, culturally, learn other words, other accents, other foods, other ways of seeing the world, about another culture, another language. It is by making ourselves uncomfortable.

And I believe that is one of the things God has given it, one of the gifts He has given this congregation: the ability to reach many people. And that comes at a price, because every Sunday when… I wish we could already establish it as a norm that I would not have to worry about anything because there are ten new people from another group visiting us here today, on Sunday; it is as though every day we have to turn the crank again in order to feel comfortable, because it becomes—it is very easy when we all speak the same language, we are the same people day after day, the same thing every Sunday. But then, okay, now we have to translate for one another and do this and make it bilingual and who knows what else and who knows how much more.

But do you know what? That is a great offering that pleases the Lord; that is the Gospel, a burnt offering that we give to the Lord by making ourselves uncomfortable so that the values of the kingdom of God may be manifested through our congregational life. And we have to make that commitment—yes, Lord. This church will always make itself uncomfortable so that the values for which Christ died may always be manifested wordlessly among us. May that be our greatest worship when You look down upon our life. Not the words that come out of our mouths, but the way we live, the way we treat one another, the way we put one another first, the way we value one another, the way we love the person who is not lovable according to the values of the world, but who is exceedingly precious in the eyes of God.

So a congregation honors the Lord through the way it lives, its values, its conduct, its sincerity, its transparency, and its humility. That is our true worship, as Romans chapter 12 says. It is not the worship of the mouth, but of the soul that allows itself to be broken and crushed by the values of the kingdom and is reconfigured according to the values of God, not those of man, culture, or worldly society. So I believe all of that is contained in tonight’s passage. Tonight, the Lord wants to reinforce that value. I prophetically declare it to be a value for this church. As long as this church is here, may that be its distinguishing mark and its standard.

Father, in the name of Jesus, tonight we receive Your call to be a church that reflects the values for which Christ died. Though He was rich, He became poor; though He was powerful, He became weak; though He was universal in His glory and power, He became particular; though He was unlimited, He limited Himself. May we likewise, Lord, as a church, be able to make ourselves uncomfortable as He made Himself uncomfortable and put ourselves into the straitjacket of Your humanity, so that Your glory may be manifested.

And Father, we believe that in our humiliation, in that discomfort to which we submit ourselves, we will then be lifted up, just as Christ was lifted up and was given a name above every name. Father, we want our triumph to come through the cross, through dying to self and to personal preferences. If You are going to lift us up, Father, may it be according to the values of Your kingdom, not according to the values of man or culture. May this word remain in us tonight, Lord, and we declare it, Father, as a foundation for this congregation, and we rebuke everything that does not align with the truth we have declared tonight.

We reject it, Father, and we embrace this value of unconditional love for every creature who bears the imprint of Your deity. Thank You for tonight; thank You for the privilege of worshiping You as we have been able to worship You; thank You for Your visitation, Lord. Take us home rejoicing tonight, Father, renewed. We bless You and worship You. Thank You, Lord, in Jesus’ name. Amen and amen. Glory to the name of the Lord. Brothers and sisters, God bless you. Glory to God. Amen.