Wednesday 28th
James 2:8-13
NIV (v8) – ‘If you really keep the royal law found in Scripture, “Love your neighbour as yourself,” you are doing right.’
ESV (v8) – ‘If you really fulfil the royal law according to the Scripture, “You shall love your neighbour as yourself,” you are doing well.’
Today’s verse is a continuation from where we were yesterday, it is the number one instruction, ‘you shall love your neighbour as yourself’. If we are not doing this, we are not doing right! Now of course it is not a literal reference to those who live in the house next door, for me, those who live in numbers 27 and 29, although it does include them, in other words, ‘neighbour’ is a reference to everybody else apart from yourself. It is a fully comprehensive word, it means love those who you like and those who you may not like, and those who you might consider as enemies, love those who have a different colour of skin, a different ethnicity, a different religion, Dr Martyn Lloyd Jones said in one of his sermons (and I may not be quoting it exactly) ‘we need to love someone even if we do not like everything about them.’ We are all different, we all have our failures, warts, and all, but we learn from the example of God himself who loved the world even though he did not like so much of what we were, for example God does not like the sin, but he loves the sinner, and as a result he came into this world to redeem us.
It was the one who thought he had it all who asked Jesus what he needed to do to inherit eternal life, and in answer Jesus asked him ‘What is written in the law? How do you read it?’ The lawyer answered with ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind, and your neighbour as yourself.’ Jesus told him you have answered correctly, but the man wanted to know more , he asks ‘And who is my neighbour?’ In other words, he was asking ‘who do I need to love?’ ‘Out of all of humanity who am I supposed to love?’ He obviously thought that there were those who would not count. And Jesus told him the story about the man who was attacked by robbers and beaten up, we know the story, finishing with the question ‘Which of these three, do you think, proved to be a neighbour to the man who fell among the robbers?’ The lawyer answered, ‘the one who showed him mercy’ It ends with Jesus saying, ‘You go, and do likewise.’ (Luke 10)
We have probably all seen this as a nice Sunday school story but let us not miss the importance of it. And within the context of this letter of James which we are going through at this moment, let’s see it in the context of James’s instructions, first in going back to being not only hearers of the word but doers as well, then secondly in not showing partiality, then thirdly in loving our neighbour as ourselves, may God help us to live out what we profess to believe, that in the eyes of God every individual is of value and worth, created in his image, ‘What is man that you are mindful of him, and the son of man that you care for him’. (Psalm 8:4) ‘What is man, that you make so much of him, and that you set your heart on him.’ (Job 7:17) and may we learn to live, love and care as Jesus did.