Gia-cơ 2

Faith and favoritism

¹My brothers and sisters, you do not hold the faith of our glorious Lord Jesus Christ while you show favoritism, do you?^{ab 2}Say a man comes into your assembly with gold rings on his fingers and dressed in splendid clothes, and a poor man comes in too, in dirty clothes. ³You give your attention to the man in the splendid clothes and tell him, “Take this good seat here,” and you tell the poor man, “Stand,” or, “Sit on the floor down by my footstool.” ⁴Have you not drawn distinctions among yourselves and become judges whose reasoning is evil?^{c 5}Listen, my dear brothers and sisters. Has not God chosen those who are poor in the world’s eyes to be rich in faith and to inherit the kingdom he promised to those who love him? ⁶But you have dishonored the poor. Is it not the rich who exploit you? Are they not the very ones who drag you into court? ⁷Are they not the ones who slander the honorable name that was spoken over you? ⁸If you truly carry out the royal law as Scripture puts it, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself,” you do well. ⁹But if you show favoritism, you commit sin, and the law convicts you as lawbreakers. ¹⁰For if someone keeps the entire law and yet stumbles at one point, that person has become guilty of breaking all of it. ¹¹For the one who said, “Do not commit adultery,” also said, “Do not murder.” So if you do not commit adultery but do murder, you have still broken the law. ¹²Speak and act as people who are going to be judged by the law of freedom. ¹³Judgment will have no mercy on the one who has shown no mercy. Mercy wins out over judgment.^d

Faith that shows itself in works

¹⁴What use is it, my brothers and sisters, for someone to claim faith if that person has no works? That faith cannot save the person, can it?^{e 15}Suppose a brother or sister has no proper clothes and not enough food for the day, ¹⁶and one of you tells them, “Go in peace; keep warm and eat well,” but you do not give them what the body needs. What use is that? ¹⁷It is the same with faith: if it has no works, it is dead in itself.

¹⁸But someone will say, “You have faith, and I have works.”^fg Show me your faith without any works, and I will show you my faith by means of my works. ¹⁹You believe that God is one?^h Well and good! The demons believe it too, and they tremble. ²⁰Do you want to be shown, you empty-headed person, that faith without works does no work?^{i 21}Take Abraham our father: was it not by works that he was justified, when he offered up his son Isaac on the altar?^{j 22}You can see that his faith worked together with his works, and his faith reached its goal through those works. ²³So the Scripture came true that says, “Abraham believed God, and it was credited to him as righteousness,” and he was called God’s friend. ²⁴You see, then, that it is by works that a person is justified, and not by faith only.^{k 25}In the same way, was not Rahab the prostitute also justified by works when she welcomed the messengers and sent them off by a different road? ²⁶Just as a body with no spirit in it is dead, so faith with no works is dead too.