Break One Law You Break Them All – September 25, 2019

For whoever keeps the whole law and yet stumbles at just one point is guilty of breaking all of it.
James 2:10

Break One Law You Break Them All

The sound of breaking glass shatters the peace of your Saturday afternoon. You go into your living room and see a jagged hole right in the middle of your living room window. The scuffed baseball rolling on your living room floor answers the question of how that hole got there.

Your doorbell rings, and when you open your door you see a group of very contrite looking children standing on your porch. “We’re so sorry that we broke your window,” one of them says. “But we’ll fix it. We’ll go get some duct tape right now and tape over the hole. Then your window will be as good as new!”

“Absurd!” you think to yourself. “It’s not just the hole in the window that needs fixing. The whole window is broken. You can’t just break a part of a window and not break the whole thing!”

In our Bible passage today, James makes the same point about God’s law. Once we’ve put a hole in any part of it, we have broken it in its entirety. We can’t just patch up the part we think we’ve broken. Just like a broken window needs to be replaced in its entirety, our sin-shattered lives must be replaced in their entirety for us to be spiritually whole.

Thankfully, Jesus has done just that for us. Throughout his life, he kept the window of God’s law completely intact. Not once did he even chip any part of it. Now, through faith in him, he gives us the completely intact window of God’s law that he kept for us. His perfectly intact obedience replaces the window we shattered with our disobedience. And in him, we can stand before God without fear or shame, for in Jesus, God’s law is completely unbroken.

Prayer:
Dear Jesus, all praise to you for keeping God’s law perfectly in my place. Amen.