James 2 My brothers, stop trying to maintain your faith in our Lord Jesus Christ, the glorious presence of God on earth, along with acts of partiality to certain ones.

Williams⁽ⁱ⁾ ¹ My brothers, stop trying to maintain your faith in our Lord Jesus Christ, the glorious presence of God on earth, along with acts of partiality to certain ones. ² For if a man with a gold ring, dressed in fine clothes, comes to your meeting, and at the same time a poor man clad in dirty clothes, ³ and you pay special attention to the man who wears the fine clothes, and say to him, "Sit here in this fine place," and say to the poor man, "Stand up, or sit there on the floor at my feet," ⁴ do you not make improper distinctions among yourselves and prove to be critics with evil motives? ⁵ Listen, my dearly loved brothers. Has not God chosen the poor of the world to be rich in faith and to possess the kingdom which He promised to those who love Him? ⁶ But you, in contrast, have humiliated the poor man. Are not the rich men those who oppress you and drag you to court? ⁷ Are not they the ones who scoff at the beautiful name you bear? ⁸ But if you really observe the law of the King in accordance with the Scripture, "You must love your neighbor as you do yourself," you are doing right; ⁹ but if you show partiality, you are committing sin, because you are convicted by the law as lawbreakers. ¹⁰ For whoever obeys the whole law, except to slip in a single instance, is guilty of breaking it all. ¹¹ For He who said, "You must not commit adultery," also said, "You must not commit murder." Now if you do not commit adultery but you do commit murder, you are just the same a lawbreaker. ¹² You must continue talking and acting like people who are to be judged by the law that treats them as free. ¹³ For merciless judgment will be the portion of the merciless man; yet mercy will triumph over judgment. ¹⁴ My brothers, what good is there in a man's saying that he has faith, if he has no good deeds to prove it? Such faith cannot save him, can it? ¹⁵ If some brother or sister is thinly clad and has no food for the day, ¹⁶ and one of you says to him, "Blessings on you, keep warm, eat until you have aplenty," without giving him the things that are needed for the body, what good does it do? ¹⁷ So faith by itself, if it has no deeds to back it up, is dead. ¹⁸ But someone may say, "You have faith, and I have good deeds. Show me your faith without any good deeds, but I will show you mine by my good deeds." ¹⁹ Do you believe in one God? Very well; the demons, too, believe that, and shudder. ²⁰ But, O senseless man, are you willing to learn that faith without good deeds is worthless? ²¹ Was not our forefather Abraham shown to be upright by his good deeds, namely, by offering Isaac his son upon the altar? ²² You see that faith cooperated with his good deeds, and by his good deeds faith was made complete; ²³ and so the Scripture was fulfilled which says, "Abraham put his faith in God, and it was credited to him for uprightness, and he was called God's friend." ²⁴ You see that a man is shown to be upright by his good deeds, and not merely by his faith. ²⁵ Was not even Rahab the prostitute shown to be upright by her good deeds, namely, by entertaining the scouts and sending them off by a different road? ²⁶ Just as the body without the spirit is dead, so faith without good deeds is dead.