December 18
December 18
Are you a doer of God’s word?
The Bible is the ultimate mirror; it will always expose you to yourself, helping you to see yourself as you actually are. James writes:
Be doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves. For if anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he is like a man who looks intently at his natural face in a mirror. For he looks at himself and goes away and at once forgets what he was like. But the one who looks into the perfect law, the law of liberty, and perseveres, being no hearer who forgets but a doer who acts, he will be blessed in his doing. (James 1:22–25)
Imagine that you have just gotten up in the morning and are about to prepare for the day. You stumble your way into the bathroom to take your first look at the damage the night has done. The mirror you look into is accurate; it will not deceive you. You look and see a bit of dried slobber on your cheek next to your mouth; you see that your hair is a tangled mess; and, if you’re a man, you see that your beard has made itself known during the night. You don’t debate the mirror’s accuracy, and you don’t think it is being unnecessarily judgmental. No, you immediately pull out your tools of human repair and get to work, getting yourself back into the condition you want to be in before you make your public appearance. When your morning mirror confronts you, you immediately become a doer; you actively respond to what it has told you about your appearance.
What if you were to look into your morning mirror and confront what you actually look like, but then convince yourself that you look okay? You then go about your day, having done nothing about what the mirror has revealed about you. That would take quite a bit of self-deception. Sadly, this is exactly what many of us do with the perfectly accurate and loving confrontation of God’s word. The Bible exposes things in us that need to be exposed. It breaks through our blindness and shows us as we actually are. In this way, it calls us to humble confession and a commitment to change. But many of us look into the mirror of Scripture and do nothing about what it has exposed in us. James says that to do so is an act of self-deception. To walk away from God’s perfect mirror and do nothing about what it has enabled us to see is spiritual insanity.
It is a beautiful thing that God has blessed us with his word, with its heart- and life-revealing power. By grace it helps us to see what we could never see without it. May God give us the grace never to walk away from his word and do nothing. May we be ready and thankful doers.