May 18

“Do not merely listen to the word, and so deceive yourselves. Do what it says.” —JAMES 1:22

Believing in God is not a passive activity. Believing is active and must lead to obedience. You’ll find throughout Scripture that every act of God in a person’s life is precipitated by an act of obedience on their part. It’s possible, as James warns us, to be thoroughly familiar with Scripture, but not to experience its truth. 

What James means when he says, “Do not merely listen to the word,” is “Don’t fool yourself by only hearing it.” He makes a very interesting analogy in the next verse. “Anyone who listens to the word but does not do what it says is like someone who looks at his face in a mirror and, after looking at himself, goes away and immediately forgets what he looks like” (James 1:23-24).

Why do most of us look in the mirror? Perhaps there’s a few who simply admire themselves, but the majority of us look in a mirror to make improvements. We’ll comb our hair, men will shave or trim their beards and women apply their makeup. What we are doing is acting in response to what we see. By the same token, if we merely flip through the pages in our Bibles, we haven’t improved upon anything. Nothing changes; it’s empty. If we sit in church and our minds are drifting in other directions, we may hear the words, but we’re not listening. That, too, is empty and we’ll forget what we’ve heard within minutes. 

Just hearing the Word of God can lead to deception. We may catch a partial truth, probably the part we like to hear, and think “Ahh, that’s good,” but we’ll end up taking it out of context, and miss the all important ‘buts’ and ‘therefores’. Or we can sit in our pews week after week and believe we’ve fulfilled our Christian duty, but we’re only fooling ourselves. James says, “But the man who looks intently into the perfect law that gives freedom, and continues to do this, not forgetting what he has heard, but doing it - he will be blessed in what he does” (James 1:25).

Believing is doing. It’s knowing the Word of God and applying it to our daily lives. 

PRAYER: Lord, I want to be very attentive to everything your Word has to say. Help me to absorb your truths in a meaningful way, and apply them to my everyday life. Thank You, Lord.

TO REFLECT UPON: Is the Word of God sinking into my heart and leading to action?