Knowing and Doing the Word of God

I wanna begin this morning by asking you to think back on a teacher that you may have had, a type of teacher, at least, from your school days, who, as they taught, telling you to perhaps follow some simple instructions, would kind of get lost in that explaining and often make it a bit convoluted by telling you stories of their week, or their past, or whatever, and by the end of a forty minute lesson, you can't remember what you were actually being taught. I had a tech teacher, so a woodworking and metalworking teacher, who loved a chat. Absolutely loved a chat. And he would begin by saying, today we are building a pencil case. And he would begin by saying, you have to grab this bit and this bit, and you have to do this and that.

But then his mind would wander, and soon we'd be talking about his grandkids, or his hobbies, or his past times, and sooner or later, you had no idea how to build this pencil case. So we know some of those sort of teachers. Good teachers, however, are the ones that would teach you what to do, and then immediately ask you to do it. So it meant that their knowledge was implanted in you immediately. Well, this morning, we're going to hear that God says that his teaching for our life works in the same way.

Not only are we to know his word, God says you are to do it immediately. We're going to see that God has this pattern in mind for Christians, which is almost like riding a bike. It's these two pedals that we push, these two pedals that we ride. The one is to know the word, and the one is to do the word. Know the word, do the word.

Having any forward motion on the bike means your feet need to be doing that work in tandem. It's the same with the Christian walk. Knowing the word and doing the word is working in tandem if we are to have this forward motion, this active faith called Christianity. We're gonna look at part b of what we actually looked at last week in the book of James, and that is where we're going to find some of this teaching. The book of James.

We're gonna look at chapter one, verse 19 to 27. James chapter one, verse 19 through to 27. Know this, my beloved brothers. Let every person be quick to hear, slow to speak, slow to anger. For the anger of man does not produce the righteousness of God.

Therefore, put away all filthiness and rampant wickedness, and receive with meekness the implanted word, which is able to save your souls. But 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.

If anyone thinks he is religious and does not bridle his tongue, but deceives his heart, this person's religion is worthless. Religion that is pure and undefiled before God the Father is this: to visit orphans and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unstained from the world. Last week, we looked at the passage just before this, where James gives us the encouragement to resist temptation. And we looked at the cycle of temptation, we looked at some of the great bits of advice that we can have in our own lives to resist those things. But that is part of, I would say, a wider context by which James has actually started this whole entire chapter, and that is the context of suffering, of persevering through suffering that James has started with.

He starts in verse two, count it all joy, brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds. For you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness. This is the broader context by which we find some of these encouragements. And so in the midst of this teaching, where James tells us, encourages us to wait patiently on God in trials, in suffering, here in verse 19, James sort of begins with, now listen to this. Verse 19 begins with, know this.

Listen up. Take note. What do we need to know? What do we need to listen to? Verse 19, everyone should be quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to become angry.

For man's anger does not bring about the righteous life that God desires. In the midst of suffering, in the midst of trial, you are not only to wait on God to deliver you, we are called to be obedient. It is an active thing, not a passive thing. To live according to the law of freedom, he says here, the law of liberty verse 25. In the midst of suffering, we are not only meant to be patient, but obedient.

Now why does James move from teaching about perseverance, resisting temptation, understanding that temptation does not come from God in this suffering? Why does James want to move from those things to teaching us about personal holiness? Well, the answer is, our hearts often look for excuses to sin when we are suffering. So with the context set, three things James tells us about the way that we live as consistent Christians. The first thing is he does, he gives us a diagnostic test.

He tests our heart. He puts us through a bit of a paradigm to measure ourselves by. And through this entire passage, really, there are five different types of people that he's highlighting, and we're going to work through those five. Five weaknesses, five types that we might fall into. Keep an ear out for some of these because they might sound familiar.

The first thing is the hypocrite. James says, be doers of God's word, not simply listeners. Yet the hypocrite is one who is quick to speak and slow to act. A hypocritical person can take a strong position on something, but when push comes to shove, their memory seems to fail, and the hypocrite cannot live up to their own standards. Often bitter and deeply ashamed of their own failures secretly, the hypocrite finds it easier to hide behind a loud voice.

James says, be slow to speak and quick to listen. Then there is the selfish listener. The second type. This is almost, you could say, the flip side of the hypocrite. Instead of being too quick to speak, they are too quick to ignore.

James says, be quick to listen and slow to speak, but the selfish listener is someone who isn't quick to listen. In fact, when the truth of God is communicated to them, they make sure that they are distracted very quickly. They pretend to have selective hearing, and they try to move on from the light of God's truth that has been put on them, that they are in the spotlight. They know it's for them. They know it applies to them.

The selective hearer doesn't like it, and therefore prefers not to do anything about it. Then we have the short fuse. This is someone prone to anger. James says, the anger of man does not produce the righteousness of God. The short fuse is someone who will rage against people who are causing pain.

Remember, this is the context of suffering. They will rage against people who are causing their pain, and in this way, they can justify hurting others while they are in pain. The short fuse is the person that is quick to become an angry person, and so their anger can be easily excused. James says, man's anger does not bring about any of the righteousness that God requires. The vindictiveness, the impatience, the coldness of that anger is not what godly lives look like.

That's the third one. Fourth, we have the compromiser. James says, verse 21, get rid of all filthiness and rampant wickedness in your life. A compromiser is someone who can't stand one particular sin, one thing that they feel very strongly about, they hate it. They complain about it with their friends, they write blogs about it, and yet, they wholeheartedly entertain another sin in their life.

They may not stand homosexuality, but they may cheat on their wife. They hate when people blaspheme God, but they abuse their coworkers. The compromiser tries to segment life into its worse and better sins, and they're willing to indulge the lesser sins according to some sort of arbitrary ranking system that they've worked out for themselves. Meanwhile, James says, get rid of all filthiness and wickedness. And then number five, the last one in our diagnostic, is the know it all.

It's the one who just can't be taught. James commends Christians to humbly accept the word. But the know it all is someone who thinks because they know the word, the work is done. With pride, they can quote scripture or theological truths, overpowering people with their big words. Instead of humbly accepting that God's training and his disciplining is for them first, they instead are puffed up in pride.

And in that puffed up state, they look more impressive than they really are. They don't know it, but they are more vulnerable, however, to Satan and to sin than they realise. And so James says, instead of thinking you know it all, James says, humbly hear and accept the word of God for you. Five types that I've identified in this passage. Perhaps we can sort of see there's parts of us there, and perhaps we can say we've, at times, been all of them.

The question, however, is what do we do with this? After we've identified some of those things, what are we to make of this? Well, this is what James is getting at. James wants Christians to fight for alignment between who they know they are and how they live. Be doers of the word.

Verse 21, I think, gives us, I think, the key phrase, the key verse there, to accept the word planted in you because only it can save your souls. Accept the word that has been planted in you because it can save your souls. We know that many times the Bible likens God to a gardener. We read about that again in John 15 this morning. And he calls his word a seed.

Over and over again, there's this image of God who takes the message contained in scripture, and he plants it in the deepest parts of a human's heart, their soul. Why does God use this image? Because he's trying to tell us that this seed, this message brings new life. It produces life. Going back again to school, I wonder if anyone did this as a science experiment in high school, where you were given a seed and you had to put it in a cup, you had to put some soil over it, you had to water it.

And every day, every morning, you had to go, and at the same time every day, look and see how it's been growing, that the seed has germinated. And then it's growing a little bit, and it's now this high, and so forth. You have to record that scientifically. That's the image that's associated with the power of the Bible. The word of God produces life.

Psalm 1 uses exactly those words. It says in verse 3 that a person rooted in God's perfect law is like a tree planted by streams of water, which yields its fruit in season and whose leaf does not wither. In other words, the word of God produces life. But despite the power of this word, James is suggesting that Christians may still struggle to see the full effects of this life giving word in their lives. And this is why he transitions to verse 22, telling Christians, be doers of the word and not only hearers, deceiving yourselves.

James labels it a self deception. To know God's word, but not to do it. False Christianity, or false religion, as he will put it here, is marked by a self deception and a forgetfulness. It looks like someone who looks at themselves in the mirror, and as soon as they walk away from that mirror, they forget what they look like. I know some of us might like to forget ourselves, when we see ourselves in the morning, first time in the mirror, but this is not that sort of situation.

As soon as you have left that mirror, you forget the image that you saw. You forget how tall you are. You forget that you have freckles. You forget what colour hair you have. You forget where your nose fits on your head.

As ridiculous as it sounds, to forget those things about you, that is how ridiculous it is for a Christian to forget what God's will is for them. James tells us, if God has shown you something about your life that either encourages you to keep going with what you're doing or to change something, whether you've learned that through a sermon, whether you've learned that through personal reflection. If God has shown you something, then take the active steps to see it through. You see that image, you know that image. To simply close the Bible, to go on with life, is like a husband or wife that says, I know exactly what my spouse loves.

He loves a caramel slice with his coffee. Some of us say amen to that. He loves fishing gear for his birthday present. And he loves to work in the shed from time to time. And yet, I've never given him any of those things.

He loves those things, but I haven't gotten him any of that. In other words, it's good to know those things, but does it make sense when that knowledge is not applied? It doesn't make sense. Know the word, and then do the word. Theologically, we understand the reality that there is still this thing of lingering sin in our life.

As Christians, we know and we understand that we've been forgiven. We have been washed clean through the work of Jesus Christ in his death and resurrection. We know that that is a statement of fact. That is not something that we will question. We need to not question.

We are forgiven. We are set free from the consequences of sin, yet we continue these small skirmishes against sin in our lives. What James is saying here is that we must remember to continue fighting for realignment. We must continue fighting to know who we are in that mirror. We are forgiven.

We have been set free. To forget that is as crazy as forgetting what you look like. We are fighting to be realigned to that beautiful and clean image of someone washed in the blood of Christ. Don't forget, remember who you are. Fight for aligning your new life in Christ with your actions.

Realigning those actions, especially habits, those ways that we speak, those ways that we think, especially difficult. The things tied to our past life that is very close to us. So if we have become a Christian and the rest of our family are not yet, boy, that is hard to change. And yet, the command is, you will change. You must change.

You are sons and daughters of God now. You have been adopted, you've been received into his family, and you will live in the same likeness as the perfect Son of God. So that's our second point. It's to fight for alignment, to be doers of the word. And then James finally wraps up this section by highlighting this third point.

He explains the fruit that God desires for our lives. Firstly, he gives us another sort of quick diagnostic test to measure ourselves with. Verse 26, if anyone thinks he is religious and does not bridle his tongue but deceives his heart, this person's religion is worthless. Religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father is this: to visit orphans and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unstained from the world. In other words, before too quickly thinking of yourself as having it all together, comparing other people to how you behave in the strengths that you may have, before you rest on your laurels, run this quick test.

What is on your tongue? What do you say? How do you say it? What is in your hands? How do you treat others and behave?

What do you do with the resources of your time and energy, very practically? I don't think James is giving us an exhaustive list here, because he actually finishes with a catch all statement at the end of that sentence saying, religion that is pure and undefiled is to keep oneself unstained from the world. So that is the catch all statement. He's not saying the Christian's life is only about looking after orphans and widows. But what James is doing, I think, is pricking our consciences again, having run this diagnostic test in our hearts, and then he holds out a vision for what we are striving for.

And that is an active faith. An intentional faith. Something that we don't assume to have, something that we don't assume is part of our lives. A faith that is purposely considering how to produce a life of righteousness. Many Christians, including the great church leader Martin Luther, really struggled with James' words here.

They really struggled with this thing about faith. How can James call my religion worthless? Because it flies in the face of some of the other central truths of the Christian faith, that is our faith is not something that can be worked for. Our faith is a gift from God, purely by grace. We can't do a thing that will warrant God's acceptance of us.

The Bible is clear on that. But here comes James, and he says, a person's spiritual life is worthless if they don't have a good rein on their tongues. Many are confused when James says, the religion that God the Father accepts as pure and faultless is one that looks after orphans and widows. It seems contradictory, doesn't it? But it's not.

It is true that we can only be saved by the gracious work of God in our lives, and that God himself produces the very faith in us to cling to what only Jesus could ever have achieved for us, forgiveness with God. But here is what James is getting at. A heart that has truly come to believe the gospel, it cannot help but be changed by that news. Even Martin Luther would realise this when he wrote, we are saved by faith alone, but the faith that saves is never alone. It means that a heart that has been gripped by the powerful message of Jesus Christ, that heart is given life.

Therefore, it cannot help but produce life. And James presses the implication of what that means for our day to day living. He says, don't forget who you are, and don't get in the way of the growth that God is producing in you. Don't forget who you are. You are cleansed, you are washed, you are sanctified, and don't get in the way of the work that I'm doing.

God loves a Christianity that has aligned itself with the goodness and virtue that the gospel is pointing at. God loves seeing the sin that has polluted hearts and minds being conquered by the implications of the gospel taking root in lives. God loves those things. God is overjoyed by those things. And so James says, go ahead and do those things.

Pursue those things. So this morning when we read these words and when we run these diagnostics on ourselves, we might identify ourselves among some of those five types already mentioned. You might realise, you are the hypocrite. You might be the bad listener. You might be the compromiser.

You may be the know it all. But take heart, the faith that saves you will not be alone. Sooner or later, we will realise the inconsistency. Sooner or later, we will realise the absurdity of having forgotten what we look like. James just says, please, get to that realisation quick.

We read earlier, Jesus saying to his disciples in John 15, you are already clean because of the word I have spoken to you. So James says, the word implanted in you is powerful to save your souls. Believe it, hold it. And Jesus says, the word I'm sharing with you is able to cleanse you, has already cleansed you. And Jesus says simply this, remain in me therefore as I remain in you.

So in closing, as we're commanded to know the word and to do the word like those two pedals, know the word and do the word, they are to be the active and intentional decisions that we make every day as Christians, to know the word and to do the word. But the vitality, the desire to push those pedals, to do the word, to know the word, the desire to do that comes from a heart that has been made alive by the work of Jesus Christ. You are already clean because of the word that is in you. Remain in me as I remain in you. Let's pray.

Lord, we thank you for your word, believing with our hearts and our minds this morning that it is able to save our souls. We thank you, Lord, that it is a holistic word. It is a complete word. Not only does it offer the way of salvation, it offers the path of righteousness. We know that there is a desire deep in your heart, oh God, for us to be aligned with the virtues and the goodness we already know about you.

The virtues and the goodness already displayed ultimately in the work of Jesus Christ. Lord Jesus, you did not come to abolish any of these commands, any of this will of yours, you came to show us how you have fulfilled it. Help us to see you as our older brother and our forerunner. Help us, Lord, to pursue with intentionality, with activeness, a life that reflects what we have already received. Help us, Lord, to remember who we are when temptation comes again, when we are again stuck in situations with family members that drive us crazy, friends who don't know you and live life very far from your commanding words, or in a society that may even direct us and move us in ways we know does not align with you.

Help us, God, first and foremostly to apply these truths to our hearts first. Help us not to be hypocrites, help us not to be compromisers, help us not to be selective hearers, help us not to be proud know it alls. God, help us to live lives that bring you honour and glory, and Lord, produce life and joy in us. In Jesus name, we pray. Amen.