Turn with me to James chapter 1.
Read James 1:17-27.
James was a most practical writer, and here we see his practicality shine through. We see some the basic ideas of the walk. The Christian life has often been called a walk. You can tell a lot about a person by their walk. Someone who is using crutches may have a broken leg. Someone who is limping has some other problem. Someone who is running confidently and swiftly is probably healthy. Someone who keeps looking over their shoulder is probably being chased or followed. We can tell a lot about a person when we look at the way they walk.
Others can tell a lot about our relationship with Jesus based on our Christian walk. How does your walk measure up today? James offers us some things to look for in our own life to see if we are walking right with Jesus. The first thing is…
I. Meekness
Jesus said, “Blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the earth.” Being meek doesn’t make someone a wimp. Meekness seeks the good of others over the good of ourselves. Meekness is the opposite of malice. When something is malicious it is done with the intent to harm someone else.
There are four aspects to meekness. The first is…
A. A Quick Ear
What is one of the hardest things to do? Listen. Listening is difficult. There are a couple old sayings. One goes, “God gave us two ears and one mouth because he knew that it’s twice are hard to listen as it is to talk.” The other goes, “We have two ears and one mouth because we should spend twice as much time listening as we do talking.” Listening is difficult. Listening is an active behavior. Our brain must be fully engaged to listen.
One of the biggest complaints that people lodge against their doctor is that the doctor won’t listen to them.
What exactly is listening? One definition says listening is “the process of receiving, constructing meaning from, and responding to spoken and/or nonverbal messages.”
Most people say that they are good listeners, but the truth is most of us aren’t. One of the keys in the sales profession is to listen to the customer and see what they want.
Our relationships with others will be so much better if we stop and listen. The same is true of our relationship with God. We must stop and listen to him. Listening, especially to God, requires stillness. We must be able to stop and listen. Psalm 46:10 says, “Be still, and know that I am God.” Often as Jesus taught, he followed up his teaching with the phrase, “He who has ears, let him hear.”
We must be “quick to hear,” as verse 19 tells us. The second aspect of meekness is…
B. A Cautious Tongue
Talking and listening are two things that we cannot do simultaneously. They are mutually exclusive activities. Our brains are amazing. It is incredible how much the human brain can do, but listening and talking at the same time is impossible.
One professor that I had in college encouraged his students to participate in class discussion. He graded on whether or not we participated in the discussion. One caution that he gave was that we should not be excessive in our participation. He wanted everyone to have a chance to be heard. I’ll never for what he said. He said, “If you hear your voice more than anyone else, you are talking too much.” We would do well to apply that to our daily lives. It’s amazing how much we can learn by observing and listening. We don’t learn anything while we are talking.
One scholar put it this way, “The truly wise and godly person in scripture is not the one who always has something to say but the person who listens to others, prayerfully considers, and only then speaks in measured tones.” We must carefully consider what is going to come out of our mouth.
Our words are like toothpaste in a tube. Once toothpaste comes out of a tube, it is impossible to get it back in the tube. Once words pass over our lips, it is impossible to get them back.
In our relationship with God, we must be slow to speak, not for fear of offending God, but for the simple fact that we can’t listen and talk at the same time. We must “be still and know that [he] is God.”
The third aspect of meekness is…
C. A Calm Temper
Whenever someone brings up the subject of controlling our anger, someone else always brings up the fact that Jesus got angry with the moneychangers in the Temple. While it is true that Jesus got angry with the moneychangers, that doesn’t give us license to fly off the handle and get in a rage and go do something that we will later regret. Anger rarely accomplishes anything that God desires.
One pastor put it this way, “Our anger, our vindictiveness, our retribution will not bring about the Kingdom which we claim to be seeking.” Our anger will not accomplish the will of God.
The real problem occurs when we allow anger to control us. Anger in itself is not wrong, but we cannot allow it to control our lives. When anger is controlling our lives, the Holy Spirit isn’t. God is not in control of our lives when anger has control.
We may be righteously angry at something, but we can’t allow that to drive our lives. This week a murderer was put to death in Florida. This man had killed an abortion doctor about ten years ago. The man was rightly angry at abortion. Abortion is murder. There is no doubt about that, and we should be angry that innocent pre-born babies are being slaughtered in our country. That doesn’t mean that we allow that anger to be channeled in such a way that another human being is murdered. Someone who murders a murderer is still a murderer. Killing doctors and blowing up abortion clinics will not accomplish anything productive. If anything, it is counterproductive.
We must be extremely careful how we channel our anger. To misuse it is highly dangerous. The third aspect of meekness is…
D. A Pure Heart
James calls us, in verse 21, to have a pure heart. James is saying here is that we should strip off all moral filth as if we were taking off extremely soiled clothes.
When we come in from working in the yard, we are usually sweaty and dirty. Our clothes are messy with dirt, sweat, and other stuff from outside. Tammy gets very upset with me when I go and plop myself down on the couch with dirty, sweaty clothes. The first thing I do is to take off the dirty clothes and put on something clean.
James is saying that we need to strip away “all filthiness and rampant wickedness.” Any moral impurity must be renounced and done away with.
It is only in a pure heart that the word of God can be implanted and grow. If any of you have ever gardened you know what affect weeds can have on a garden. They take nutrients and water from the good plants. They choke off the sunlight. It’s bad news. In Matthew, Jesus told the story of a man who planted seeds, and some of the seeds fell in an area that was thorny. When the seeds grew the thorns choked off the plants and they died. When our hearts are filled, even partially, with the weeds of moral filth, those weeds serve to choke off God’s Word from growing in our hearts.
James also tells us that we must have…
II. Self-Knowledge
Back in the 1960s and 70s teenagers were often tying to “find” themselves. They wanted to know who they were. They wanted to create an identity of their own. They wanted to know what was possible for them. They didn’t want to settle for the same life that their parents had lived. They wanted to expand their horizons.
God wants us to know who we are and what we can become. God wants us to know what is possible for our lives. Are we doomed to be trapped in a life of sin forever?
A. The Command
The command is given in verse 22. James tells us to “be doers of the word, not hearers only.” We are to listen to the Word of God. That comes through Bible reading and study, as well as church attendance. We are to listen to it and allow it to penetrate our life. It not enough to just listen. There are an awful lot of people in the world who know an awful lot about the Bible. They are experts in Hebrew and Greek. They intimately know the culture of Bible times. They know more about the Bible than just about anyone, but that doesn’t mean they are true followers of God. It is not enough to only listen.
We must be doers of the Word. We must put into practice what the word says. When it comes down to it, we have to do it.
I have a forest of books on the subject of theology. Everyone has their own opinion, and of course they are all right and everyone else is wrong. It doesn’t matter how much we sit and read the Bible and pray or go to church. What matters is doing the Word. So that there is no misunderstanding, James explains for us. In verse 23-25 we find…
B. The Command Explained
James gives an interesting analogy. He talks about a man who looks in the mirror and forgets what he looks like. How many of you looked in the mirror this morning? I did, but the mirror broke. We all look in the mirror everyday probably more than once.
What does the mirror do for us? It lets us see everything. We see our messy hair and the zit on the end of our nose. Have you ever tried to shave or put on make-up without using a mirror? It sure is a lot easier with a mirror.
How many of you know what you look like? One of the neat things about having kids is when they recognize their own picture or reflection. Joey used to point to his reflection in the mirror and say, “Baby.” Now he says, “Joey.” We all know what we look like.
If you comb your hair without the aid of a mirror, it probably won’t look right. And if you’re wondering, I did use a mirror this morning when I combed my hair.
The Word of God is a mirror as well. It reflects what we really look like. It shows us the sinfulness of humanity. It shows how awful we look because of the ravages of sin. Sin has so contaminated humanity that we don’t want to look at ourselves in the mirror. If we want a right relationship with God, we must look into the mirror.
The Word of God is the only thing that can free us from the bondage of sin. James says that the law of God gives us liberty. It shows us our problem, and it gives us the solution.
The solution is not in following the rules, but in allowing Jesus to cleanse our lives.
We must continue to walk in the Word of God. When we have a garden, it not enough to pull the weeds once, we must be ever vigilant to make sure that no weeds come back. When we are walking with God, we must be sure that we don’t allow moral weeds to creep back in our life. It’s not enough to get the problem solved once and think we have it forever.
We don’t comb our hair only once in our life. Now, I’m getting closer to the point where I won’t have to comb my hair much, but that’s another story. Every day, maybe sometimes more frequently, we have to comb our hair. We must daily make sure our relationship with God is right. James says we must persevere, or we must stick to it.
The next thing James turns to in our Christian walk is…
III. Practical Religion
Our relationship with God must be expressed in practical ways. James looks at two types of service. The first is…
A. Useless Service
James says that “if anyone thinks he is religious.” So often in the church we get the notion that we are okay in our relationship with God just because we warm a seat every week.
James says that if can’t control our tongue, our religion is worthless. There are two types of religion. There is external religion, and there is internal religion. James is saying that someone who can’t control his own tongue is practicing external religion. They are going through the motions. They may sing the songs, read the scripture, and they may even pray, but without a heart that is right with God all of that stuff is worthless.
The tongue reveals what is in the heart. If our talk is bad, then our heart is bad. Jesus said, “For out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks.” Whatever is in our hearts will come out of our mouth. When are hearts are filled with the contamination of sin, that will be made clear because it will come out of our mouth. If our heart is filled with the love of God, that will be made clear because it will come out of our mouth.
Having defined useless service, James turns his attention to…
B. Useful Service
Verse 27 says, “Religion that is pure and undefiled before God and the Father is this: to visit the orphans and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unstained from the world.”
We see in this verse a tension that has always existed. The tension lies in our command to be involved in the world and yet maintain our purity of heart.
God’s desire is that we engage those in need. Those in need are not just the orphans and widows, but all those who are downtrodden. Anyone who doesn’t know Jesus as Savior needs of our help. Many in the Church have neglected this because they don’t want to be contaminated by sin.
At the church we used to attend, one of the teens vandalized the church, and someone said, “That’s what happens when you get kids like that in the church.” To that I would say, “Those are exactly the kids that need the church.”
Our other obligation is to “keep [ourselves] unstained from the world.” We have to maintain our relationship with God.
We must have a good horizontal relationship with our fellow mankind and a good vertical relationship with our heavenly Father. One pastor put it this way, “While the horizontal dimension of true religion—caring for the widow and orphans—necessarily involves engagement in the world, the vertical dimension insures distance from the world.”
Conclusion
How can we live a life like this? How can we be quick to listen, slow to speak and slow to anger? How can we strip ourselves of the moral filth that results from sin? How can we go from being only hearers of the Word to being doers of the Word? How can we look into the Word of God and not forget what it says? How can we control our tongue? How can we care for the down and out? How can we remain unstained by sin in the world?
The answer is, “Jesus!” Jesus is the answer to all of these questions. God doesn’t call us to live this kind of life and not give us the power to follow through with it.
Jesus is all-powerful, all-loving, all-knowing, and ever present King of the universe. All we need to do is ask him to help us.
It was Jesus death on the cross and his resurrection from the dead that allows us to receive power from him to walk a walk of purity and holiness. That is what we celebrate this morning by receiving of the sacrament of Communion.
