FAITH THAT WORKS
JUST DO IT!
James 1:19-27
Last Sunday was the Super Bowl. A couple of years ago I read a story in the sports section of the newspaper about the two teams that were playing. What made that story interesting to me was that it was a story on the spiritual life of several of the players in that game. The story reported that there are some players who read their Bibles as much as their play books.
It went on to detail these player’s commitment to Jesus Christ. I always like to hear stories like that, and I especially like to hear that they are reading their Bibles. I like to hear that because there is so much ignorance concerning the Bible in our society today. So many people today don’t read or understand the Bible. This is not because they don’t have a Bible, the problem is that it is not read.
The most common thing associated with the Christian life is to take God’s word and go through the process of internalizing it. When you first become a Christian you hardly know where to begin. I read through the Bible every year. It’s a big task to take God’s word and internalize it.
That’s what James is talking about in today’s passage. He’s talking to us about three actions that need to be in our lives. They’re all part of the process of taking God’s word and internalizing it.
1. Receive God’s Word
My dear brothers, take note of this: 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. Therefore, get rid of all moral filth and the evil that is so prevalent and humbly accept the word planted in you, which can save you. James 1:19-21
The appeal here is to everyone. All of us are to take this key phrase, at the end of verse 21, accept the word planted in you. That is receiving the word. Before getting to that point, James speaks of four things in life which will create a bottleneck for God’s word moving into our lives if we don’t do them.
a. Be quick to listen
Be quick to listen. An attitude which says, Don’t confuse me with the facts, my mind’s made up! is not conducive to allowing God’s word in. An attitude like that will keep God’s word from being planted. Good listening makes a tremendous difference in the effect God’s Word has on our life.
In 1917 John Foster Dulles was serving on the staff of the American Embassy in Berne, Switzerland. Late one afternoon in April, Dulles’s phone rang. A heavily accented man introducing himself as Vladimir Ilyich Lenin urgently asked to speak to someone at the embassy later in the day. Most of the senior staff had already left and Dulles had an important date with a young woman in an hour. He told Lenin to come to the embassy when it opened at ten the next morning. Lenin protested but Dulles remained firm and hung up the phone. Lenin did not come to the embassy the next morning or ever. He went back to Russia by train and took total control of the Communist revolution. Dulles often reflected later in his career the possible difference it might have made to millions of people had he taken the time to listen to a Russian exile that April afternoon of 1917.
b. Slow to speak
Be quick to listen and slow to speak. I often do that in the reverse, when I should have keep quiet I just let it fly. And you probably have too! One of the things that keeps us from hearing is that we speak to much! You can’t be an effective listener if you are doing all the talking. When God was giving out body parts, he gave us two ears and one mouth — that ought to say something to us. Often, we don’t hear what someone is saying because we are not listening.
c. Slow to anger
Then be slow to anger. Isn’t it interesting that anger is mixed up with listening and speaking? The reason why it is in there is that anger is sort of like sediment in a pond. When I go golfing, I always find the water, even if no one else knew it existed. If you try to fish you ball out, you always find loose sediment there and it muddies the water so you can’t see. Anger is like that in our life. It is there, and I’ve found that I don’t listen to God very well when I’m angry.
Anger and quick speech are closely related because anger is most often expressed verbally. We need to maintain a calm attitude that restrains hasty, improper reactions to what we hear. Freedom of speech involves great responsibility.
Anger must not be taken lightly. Jonathan Edwards, the early American scholar and preacher, had a daughter with an uncontrollable temper. A fine young man had fallen in love with her. He came to Edwards one day and asked to marry her. The father said, You can’t have her. The young man said, But I love her. Edwards said, You can’t have her. The young man said, But she loves me. Again Edwards said, You can’t have her. Why can’t I have her? he protested. Because she is not worthy of you, replied Edwards. ... She is a Christian, but the grace of God can live with some people with whom no one else could ever live.
James says it well, ...man’s anger does not bring about the righteous life that God desires.
d. Clean house
We live in an age characterized by moral filth. Obscenity is big business. Pornography floods the bloodstream of America. The FBI says one out of four 12 year old girls will be raped in her lifetime unless something is done about pornography. More than a million children are sexually abused every year in our country. 300,000 children and young people are used to produce kiddy porn every year. An avalanche of pornography ravages America!
It is especially tragic that the filth can be found in many Christian homes. We must get rid of moral filth and the evil that is so prevalent. Society has moved away from fixed standards. Christians must hold to high moral standards.
Lewis Smedes writes, We are in a crisis of morals... The crisis is the loss of a shared understanding of what is right. Worse, it is a crisis of doubt as to whether there even is a moral right or wrong at all.
Television has helped make the lustful look, casual sex, prostitution and adultery seem normal, while it devalues biblical morality as a remnant of the dinosaur age. Advertising sells its wares by titillating envy, greed, and lust. Godliness is gone as a virtue, evil has become respectable. It has become good to be bad.
I am amazed that we have a statewide safety campaign to buckle up. We have laws in place to punish the offenders. Our lives our precious. If, on the other hand, you take a stand for the sanctity of life, you are treated as the worst kind of human being in the world. We have exchanged the truth for a lie.
The Greek word translated moral filth was a medical term. It referred to the wax build-up in the ear that causes a hearing loss. Moral filth and evil in our lives plugs up our hearing. If you approach the Word with unconfessed sin, you’ll never receive what the clean heart does.
There are no automatics to the Christian life. You don’t go on cruise control in your spiritual development. There is no automatic pilot in the Christian life. All of us, on a daily basis, need to work on being quick to hear, slow to speak, slow to anger and to put away the moral filth and evil. It’s an ongoing assignment.
So take this matter of receiving God’s word seriously.
2. Do what it says!
Do not merely listen to the word, and so deceive yourselves. Do what it says. Anyone who listens to the word but does not do what it says is like a man who looks at his face in a mirror and, after looking at himself, goes away and immediately forgets what he looks like. 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 1:22-25
The second action for the growing Christian in regard to the word is not only to receive it, but do what it says! The Christian can’t settle down into passivity in his life, go into simply a listening mode. Christianity is a life of action.
It’s not critical that you have a theological understanding of the Bible, that you have a linguistic understanding of scripture, that you have a hermaneutical, exegetical ability to look at God’s word. What is important and vital is that you have a working knowledge of the Bible. My real problems in the scripture are not with the hidden esoteric, difficult theological issues. My problems are with the things that are plain where it calls upon me to do them. That’s where I get my problems. It’s the flesh in me that wants to say no.
James suggests that we take a long and continuing look at God’s word. Not a casual look but look intently at his perfect law of liberty that gives freedom. That means we are to examine the word, to carefully investigate the word, and we are to research it. Do what it says!
3. What does that look like?
The third action that James puts before us is the practical application of the word. If anyone considers himself religious and yet does not keep a tight rein on his tongue, he deceives himself and his religion is worthless. Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world. James 1:26-27
James explains what he has in mind in practical terms. Real religion involves these elements to it.
a. Control your tongue
The first practical application of doing the word of God is the control of the tongue. James’s already referred to this in verse 19. We’ll look at this in depth when we come to chapter three. James’ concern was speech. In verses 1-19 James has been addressing the person who’s going through trials, an individual going through stress. One of the things that happens when you’ve got a lot of pressure on you is that you might in a given situation simply erupt. Something will set you off so you will spew out a ton of speech you really wish you hadn’t done.
So when we’re under stress, there’s to be a tight reign on the tongue, control is being asked for. It’s not a good idea to ventilate our rage. The scriptures saying keep a tight reign on the tongue. Is that easy to do? Not if you like to talk alot!
b. Take care of widows and orphans
The second thing that James tells us to do on a practical level is to have social concern. Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress. From James’ perspective these were the two most pressing social issues of his day in which the Christian church dealt. There was no social security program, no private fund raising efforts, no shelters for abused women, and no orphanages in society. Christians therefore developed a concern for the last, the least and the lost. Among the most glaring problems in the social order was what to do with widows and children who lived then, as they do today in many non Christian cultures of the world, out on the garbage heaps of the city.
If James were writing this today I think he would expand this widows and orphans list to include abused children, the mentally handicapped, the physically handicapped, those in nursing homes and prisons, the poor. That’s part of living out the gospel. Especially when we’re under stress.
If we relate that back to verses 1-19 one of the things that happens when we’re under stress is we tend to turn inward and become exclusively concerned with our concerns. One of the things that the Lord wants to draw out of us through His word is into the needs of others, knowing that that is a healing act itself. So, look beyond your concerns to the needs of those whose lot in life is significantly worse off than yours.
Isn’t this what Jesus says? I was sick and you came to me. I was poor and you visited Me. I was hungry and you fed Me. I was naked and you clothed Me. You came to Me. That’s what James was saying. Our faith needs to include that social dimension of being very much aware of those who are the less fortunate and who we have without our power to help.
Mother Teresa was once asked if she ever became angry working in Calcutta seeing the horrible conditions of man’s inhumanity to man. She replied in her very quiet way, I’m too busy loving to expand even one moment of my energy in anger. Too busy loving to be angry.
c. Keep yourself clean
The third thing that James tells us as a practical application of the word is that we keep ourselves unpolluted from the world. The scripture is calling us not to a life of escapism or irresponsibility, but to a life of responsibility and personal purity.
There is a war in our culture between the Christian and the non-Christian lifestyle. I know that you, on a one to one level are much more aware of it that I am, because I spend a most of my time ministering to the body of Christ. I don’t work next to someone who’s swearing and telling all kinds of things that cannot be repeated. Many of you have that kind of experience. You know the clash between the Christian and the non-Christian in the values.
James is saying that in that kind of a polluted world in which we live, where people’s thinking is not straight and where wrong is being called right and what is right is being called wrong, we’re to live morally pure. Unpolluted.
Tell story of pastor whose daughter is now divorced with two small children. The father and husband moved out and it turned out that he was homosexual.
At stake is not only these two little kids but probably a host of other child custody fights in our state between Christian parents and non-Christian parents.
This is not a singling out of homosexuality. God’s word tells us to be unpolluted from all sin. If it is wrong to be involved in homosexual activity it is also wrong to be involved in heterosexual immorality. It is wrong cheat on your income tax. It is wrong to tell jokes to denigrate people of another race. It is wrong to have racial attitudes that are not like Christ. It is wrong to steal from your employer whether it’s the theft of office material or the time on a time card. God is no respecter in terms of sin. He tells us as Christians living in this world that we are to strive to live an unpolluted life.
This doesn’t mean that we are better than everyone else. We’re to recognize that but for the grace of God there go I. But it is to have an attitude from the heart that is humble before God and other people that says this is God’s word. This is the lifestyle that Jesus calls me to. I choose to live it. And the Holy Spirit chooses to give me the power to live it.
God has heavily invested in us. He will do anything to spare us from any moral pollution that is in the world. That is why he sent his son to die in our place. Sin is real. It’s not a psychosis that belongs to Christians. It is separation from God. God holds it to be serious, whether you feel this way or not is immaterial.
God has provided, through the death of Jesus, that we live free from sin. He calls us to live as people of freedom and to be serious about following Jesus. He calls us not just to be saved. He calls us to be converted. He calls us not just to be challenged. He calls us to be changed. He calls us not to be persons who are Christians when we’re in church. He calls us to be Christians when we’re in the world. He calls us to follow him in this world. To receive is word, to do his word and to apply his word.
