Doing the Word

The point of James 1:22-25 is abundantly clear. If you’re not familiar with it, take a sec and look it up. We don’t impress God by how much of the Bible we’ve heard. He’s looking for what we’ve done with it. We’re duped if we think our knowledge of the Bible—or our daily reading of the Bible—proves much of anything. (But do keep reading every day!!)

James uses a mirror analogy to make his point; but I’ll admit, his illustration has always seemed too farfetched to me. Nobody sees a mess in the mirror and just walks away! But then I realized that the point of the analogy isn’t just to demonstrate how ridiculous it is to hear the word without doing it. His point is a little more subtle than that.

I think the mirror analogy is more about what happens before we come to the word than after. It’s more about what we want from the word (our motivation) than what we do with the word (our will). We approach a mirror expecting to get some help and make some changes, and that’s exactly how we should approach the word of God. The goal is not just to read the Bible, just like the goal is not just to look into the mirror. The whole point of looking into the mirror and hearing the Bible is to change! The mirror is not the focus; the mirror assists us to do what we really need to do—fix stuff.

So here’s the question for us: what demonstrable changes have you made because of what you heard from or read in the word lately?