James 1:16-26 Act on What You Hear
19-21 Post this at all the intersections, dear friends: Lead with your ears, follow up with your tongue, and let anger straggle along in the rear. God’s righteousness doesn’t grow from human anger. So throw all spoiled virtue and cancerous evil in the garbage. In simple humility, let our gardener, God, landscape you with the Word, making a salvation-garden of your life.
22-24 Don’t fool yourself into thinking that you are a listener when you are anything but, letting the Word go in one ear and out the other. Act on what you hear! Those who hear and don’t act are like those who glance in the mirror, walk away, and two minutes later have no idea who they are, what they look like.
25 But whoever catches a glimpse of the revealed counsel of God—the free life!—even out of the corner of his eye, and sticks with it, is no distracted scatterbrain but a man or woman of action. That person will find delight and affirmation in the action.
26-27 Anyone who sets himself up as “religious” by talking a good game is self-deceived. This kind of religion is hot air and only hot air. Real religion, the kind that passes muster before God the Father, is this: Reach out to the homeless and loveless in their plight, and guard against corruption from the godless world.
Do you find yourself being led by the Holy Spirit toward certain themes in the Word? For instance, around twenty years ago I began to focus intently upon seeking holiness. I recognized that holiness was foreign to this world, yet it is vital to the body of Christ.
Just last year I began to be impressed with the need to ask daily for our needs: bread, love for others, grace, mercy— it is all about that daily relationship with God. From that foundational relationship springs our relationship wth others.
Recently my focus has been on not just reading the Word, but upon doing. Acting upon the living Word, giving breath to what I read, both in thought, word, and deed. And I see that these three themes are threaded together like a fine tapestry woven in love and in service to Jesus my Lord
May we examine our lives and indeed our actions so that all that we say and do reflects Christ, speaks love, mercy and grace, and we do this daily.
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
- Posted in: Blogs
Seeking Holiness 