At the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II she was presented with a bible and the person who gave it to her said; “this is the most precious thing that this world affords.” True! But for many Christians the bible remains a closed book.
THE CHRISTIAN AND THE WORD OF GOD (James 1:19-25)
The puritan preacher William Gurnall once said; “the Christian is bred by the word and he must be fed by the word.” It is by God’s Word that the Christian life begins. This is the consistent testimony of Scripture. In James 1:18 we read. He chose to give us birth through the word of truth, that we might be a kind of firstfruits of all he created. The same truth is taught in 1 Peter 1:23. The Word of God also has a vital role to play in our ongoing growth.
- THE NEED TO RECEIVE GOD’S WORD
In vrs 21 we are instructed to humbly accept the word planted in you, which can save you. If a child of God is to grow to maturity in Christ he or she will need a regular intake of God’s Word. In 1 Peter 2:2 we are reminded; like newborn babies, crave pure spiritual milk. so that by it you may grow up in your salvation, now that you have tasted that the Lord is good. Any new parent will know the strain of sleep deprivation. It is not long before you are wakened by the shrill cry from the cot. Not great fun! And yet – viewed from another perspective that cry is healthy. It tells you that the child is growing and hopefully once it’s tummy is filled after a feed it will go back to sleep again. Peter says that it is the same with the Word of God. One of my clearest memories of my son, Daniel as a toddler is of a time when I went to answer the telephone and in my absence he got hold of one of my bible’s and started to shred the pages and stuff them into his mouth. When I returned naturally I was horrified. Immediately I thought of Jeremiah 15:16 when your words came, I ate them: they were my joy and my heart’s delight. Job tells us in 23:12; I have treasured the words of his mouth more than my daily bread. If you go for a day without food you experience pains in your stomach. Job says it should be the same with our spiritual food. If we go for any length of time without spiritual nourishment our spirits should start to growl. This is what James is saying in vrs 21. He compares the Word to seed and our hearts to soil. Any gardener knows that soil needs to be prepared before seed is planted. It is the same with the believer and the seed of God’s word. How can we prepare the soil of our hearts so that the implanted word germinates, grows and become fruitful? Well there are a lot of weeds that need to be removed. We are to get rid of all moral filth and the evil that is so prevalent. The Greek word for moral filth was used in the ancient Greek world as a medical term for “wax in the ears.” Sin in the life of the child of God is like wax that deafens him\her to the teaching of the Word of God. Peter says the same thing in 1 Peter 2 therefore, rid yourselves of all malice and all deceit, hypocrisy, envy, and slander of every kind. Like newborn babies, crave pure spiritual milk, so that by it you may grow up in your salvation. Sin clogs up our spiritual ears to God’s voice. Having cleared away the spiritual weeds from the soil in our hearts we could do with some fertilizer to stimulate the growth of the implanted seed. The fertilizer which James identifies is humility. You may have heard the oft quoted cliché. God’s word says it, I believe it, that settles it. This is not quite true. It should read like this. God’s word says it and that settles it regardless of whether I like it or not. That is humility. - THE NEED TO OBEY GOD’S WORD (vrs 22-25)
James compares a man with a mirror to a believer with the word of God. Here is this man who has just woken up and looked at his face in the mirror and then he goes away and immediately forgets what he has just seen. He forgets that his hair was standing out at a ridiculous angle. He forgets that there was this huge blob of shaving foam on his neck. He forgets to run a flannel over his dirty face and cannot understand the strange stares that he receives at work. We can do the same with the bible. We come to it in a hurry. Then we bow our heads for a brief prayer and then it’s off into the busyness of another day without one more thought given to the passage that we have just read. According to vrs 22 a person who reads the bible but fails to obey it is deceived. In vrs 25,26 we are pointed to a better way. Firstly, we are told the man who looks intently into the perfect law that gives freedom and continues to do this . . . will be blessed in what he does. The Greek word translated intently is used in 1 Peter 1:12 to speak about the attitude that the angels display in reflecting upon our salvation. They long to look into these things. The second thing that ought to characterise our approach to God’s word is obedience. But the man who looks intently into the perfect law and continues to do this not forgetting what he has heard, but doing it – he will be blessed in what he does. Notice that we are not said to be blessed in proportion to the amount of bible knowledge that we accumulate. We are blessed to the degree that that we live in obedience to that which we are reading. It is no coincidence that in these verses our Lord likens the Word to a mirror. The bible is a spiritual mirror in which we see ourselves as we really are and the Lord as He really is. As we expose ourselves to the mirror of the Word we see not only the beauty of our Lord and of the salvation he provides but our own personal shortcomings. But it is what we do next that matters. When our consciences are moved by a sermon, or by our daily reading of Scripture we should commit ourselves to doing something about it and then we will be blessed. The problem with many of us Christians is that the Word of God merely arouses our curiosity but it does not change our lives.