I am teaching through James this fall on Wednesday nights at The Gathering and thought I would share some of what I am teaching on here too. Here are just some excerpts from this past week: (note: nothing has been reedited from my notes)
James sees the key to being a person who doesn’t just pay lip service to Christ but a person who does what we are called to do as disciples begins with listening. Listening is truly a gift. Not everyone is great at it, but we all must develop a willingness to listen 1st and restrain our speech, if we do we will find ourselves getting along better with others.
Nobody wants to be around someone who is a hotheaded/temper losing freak all the time. Do things happen in life that make us want to scream and punch the wall, yes, but in those instances we have to remind ourselves that we must listen hard and fast before speaking, because there is the potential that we would say something we don’t really mean, hurt people we love, and sin by allowing our anger to be a stumbling block to others and ourselves.
James commands us to get rid of all the junk, garbage, filth in our lives so that we can live lives of purity and godliness as we strive to follow after him.
You ever been in the shower and the tub starts to drain slow or back up, mine does that sometimes with all the hair that gets caught in the drain! What has to happen in order for you to be able to shower without standing in water? You’ve got to pour some drano or something like that down the drain in order for it to open back up and do what it’s supposed to. The same is true in our lives, if we are going to truly live lives of committed disciples of Jesus Christ, then we must get rid of all the sin in our hearts so that we can truly seek God with our whole heart!
Reread vs. 22-25.
Have you ever been around someone who talked a lot about doing something or doing things a certain way but in reality that never happened for various reasons?
If you and I as Christians read the Bible, here it taught and preached on Sundays and Wednesdays but are never changed and don’t put it into practice then what good is it to us? What good are we to the people around us?
We can’t just be people who encounter the God of the Bible but our lives aren’t changed by that encounter. James says, that’s like looking at your face in the mirror and turning around and forgetting what we look like. Instead of encountering God through the pages of scripture and letting our lives be changed we engage God and walk away as if our lives were exactly the same.
Now I know that many of you guys spend longer than the girls in front of the mirror getting ready and then you walk away from the mirror and find the next mirror you can to stand in front of so that you can check yourself again. What’s that about? Did you forget how you looked over the span of 3 seconds? That’s what James is talking about here.
The contrast is what we need in our lives. We need to look into the perfect law of freedom and be doers of the word and not just hearers. If we hear that God wants us to love our enemies but don’t actually do it we aren’t putting our faith into practice. If we hear that God wants us to show mercy rather than justice but don’t do it then we aren’t putting our faith into practice. If we hear that we need to care for the needs of people around us, especially people who are marginalized (see verse 27, widows and orphans) but don’t do it then we aren’t being doers of the word, only hearers.
If we are going to be serious about living our lives as disciples then we have got to stop just listening to what God tells us to do and actually do it.
The tongue: vs. 26 Controlling our tongues is one of the hardest things in life to do isn’t it?
It may not always be cussing and vulgar language…it may be gossip, or mean/hurtful things that we say to others. We all need to be reminded how powerful our words are! They can build people up or tear them down in a blink of an eye.
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