If anyone thinks he is religious, without controlling his tongue but deceiving his heart, his religion is useless. Pure and undefiled religion before our God and Father is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself unstained by the world." James 1: 22-27
WOW! Some pretty strong words from God's servant, James, on whether or not we actually live out His Word. A lot of Christians do not. They attend church. They try to do good things. They donate their unwanted items to Goodwill. They sing in choir or volunteer for the food drive. Or both. Not that those things are bad, but do they produce growth...do they draw our hearts closer to Him...do we even do them for the right reason with the right attitude of humility towards God?What James is talking about here is having enough humility to seek to be right with God by doing what He says in His Word and not just knowing what it says to do.
If we're honest, we must admit that we struggle with that.
Doing requires action and sacrifice with the right attitude. But most the time we don't have time for action and sacrifice, and we're too impatient to have the right attitude!
Unless it's sacrificing time to watch our favorite tv show. Or play on Facebook. Maybe surf Ebay for some treasure. Run our kids all over the place to meet commitment requirements that keep us living out of our cars.
That's life, right?
Wrong.
That's absolutely NOT the "doing" that James is talking about OR that God desires for our lives. The doing that we should be about is personalizing our knowledge of God by studying His Word for our own sake. So that we remain humble and remember who we are and Who He Is. That heart felt attitude will motivate us to put feet to our faith in an extraordinary way.
No PhD can teach us that. Only our humble attitude to truly know Him in a right relationship with Him will help us choose doing over hearing only.
Take a look at the warning clearly presented to us in this passage: "deceiving yourselves", "forgets", and "deceiving his heart". That's some scary stuff to me. Because if we don't know Christ on an intimate level, we will easily be deceived, forgetting who we are and Who He Is. Our hearts will be deceived, which leads to a kind of hardening that is not easily changed. And generally, we don't recognize any of that!
And that's exactly how the devil wants to destroy us.
We must ACT...DO...to avoid losing intimacy with God and being deceived by the devil. There is no other way. No degree to save us. Just a relationship.
With Christ.
