Slow to Speak, Quick to Do | James 1:19-26 | Faith That Works

We live in a culture saturated with our own reflections—from mirrors to smartphone cameras—yet we often struggle to truly see our spiritual condition. In this message, we look at James’ challenge to be "doers of the word and not hearers only."

Being a follower of Christ involves more than just "saving the image" of the Gospel in our minds; it requires us to live it out in our speech, our tempers, and our service to those in need. Discover how the "law of liberty" sets us free to live a life that is truly blessed, even in the midst of trial and sacrifice.

 

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Thank you for joining us for this week's sermon from First Reformed Church in Edgerton, Minnesota. Each week, we dig into God's word, trusting that the Holy spirit will continue the good work of sanctification in us. As most of you know, because you're forced to listen to me speak regularly, I often find myself thinking about some abstract things. As I was letting the text that we read from this morning from James ruminate in me this past week, I was walking somewhere and I started thinking about mirrors. What I was wondering about was how often did someone in the first century actually look in a mirror? How often could they see what they looked like? Did the average home have a mirror? Was there a local mirror smith whose job made it possible for people to have a good hair day? I guess I I was imagined that if they wanted to see what they looked like, they had to go down to the local pond, hope it wasn't windy and making a bunch of waves so they could see what they looked like in the pond. What this got me thinking, we can see ourselves Probably more than any other culture in history.

We not only have mirrors all over the place, but we also have a culture with glass everywhere. We have windows everywhere where these windows of stores, churches, whatever, car windows, reflect our image back to us as we walk by. We also have devices in our pockets that have a camera that faces us all the time. We should know better than anybody ever what we look like because we are able to see ourselves all the time. As we look James has to say here in the second half of this first chapter of his epistle, we see a statement about being a doer of the word and not just a hearer. He compares it to someone who looks in a mirror and forgets what they look like. Now, we might think that that statement makes sense to his first century audience because, like I said, mirrors were more scarce than they are now. But we know how this works, too. How often do we look in the mirror, walk away and have to sneak a peek again because we forgot that we were even looking in the mirror, or why we looked in the mirror? As we dig into this passage today, we come from the opening words of James, where we heard that we were to come to trials as joy because God was going to use them to build us up and produce steadfastness in us.

Now, as we continue through this letter, we find James encouraging us to not just say the right words or think the right thoughts. He implores us to do, to actually do what God commands of us. Right away, as we come to verses 19 and 20 that we started out with this morning, we see this spelled out clearly for us. We are to be quick to hear, slow to speak, slow to anger. Because anger doesn't produce the righteousness of God. I'm guessing that I don't need to persuade any of you on the importance of what is being said here. I don't know anyone who would object to this statement that we should be quick to hear, so to speak, slow to anger. But actually doing it, on the other hand, is hard. It's really hard. I think most of us are slow to hear, quick to speak, and we get agitated very easily. Too often, we only listen so that we can find an opening to talk. That mindset is completely contradictory to what James is saying here. It's important to make sure that we take note of the fact that to be slow to speak and slow to anger, this isn't implying that we should just shut our mouths, that we should never express concern about anything.

That's not what James is saying. These instructions here follow this statement to be quick to hear. We need to be deliberate to take in what is being said and then assess before we When we are quick to speak, we're not just quick to speak. We are slow to hear. We don't hear everything. When we do that, what do we do? We fill in the gaps of what we don't hear with our imagination of what we think is going to be said or with our personal perspective. But imagine if the world was a place where we did what is said here. It would It would, most assuredly be a better place, wouldn't it? As I said, it doesn't mean that anger would not exist. There is a place for righteous anger, right? But it would hopefully mean that there would be a lot less unholy, misplaced anger. Of course, there wouldn't be perfect peace, but there would be more acting with wisdom if we actually listened and heard. The statement about anger here, not producing righteousness, also rings true for us. While there is a type of anger that can be just and righteous, we know that's not what James is talking about here.

It's very clear. He's talking about sinful anger that not only does harm when it's being expressed, but we know what happens when there's a lot of anger. It ferments deep down in our souls. It creates hostility and bitterness within us. We know all about this because we've all experienced it in ourselves, and we've seen it happening in others. It's important then that we make sure that we listen, not just to someone who is talking to us or to some report that we're receiving. We need to first and foremost listen to the word of God. The world is going to be filled with anger. The world is going to be noisy. We need the peace of the gospel that passes understanding, and we get that from hearing the word of God. James shows us this when he tells us to put away all filthiness and rampant wickedness and instead receive the word that we have received with meekness. The gospel that comes to us and we receive by faith as a gift from God will do the good work in us as God has promised that it will. But we need to make sure that we're quieting the noise.

That noise isn't just the noise of the world around us. It's also the noise that our self-sinful hearts and minds create in us. Our fallen desires like the filthiness. Our sinful hearts love the wickedness. Those things quickly become static that blocks out the clarity of God's word for us. The noise of the world, the wickedness of the world, That has no power to save. In fact, it brings condemnation. But the word of the gospel brings life. Daily, we need to remember this word of the gospel that tells us that We were dead in trespasses and sins, but God, in his mercy, has united us to Christ, and now we have been brought to life. God has given us this mercy, and he has given us his Holy spirit, and so we know that it's to quiet the noise. But James warns us that there are other traps along our path to spiritual maturity. We can hear the word and we can receive the word with meekness, But then we can miss the point of it in its entirety. We do that when we don't do anything about the word that we've received. The key point of this passage we have today is right here, to be be doers of the word, we are to actually do what we hear in God's word.

When we only hear, James says that we are deceiving ourselves, and that's a terrible place to be. No one likes to be lied to. But it's even worse when you're the one doing the lying to yourself. James says, That's what we do when we don't do what the word says. We tell ourselves we believe the word, but when we don't do anything about it, do we actually believe it? These are really convicting words. He illustrates this idea, convicting us even more by bringing in the idea of forgetting what you look like after looking in a mirror. As believers in the Lord Jesus Christ, it is his word that is to shape what we look like. When we look into God's word, we see what our character should be. We picture ourselves as that type of person. That is what we should look like. But then we step away and we can't remember what we are supposed to look like. We then act out of character from the way that we're supposed to be, from what we say we believe. We know how we would view a person who looks in a mirror and then has no idea what they look like.

We would think that they are unobservant at best or lacking intelligence at worst. But we all see something we're called to do in God's word. We all read something in God's word and agree to it. But then we walk away and we act contrary to what we said we believed. We can so easily do this. We hear the word and then walk around each day without repentance and without change occurring in us. When we do this, we treat scripture No different than a social media post that we scroll past with nothing more than a casual glance. But James calls us to do more than that. We're called to perseverance. We look intently into the law of liberty, and then we are to do something about it. We move then from being just a hearer, and we become a doer. We all like to be listened to. Especially when we're giving instructions. I think we've all given instructions to someone. We assumed that they understood what we were saying. Then later, we discovered when we saw that they were trying to do what we told them to do, that they didn't hear us at all. That's frustrating.

But we are just like that when we step away from God's word and we're not impacted by it. But this is much more important than giving instructions to someone and they don't do something the way we like it to be done. We're not disregarding how someone wants to fold the towels, wax our car, or prepare our food. We're talking about the word of God here. That is the place where we learn how we're to live a life of Holiness that brings glory to God. We need to make sure that we're listening, hearing, and doing. On top of all this, James reminds us of a great truth. A life of doing the word of God is a blessed life. He's We're not speaking of material blessings here. In fact, obeying God's word may bring you persecution and bring you hardship. We just had the admonition to these young men after they made profession of faith. You'll notice they had all the benefits of being among the people of God, full communion. What did it end with? That may include suffering. We have to understand this reality. It may be a blessing that we receive from obeying God's word to suffer.

That's hard for our modern minds to hear. When we think of blessings, we think of material things. But obeying God may cause us to suffer. But There is a blessing there that we know that we're doing the will of God and not the will of man. There's a blessing there knowing that we were obedient to God and didn't give in to the pressure of the self or the world. And living our lives in this way shows that we have an authentic faith. As we see in these final two verses, one of the easiest ways that we deceive ourselves is to think that we are religious because we have a particular view or a particular way we understand things or a particular place that we come on the Lord's day. None of that is wrong. None of that should be neglected. That's not the point here. The point here, the point he's making is you can have all the right understandings of scripture, and you can be in church all the time. But if you don't react according to those convictions, it doesn't mean Anything. James tells us that the purest form of faith before God is to visit widows and orphans and to keep ourselves unstained from the world.

In other words, we care for others more than ourselves, and we don't give in to the seductions of the world. We visit widows and orphans because we understand that God visited us in our spiritual poverty. And so we desire to serve those with physical poverty. And in light of the mercy that God showed to us in forgiving our sin and making us clean, we're called to move away from the things of the world that stain us. Because we've been set free from them. James calls faith that doesn't do these things, worthless. It isn't real. It's a shame. We don't want that to be true. I don't know anybody who wants to be a fraud. I don't know anyone who would like to be called a hypocrite. We want to be faithful to the one who saved us by his grace. I want to close up with two practical ways that we can work towards this goal that James sets before us here today. The first thing that we absolutely have to do is we have to gaze into the mirror, because here we see that scripture is that mirror. It shows us what we are to look like as believers.

That's our mirror. Just like I mentioned with actual mirrors, in our modern time, we have mirrors everywhere. We have no reason not to gaze intently to the words of scripture and know where we are to live. Just like there's mirrors everywhere, we have Bibles all over the place. We have them in our pocket all the time, digitally. We've got more Bibles and access to the Bible than people have had in any time in history. There's no reason that we can't gaze into that mirror that shows us what we're to look like. As we gaze into it, we need to trust that God, through his Holy spirit, is using that word to conform us to the image of Christ. We need to know what we are to look like. If we never look in the mirror, we don't know. Have you thought about the fact that you are dependent on reflection to know what you look like? Whether a pond, a mirror, or the lenses of a camera, you can't really know what you look like without them. You can't really know what you are supposed to look like without the mirror of God's word. So be deliberate to gaze into it.

See the image of Christ there. Study what you are to look like that you might reflect Christ to the world around you. Second, don't just save the image, use it. I'm guessing I'm not the only person who takes a picture on my phone or saves a meme, and then I never look at it again. We possess those images, but we've never used them. They don't do us any good. It just takes up space on our devices. James is warning us of a faith where we just save the information but don't ever put it to use. The law of liberty that he talks about isn't just something to agree with and ascend to conceptually. It's for living. He says the person who is blessed is someone who perseveres and acts. Think about the absurdity of looking into a mirror, realizing that you're covered with mud mud, and then you just walk away satisfied with the fact that you've got mud all over you. The mirror doesn't make you clean. It shows you where you need to remove the mess. We would agree with James that we are to be slow to anger or that we're to care for widows and orphans.

But knowing that doesn't produce righteousness. We grow in faith when we turn to Christ in repentance and faith and and do what God commands us to do. James says that blessings come to the people of God, but it doesn't come in the knowledge. It comes in putting it into action. It's found in the middle of a heated argument. Instead of going off the handle, you remember that you're to be slow to speak and slow to anger. It's found when you know someone who is in distress and you help them, That is where faith becomes real. As the forgiven people of God in Christ Jesus, we know that we have received the word and that the Holy spirit is at work in us. So may we depart from here today and may we be emboldened to trust in that truth and let the grace that he has given us, emboldened us, to live in action. May we, as God's people, knowing that he has saved us, be doers of the and not just hearers. Amen. Let us pray. Great and merciful God, we thank you that your word shows us how we are to be. We pray that we would not just look at it and ascend to the ideas of what your word has to say, but that we would be doers instead of only hearers of your word.

We know that we can do this because your Holy spirit empowers us and indwells of us. May we hear your word with gladness and move towards you in repentance and faith daily, that our lives are glorifying to you and that we might be your witnesses to the ends of the earth. It's in the name of Jesus that we pray. Amen. Thank you for joining us for this week's sermon. For more information about First Reformed Church, head to our Facebook page or website, edgertonfrc.org.

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