Sermon preached at The Bridge Church, North Vancouver- June 23, 2024
Intro
One of the blessings of being married is that you are continually reminded of where you fall short. And I do mean that genuinely. When you live at arms-length from people, you can convince them that you’re this easy-going, extroverted, altruistic person. But when you live with someone day in and day out, there will be no such deception. Only reality. Your shortcomings get exposed and that’s true regardless of whether your spouse points them out or not. One of my shortcomings that marriage makes especially clear is my listening skills. I’m guessing I’m not the only one. One on one, without distractions, I’m a great listener. But when there are other things on my mind, it’s in one ear and out the other. And then Carolyn will say to me, “you remember we’ve got that thing at school tonight, right?” And I’ll respond, “I’ve literally never heard this before in my life.” She’ll insist, “we talked about it yesterday, and the day before, and the day before.” And I’ll reply, “we did not.” And we go back and forth on that until I give up and admit that I must have not listened well, even while secretly thinking she might be making this all up.
That’s the kind of thing comedians do a much better job than me at making light of. But according to the Bible, it’s not a joking matter. Ultimately, what we listen to and how we listen to it is a life and death matter. That’s where James goes in the next section of his letter that we’re going through this summer.
1. Listening to people
19 My dear brothers and sisters, take note of this: Everyone should be quick to listen, slow to speak and slow to become angry, 20 because human anger does not produce the righteousness that God desires.
James 1:19-20
These first two verses begin with listening in general. I don’t think anyone would disagree that these verses speak wisdom. Most people would read these words and admit, “yeah, that’s good. I’d like to do that.” But we struggle with actually living it out, don’t we? Slow to speak and slow to become angry. Think about that. How incredibly counter-cultural is that at the moment? We are a culture currently driven by all kinds of platforms that give everyone a voice. Whether that’s YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, the goal is to rack up views and likes and subscribers. It’s a source of identity and of validation for people. The problem is, how do you get attention when there is so much competition? You need to be louder, more abrasive, more controversial, bolder. You need to speak immediately into any and every situation, because if you don’t, people are going to be looking for opinions and they’ll turn elsewhere. There’s a phrase I’m sure many of you have heard: the hot take. It’s an opinion generated quickly in response to a current event. By definition, there’s no time to really consider what you’re saying or to examine it from different angles. Your “take” needs to be immediate and attention-grabbing.
This dynamic is played out in all the media we consume, especially the news. In this day and age, you get revenue from generating traffic to your site or video, which increases ad revenue. That means you need click-bait. You need headlines that will engage people’s emotions, and what studies have shown is that negative headlines that stoke fear or anger are far more likely to be shared on social media than positive ones. Or think about politics. Have you ever tried watching a political debate? It’s impossible. Everyone talks over everyone else. You can barely comprehend anything in the chaos. The point is that we are a culture driven by anger and quick speaking.
We do this, and yet we see that the fruit of anger isn’t good. James says that human anger does not produce the righteousness that God desires- righteousness here meaning life as God intends us to live it. Now, there is such a thing as justified, righteous anger. When God is angry, it’s righteous anger driven by a pure sense of justice and love. When we see genuine injustice in the world as God would define it and we feel angry about that, that’s not a bad thing. But let’s be honest: most of our anger is not of that nature. Most of it is driven by self-righteousness or by pride. I’m angry on the road because that person isn’t allowing me to merge and so now I’m screaming (only in my mind, of course, because I’m non-confrontational), “oh you think you’re better than me? You’re so important and your destination is so super important that you need to save this one second from your commute?” I’m angry at my toddler for waking up at 5am because I had other plans for this morning that they’re now ruining. I’m angry at a co-worker because they didn’t do this job and now I’m delayed and I feel like they were inconsiderate towards me. You see what I mean? Most of the anger we experience is not truly righteous anger. It is driven by selfishness rather than love. Therefore, the fruit of it isn’t righteous. It’s bitterness, it’s spite, it’s envy, it’s discord, it’s revenge.
The alternative for James, of course, is being quick to listen and slow to speak and slow to anger. It’s restraining your speech, choosing to ask questions first and try to understand. He’s not alone in this. Here’s Proverbs 17:
“The one who has knowledge uses words with restraint, and whoever has understanding is even-tempered. Even fools are thought wise if they keep silent, and discerning if they hold their tongues.”
Proverbs 17:27-28
Our first response in most cases should be to listen and not immediately respond with our thoughts. Even if we’re sure we’re right, even if we really are right, the only way we even have a chance at convincing the other person will be if they truly feel listened to and understood. If we have a disagreement with someone, we should be able to explain their position so well that they would say, “yes, that’s exactly what I think.” That would be a good goal to aim at in order to de-escalate situations. If Christians were known for that, it would be a powerful witness. It would be light in a dark world.
However, there’s a particular kind of listening that James is advocating, a particular voice he thinks we need to hear.
2. Listening to the word
21 Therefore, get rid of all moral filth and the evil that is so prevalent and humbly accept the word planted in you, which can save you.
James 1:21
James talks about the word in this verse. He did the same thing in verse 18, where he writes that God gave us birth through the word of truth. He does the same thing in verse 22, where he tells us not to merely listen to the word. Word, word, word. What’s this word? Clearly, it’s from God. God gives us birth through the word. He saves us through the word. The word is from God, the word is the message that God speaks to us. That’s why Jesus is called the Word of God in John 1. He is the climax and the fullness of what God reveals to us. But we can also say that the Bible is the word of God, because it is the faithful and inspired written account of God’s message to us. All of Scripture points to Jesus our Savior. To sum up, we can say that the word is the message that God reveals to us through the Scriptures that has Christ and his salvation as its primary focus.
James compares this word to a seed that is planted in the ground. Jesus utilized the same imagery in one of his most famous parables. Jesus imagined that a farmer sowed his seeds all over the place, and Jesus said that the seed was like the word. But just as in Jesus’ parable, James says there are hindrances that keep the seed from growing and bearing fruit.
Weeding
Obviously, this is a gardening illustration. For a few years now, we’ve had a garden plot in a community garden near our home. It’s a box that’s, I don’t know, 3 feet by 6 feet. We have to walk a little ways to the garden, so that’s a pain, and then the plot is so small that at the end of the season, you’ve maybe harvested 20 little cherry tomatoes and 4 half-rotten strawberries, plus all the oregano you could want. It’s a bit underwhelming. However, I grew up in a small Manitoban town in Manitoba with a big backyard. We had a huge garden- tomatoes, radishes, corn, strawberries, carrots. We had rows of corn stalks that grew far taller than me. I have these delicious memories of corn on the cob in the summer. That garden also gave me the first paid job I ever had. The tomato plants would attract these bugs that I discovered just this week are called Colorado Potato Beetles. Nobody told the bugs what they were named, or they wouldn’t have been infesting tomato plants in Manitoba. In any case, my job was to collect these bugs, and my parents paid me 5 cents for every potato beetle I caught. Looking back, those sound like 1940s wages, but I assure you I’m not 90 years old. I was just a pastor’s kid in the ’90s.
Let’s get back to the point. For seeds to sprout and plants to grow, there are certain hindrances you need to eliminate, like weeds and pests. In Jesus’ parable, he talks about anxiety, the deceitfulness of wealth and the desires for other things as weeds that keep the word of God from bearing fruit. James names moral filth and abundant evil as elements that have to be thrown out. I want to talk just for a second about that “prevalent” evil. The word there often means something like “abounding.” It’s like evil is always under the surface, looking to emerge wherever it can. You think you’ve taken care of it in one spot, but it’s spiritual whack-a-mole. Soon enough, evil pops its ugly head out somewhere else. And because of that, it needs constant tending to.
Again, back to the gardening image, you know that gardening requires attention. If you’re not on top of it, weeds will quickly take over. No matter how many you pull out, there will be more in the future to uproot. So here’s the job: look at your life and identify behaviors and thoughts that are contrary to the word of God. For various reasons, you might want to leave those in the garden, but the Bible and experience tell us that you will not grow a fruitful garden unless you are committed to pulling out the weeds that compete with the Word of God, that are crowding out God’s voice in your life. So identify those competing behaviors and thoughts and do what you can to silence them.
Planting
We’ve seen that weeding is important, but most important of all is the seed that is planted, which is the Word of God. James tells us to humbly accept this word. The humility part is crucial. Remember what we said about anger? Our human anger is usually driven by pride. It’s driven by a sense that I am somehow being deprived of something good that I deserve. It’s a hardness of heart that insists that I’m right and that others are continually in the wrong. It’s hard soil, which makes it impossible for seeds to penetrate into the ground, for the word to be heard. I can see that in my own life in so many ways. Biblical humility, on the other hand, is equivalent to a soft heart that is ready and willing to admit our own shortcomings. It’s soft and fertile soil that is able to receive the seed, to hear the word. Humility means I recognize that I’m actually the recipient of incredible, undeserved grace. I’m actually getting better things than I could ever deserve. Humility admits our own weakness, our own lack of wisdom, and our need for help. It turns out that this is crucial when it comes to the word of God.
If I approach God’s word with pride, I will immediately reject anything that doesn’t quite fit with my preconceived ideas. I’ll reject anything I don’t like or am having a hard time understanding. I place myself above the word and say that it needs to submit to me. People do this with the Bible all the time. They do this with Jesus all the time. They love that he says “don’t judge,” so they’ll accept that wholeheartedly. But then they discover that he talks about hell a whole bunch, and they’ll jettison that because they’re just not a fan of the idea. In other cultures, it’s the opposite. They cherish the stuff about judgment because of the wickedness they’ve seen, but they’ll reject the command to forgive. Humility means I accept the word of God and submit to it, including the aspects I’m not sure about, and let it do the work in me God wants it to.
This is of the highest degree of importance when it comes to the centre of Christian faith, which is the cross and resurrection of Jesus. People want to believe they can justify themselves. They think that if they are a relatively good person, God will accept them. Humility means we accept God’s verdict that we are guilty of sin and are deserving of death. Humility means accepting God’s word that salvation comes through Jesus who was crucified and paid the price of our sin. Humility means we submit to God’s grace that we do not deserve, instead of trying to save ourselves.
To sum up this part, it really comes down to how we hear God’s word. His word is what we need to receive. It is what saves us and produces the fruit of abundant life. But to listen well to God means we need to learn to block out some of the other competing noises that twist and distort what He’s said. It also means we need to listen to the entirety of what He says, and not do the selective listening thing where we only hear what we want to hear. Humbly accept the word that God has sown like seed in our lives, because this word brings about our salvation.
Now, we know that James is very practical, because it’s about life! If we really listen to God, if we truly hear the Word, it’s going to be reflected in how we live. Here’s 1:22-25:
3. Obeying the word
22 Do not merely listen to the word, and so deceive yourselves. Do what it says. 23 Anyone who listens to the word but does not do what it says is like someone who looks at his face in a mirror 24 and, after looking at himself, goes away and immediately forgets what he looks like. 25 But whoever looks intently into the perfect law that gives freedom, and continues in it—not forgetting what they have heard, but doing it—they will be blessed in what they do.
James 1:22-25
There are a few things I see as important parts of this illustration James uses. One is that the word of God is compared to a mirror. That’s one of the functions of the Scriptures: to serve as a mirror, showing us what we look like. This is important because we might come to a passage like James 1:19 about being quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to anger, and immediately think, you know who needs to hear this? Sid. I should send this verse to Sid, because man, does that guy need this. He’s the most angry, talkative person I know. (If your name is Sid, I apologize!) Look, it’s not wrong to share passages or even to think about certain people who need to hear certain words from God. But before we do that, especially when it comes to parts of God’s word that are convicting of sin, we should always let it be a mirror in our own lives first. Is there anything in me, about me, that this passage is pointing to? It’s like what Jesus says about someone who is constantly trying to pick the speck of dust out of other people’s eyes even while there is a beam lodged in their own eye. First get rid of the beam and then you might be able to address the speck in your friend’s eye. Humbly accepting the word of God means letting it function as a mirror, showing you more accurately who you are.
Another point to notice is that both kinds of people that James talks about do look in the mirror. Both are hearing the word. Both are spending time in the Scriptures. However, the mark of a maturing disciple of Jesus is not simply reading the Bible and checking that box off of your daily to do list. I recognize this danger when I have some kind of goal in mind. For example, I might have a plan to read a certain number of chapters in a day, or I’m trying to read the Bible within a year, or I’m following some kind of reading plan. Those aren’t bad things, but if you’re not careful, the word becomes more of a task you get through. Unless it really makes a home in you and affects the way that you think, live, and speak, you’ve missed the point. Both kinds of people look at the mirror, the key is what you do with what you saw in the mirror.
Third, notice that the doing of the word is a response to God’s grace in Christ Jesus. I think you even see that in the mention of the law that gives freedom in verse 25. Remember, a case can be made that James is the first book in the New Testament written. He doesn’t have a New Testament. He has what we call the Old Testament, but for the early followers of Jesus was simply the Scriptures. And if you are familiar with your Bible, you probably connect the Old Testament with the word “law.” There are lots of rules there, it’s true. But something that is consistent throughout the Bible, Old Testament included, is that whenever there are instructions, they are given as response to God’s gracious work of salvation.
Think about the 10 commandments, the most famous set of laws in the Bible. Israel receives those instructions at Mt. Sinai at the beginning of their journey to the promised land. However, that gift (and it is a gift) is in response to the Exodus, to the dramatic event where God brought them out of slavery in Egypt by His mighty hand. It was a law that came out of God’s work to set them free. It was a law that was designed to preserve their freedom so that they didn’t fall back into old ways of living that were really a form of slavery. The order is really, really crucial here. We don’t follow God’s instructions as a way of earning our freedom or salvation. Don’t think you can ever earn God’s grace, because if you do, you’ll miss it altogether. We receive the grace of God through faith in Christ, and then we follow His ways as a grateful response to what God has done. He sets us free. Obedience allows us to continue walking in that freedom.
That leads me to a fourth point about this analogy: the importance of pressing on. Verse 25 talks about looking into the law and continuing in it. The word there could also be translated as “abide.” It’s like you’re living in the word and it’s living in you. It’s going with you throughout the day, it’s shaping how you’re experiencing the events of your day. I’ve heard a term that connects well here: the companionship of the word. The Scriptures as understood through the light of Christ becomes like a friend that is with you through the day. This kind of abiding language is all over the place in the New Testament. For example, 1 John 2:24 teaches, “as for you, see that what you have heard from the beginning remains in you”- same word for abide- “if it does, you also will remain in the Son and in the Father.” See that what you have heard from the Lord abides in you. Practically, this might mean memorizing Scripture and repeating it to yourself at various points in the day. Last week, I read Psalm 73, which has this line, “whom have I in heaven but you? And earth has nothing I desire besides you.” I had to come back to that a bunch of times this week, to remind myself where my true longing is to be located. Abide- live, soak, be permeated- in the word of God.
And that leads to a fifth and final point about this. I’ve been trying to caution against a strict legalism that just puts all our focus on doing things by our own power or as a way of gaining salvation. That word abide reminds me of something Jesus says in John 15, where that language occurs a lot. He says, “remain in me, as I also remain in you. No branch can bear fruit by itself; it must remain in the vine. Neither can you bear fruit unless you remain in me” (15:4). Where does the power to obey, to bear fruit, come from? From Christ’s power at work in us. We can’t bear fruit unless we live in companionship with him. And actually, I think that idea is in James 1 as well.
Remember that verse 21 says that the word has been planted in us. It’s not natural to us. Weeds seem to come pretty naturally, but the fruit has to be planted from the outside. Obedience to the word is only possible if it’s rooted in a growing relationship with the Lord. This was what the prophets in the Old Testament recognized as being the issue with the Law: it often wasn’t a heart thing. In Jeremiah 31, God says that a day is coming when “I will put my law in their minds and write it on their hearts” (31:33). Through Ezekiel, God says, “I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you. I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit in you and move you to follow my decrees and be careful to keep my laws” (36:26-27). So yes, we need to not only hear the content of God’s word, we need to live it out. But to do this, we need to be filled by the Holy Spirit and to walk closely in relationship with the Lord, relying on His power for obedience.
Put this all together and here’s the point: don’t just listen to the Word. Genuine hearing means we do what it says. Let it seep into every area of your heart and transform you. Let the word of God be your companion. Lean on God’s power every step of the way to respond to His grace through this obedience.
4. Practical outworking
Like we’ve said, James is intensely practical. So even here, after a vivid illustration, James wants us to see some examples of how this works out.
26 Those who consider themselves religious and yet do not keep a tight rein on their tongues deceive themselves, and their religion is worthless. 27 Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world.
James 1:26-27
I won’t go into a ton of detail about this, because James will come back to these themes throughout the rest of the letter. There are three main areas where “true religion”- in other words, authentic faith in Jesus- will be manifested in day to day life. One is the tongue. James will show us later that what comes out of our mouth is a pretty accurate reflection of what’s in our heart. If Christ dwells in our hearts through the word, it’s going to change the kinds of words that come from us. If what comes out of our mouths is bitter and vile, all our grand statements about our faith are going to be pretty empty.
A second area the mirror of the word will spark change in us is our compassion for the people in the world who need it most. We’re talking about those of lowest status and least power, people like orphans and widows. If we abide in the word and the word abides in us, we will obey the consistent instruction about caring for those kinds of people. After all, it’s what God Himself does. Psalm 68 says that God is “a father to the fatherless, a defender of widows…God sets the lonely in families, he leads out the prisoners with singing” (Ps. 68:5).
And the third area James mentions briefly is that we will not be “polluted” by the world. The world here is not the earth and everything in it. When the Bible uses this language, we’re talking about everything contrary to God’s Kingdom, everything contrary to His ways. It’s everything that is at odds with our allegiance to Jesus. As long as we live in this world, there will be pressures exerted on us to try to get us to conform to the world instead of to Jesus. True faith means we will obey Jesus, resist those pressures, and be willing to pay the price. Again, James will get more into these ideas later, but they’re three brief examples of how God’s word dictates a change in how we live, speak, and think on a day to day basis.
Conclusion
Let’s wrap this up. We generally have a listening problem. This is true with other humans and it’s true with God. We often have closed ears. Other times we hear selectively. Sometimes we have distorted hearing. And other times we hear and don’t do anything with it. We don’t obey. My friends, God wants a relationship with us, because He is love. He has done everything necessary for us to be reconciled to Him through Christ. But to grow in this relationship, just like growing in any relationship, means becoming better listeners. With God, it means that we will hear His voice, submit to what He says, and obey it. By the power of the Holy Spirit dwelling in us, let’s show the world a witness of what it truly means to listen.