One of the biggest misconceptions about the Bible is that it’s just another book.
In fact, many Christians treat Scripture as if it’s just a collection of ancient letters and books that inform us about God and religious matters.
While the Bible is certainly a collection of ancient documents, it is also much more than that. It is the very word of God. The Bible is inspired by God, which means He spoke through humans to create these letters and books.
More than that though, God’s Word is living and active. The Holy Spirit uses the Bible to speak to us even today. This is what makes Scripture distinct from any other book.
James tells us in James 1:22 that the power of Scripture doesn’t just come by hearing it, but by living it out.
Scripture has the power to radically change the way we live, but we must take the effort to first read it, and then do what it says.
James goes on to say in verses 23 and 24 that anyone who reads Scripture and doesn’t follow God’s way is only deceiving themselves. We think we are following God simply by reading His Word, but God desires that we live out the truths of Scripture in our own life.
This is what it means to follow God’s way rather than our own.
Take a moment to consider a few ways you can begin to live out the truths in Scripture. Spend some time in prayer asking God to reveal to you an area of your life that needs transformed by His Word. And then, resolve to not just hear God’s Word, but to do what He says as you follow after Him.
James 1:22-24: Do not merely listen to the Word, and so deceive yourselves. Do what it says. Anyone who listens to the Word but does not do what it says is like someone who looks at his face in a mirror, and after looking at himself, goes away and immediately forgets what he looks like.
So in first-century ancient near-Eastern church, most people took in the Word of God by listening, by hearing it read by someone else. But today, we typically take in the Word of God by reading it personally. A modern-day translation of what James is saying might be something like: don’t merely read the Word that you might have an intellectual paradigm shift; read the Word that you might live it in your bones.
Then James, the brother of Jesus, borrows a page from Jesus’s book, offering us a parable that might illustrate this principle. He says anyone who reads the Word and then goes and lives how they would’ve lived otherwise is like someone who looked at themselves in a mirror and then forgot what they looked like. Now the obvious implication here is that to look at yourself in the mirror is of course to make some kind of adjustment about your appearance, to tame a wild hair or to correct some kind of blemish. If you look in the mirror, and notice something off about your appearance, and then go on without correcting it, you might as well never have looked in the mirror in the first place. James is saying something like that. But he’s also referring all the way back to the beginning of the biblical story, when in Genesis 1 human beings are set apart from creation and that we are made in His image. In sin, we forgot what we looked like, in a sense. And that’s what James is saying, that when we look into the Word, and don’t merely understand it in our minds but live it in our lives, we recover our created identity, and we discover again the true selves that God made us to be in the first place. So today, may you not only get the Word read, but may you get it lived.
