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To Do or to Be?

"But be doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves.  For if anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he is like a man who looks intently at his natural face in a mirror.  For he looks at himself and goes away and at once forgets what he was like." - James 1:22-24

James makes the point here of emphasizing that we should be doers, not simply do.  He makes this point to show that being godly should be part of our personalities, the Word becomes who we are and makes up our character.  When you start to BE something, it's more than just doing it, sorry Nike.  I know a lot of people who run, but aren't runners, who lift weights, but aren't weightlifters, but I wonder how many people I know who do church, but aren't Christians?  How many people are deceiving themselves today...deceiving was actually a mathematical term back then for a miscalculation...by merely being content to hear the Word but not work on our personal relationship with God and Jesus?  Being content with a shallow relationship with Him is a serious spiritual miscalculation. 

The man looking in the mirror here is not someone just passing by a mirror in a hallway and taking a casual glance, which I may or may not do on occasion.  To look meant to carefully observe the object you were looking at.  Mirrors during these times were not glass like today.  They were metallic, polished to a high gloss, so they gave off adequate reflections of the object but not a perfect picture like we have today so it took a little more time to gain a clear picture of the image in the mirror back then.

How many of us have been to a revival, a camp, or a worship service where we felt like God was sitting right there on our shoulder and we couldn't wait to run out and tell everybody we saw about Jesus?  I would guess most church going people have been excited like that at some point before.  But how quickly does that excitement fade?  30 mins?  1 hour?  A day?  A week?  Christians are not to walk away from the mirror, out of that life-changing service and forget about it.  We are to act promptly when we hear the Word of God and feel His spirit moving.  Otherwise, we are left just like the man who forgot what his reflection looked like and we let go of the changes and improvements we wanted to make in our own lives from the hearing of God's word. 

Don't just do it, be it.

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