Good morning, church. Our reading this morning is in the book of James, chapter 1, verse 21 through 25. Therefore, having stripped off all filth and the evil that is so prevalent, humbly receive the implanted word, which is able to save your soul. But be doers of the word and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves. Because if anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he is like a man looking at his own face in the mirror. For he looks at himself, goes away, and immediately forgets what kind of man he was. But the one who looks intently into the perfect law of freedom, and perseveres in it, and is not a forgetful hearer, but one who does good works, this person will be blessed in what he does. Amen. Let's pray again. Father, we seek life from you. We know from this passage that your word brings us life. From verse 18, Receiving your word is what gave us. That's how you chose to give us life to begin with and that's how life continues that's how we flourish and grow and and Become alive in you by receiving your word and we think about that Lord even on this day this this sanctity of life Sunday where we cry out to you and hundreds of pulpits and congregations across the country right now crying out to you God you're hearing all these prayers asking that you would please please help us fight for the lives of the unborn and to prevent people from killing their own children and prevent the society from being so accepting of that practice Lord, we, our heart breaks when we think about that and we just, we cry out for mercy from you. Have mercy on this country, Lord, because of this great sin and other assaults on the sanctity of life like assisted suicide or euthanasia or various things that are happening. Those are atrocities, Lord. And if those are serious, if it's a big deal to do things that are an assault against physical life, how much more serious, Lord, when we make assaults against spiritual life, when we do things that would hinder and harm spiritual growth and well-being and life from You? And so, Lord, when we come to this passage and we want to learn about how to receive Your Word and receive life from You, It's an urgent plea. Help us. Help us hear. Help us receive. Help us to put it into practice. We ask this in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ. And we ask that you would do it by the power of your mighty spirit. Amen. One of my favorite moments in Old Testament history is when the Jews first got the law from Moses. He came down from Mount Sinai, delivered the law to them, and in Exodus 24-7 we see their response. It says, Then he took the book of the covenant and read it to the people, and they responded, Everything the Lord has said we will do. We will obey. What a great response that is. We will listen, we will obey. That is the attitude that God desires His people to have with regard to His Word. We've been studying verse by verse through the book of James, and we left off last time at verse 21 of chapter 1, where James talks about humbly receiving God's Word. And we found that your spiritual life and health and well-being and growth, even your ultimate salvation on the last day, depend on you living, having a lifestyle of receiving God's word. Welcoming it into your heart, letting it penetrate. That's how you get life. And that's how you'll ultimately, that's how you got saved to begin with, that's how you're being saved right now, and that's how you're ultimately going to be saved on the last day. So that was last time in verse 21. Now, starting in verse 22, James is gonna expand on this whole concept of receiving the word. What does that look like? What does that actually look like? Because one of the biggest mistakes that we make as Christians is thinking that receiving the word is mainly an issue of learning. And we get content with just learning. We get so wrapped up in learning information from the Bible that we don't put adequate energy into putting it into practice and doing it. So James tells us, yes, verse 21, devote yourself to receiving the word. But, verse 22, be doers of the word and not hearers only. That's the Holman translation. I'm not using the NIV today just because the NIV doesn't do it literally enough and I think this is a better translation. So, in this paragraph, so be hearers or doers of the word, not hearers only. He wants us to understand that receiving the word is much more than just hearing. It's much more than just hearing and understanding. It's more than hearing and understanding and believing and accepting and agreeing. It's more than all of that. Receiving the word is hearing and understanding and agreeing and then doing. Do it. And if you stop that process short of actually doing, then it's worthless. It's worthless. Because that's the whole point. You can't get in shape by researching fitness. You can't get rich just by reading books about investment. You actually have to go out and make the investments. You can read every resource out there about building and construction and you're never gonna have a deck in your backyard unless you start swinging a hammer at some point. And the Christian life is the same way. We haven't received God's word until we put it into practice. Now, this is a really dangerous moment in this sermon. because you already know that, right? If you're a Christian, you're sitting there, you're thinking, of course, obviously. I mean, every time I read the Bible, I wanna put it into practice, I do that every day. And if you're a Christian, you do, you do that every day. If you didn't put God's word into practice at all, you wouldn't be a Christian, you couldn't be, because you wouldn't be, you wouldn't have come to Christ and you wouldn't have believed. So you gotta put it into practice. If you're a Christian, you're doing this. Every Christian knows this. And yet, if you look here, James is most definitely talking to Christians. This is written to believers. He's talking to brothers. So don't look at this passage and think, well, this doesn't apply to me because I'm putting God's word into practice every day. This doesn't have anything to say to me. I already know this. Don't think that way. Every Christian knows this, but what James is doing here is he's giving a basic wisdom principle that can be applied in varying degrees in your life. Every Christian is already trying to put God's word into practice every day, but one of the most common errors we make as Christians is we get out of balance with the hearing and the doing. the time and effort and energy we put into hearing and learning compared to the time and effort and energy we put into the doing doesn't match, it's out of balance and so we can get so caught up with learning sermons and studying and reading books and packing information into our heads that we fall into the error of thinking that we're making spiritual progress just because we learned something from God's Word even if we haven't put it into practice yet When we do that, James wants us to know we're actually doing damage to our souls. You do damage to yourself every time you learn something from God's word and you don't put it into practice. And the damage you do is, he calls it self-deceit. Look at verse 22. But be doers of the word, not hearers only, deceiving yourselves. Every time we listen to God's word but we fail to put it into practice, it has a self-deceiving effect on us. It tricks you. It tricks you into thinking that mere listening is of some value. And that that's spiritual progress. When you learn something from the Bible and you learn something that you need to change in your life from the Bible and you don't make the change. That feels like spiritual progress. It feels like, just because I learned it, I'm making spiritual progress. But if you don't make the change, then it ends up deceiving you into thinking that that's what spiritual progress is. It's just learning more. And that's why there's so many people in the church whose character is just exactly the same as it was 10 years ago. It's almost identical to what it was 10 years ago, but if you ask them, how's your walk with the Lord going? They say, oh, it's great. Making lots of progress. I'm really learning. I'm really growing. And they think that because they think learning itself equals spiritual progress. So, what's the solution? If you're out of balance in this area, lots of learning, not much doing, what's the solution? I was in a church once where the pastor was, he just really preached these really basic, simple, shallow sermons, and you never really learned anything from the Bible, you didn't already know. Every week it was like that, and I talked to him about it once, and I asked him, why do you do that? I said, why do you do that? And he said, it's because, and he's pointed to this principle. He said, I don't want to create a bunch of Pharisees in this church whose knowledge is way out ahead of their doing. I want that to get out of balance. Now, I applaud that pastor for wanting to make sure the scale doesn't get out of balance with hearing and doing, but he's, in trying to fix the problem, he's addressing the wrong side of the scale, right? He's trying to reduce the learning. If there's too much learning and not enough doing, you don't fix that by reducing the learning, you fix it by increasing the doing, right? And that's the solution James gives us. He doesn't say, stop being hearers, stop hearing so much. He doesn't say that. He says, be hearers and be doers. Knowing and doing are like, you can think of them like two pedals on a bicycle. You ever tried to pedal a bike that only had one pedal? That does not work very well. You've got to push here and then here. This side, this side. Listening, doing. Listening, doing. Think of it that way. You push one, then you push the other. If you only have one pedal, it's not going to work. But some people, they just want to push one of the pedals. Like some people, they just want to push the doing pedal. You know, I don't want to read. I don't want to study. I'm out of school now. I'm not the academic type. I just want to love people and serve people and worship God and I don't want to do all this study stuff. The problem with that is you don't know very much about how God says to behave. You want to behave the right way, but you don't know how because you're not learning. You don't know what God requires or what a holy life looks like. Just to give you an example, a friend of mine called me just last week and he told me, he said, Daryl, I have gained so much victory lately over my lust problem because I studied Ephesians 5 and I learned about how you can overcome lust through gratitude and I never understood that for all these years I never understood how you can use gratitude to defeat lust now I understand that and I'm having all this victory that's just an example of how how if you're trying to do the word without hearing the word first it's not gonna work you need instruction from God's word to be able to do it So pushing the doing pedal only, that won't work. But neither does pushing the learning pedal only. And that's the point that James is getting at here. There are some people that all they want to do is push the learning pedal. They just want to study. They just want to learn. They go to conference after conference, listen to sermon after sermon, and they'll go to a retreat and they think, man, I grew so much this last weekend at that retreat. Oh really, you grew? What do you mean you grew? Well, I learned all this stuff. And they think that just because they're learning, they're growing. And so they learn and learn and learn. They keep pushing that knowing pedal and that knowing pedal. And they're learning and getting information. And man, they can ace any theology exam. They know more things about Ezekiel than Ezekiel knew. And they just, I mean, these people, they're like walking concordance. They know so much. And yet, their anger problem is right where it was five years ago. No progress. Lots of knowing, not much doing. They're like, I know the Greek word for love your wife. Great. Why does your wife look so miserable? I mean, are you putting it into practice, all this information you have? You can't do the word without knowing the word. And there's no point in knowing the word unless you do the word. Pedals on a bike. Hear the word, do the word. Hear the word, do the word. You got up an hour early before work to study your Bible. Excellent! Fantastic! But is your life different? Are your relationships different now? Is it affecting your speech today? Are you serving people more? Are you loving people more? Or did you just listen? one of the best insights I've ever heard about how to do your daily Bible reading came from Sam just a couple months ago he told me he said whenever you finish your devotions in the morning at the bottom in your notebook or on a piece of paper write today I will then finish the sentence with some specific thing that you're gonna do today to put into practice what you just learned from God's Word today I will How many times do you read your Bible in the morning and you don't accomplish anything other than advancing the bookmark? And there's just too many Christians that think that's progress. If I can just get that bookmark, keep that bookmark moving, I'm doing good. If your daily devotions don't include an action plan, they're incomplete. And the more specific the plan, the better the results will be, the more helpful it'll be. You know, Proverbs, the book of Proverbs has a lot to say about making plans. There's wisdom in making plans. God wants us to plan. Planning is important, and you understand that if you do any kind of project, right, or business, or building something, or a vacation, all kinds of things that we do, we plan them. We know you've got to plan in order for it to work out. But how much more important, if those things are important, how much more important to plan your spiritual growth, to plan how you're going to put into action what you've learned from God's Word. Think about it. So instead of, you read your Bible, instead of saying, man, I read Philippians 2, I need to be a servant. I read about Jesus watching the feet of the disciples. He said we need to follow that same example. I need to be more of a servant. I need more of a servant's heart. I'm going to try to serve today. Instead of that, say, Today I'm going to do at least three specific actions of servanthood that I wouldn't normally have done. Loving service. And I'm going to write them down in my journal just to make sure I got it done. And I'm going to train myself to get in the habit of doing that. And here's my plan. Instead of saying, well, man, I've got to use my mouth to uplift people instead of tearing people down all the time. That's great, but how about being more specific? Today I'm gonna say at least five uplifting things to build people up. And I'm gonna jot them down when I say them, so I can develop a habit of doing that. Or it could be something as simple as, you know, you read your Bible, maybe you read Psalm 119, and you're like, man, this guy loves God's Word. I wish I had that kind of desire for God's Word like this guy has. My passion for the Scriptures is kind of weak compared to this. I wish it were more, but I don't know what to do. I don't know how to increase it. So here's what I'm going to do. Today I will call my prayer group leader or a biblical counselor or pastor or somebody, and I'm just going to ask the question, what are some practical steps I could take to increase my passion for God's Word? And I'm not going to eat a meal until I've made that phone call. Just a plan, just some specific plan. And you can do the same thing with sermons. You listen to a sermon. You know, the Q and A that we have, the question and answer time at the end of the sermon each time, that's a perfect time for you to just pull your bulletin out and write, or get a notebook and say, this week I will. And just write out specifics. What are you going to do? Make it as specific and measurable as possible. How are you gonna put God's word into practice? Now, for some of you that sounds legalistic. If that sounds legalistic to you, I would suggest you might be confused about what legalism actually is. I really think confusion on what legalism is, is one of the biggest culprits in preventing people from being doers of the word. Because they think anything that's specific is automatically legalistic. Coming up with a specific plan of how you're gonna put God's word into practice, how you're gonna obey God's command is not legalism. That's not what legalism is. Legalism is when you impose your plan on someone else. That's legalism. Or when you depend on that, your performance in that plan to maintain favor with God instead of depending on Christ. That's legalism. But it's not legalistic to see something in God's word and make specific plans of how you're gonna walk it out. And I'm not suggesting here that this is all there is to spiritual growth. All you have to do is make a plan, and it'll work. I'm not saying that. Sometimes you decide to put a principle into practice, and you say, today I will, and you try and do it, and it doesn't happen. And you try again tomorrow, and it doesn't happen. And you keep trying. In other areas, you try it, and it works. But in this area, you keep trying, and it doesn't work. And so, you gotta figure out what's clogging up the works here. What's the problem? And you gotta deal with some heart issues. And you gotta find out, well maybe there's an out of control desire that's messing me up. Or maybe there's some kind of idolatry in my heart. Maybe there's some wrong attitude. Or maybe there's some misconception about the nature of God. Or a lack of understanding of one of his promises that's preventing me from having success in this area. And when that happens, go ahead, address the heart issue. You gotta do that. You gotta get that out of the way. so I'm not saying that that obedience is only a matter of just deciding to do something specific but what I am saying is deciding to do something specific is a crucial part deal with the heart issue yes but also make some plans to take some action some specific action and live it out hear the word do the word hear the word do the word or to put it in the words of the great theologian Tracy Ferguson, listen and obey. That's what she always used to say to our kids. Whenever she would discipline the kids, if she would give them the spanking for disobedience, she wanted to make sure they understood this is because you disobeyed, you're getting these spankings. So it would always be three swats, listen and obey, you know, every time. And it worked, they got it. They started to... Although sometimes I wonder if our kids ever sat back and thought, You know, I totally see the listen part and the obey part, but does there really need to be a swat for the word and? I think that just helps with the rhythm. Anyway, she just wanted him to understand, this is about obedience, listen and obey. She did that for years, and so I just hear that. Every time I read James 1, 22 to 25, I just hear Tracy's verse. Isn't that exactly what James is saying? In this whole text, he's saying, don't be hearers of God's word only, but doers, put it into practice. Basically, this is God just looking at us and saying, listen and obey. If you can remember those three words, you pretty much got the message of this passage. And Tracy wasn't actually the first one that came up with that phrase. It dates back to actually 1500 B.C. when the people of Israel said it to Moses in Deuteronomy 1527. They told Moses, Moses, you go near and listen to all that the Lord your God says and then come back and tell us whatever the Lord God tells you and we will listen and obey. This is our attitude. That's the posture that we're to have when we approach God. Speak, Lord. Speak to me. Teach me. Open my eyes and I will listen and obey. That attitude is so supremely pleasing to God. He loves that. He loves that. Look how he responds in the next verse. Verse 28, when they said that, we'll listen and obey. The Lord said to me, I have heard what this people said to you. Everything they said was good. Oh, that their hearts would be inclined to fear me and keep all my commands always so that it might go well with them and their children. God is just saying to Moses, I hope these people keep that. Don't let them lose that. Whenever we have a heart that says, I want to listen and obey God, God is in heaven saying, don't lose that. Hang on to that. That is a great attitude. I want so much for you to keep that attitude because I want to be able to keep blessing you. And we'll find next week what that's all about, the blessing. God loves that attitude, which explains why Jesus went around saying that all the time. I mean, Jesus, this is a big theme in Jesus' teaching. He's taught this a lot. Remember last week I told you that Peter stole a lot of his material from James? Well, James stole all his material from Jesus. And it's easy to see that in this particular context because he used similar words. If you look at verse 25, James 1.25, see if you can pick up on any similarities between James and Jesus here. Here's what James says, the one who is not a forgetful hearer but the one who does good works, this person will be blessed. Now Jesus, Luke 11.28, blessed rather are those who hear the word of God and obey it. or in John 13, 17, if you do these, or if you know these things, blessed are you if you do them. A blessing comes from hearing and doing. Or Matthew 7, you may want to turn to this one, because this is a pivotal one. In Matthew 7, the end of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus preaches the whole Sermon on the Mount, and then he closes with, this is his closing paragraph of this sermon. And here's what he says. therefore everyone who hears these words of mine and does them, he's a doer of the word, he's not just a hearer, it's like a wise man who built his house on the rock. The rain came down and streams rose and winds blew and beat against that house and yet it did not fall because it had its foundation on the rock. But everyone who hears these words of mine and does not do them, he's a hearer and not a doer, he's like a foolish man who built his house in the sand. The rain came down and streams rose and winds blew and beat against that house and fell with a great crash. Now that passage, what's the difference in that passage between the wise man and the foolish man? Your first thought might be, well the wise one had the word of God and the foolish man probably didn't. But that's not the case. Look at how the wise man is described in verse 24. Jesus describes him, he hears these words of mine. Now look at the description of the foolish man in verse 26. What does it say about him? He hears these words of mine. The knowledge, these two guys' knowledge of God's word is identical. It's described in identical terms. They both hear. The only difference is one of them is a doer and the other one's not. It's the doing part. Now raise your hand if you remember the Sunday School song that went along with that song. You know that song? Wise man built his house upon a rock. Remember that one? Wise man built his house upon a rock. That song, I heard this story last week of this, a true story of this woman who she came, and her ministry was she would come and clean the church every week. So every week she'd come and clean the church. She'd bring her little son with her. And he would help her clean. And you could always tell when they're in the building cleaning because that little kid would sing that song. That song. No other song. Every time, this song, while he was cleaning. Now, I don't know if this kid just has like mad hermeneutical skills somehow where he understood, but there isn't a more fitting song to sing, there isn't a more fitting passage to sing about while you're serving in the church than that song, which is about being a doer of the word. That kid's being a doer of the word and he's singing about being a doer of the word. I don't know if he knew it, but he was building his house on the rock while he was singing that song, cleaning the church. Such a basic principle, and yet so easy for us to forget. I mean, how often do we drift in just hearing, hearing, hearing, and we forget about doing? Picture this, picture a guy, he gets up in the morning and he writes a little note to his kids to remind them to do their chores before they go to school. So the note says this, dear kids, Don't forget your chores, especially the trash. Today's trash day. So make sure you go through the house, empty all the wastebaskets into the garbage can in the garage, and then take the garbage can from the garage out to the curb because it's garbage day today. So do that before you leave for school. Don't forget. I love you kids. Have a great day. See you tonight, Dad. Gets home from work that night. Dad comes home. He pulls up. No trash can out on the curb. walks in the house, wastebaskets are all completely full, trash overflowing all over the floors, trash everywhere. Okay, family meeting, kids, did you get my note? Oh yeah, dad, it was amazing. I mean the prose, the punctuation, the use of imagery, it was just the greatest note on trash removal we've ever read, ever written. And that part at the end about your love for us, oh, Dad, that's the interpretive key to the whole note. It just moved us to tears. We love you too, Dad. The fact is, we were so inspired by the note, we didn't even go to school. We spent all day just studying that note and removing it. We studied about trash removal. Did you know it reminded us of the people of Israel in ancient Israel in the Old Testament? Did you know they had to remove the trash from the camp? It had to be taken outside the camp because that's a picture of sin. It's a picture of holiness. Trash removal is a picture of holiness. And it called to our mind Paul in Philippians 3. where he talks about his former righteousness, his self-righteousness as a Pharisee, and he says, now I consider it rubbish. Dad, that's trash! And we were just so convicted about the need to get the word out about how to think about trash removal in a gospel-centered way instead of a legalistic way. And so we started a website, and we've actually launched a ministry. And meanwhile, Dad's looking around, and he's knee-deep in trash. Now, were those kids honoring his note? No. No, why? Because they ignored the purpose. God wrote us a note. It's got a purpose. Every passage in there has a purpose. Should we listen? Yeah. Should we study it? Should we memorize it? Should we read books about it and listen to Psalms? Absolutely. But only so that we can do it. so that we can honor God by fulfilling the purpose of this note that he's written to us. So how's that done? I mean, what insights can we gain from this particular passage, James 1, 22 to 25, on how to become more successful in putting God's word into practice? Well, if you're the type who you wanna do this, you really wanna get better, you wanna put it into practice, you wanna be a doer of God's word and do better at that, you're gonna have to defeat enemy number one. And enemy number one, when it comes to putting God's word into practice, is forgetting. That's the biggest problem. Just forgetting. That's what he talks about the whole rest of the passage. Verse 23, because if anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he's like a man looking at his natural face in a mirror. For he looks at himself, goes away, and immediately does what? Forgets. What kind of man he was. You can underline the word forgets there, because that's the key. The problem here isn't lack of willingness. It's not lack of knowledge. It's not lack of understanding. It's not even lack of resolve. It's just lack of remembering. He forgot. And the picture James paints here is actually kind of funny. It's a comical picture. I mean, who does this? You're getting ready for church in the morning and you look in the mirror and you're like, okay, I guess my hair's a modern art sculpture now. I guess I gotta deal with that. And I got a little breakfast in my teeth there still, I can see that. Flies down, okay, I'm gonna have to take care of that for sure before I go. And you get all this data and this stuff that needs fixing and then you step away from the mirror and instantly it's gone. And you just go to church that way. I mean, has that ever happened to you? You just show up here at the prayer group in your pajamas, and your prayer group's like, what's the deal with the pajamas? Oh yeah, you know, I noticed that in the mirror this morning, I noticed that, I just have a memory problem. No, I mean, a lot of us have bad memories, but usually it's not that bad, right? And so James is giving us a ridiculous illustration here, on purpose I believe, to show us how ridiculous it is when we do that same thing with the mirror of God's word, which we do all the time. physical mirror shows you what's wrong with your face, biblical mirror shows you what's wrong with your heart and so often we sit here in a sermon and we're just like, wow, I gotta fix that, I need to address that, my fly is really down in that area, I gotta take care of that and the second we hit that parking lot, poof, it's gone and we don't think about it again until seven days later when we're sitting here, oh yeah, that's right, I was gonna do that and it's not that we haven't learned the information, it's there Very often, if we took a test, we could ace the test. It's there. See, here's the thing you need to know about forgetting. There's different kinds of forgetting. This is crucial to understand this. One kind of forgetting is total inability to recall the information. Like, you know, who's that guy? I can't remember his name at all. It's gone. That's one kind of forgetting. That's not what James is talking about here. What he's talking about here is a different kind. where it's not, it's in your memory banks, and you could recall it, you could easily recall it if you tried. It's right there. It's just that it doesn't come to mind at the moment it needs to come to mind. You know that kind of forgetting? This is the honey, would you stop on your way home from work and pick up a gallon of milk kind of forgetting. You know what I'm talking about? You give me blank stares. Where you remember it, If somebody asked you on your drive home, pop quiz, what did your wife ask you to do on your way home? Oh yeah, I'm supposed to get, I mean, no problem. You'd say, oh yeah, I'm supposed to get milk. If something reminded you. The problem is, you think about it 10 minutes before you pass the store, again, 10 minutes after you've passed the store, just not while you're passing the store. I'm the only one, I guess, that does that. It happens. This is why your kids come home with their homework still in their backpack. If somebody asked them, are you supposed to turn in your homework? Oh, yeah, I know, I am. But it just doesn't come to mind while they're at school. That's the kind of forgetting that James is talking about here. There are so many principles from God's Word that we know them. We know them. We got them down cold. I mean, we could easily teach a class on them. We got them down. But they just don't seem to come to mind at the moment when we need them. You know for a fact God has graciously forgiven an infinite debt of my sin that I owed, and now He's forgiven me. You know that. I mean, we all know that. And yet, think of how many situations in your life would have been a lot different if that fact would have sprung to mind at the right moment, like when somebody's sinning against you, and that happened to pop into your mind. Think of the most helpful principles that you've learned in sermons and in Bible studies and imagine how different your life would be if those principles, some of those principles would spring to mind right at the moment when you need them. This kind of remembering, the kind that brings the right thought to mind, to the front burner of your thinking at the right moment, that kind of remembering to where you think of it right when you need it instead of 10 minutes later when it's too late, That's one of the most crucial elements of living the Christian life and spiritual growth. Learning how to have that kind of remembering and the lack of that kind of... When you have the lack of that kind of remembering... and things aren't springing to mind and it's causing some spiritual problem in your life. It's causing you to fall to sin over and over. The solution isn't necessarily learning more principles or learning different principles. The solution might be just to find a way to get that one principle you already know that'll work just fine if you think of it to come to mind at the right moment and be in your conscious thinking. There are some Christians who are, I mean, they're reading book after book, going to counselor after counselor, doing one study after another, looking for more and more answers. They say, I want to go deeper. I want to go deeper. And they don't realize the answers that they already have would work great if they could just think of them at the right moment. And so often, we're like a guy who goes to the optometrist every day for a new prescription because he just can't remember to put on the glasses that he got yesterday. now please don't hear me saying that we need to learn less and listen less and study less that's not what I'm saying very few people are spending too much time studying God's Word we don't need to learn less we just need to learn better we need to get the go ahead and get the new prescription but then remember to put on the glasses and that's what James is trying to help us learn how to do and you see this everywhere, God is always reminding us of this. How many times in scripture does God, do you hear God say, don't forget, don't forget, remember this. I mean, just in the book of Deuteronomy, chapter four, verse nine, he says, be careful and watch yourselves closely so that you do not forget the things your eyes have seen or let them slip from your heart. Don't let that happen. In fact, he even gave them some memory cues, some aids to wear on their clothing. So he said, put these tassels on your clothing just to remind yourself. Numbers 15, 37, you will have these tassels to look at so that you will remember all the commands of the Lord that you may obey them. You get that? Remember in order that you may obey. How do I obey? By remembering. Verse 40, then you will remember to obey my commands. You can't obey without the remembering. And so God is constantly reminding His people, remember, remember, don't forget, don't forget. Just to give you a sampling in Deuteronomy, I read you the one in chapter 4, chapter 5 verse 15, remember that you were slaves in Egypt and that the Lord your God brought you out chapter 7 verse 18 remember well what the Lord your God did chapter 8 verse 2 remember how the Lord your God led you 9, 7 remember this and never forget 6, 12 be careful that you do not forget 15, 15 remember that the Lord redeemed you 16, 12 remember 24, 18 remember verse 22 remember then what happened? Psalm 78 11 they forgot they forgot what he had done Judges 8.34, they did not remember the Lord their God who had rescued them from the hands of all their enemies. You know how long it took the Israelites to forget the whole Red Sea thing? I mean, the Red Sea, that's pretty big. You know, they're going through, you pass through a sea that's standing, you know, it's walled up, dry ground, you're escaping from enemies, Egyptian army is there, they're pursuing you, all of a sudden it crashes down on them, they all die, you're standing there fine. Okay, that would like register in your thoughts, right? How long did it take them to forget that? Three days. Three days later, they come to a place, they don't have good water, the water's bitter, and they start grumbling, and they're just like, oh, what are we gonna do? Like, you know your God has a little bit of power, can you think back three days? They forgot. If you read Psalm 106 and you get to verse 12, Psalm 106.12 sounds like, man, these people are doing great. I mean, I'd love it if everybody's doing this good. Psalm 106.12, they believed His promises and sang His praise. That's pretty good, right? Faith and worship? I mean, That's excellent. Seems like if you've got those two things, faith in God and heartfelt, joyful praise and worship from the heart, you're doing pretty well spiritually, right? But not even faith will be enough for you if you forget what God has done and His promise. Look at the next verse. They have all this faith, they have all this worship, but verse 13, but they soon forgot what He had done and did not wait for His counsel. How often are we like that? So few steps between our singing and our sinning. We're worshiping, then we're forgetting. I just think of how many times I've sat in this room and been moved to tears in corporate worship, praising God with all of you, and thinking about some marvelous truth about God, and just moved to tears, and a few hours later, it's the farthest thing from my mind. In the middle of the week, I'm walking through my day. I'm just walking through my day, all of a sudden temptation hits. And at that moment, years of theological training just evaporates. And at that moment, I can't think of a good reason to follow God's way instead of the way of sin. After all I've said to you, all I've learned, suddenly I'm just like, looks like the sin is a better option. I mean, we forget. Every Christian struggles with this. Even David had to preach to his soul and call upon his soul not to forget Psalm 103. Forget not his benefits. And it was the last thing God ever said to the people when he ended the Old Testament. Right before the 400 years of silence in between the Old Testament and New Testament, last chapter of the last book of the Old Testament, Malachi 4-4, remember the law of my servant Moses. Don't forget. And so it's no surprise that when the Messiah does arrive, he goes around saying things like, John 16, 4, I have told you this so that when the time comes, you will remember. And I could go on and on. It's such a huge theme in scripture. And it makes perfect sense, right? I mean, what would be better, to learn 100 things and forget 95 of them, or to learn 10 things and remember all 10? Work hard at learning. Learn as much scripture as you possibly can, but also work hard at remembering it so you can do it. Work hard at getting those principles so deeply ingrained into your belief system and so integrated into your belief system that it controls your outlook and your feelings and your attitudes. Every time you learn some new truth from scripture, The goal is to start making connections between this new truth and all the other stuff that I already know to be true, all my other beliefs. And what are the connections? And you keep making those connections until this new truth becomes so integrated in with all your other things that you believe that it becomes like your belief in that truth becomes like your belief in gravity. Think about your belief in gravity. You know all about gravity, right? And it controls the way you think, it controls the way you feel. Over the years you've experienced the reality of gravity in all kinds of different contexts, right? Tripping and falling, dropping the pencil, whatever. You've experienced it so much that now your outlook, your belief in gravity defines your outlook and the way that you think about things and the way that you feel about things. So that it actually, without you even having to consciously think about it, You take it into consideration in the way you operate, don't you? In every single thing you do. You drink a glass of water, you're taking gravity into consideration, but you're not thinking about it. You're walking through the woods, you hear this big crack, and you look up, and way up there, there's this huge branch that just broke off right above your head. You don't look up at that thing and say, What did my seventh grade science teacher say about these? It's like 9.8 meters per second squared acceleration. That thing is gonna be coming down at me and it's about that far away. I think I got about a second and a half before I'm crushed to powder. You're not doing all that. You just jump out of the way, right? You don't have to think it all through because your belief in gravity just determines your outlook on things. and it determines your emotions. You stumble on a cliff, almost go over a cliff, it's a thousand feet down, whoa, your heart's beaten. Why? Because you did a bunch of calculations? No. Because you looked up your old science notes? No. It's just because you know all about gravity, and you believe it. If we could get the truth of God's word into our heart like that, we would be doers of God's word. you don't sit around and think how can I put how can I put the principles of gravity into practice today you don't have to do that it's part of your fabric of your thinking isn't it true that there are some principles from God's Word that they're in your heart like that they are in there they are like your belief in gravity you just feel them to be true you know them to be true they just seem true to you maybe you're the type where Your belief in God's power is like that. You don't question, it just seems true, it feels true, you don't even have to work yourself into believing it, it's just there. But when it comes to, say, God's kindness, that's a little harder. You have to kind of work at reminding yourself, no, this is good, what God is doing is good, he's kind, and you have to keep reminding yourself, because it just doesn't really seem true. Or maybe it's the other way around. Maybe you understand God's kindness, you believe that like you believe gravity, but his wisdom you have trouble with, or his justice, or whatever. And your belief in that thing that it doesn't feel true, you still believe it. I mean, if somebody asks you, do you believe that? You're like, of course, absolutely, I believe that. But when it comes to your knee-jerk reactions to things, and your emotional responses to things, the belief in that truth isn't governing that. because it hasn't sunk in deep enough. Which truths from God's Word haven't become integrated into your soul and belief system enough to control your outlook and your feelings? Which ones? For you personally. Maybe it's your belief that opening your Bible and spending some time alone with the Lord would be more satisfying, ultimately, than turning on the TV. Somebody asks you that, and you're like, of course it would be. But, doesn't feel like it right now. Feels like I just wanna click on that TV. Maybe it's the fact that the sins that you committed against God that He has forgiven are a million times more severe than the sins that anybody is committing against you. and you believe that but it's not coming to mind right now when people are sitting against you because it hasn't sunk down deep yet and whenever you learn a truth from scripture and it doesn't become integrated into your belief system like that what happens is it just sort of sits there on the shelf of your brain and eventually floats away it doesn't get connected with the other beliefs and so you forget it that's why you forget it because it doesn't have enough connections You don't understand how that truth relates to other things that you know to be true. So how do you make truths from Scripture sink in so that you believe them like you believe in gravity? How do you do that? How do you make them so that they pop into your mind, your conscious thinking, at the moment when you need them? Well, James is going to give us several instructions for that in verse 25. He's going to tell us, number one, to look intently into the Word. The manner in which you study the Bible will determine, in large measure, how deep it goes. That's one thing. Secondly, he tells us we need to continue and persevere in our studies. He says whoever does that and continues to do that, perseveres in that, doesn't quit. He's blessed, so that's a key. Then he talks about forgetting, not forgetting, but doing. Then he points us to a certain way of thinking about the nature of God's word. You have to think of it as the gospel of freedom, the law of freedom. The law of freedom and knowing what that means is going to help you hear and remember and do. And then he points us to the reward, the blessing. And that's a motivation that will help you. So there's a handful of principles that James is going to give us in verse 25 to help us become doers of the word. And I just zoomed through them right now because our time is gone. We don't have time to look into those in depth. We'll plan on doing that next time. Try to look into each one of those in depth so we can really get a handle on them. But today, with the last little bit of time, last couple minutes, let me just let you know about a couple of tools that are available to you that we hope will help you with this, that we've developed for this, that are designed for this exact purpose, to help you become doers of the word and not forget. The first one is the sermon devotionals. You might have noticed last few weeks I've been putting at the end of the sermon manuscript daily devotionals built around a sermon, and those devotionals are designed around the various components of godliness training. You know, in 1 Timothy 4, 7, when he says, train yourself to be godly, there are certain things you need to do in order to make progress and become a doer of the word, and these devotionals are designed with those components in mind and these principles in James 1, 25 in mind, so that, for example, they have the today I will part in there, where you can write out what you're going to put in practice. If you want to get those, all you have to do is mark on your prayer slip, I want to receive the sermon manuscript every week and they'll start being emailed to you on Saturdays. So that's one thing. The other tool is what we call our James 125 groups. If you ever wondered, why do they call them 125 groups? This is why, this verse, right? We named them after this verse, because they're for this purpose. When we came up with those groups, we were asking ourselves, how could we help people not just be hearers of the word, but really get it ingrained in their hearts so they become doers, and these groups are what we came up with. And all they are are just small groups that meet in people's homes during the week, and you get together and go through the the application questions in your bulletin. If you look at your bulletin right now, you'll see in there, it says application, James 125 questions. And those questions, they're not review questions. Like, all right, how many, you know, how many Greek words did Daryl say, and blah, blah, blah. It's not that, it's not review questions, it's application questions. Like, in your life, what's getting in the way of you putting this principle into practice? Thinking through that will help ingrain the thought into your soul and integrate it into your soul. And what'll really help you do that is if you go to one of those groups and you hear, as they go around the circle, and like 10 different people talk about what's preventing me from putting this into practice, what does this look like in my life? It's amazing, because you hear about it, and it's like, wow, I never thought about it from that angle. I was thinking from this angle, but I didn't think of that. And then something else, and it opens your mind even further to it. And by the time you go around the whole circle, man, you've spent a whole evening really deeply thinking about this principle, and you're getting it. You're getting it. So that's what those groups are designed for. There's actually already a few of them in place, different places, and we'd like to, they're pretty much full, so we'd like to create a bunch more of these. And the idea is we're gonna model these after the fellowship family model that they've been doing down at the South Campus that's just been such a blessing down there. It'll be the same thing. So the idea is it'll be geographical, so there'll be one near your house, and you go to that one, how often they meet will be determined by you guys. You just get together first meeting and decide how often we want to do this, twice a month, or once a month, or whatever. And you'll have a meal together, kind of like a potluck meal together, and pray together, and then you just go through these questions and talk over these principles and help them sink down deep into your soul. Our goal is to launch those new groups maybe as early as the beginning of March if we can get all the leaders in place and all that. So all we need from you is to find out where you live. So that's why we have the map out there. This is the phantom map that we announced last week that wasn't actually there. Now it's there. I saw it with my own two eyes today. So it's there. And as soon as we dismiss, we just go out into the main foyer there and put a pin on your address on that map. with your name and your information there so we can get that logged in and we can look and see where everybody is and we know where these groups need to be located. I really hope that you would consider being a part of one of those groups. because it'll help drill these principles into your mind and help you become a doer of God's Word. So, and if you have an interest in hosting one in your home, jot that on your prayer slip so that we know that we can give you a call. Okay, well, if one of your kids came up to you and asked you for some money, wouldn't one of your first questions be, What do you want it for? What are you going to use it for? Maybe I'll give it to you. Maybe I won't. Depends. What do you need it for? What are you going to do with it? You know, I wonder if God says that to us when we open our Bible in the morning and we say, God, speak to me. Teach me. I don't understand this passage, God. Help me understand this passage. And God's up there saying, why? What are you going to do with it? Why do you want this information? Just so you can pile up data in your head and impress people? What are you going to do with it? My kids come up and ask for $50 and I say, what do you need it for? And they say, I don't know. Then the answer's going to be no. That's pretty easy. God's asking you. I'll give you knowledge. What are you going to do with it? What are you gonna do with what you've learned this morning? What are you gonna do? I told you about the little boy who sang the song from Matthew 7 while he cleaned the church. That little boy, the rest of that story is that little boy died at age three. It's a sad story. And at his funeral, they were carrying out his tiny little casket. And as they carried the casket out, they played that old Sunday school song. that he used to sing. And I was thinking, wouldn't it be wonderful if on that day when we carry your casket out of here at your funeral, and we think, what would be the perfect song to play? And it needs to be a song that really matches that person's life. Wouldn't it be great if we have to pick one that's all about being a doer of God's word? Father, that's our prayer. We want lives like that. We wanna be doers of your word, not just hearers. Save us from the self-deception, Lord, and give us the energy to plan and to overcome whatever laziness we need to overcome, to trust in you, and to put your word into practice. We ask this in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, amen.