James 1:22 “But be doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves.”
Does your thinking ever trick you into believing you possess a certain quality simply because you’ve heard about it?
In 1974, Chip and I transformed our Chevy van into something that resembled an RV. With a makeshift bed and cooler-turned-refrigerator we left Florida for a month-long trip across the country. One of our destinations included attending the World’s Fair in Spokane, WA. The theme of the Expo was the environment. We took in exhibit after exhibit extolling the virtue of caring for the earth’s resources. This was the early 70’s when not many people had jumped on the environmental bandwagon. We left feeling quite enlightened, maybe even a bit “ecologically smug.” We patted ourselves on the back because we determined to do our part in taking care of the planet.
You can imagine our horror when we got back to our apartment and realized we had forgotten to turn off the oven! That’s right. I had been warming up some coffee cake to take for our first breakfast on the road, and left the oven on for a whole month! Thankfully, nothing caught fire. But Chip spent hours repainting the now yellowed walls surrounding the oven. Our ecological smugness faded as quickly as plastic straws in San Francisco.
Clearly, hearing about the importance of caring for the environment did not make us environmentalists. Hearing about the necessity of getting rid of anger doesn’t make us gentle. Hearing about the call to generosity doesn’t make us generous. And hearing about someone else’s heroism doesn’t make us courageous. If hearing doesn’t lead to doing, we can kiss becoming goodbye.
According to James, it’s easy to deceive ourselves into thinking we’re something we’re not when we don’t follow up on what we hear. If we want to cultivate a particular virtue, we have to go beyond mere listening. We have to move on it in order to incorporate it as a part of our lifestyle. Otherwise, we’re like people who look at their faces in a mirror and promptly forget what they see (James 1:23-24).
Friend, don’t let yourself be deceived. Put into practice the things God calls you to do. The world doesn’t need more folks who fail to practice what they preach. When the light signal turns green, don’t sit there thinking it’s a nice color. Go!