January 7 - Do Something

        James 1:22-25 - "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 a man who looks at his face in a mirror, then goes away and immediately forgets what he looks like. However, the man who looks intently into the perfect law that gives freedom and continues to do this, not forgetting what he has heard, but doing it - that man will be blessed in what he does."

        Most of us comb our hair, using a mirror. Why? Because we want to know how we appear when others see us. Or we simply want to make sure that we have groomed ourselves so as not to appear terribly unkempt and ridiculous. When we are finished with the grooming, we rarely need to look again, unless an outside force, or time and gravity, has wrecked our previous efforts. We rarely have to take a second glance to make sure we parted our hair on the correct side; or to make sure that we even addressed it at all before we left the house. Those steps are fairly basic, and would be absurd, if from one hour to the next, we wondered if we ever combed or brushed our hair at all that day!

        So too, is the absurdity of simply listening to a Sunday message, and then not putting it into practice. Or simply reading a chapter in the Bible, just to say that we did so for the day. God doesn't want to see how faithful we are in our religious rituals. He wants to see action, and that from the heart. 1 John 3:18 states, "Let us love not with words or tongue, but with action and in truth."

        Years ago, I had training classes for my job. I was told that the best way to learn anything was to read the instructions aloud, while performing the task, then repeating the process. I was also told that simply reading or hearing instructions with no other action, only gave the learner a 10% chance of remembering what he heard. So if I want to be blessed and understand God's ways deeper, then I must do - regularly.