Daily Manna, Year Two · Day 135 · May 15
Doers of the Word
“But be ye doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving your own selves.”
Friend,
You know the moment. The service ends, and at the door three people shake hands and agree it was a good sermon. Then the alarm goes off the next morning, and not one sentence of it comes into the day with you.
James was writing to believers "scattered abroad," and this line comes inside a paragraph about listening. He has just told them, "let every man be swift to hear, slow to speak, slow to wrath." So he has just praised hearing, and then he says: "But be ye doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving your own selves." The danger he names is fooling yourself, and it comes attached to the very thing he told them to do.
His picture is a man at a mirror: "he beholdeth himself, and goeth his way, and straightway forgetteth what manner of man he was." In that world a mirror was a piece of polished bronze, dim and small, and you had to hold it up and tilt it before it showed you anything. This man does look, and he looks properly, but he cannot carry what he saw as far as the door.
Ezekiel had a congregation like that. God describes them almost fondly, and yet the description is devastating: "they hear thy words, but they will not do them." Then He says, "thou art unto them as a very lovely song of one that hath a pleasant voice, and can play well on an instrument." They enjoyed Ezekiel, and that was the whole problem.
James does not leave it there, and I do not want to leave you there either. "But whoso looketh into the perfect law of liberty, and continueth therein, he being not a forgetful hearer, but a doer of the work, this man shall be blessed in his deed." The blessing is found in the deed itself, more than in hearing about it or deciding to do it later. So it is waiting for you out in your week, in your own house, if anything from the service is still alive there. It is in the face you still recognize in the mirror days later, and in the quiet good you do where nobody is watching and nobody shakes your hand afterward.
May God keep His word alive in you long after the last hymn, and may you find His blessing waiting for you in the doing.
Yours in the same pew,
a fellow hearer
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 135 is A Full Reward (Ruth 2:12).