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.”
The handshake at the door afterwards, three people agreeing it was a good one. Monday at seven the alarm goes, and not one sentence of it comes into the day with you.
James is writing to people scattered by trouble, and the line arrives inside a paragraph about listening. Let every man be swift to hear, slow to speak, slow to wrath. He has just commended hearing. Then: But be ye doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving your own selves. The danger he names is self-deception, and it comes attached to the thing he has 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. A glass in that world was polished bronze, dim and small, held up and angled before it showed you anything. The man does look. He looks properly. He cannot carry what he saw as far as the door.
Ezekiel had a congregation like it, and God's description is almost affectionate and completely damning. They hear thy words, but they will not do them. Then: 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 him. That was the finding.
He does not leave it there. 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. Blessed in the deed. Not in the hearing of it, and not in the resolve afterwards. So the blessing is not on Sunday at all. It is on Wednesday, in your house, if anything from Sunday is still alive there; on Friday, in a face in the glass you still recognise; and in the doing of it, where nobody is watching and nobody says afterwards that it was a good one.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 135 is A Full Reward (Ruth 2:12).