Would your friends describe you as someone who is quick to listen, slow to speak, slow to anger? If you're married, would your spouse say these things are true of you? The book of James tells us that these things ought to be true, not just of some people, but of all of us. And today on Truth for Life, Alistair Begg helps us see not only why these things are so vital, but also how we can make them more of a reality in our own lives as we continue our study in James chapter 1. We begin today at verse 19. Have I been included in Christ? Have I heard and responded to the Word of truth, the gospel of my salvation? Alec Matia puts it quite masterfully when he explains the way in which we are made alive.
Listen to this brief but profoundly helpful quote. The Father uses the gospel, the Word of truth, in two ways. First, he speaks it inwardly to our dead souls imparting life, bringing us to birth. Secondly, he presents the same Word of truth to us as a preached gospel to which the new life within makes a personal and believing response. That's what James, the brother of Jesus, is reinforcing. He's saying, think about this, he chose to give us birth through the Word of truth. We are, says Paul, included in Christ through the Word of truth when we believe the gospel. I must leave it here, but I must say again to you, do you believe this?
Is this you? This is the vital question of life. There is no more vital question, none at all. The initiative that God takes, the instrument that God uses, the Word of truth, and thirdly in the verse you will notice the intention that God has in doing this. He intends that we might become like him, that we might offer our lives in the way in the Old Testament they offer the firstfruits of the harvest to God as an expression of their gratitude, so his intention is that we will offer our lives as an expression of our gratitude for all that God has done. He uses the Word to bring about our spiritual birth, and then, going into verse 19, you will notice that it is by this same Word that he enables us to grow spiritually.
The similarities between the beginning of James and the beginning of 1 Peter are striking. For example, verse 23 of 1 Peter 1, For you have been born again, not of perishable seed, but of imperishable, through the living and enduring Word of God. It is by the Word of God that you have been brought to faith. And this is the Word that was preached to you, straight into chapter 2, Therefore rid yourselves of malice, deceit, hypocrisy, envy, slander of every kind, and like newborn babies crave pure spiritual milk, so that by it you may grow up in your salvation, now that you have tasted that the LORD is good.
See this? The same process he describes, using different language but getting to the same point. It is God's Word that not only gives us life but also transforms our life. God's Word gives it, and God's Word transforms it. Now, when you get to verse 19, with this very straightforward call to listen up—my dear brothers, take note of this, listen up—you will see that he then calls for us to do three things in relationship to the Bible, to the Word of truth. First of all, that we should be found listening to it, secondly, that we should be found receiving it, and thirdly, that we should be found doing it.
First of all, listening. One should be quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to become angry. What a challenging little statement. And it's only the first of a number that James is going to bring to bear upon us in a way that will make many of us squirm under the impact of its truth, forgetting that we have been given two ears and only one mouth so that we could listen twice as much as we talk. But some of us have a real problem with this.
Over a hundred years ago, one pastor addressed his congregation as follows—and I was reading this just yesterday, and I thought I'd share a wee bit of it with you, because it was so challenging to me. This is how he writes, There are some people who are always talking. They cannot think. And it is a relief to them to hear the sound of their own voices.
Just as women who are in ill health find a welcome relief in sewing or knitting and sew or knit just to pass the time, there are some people who find relief in talking. And by their incessant talking, they disable themselves from thinking. They also disable themselves from listening. They lose the power of grasping the real meaning of anything serious that is said to them. Their minds are like reservoirs with a large leak and a small supply of water.
Everything that comes into them runs off at once, and they're always empty. Incessant talking, without careful and earnest listening, makes them utterly frivolous, reduces them almost to a state of idiocy. And further, this habit prevents them from listening even to God's Word and from thinking about it. They are not accustomed to listen or to think, and so when the divine Word comes to them, they cannot really listen to it, and they cannot contemplate what it says.
Well, I don't know about you, but I find that just cuts a little bit too close to the cloth. And what is true in terms of interpersonal relationships, whether it's around the dining room table with friends that we've invited to our home who came over to eat but not to listen to us talk, or whether it's at Starbucks, where we can't wait to get the first opportunity to read all the titbits that we've found in The Wall Street or The New York Times—whatever it might be, most of us do far too much talking. If all that we say in a single day, with never a word left out, were written each night in clear black and white, it would make strange reading, no doubt. And then just suppose, before our eyes would close, we had to read the whole record through. Then wouldn't we sigh, and wouldn't we try a great deal less talking to do?
And I more than half think that many a kink would be smoother in life's tangled thread if half what I say in a single day were to be left forever unsaid. Now, I think that James here has in mind something more significant than simply our interpersonal relationships, because, remember, he has introduced us to the thing we're supposed to be listening to—namely, the word of truth. We are, in verse 21, to accept this word. In verse 22 and following, we are to do this word. And I think that James has expressly in mind the peculiar danger of being too quick to proclaim the truth to others before really paying proper attention to it ourselves.
I think that's the warning in verse 1 of chapter 3. Not many of you should presume to be teachers, my brothers, because you know that we who teach will be judged more strictly. Well, we can be sure that while we're doing all the talking, we're not listening.
That's as true in relationship to the Bible and theology as it is to anything else. Because we know that the individual who talks a lot gets in trouble. The individual who talks a lot is often opinionated beyond what is acceptable. The individual who talks a lot and is opinionated beyond what is acceptable is very likely to become animated in his opinions or our opinions. And when they get animated and heated up in their opinions, if somebody doesn't seem to be adopting their opinions very quickly, then the chances are they're going to get very angry about the fact that people are not as animated as they are about what it is they're so opinionated about and wanted everybody to hear. You might have met someone like this, I don't know. I really don't have to go very far at all to meet someone like this.
I don't have to leave my own bathroom. But the fact of the matter is, we dare not assume that our heat and our passion are expressions of fidelity and usefulness. They may simply be heat and passion. And our very forcefulness may be a cause of stumbling rather than a cause of helpfulness. You see, the anger of man isn't going to bring about the righteous life that God desires. Our intensity, our focus, our emphasis, whatever it might be, does not ultimately work God's righteous purposes. If it did, I think Jesus would have operated in a different way. And that's why, isn't it, that the cleansing of the temple is so striking in all of the life of Jesus that we have in the Gospels?
Why? Because it is such an unusual expression of righteous anger. But in the main, Jesus is not known for such displays.
His anger was legitimate, but it still stands out. Einstein, on one occasion, defines success as A. A, he said, is a success in life. And he said, if A is a success in life, then A equals X plus Y plus Z. With X being work, and Y being play, and Z being keep your mouth shut.
It's pretty good. I try and remember it, but it's hard. I have a friend on the West Coast—my state, she's a friend of my wife and I—and on one occasion in Washington, D.C., in a conversation that went along these lines that fell into the realm of personality types and all the psychological profiling about whether you were an A, a B, or a C, or an F, or whatever you were, we agreed that we weren't dissimilar from one another, and she said she would send me some stuff to help me and try and make me a better person.
And you can imagine what a large amount of information that was. But actually, she gave me one particularly helpful little piece that I keep with me all the time, and it gives me a drill for each day of the week. And I'm supposed to put a checkmark every time I've completed my drill for the day.
If you were up close, you could see that there are no checkmarks on this at all, because I've never been successful in doing this. Let me give you just some indication of it. On Monday, my drill is, don't interrupt anyone today, don't finish anyone's sentence, and avoid speech hurrying. Okay? Usually by about seven-thirty Monday morning, I completely blew that one out. Tuesday, be aware of how pleonastic you are today. Well, first I needed a dictionary for that.
I went to it, and I discovered that pleonism is the use of words, the use of more words than is necessary in order to give a sense of something. Violation number two. Wednesday, avoid all lecturing and pontificating. Don't tell anyone what to do or how to do it. Would you please just keep closer to the inside lane, Susan?
Thank you. Oh, there goes Wednesday. Thursday, don't contradict or correct anyone today.
Don't be argumentative. Forget Thursday. Friday, avoid being over-definite in how you state your opinion. Saturday, avoid all polyphasing when someone is talking to you, whether in the telephone or face-to-face. In other words, don't be multitasking when someone is talking to you. Look at them in the eye and stay focused. Don't be here, there, everywhere, going, making notes and stuff. Saturday's a bad day. And Sunday, speak in an unhurried, even-paced way, avoiding rapid, dysrhythmic speech.
See why there's no checkmarks? I don't know why you're all looking so smug. I know some of you as well. Listening to it and receiving it. And with this, we finish receiving it. How are we going to listen to God's Word if we're always talking? How are we going to listen to God's Word if we have angry hearts? If you're an angry person, you don't hear what's being said, do you? Angry people are not listening, they're just rearranging their prejudices. They don't listen to arguments, they don't process information. They simply become increasingly recalcitrant. And I lay it to you as an absolute definite that if you're angry with me or angry with anybody else that's ever in this pulpit, frankly, you might as well go work in the nursery.
Except that you'll be a jolly nuisance in the nursery. Because the anger of man does not work the righteousness of God. That's why you can't be angry in the pulpit with the Word of God, and you can't be angry out of the pulpit listening to the Word of God. If anger needs to go, so does moral filth.
That's what he says. Here is a second barrier to listening to the Bible and profiting from it. If an angry mind will spoil it, so will a dirty mind. A dirty mind. Hence the issues of prevalent evil as he mentions it here, which in the King James Version I think used to be, or was, or is, a superfluity of naughtiness.
I remember as a boy reading that and thinking, I probably know a lot about a superfluity of naughtiness. I'm not unaware of the evil that is so prevalent around me. I'm not unaware of how easy it is to sin very quickly with my eyes, how easy it is to sin in my mind, how easy it is to get myself in a complete tied-up tangle and mess. And it is ultimate naivety and stupidity on my part to think that all of the absorbing of moral filth can be flushed away by a thirty-minute sermon once a week by well-meaning people coming to try and fix themselves up and go out and fight the battle all over again. It won't happen. It just won't happen. No, you will notice he doesn't say, Pray about it, he says, Get rid of it.
How am I going to get rid of it? By the enabling power of God. How does he enable me? He enables me by his Spirit through the Word. That's why the psalmist says, I have made a covenant with my eyes that I will not look lustfully on a woman. How will a young man keep his way pure? By paying heed, taking heed according to your Word.
The Word acts as a purifying instrument. But our part in preparing to hear it is to make sure that we do not come angry and we do not come dirty. Every so often, someone will say to me, What were you leaning against?
And I'll say, Why? They say, Well, look at your jacket or look at your coat. It's clear that you've been leaning up against something. And just in the same way that we may very quickly become physically dirty, and sometimes even inadvertently so we may become morally messed up, be careful what you're leaning against.
I want to be careful about what I'm leaning against. You see, if you think about it, here I preach Sunday by Sunday, and others do too, to this congregation. Some people in the congregation grow and mature, and some don't. Is the problem with the message? Well, you could say, Yes, if nobody grew and nobody matured, you could say, Well, the message is no good.
It's not possible. We don't learn anything. We can't grow. We can't mature. But if some grow and mature and others don't, what does it speak to? It doesn't speak to the seed, it speaks to the soil.
And some of us have acidic soil in our hearts, the acid of anger, or the clay of living compromised to prevalent evil and to moral filth, or the weeds of being willfully disobedient. I am not going to do this. I don't care what it says. I'm still going to divorce her. I don't care what it says. I'm still going to sleep with him. I don't care what it says. I'm still going to fiddle on my income tax.
I don't care what it says. No, you cannot, you see. Act in that place of instability and expect, as James told us earlier on, that we will receive anything from the Lord.
Such a man is unstable in all of his ways. Well, what are we to do? In a phrase, humbly accept the word planted in you which can save you. Humbly.
Humbly. Thank you. Thank you. I didn't get it all, but I got something. Thank you. I didn't understand everything, but I did understand this. Thank you. I believe that you knew all about me this week, and you spoke to me through the word of truth.
Thank you. You see, that's why the way in which we come to the preaching of the Word is so vitally important. If we don't prepare and deal with our anger and deal with our moral filth and deal with the junk that's all in us, we're like individuals eating Snickers bars on the way home from the nine o'clock service. So that by the time our mom serves us up our favorite lunch, we've got no appetite. But don't you love this? Isn't this your favorite meal?
Yes! Well, how come you don't want to eat your favorite meal? You've been eating something else, haven't you? And then she goes in your pockets. Starburst. You find all my sins eventually Snickers. Those long packets of peanuts that you can put the whole opening in your mouth and just chug the whole thing.
No surprise. You've filled yourself up with junk, and you're not ready to eat what you love. Makes perfect sense physically, and it makes equal sense spiritually. Why is it so important? Because it is as we humbly accept the Word that is planted in us that we're saved. That we're saved. The Word saves us. Saves us from what? Saves us from ourselves. Saves us from our sin.
Saves us from our secrecy. God comes and saves us from sin's penalty. One day we will be saved from sin's presence.
That'll be heaven. And in the meantime, we're being saved from sin's power. How? By the work of the Holy Spirit. Through the Bible. Read your Bible. Pray every day. And you'll grow, grow, grow. And you'll grow, grow, grow. And you'll grow, grow, grow. Read your Bible.
Pray every day. And you'll grow, grow, grow. That's what we're teaching the children back here.
And we're just overgrown kids. The lesson's the same. You've been listening to Alistair Begg on Truth for Life. Alistair will close today's program with prayer in just a minute, so please keep listening. The simple truth that we teach our children to read your Bible, to pray every day, these are lessons we never outgrow.
And if you have young children or grandchildren, you know how eager they are to imitate the activities of those around them. If you're reading your Bible, they want to read theirs, even if they're too young to read. So we are recommending a colorful book that can help you share God's word with your children. It's titled Bible Stories Every Child Should Know. It's a collection of more than 120 stories from the Bible, all of them written specifically with young children in mind, so they can easily follow along. Your kids will enjoy the popular stories of Moses and the burning bush, or Jonah and the big fish, but they'll also hear stories that are less familiar.
Bible characters like Balaam and his talking donkey, or King Josiah and the lost book. This book does a really great job of linking the Old Testament events with their New Testament fulfillment in the Gospel. Request a copy of the book Bible Stories Every Child Should Know when you donate to support the teaching you hear on this program. Online giving is quick and easy. Simply tap the image in the app or visit our website truthforlife.org slash donate. And if you'd rather mail your donation along with your request for the book Bible Stories Every Child Should Know, write to us at Truth for Life.
Our address is post office box 398000 Cleveland, Ohio 44139. At Truth for Life, we are passionate about teaching the Bible. We aim to do it in a way that is clear and relevant, and we trust that as you listen to this daily program, the seeds of God's word fall on the soil of a heart that is eager to receive it and that its truths will transform your life. Now here's Alistair with the closing prayer. Father, thank you for the Bible.
Thank you that it's clear. Sometimes the preacher can be unclear and we can be vague in our response, but we pray that beyond the voice of a mere man, we may hear your word, that word of truth. I pray for some who do not as yet believe, who are not yet included in Christ, I pray for your work within their hearts, that inward work of the word, bringing them to new life and then enabling them to respond to the gospel as it's preached, calling them to faith and trust in Jesus. Be with us in the hours of this day and in the days of this week, and we pray that you will order our minds and our steps. And may the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God our Father and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit rest upon and remain with each one who believes now and forevermore. Amen.
I'm Bob Lapine. We all like to imagine a better version of ourselves, but when it comes to matters of faith, there's no sense pretending. Our deception can have eternal consequences. You don't want to miss tomorrow's message entitled, Don't Kid Yourself. The Bible teaching of Alistair Begg is furnished by Truth for Life, where the Learning is for Living.
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