Do What It Says! (Part 2 of 2)

All of us as believers are taught to listen carefully to God's Word. And yet James 1 warns us that if all we do is listen, we're deceiving ourselves.

Is it possible to hear God's Word and remain unchanged? Today on Truth for Life, Alistair Begg teaches on the right way for us to respond to the Bible. Our study continues in verses 22 to 25. Remember, Jesus says, it's not the healthy that need a doctor, it's the sick. I didn't come to call the righteous but sinners to repentance.

And then the physician who heals gives you, if you like, the prescription. And he says, now, I have redeemed you in order that you might become the firstfruits, that you might be dedicated to God. How are we to be dedicated to God? Well, we're to be dedicated to God by the doing of God's will.

Where do we find the doing of God's will? We find it in his law. What is this law? Is it external?

No, it's internal. Where is this law? It's written in our hearts. And paradoxically, the constraining impact of the law is what provides freedom.

Freedom. Now, unless we get this, we will be in all kinds of difficulty, and some of us, frankly, are, and I know that from talking with you. Because you've bought an approach to Christianity which uses terminology correctly in its phraseology but misapplies it. So, for example, you routinely say, We're not under law, we're under grace. Which, of course, is true. That's a quote from the Bible, but what does it mean?

In a significant number of people who say that phrase to me, this is what it means. It used to be in the Old Testament there was a thing going on about law. But once we got to Malachi and went through the four hundred years of the intertestamental period and got into Matthew, then we were finished with law, and all we do is grace. Under law, you were supposed to do what you were told, you had to obey the Ten Commandments. Under grace, you do what you feel like, and the Holy Spirit helps you to feel the way you want to feel. So, really, you don't want anybody telling you anything that you're supposed to do or not do, because that's Old Testament stuff.

If they're truly in the New Testament, they will never say that to you, and if they do, you will know they are legalists, so don't listen to them, don't pay any attention to them at all. Because the key is, you have been set free from all of that. You are no longer under law. You're under grace.

Now, that may be something of a caricature, but not too much. The fact is, we are no longer under law as a means of acceptance with God. All of our acceptance with God. And it always was as a result of grace—the grace of law. We are not under law as a means of acceptance with God. But we are under law as a means of living for God. Our freedom in Christ—and this is the paradox—is tied directly to our obedience. It is by our obedience that we're free. Disobedient people think they're free, but they're in bondage.

Obedient people may feel themselves constrained, but they're in freedom. Now, James is taking a leaf out of his brother's book, isn't he? Jesus said the same thing time and again. John chapter 8, "'If you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples.'" This is verse 31 of John 8. "'If you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples.'" Remember, we talked earlier about the people who listened to the lectures but didn't become disciples.

Jesus may well have the same thought in his mind. "'You come along to all these talks,' he says, "'and you listen, but you go away. You're charmed by them, but you're not changed by them. If you hold to my teaching, then you're really my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.'" Now, I have to get back to the—this is a parenthetical journey here. If you want to think this through a little more, then let me commend a book to you called Pathway to Freedom. You don't need to read the whole book, but just the prologue. And in the prologue, the author there deals with Calvin's third use of the law—the third use of the law.

And, as I say, you will be helped by that. Cowper, in one of his hymns, succinctly grasps this in one stanza when he puts it as follows. To see the law by Christ fulfilled.

Okay? Jesus kept the law, every detail of the law, in its perfection. He did what we in our sin cannot do, could not do. To see the law by Christ fulfilled and hear his pardoning voice. And hear his pardoning voice. The rest of the quote in Hebrews 10, there is, and the Holy Spirit goes on to say, And their sins and their lawless acts I will remember no more.

Why? Because of the finished work that he's just referenced in the earlier part of the chapter. To see the law by Christ fulfilled and hear his pardoning voice changes a slave into a child and duty into choice. To see the law by Christ fulfilled and hear his pardoning voice changes a slave into a child and duty into choice.

I love your law, says the psalmist. I love it. It's not external to me. It's not a nuisance to me. It's not making me chafe at the bit.

Why? Because it's written in his heart. If you want to know freedom from guilt, lust, fear, loneliness, aimlessness, emptiness, as a Christian, it is dependent upon your obedience on obeying what you've been taught. That's why, you see, some people in a congregation like this go on to maturity and others don't. It's the same seed that's sown. Everyone hears the same sermons.

What's the difference? Well, it's all in the parable of the sower. Remember, Jesus said, and the sower went forth the sower, and when he sowed, some seed fell by the wayside. It just landed on stony ground. It was on the hard bits of the path. It never had any root at all. The birds picked it up, and it was gone in a moment or two.

It hardly had a chance to hit the ground, and it was away. In the same way, the people who come and listen to the Bible taught, and they're out the door within fifteen seconds. They can't imagine why they would stay around for an iota longer.

And others, instant bloom. All of a sudden, they're enthusiasts. Springtime enthusiasm wanes in the summer, dies by the autumn, and in the winter, no one knows where they are. Others seem to be going along nicely, and the truth is choked out. It's choked out by stuff, by worries and cares and money and possessions and anxieties, because we've forgotten that godliness with contentment is great gain. And in actual fact, when you read the parable of the sower, it becomes perfectly clear that there's a tremendous amount of wastage in the whole process, isn't there? But the good soil, said Jesus, represents the hearts of those who receive the truth when it is planted in them, who obey it, and who go on. Now, I'm going to assume for the moment that every one of us in this room wants to be that good soil.

Wants to be that good soil. What is represented in that good soil, according to James here in this verse? What is the right way to respond to the Bible? Well, he tells us, first of all, we are responding to it intently—intently. The man who looks intently into the perfect law. The word that is used here is the same word that is used in 1 Peter chapter 1, where Peter says that the angels desire long to look into the things about salvation, because they have been able to observe what is going on, but they do not know it experientially. They have a genuine desire, looking, as it were, from the ramparts of heaven to look into these things. It's the same word that is used when Peter and Mary arrived at the tomb on resurrection morning, and they ducked down, and they looked into the tomb.

They looked intently—perhaps even, we might say, wonderingly and worshipfully. So says James, if a person is going to get benefit from the Bible, then they need to be that kind of person. The man who looks into the Word, not with a casual glance, but with a genuine desire to know what it says, with a genuine desire to miss nothing of its truth, that person is the happy man. That man is the man who will be blessed.

And remember, he's very happy to talk about being happy. Blessed, he said, is the man who perseveres under trial, verse 12. That's paradoxical. Trials and blessing? Yes. Trials and joy? Yes. Law and freedom? Yes.

Another paradox. Here is the blessing. Now, I hope that you make use of every means that we suggest is available to you through the Bible in a year, through the Bible in half a year, through the Bible in the Bible, on the Bible, whatever it might be. There's a constant refrain saying there's a direct correlation between our individual response to the Bible and our effectiveness and enjoyment of the Christian life.

And we don't have to make a great show and tell out of it. All you need is—all you need are just blank sheets of paper and your Bible, and then a passage of the Bible, and decide what it is. If you've never done this, you know, decide, Well, tomorrow, since what's the shortest gospel? Mark's.

Okay, I can try that one. I will try Mark. I'm gonna try and read Mark now before we get to Easter. So you get Mark tomorrow morning, and you go to Mark chapter 1, and you read for eight verses, let's say. If you want to go for honors, you go to verse 13. If you want to really bust through it, then you could go, of course, the whole chapter.

Some of you are perfectionists and will want to go read the whole of Mark, and that would be a tactical error. But all you need to do is you open it up, and you ask a number of questions in your little book. And you ask yourself the question, first of all, Is there anything in this passage that teaches me about God the Father? Anything that teaches me about God the Son?

Anything that teaches me about God the Holy Spirit? And you look in—I'm not going to do it for you, but you look in there, and if you find out an answer to that, then you write it down. And then you can ask a question like, Is there anything in this passage that tells me something about myself? Is there a sin that I need to avoid? Is there a promise that I should accept?

Is there a command that I need to obey? And before you know where you are, you've done your own investigation, and you have discovered things as a result of your desire to look intently into the Bible—intentionally and intently, as opposed to reading the Bible in a way that expects the Bible to do things absent the engagement of our minds. Like, well, it didn't hit me. What do you mean it didn't hit you?

What did you expect it to do? Well, I expected—I hear these people tell me, and it just jumped out at me. Well, it didn't jump out at me.

Well, you know what? It hasn't been jumping out at me a lot either lately in studying James chapter 1. I've had to do a lot of jumping into it, because it hasn't been doing a lot of jumping out of it. And if I waited for it to jump out, I wouldn't have sermons Sunday by Sunday.

I have to look intently into it. And if you'll do the same before you know where you are, you will build your own compendium of the discovery of God's truth, which you will find yourself sharing with others. Somebody says something to you in four weeks' time, you say, you know what? Funny you should mention that, because just towards the end of Mark's Gospel, after Jesus has done all those healings and the disciples come and find him in the early hours of the morning and say, you know, we're doing well on the healings, Jesus, I think we ought to just keep this going. Jesus said to them, Let's get out of here and go to other villages where I can preach the gospel, because that is why I have come. And the reason that you brought that up was because somebody told you that the key to Christian living was in miracles and in healings. And you said, No, I discovered something in Mark about that. I wonder if I can remember it.

Yeah, apparently Jesus was more concerned about preaching the gospel than he was about healing. Where'd you get that from? Oh, I just discovered it myself. You did? Wow! How'd you do that? Well, you just get a book, it has the blank sheet.

Right? But that's what you tell your children. Intently, habitually, habitually. Notice what he says. The man who looks intently into the perfect law that gives freedom and continues to do this. Continues to do this.

Not a burst of enthusiasm followed by chronic inertia. Not, Oh, I think I'll read the whole of Mark's gospel before the evening service, and then I'll take care of it, and I won't have to do anything for a month. No!

No! He habitually does it. He continues to do this. He keeps coming back to it. Solomon, when he urges wisdom upon his son, gives us a classic few lines on what this will look like. He says, My son, if you accept my words—not if you hear them, if you accept them—and store up my commands within you, turning your ear to wisdom, applying your heart to understanding, and if you call out for insight and cry aloud for understanding, and if you look for it as for silver and search for it as for his own treasure, then you will understand the fear of the LORD and find the knowledge of God. The corollary being, if you don't, you won't.

It's straightforward. Raw talent will win intermittently but not consistently. Unremitting diligence will manage to pull off one or two events.

The combination is powerful. Do you store God's Word up? Do you have a store of God's Word?

Do you have a different store than you had this time last year? Are you a Psalm 1 girl, meditating on the law day and night? I chose the word habitually rather than consistently because I wanted to make the point that there is such a thing as a good habit. We tend to use the word of habit as if habits are bad. But no, there are good habits. There are holy habits. I thank God for the establishing of holy habits when I was a boy, for the memorization of the Bible, for the vast majority of the Bible that I know I haven't learned as a pastor. I learned as a boy. And I was a very, very, very ordinary and routinely bad boy.

Finally. Not only intently and habitually, but obediently. Obediently. Not forgetting what he has heard but doing it.

Doing it. Remember, Jesus says the same things, doesn't he? And again, I think it's impossible to read James without, as it were, hearing an echo of Jesus in the background. After Jesus had washed the disciples' feet, he then turns to his disciples and he says, Now that you know these things, you will be blessed if you do them.

Do them. Now that you know, you will be blessed if you do. Knowing, doing. And the blessing is directly related to the doing, not to the knowing.

He made the same point dramatically. That is, Jesus, on one occasion, when a lady calls out from the crowd, much like in a golf tournament, You're the man! She didn't actually say that.

This is what she said. Blessed is the mother who gave you birth and nursed you! Jesus shouted back, Blessed, rather, are those who hear the word of God and obey it. In other words, thanks for that thought.

But let me tell you what really matters. You can imagine the lady's husband going, I told you not to shout that out. What are you shouting out? Who's gonna shout? Wait, I'll tell you what to shout out. I got some things to shout out. You find it the whole way through the Bible.

I could go on all morning, but I won't. The psalmist, Psalm 19, when he talks about the law of God, and he says, You know, the statutes of the LORD are right, rejoicing the heart. The commandments of the LORD are pure, and enlightening the eyes, and the fear of the LORD is clean, and so on. And then he says, In keeping them there is great reward. In keeping them there is great reward. Not in knowing them. In keeping them.

In keeping them. You see how the law gives us freedom as we keep it. And we keep it not because we are endeavoring to be accepted by God but because we have been accepted by God. We live in purity and in honesty with our spouse, not as a means of gaining her hand in marriage but on account of the fact that this treasure even accepted our hand in marriage. I could not work my soul to save, for this my LORD has done. But I can work like any slave for love of God's dear Son.

Final verse from the psalmist. I will always obey your law … forever and ever. I will walk about in freedom, for I have sought out your precepts. I love the paradox.

I hope you do too. I will walk about in freedom, for I have sought your precepts. You see? Not I will walk about in freedom on the basis of my own judgments, on the basis of the judgment of my own heart. To put the judgments of our hearts before the law of God, to quote Anthony Burgess in the seventeenth century, is to have the Son follow the clock. Be aware and beware of those who tell you that you have been set free now, simply to respond to the promptings of the Holy Spirit, and that is all you need to obey.

No, it isn't. Because the Holy Spirit turns us back to the abiding truth of the perfect law, which brings us into freedom. And it is in our obedience that we discover blessing.

That's how he finishes. And this man will be blessed in what he does. In what he does. Someone has said that when the Word of God makes an impression—i.e., when we hear it—if it is not followed by an expression—i.e., in the doing of it—then it leads inevitably to depression. So when the Word of God comes home and makes an impression on our minds and calls us to action, we give no expression to it, then it's no surprise that we find ourselves living with an increasing sense of disappointment and disheartenment.

The pattern that James gives us here is straightforward. Hearing plus doing equals blessing. Hearing plus doing equals blessing. How can I hear? Because of God's amazing grace.

How can I do? Because that same enabling grace fashions in my heart and enables me to do that which the Word calls me to. And it is there that genuine happiness, true blessing, is to be discovered.

And that's the equation. Hearing plus doing equals blessing. This is Truth for Life. You've been listening to Alistair Begg with a message titled, Do What It Says.

Alistair returns in just a minute to close this program with prayer. Today's message emphasizes the importance of reading God's Word. In fact, Alistair mentioned that the vast majority of scripture he knows, he learned as a boy because of habits that were established when he was still young. Well, we want to help you build habits of reading God's Word in your home, even with the youngest members of your family. And that's why we've been recommending a book titled, Bible Stories Every Child Should Know. This is a colorful book that reads the stories of scripture so you can read them to your children or your grandchildren. In fact, there are more than 120 stories in this collection that allow you to start and end each day in God's Word for several months. You can request your copy of Bible Stories Every Child Should Know when you donate, but please don't delay. Today's the final day we'll be mentioning this book on this daily program.

Click the image you see in the app or call us to request the book, 888-588-7884. Now, here is Alistair with a closing prayer. Father, thank you again for the Bible. May the truth of your Word find a resting place in our hearts and minds, and may your grace and mercy and peace from Father, Son, and Holy Spirit from Father, Son, and Holy Spirit rest upon and remain with all who believe, now and forevermore. Amen. I'm Bob Lapine. You may think most religion is worthless, and there's a sense in which you wouldn't be completely wrong.

But it doesn't have to be that way. What kind of religion does God accept? Find out as you listen tomorrow. The Bible teaching of Alistair Begg is furnished by Truth for Life, where the Learning is for Living.