Welcoming the Word
James 1:19-27
sermon transcript
8/6/17
Would you open your Bibles to James chapter 1 please? If you were here last week, you might recall how Pastor Barry helped us approach the book of James. He gave us an illustration that was memorable. I don’t have it with me to re-show you, so, if you were here, you can remember, and, if not—well—use your imagination. We often approach the book of James, and in particular chapter 1, as though it were a string of pearls, as though James thought of an idea that he wanted to talk about, spent a couple of verses on that, and then something else popped in his mind, and he addressed that, and then on and on we go through chapter 1. Pastor Barry suggested to us instead that we ought to view the book of James and chapter 1 especially more like a tapestry, where each of the topics addressed are interwoven intimately, and I fully agree with that perspective. I want you to see James 1 especially as flowing and interconnected in everything that it addresses.
He suggested that the main topic of chapter 1 is trials, and I think that’s pretty clear, at least at the beginning, but I’d like to suggest to you that that’s the topic that runs on through the whole chapter. If you remember back to last week, he helped us see how some of the pieces fit together, and I’ll try to continue that thread. James opens with this command to “count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds.” And then in verse 5, he starts talking about wisdom, and we might think, “Well, he’s talking about something different,” but I suggested to you a couple of weeks ago when we opened up this passage that he recognizes that what you need and what you probably lack as you go through a trial is wisdom. So, you need to get wisdom when you face trials of various kinds. And how do you do that? Well, you ask God for it. And then in verses 9-11 he seems to introduce the rich and the poor suddenly out of nowhere, but Pastor Barry helped us see that being wealthy and being poor each present their own set of trials that we might struggle with, and that seems to be why James introduces them here. And then, sure enough, in verse 12 he actually mentions the word “trial” again. That helps us see that he’s still talking about the same thing here: “Blessed is the man who remains steadfast under trial,” James says. But then in verses 13-15, he starts talking about temptation, and, again, we might think that this is something different, but Pastor Barry showed us that that’s actually the same word in Greek that’s translated “trial,” and now here it’s translated “temptation.” And you remember in those verses he showed us that what we need to see is that every trial that we face comes with its own unique temptations. And the way James characterized temptation is not something that comes from outside of you. It doesn’t come from the devil; it doesn’t come from culture; it comes from you. The source of temptation is your desire. And if you think about it, when you’re in the midst of a trial, you might desire very many things that are good things, perhaps. You might desire for the trial to end, for example. But, in that desire, you could be led into sin. Think about it: if you want the trial to end, you might start trying to manipulate people who are causing the trial or who are causing you pain. Or, you might try to manipulate God with your words. And so your desires “conceive sin,” and James warns that if you keep going down that path, sin will produce death at the end of the day. James emphatically that these temptations do not come from God; don’t think that! And so that turns his attention, in verse 16, to God himself. What does come from God in the midst of your trials? Only good things. And isn’t that a temptation that we face when we’re going through trials, to think that God is angry with us, to think that God is punishing us? But, no, when you’re in the midst of a trial, God is giving good gifts throughout that trial, and the challenge is that we would remember and believe that in the midst of the trial. And then in verse 18, James turns to the great “good gift,” the gift of our very life as a child of God. Verse 18 says, “Of his own will”—by God’s own desire and decision—“he brought us forth”—he caused us to be born—“by the word of truth.” And Pastor Barry showed us how that phrase is probably a technical term for the gospel, the gospel message that brought you to life. You see, God uses the gospel to give life to dead sinners. That’s how he works. He uses that message about Jesus’ perfect life of obedience in your place, his sacrificial death for your sins, his glorious resurrection from the dead and exaltation to the throne of God, as the gospel message. That’s what God uses to save people!
And then when we come to verse 19 this morning, we might be tempted, yet again, to think that James is changing the subject suddenly. Look at verse 19. We use it as a proverb; we quote it often and think that it’s talking about one thing, and it seems to be that James has changed the subject drastically. In verse 19, James says, Know this, my beloved brothers: let every person be quick to hear, slow to speak, slow to anger. Haven’t you applied that to your interpersonal relationships? When you think of that verse in your mind, you’re thinking, “Well, when somebody is talking to me, I need to be eager to listen to what they have to say. I need to care very much about what they have to say, and not as much about what I want to say. I need to be quick to listen, eager to listen to my wife, to my boss, to my friend. And I need to be slow to speak; I need to be not so much caught up in what I’m going to say in response to what they have to say. And then, if I don’t like what they have to say, I need to be very slow to anger; I need to hear them out and give them the benefit of the doubt.” Right? We’ve all applied it that way, but I’d like to suggest to you that that’s not what on James’ mind. He hasn’t changed the subject; instead, he’s talking about the word that he just spoke of, the word of truth, the gospel. He goes into a section that focuses on how we respond to God’s Word, and I think verse 19 is very much caught up in that.
So, I’d like to suggest to you this morning that verses 19-27 continue thinking about the idea of trials. The question on the table, I think, for James is: How do you avoid giving in to the temptations that arise during trials?[1] In temptation, if your desires can lead you into sin in the midst of a trial, how do you stop that process? How do you abort the process that James describes there? And I suggest to you that the way that James suggests is by how you respond to God’s Word, particularly how you respond to the gospel in your Christian life. So, let’s dive into this section and see what he says.
Verses 19-21 focus on the command to “welcome the word.” Let’s read those three verses together and see what he says. Know this, my beloved brothers: let every person be quick to hear, slow to speak, slow to anger; for the anger of man does not produce the righteousness of God. Therefore put away all filthiness and rampant wickedness and receive with meekness the implanted word, which is able to save your souls. So, again, in verse 19, I don’t think that he’s just grabbing hold of a proverbial saying and talking about our interpersonal relationships all of a sudden. Instead, he’s talking about the way that we respond to God’s Word, particularly the gospel, the word of truth that he just mentioned in verse 18. “Let every person”—and remember, when you see the little word “let” in James or in the New Testament more generally, it’s a command; it’s an imperative. “Each person must be quick to hear.” Quick to hear what? Quick to hear the word of truth, quick to hear the gospel. That is to say that yours and my prime directive needs to be to hear again and again and again the good news, the gospel that saved us in the first place. We need to be eager to listen to it, ready to hear it.[2]
We need to be slow to speak. When we come to the Bible, we can oftentimes have an idea in our minds that we already know what this means, this passage that I’m reading or listening to preached. I already know what this says; I already know what this means. We’re already talking internally. We’re speaking about what the passage means, rather than letting the Bible speak and letting God’s Word speak to us and rule over us. We come with our own preconceived notions, and we need to submit those to what’s being said.[3]
And sometimes even we can respond with anger when we hear God’s Word. God’s Word cuts sometimes, when it challenges our preconceived notions, our opinions, or our habits that we just can’t seem to shake off. Sometimes we might respond with anger when we hear something we don’t really like to think about God, or that we really don’t want to do with our lives.[4]
I think James is actually drawing on Old Testament Scripture here. Now, most people would point to some of the Proverbs that talk, again, about how it’s important for you to listen to your neighbor or not to be quick to speak to your neighbor. You can pull Proverbs all over the place that support those ideas. All of that is good and true and right. But I think James is actually drawing from a different passage in the Wisdom Literature, Ecclesiastes chapter 5.[5] Ecclesiastes chapter 5 says this: Guard your steps when you go to the house of God. To draw near to listen is better than to offer the sacrifice of fools, for they do not know that they are doing evil. Be not rash with your mouth, nor let your heart be hasty to utter a word before God, for God is in heaven and you are on earth. Therefore let your words be few. You see, the Preacher here in Ecclesiastes is talking to an Old Testament Israelite, and he’s saying, “When you come to the temple, come with a desire to hear God speak. That’s your prime directive when you come to the temple.[6] Come, saying, “I want to hear God speak to me.” And he warns against how an Israelite might come to the temple just wanting to talk to God. He’s warning against the desire to think, “I really want to ask God for help; I really want to tell God what I think; I really want to talk to God.” And the Preacher in Ecclesiastes is saying, “Your prime directive needs to be to listen to God.” It needs to be more important to you that you hear what God says than that you would have God hear what you have to say.[7]
Now, he’s not saying, “Don’t come and pray. Don’t want to pray.” He’s not saying that. He says, “Let your words be few.” Not zero, but few. And let me apply this to us as Christians: when we come together in this place, our prime directive ought to be, “I want to hear what God has to say. I want to hear God speak to me in this place.”[8] But we often come with other desires. We often come, eager, excited to come and sing, or to come and pray, or to come and fellowship. And all of those things are good, but there’s a greater need that we all have, and it’s to hear God speak. That should be the driver; that should be the prime motivation for why we come: we want to come to hear God speak, not to make sure that he hears what we have to say.
James doesn’t say, “Let your words be none at all,” either. He doesn’t say, “Don’t speak at all.” He says, “Be slow to speak.” We need to listen to God’s Word; we need to hear it and make sure that we’re responding appropriately, and that’s where James will turn in the next paragraph. But, before we’re done, let’s think about this a little bit in this place but also in our devotional reading, like when we’re reading our Bible at home. We need to be eager to listen to God speak as we read the Scriptures and as we hear them taught and preached. Sometimes we can get to where we have favorite parts of the Bible that we return to repeatedly, and we don’t really touch some other places, like Ecclesiastes, for example, or the Song of Solomon, or the book of Revelation. These things that we’re not really interested to go in and read; we’re not eager to go and hear what God has to say. But we need to be eager to hear all that God has to say, not just portions, not just the parts we like. And we need to be pursuing that, not only in our daily Bible reading, but also in our church setting from the preaching of the Word and the teaching in our Sunday school classes; we need to be focused on the whole of God’s Word here.
But we are to be slow to speak, that we would not be quick to jump up and argue. James’s setting in the first century probably was a little bit more dialogical than we do it here. They probably had a setting similar to what a synagogue would be like in the first century, where the person opening up the Scriptures would take questions and comments and arguments. It’s more like a Sunday school class that we might have here, and James is warning the person who comes to listen to God’s Word, “Slow down before you get ready to stand up and argue and say, ‘I don’t think that’s right,’” or before you question.[9] This is one of the reasons, historically, this passage and the application of it to that setting, why we have a more monologue kind of setting, and we have for hundreds of years if not thousands. The preaching of the Word needs to be heard and received well.
But also this idea of “slow to anger”—if when you hear the Scriptures or you read your Bible and you get angry at what you read, you’re wrong in your response. Verse 20: For the anger of man does not produce the righteousness of God. And I like the way the NIV, the old NIV, the ones in the pews, the 1984 edition, puts this verse: For man’s anger does not bring about the righteous life that God desires. That’s what he’s talking about here.[10] If you hear God’s Word and you find yourself rising up in anger, you need to check yourself, because you’re responding poorly. You’re not doing the right thing. I can remember a time in my college years, when I was a freshman in college I think, and I had been reading through the book of Romans, I guess for the first time all the way through, and I came to Romans chapter 9 and I read verse 18 that says, [God] has mercy on whomever he wills and hardens whomever he wills, and then I read a couple of verses later, Has the potter no right over the clay to make out of the same lump one vessel for honorable use and another for dishonorable use? And I threw my Bible across the room…literally, physically, immaturely. But I did. I have since come to terms with that. But I responded in anger, because I thought, “How can my God have those kinds of rights, and I not have any? How can that be?” I was outraged. And I was wrong. And isn’t it the case that we often come to the Bible with an attitude of standing over it and judging it? If it says something about God that I don’t like, well, I just won’t read that part. That’s not the attitude that James commends to us here. We must be quick to hear, eager to listen.
Verse 21 goes on to give us this command that we need to put away all filthiness and rampant wickedness. And he’s talking about this righteous life that God demands, and if our anger won’t get it, the question is: well, what will? What will get it? How do we respond righteously? How do we live a righteous life? Well, Paul tells us that it’s the Scriptures, and James has the same answer here. Famous verses, 2 Timothy 3:16-17: All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete—or perfect, or mature; it’s the same word that James has been using in chapter 1 to talk about our maturity as we endure trials and also that final perfection that we’ll reach on the last day; how do we get there? The Scriptures will get us there! The Scriptures will get us there. The Scriptures are what equips us for every good work. You want to do something good in your life? The Scriptures will enable you to do it.
So, what’s needed then? Well, less sin—he says, “Put away all filthiness and rampant wickedness”—and more gospel. He says, Receive with meekness the implanted word, which is able to save your souls. “Receive”—that’s a word for welcoming. Welcome the word. Don’t just listen to it; welcome the Word. Welcome the word into your heart, into your life. Welcome its authority over you. Welcome it with meekness; that’s the opposite attitude of anger. That’s the opposite attitude of standing over the Scriptures. It’s an attitude that comes to the Bible and says, “Whatever this book tells me is true, I believe it. And whatever this book tells me to do, I will seek to do it.” It’s an attitude of teachability when we come to the Scriptures,[11] that I might be wrong about what I think this passage means. Every time I re-read a passage of Scripture for the thousandth time, I need to come with an attitude that says, “I might not have understood this completely or correctly.” I need to be coming to this book allowing it to have free rein over my thinking and my living. That’s meekness in this case.[12]