Hi friends, welcome back to our verse mapping study. We are slowly working our way through James. So for each big section throughout the book of James, we're taking one Bible verse and verse mapping it.
And this will give us a big overall sense of the passage as we look at it, but also as the book itself. So you'll notice down below is a little paperclip icon. And if you click on that, it's a downloadable worksheet.
Today's is two pages. I'll explain this back page in a second. If you want to print it off, this is what we're going to kind of go through.
It's kind of the order or framework that I picture when I'm verbally verse mapping something with you guys. So this is a really helpful tool. The bubble format is how I call it in my head. It's just you're able to visually see what you're doing in the Bible verse. So here's our verse today.
This is the second big portion of James, James chapter 1, the second half of it. And we're looking at specifically verse 22. But let me read the whole second half of chapter 1 in James. for us all really quickly.
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.
But be doers of the word and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves. For if anyone is hearer of the word and not a doer, he is like a man who looks intensely at his natural face in a mirror. For he looks at himself and goes away and at once forgets what he's like. But the one who looks into the perfect law, the law of liberty, and perseveres, being no hearer who forgets, but a doer who acts, he will be blessed in his doing.
If anyone thinks he is religious and does not brittle his tongue but deceives his heart, this person's religion is worthless. Religion that is pure and undefiled before God the Father is this, to visit the orphans and the widows in their affliction and to keep oneself unstained from the world. All right, so that is our passage that we're kind of big picture looking at today.
But also we want to keep everything we talked about last week in mind. So if you haven't seen episode one of this James series, it will be linked down below. That's where I kind of talked about the overarching context of the book, the author, who he's writing to, etc. This is James, the half brother of Jesus. Remember, he's...
writing to believers at large. He's writing to the church. He's an early church leader.
We see him in Acts 15 and he's really writing to the Christians about like what it now means to live by faith. And we talked about this visual here of being repentant and responding in faith to Jesus Christ. And James really focuses on this end of the Christian life of, okay, so if this has truly happened, we are then naturally going to produce fruit.
Paul, however, focuses a lot here and doesn't put as much emphasis on fruit. James, however, does. He puts a lot of emphasis here. He says, okay, if this is true, then we're going to be doing this.
And Paul's really focused on this just happening. So there is a misconceived problem between James and Paul, but that's just wrong. It's not really a problem.
We're all just kind of talking about this. And so if you'll see on the second page, while we have beautiful little bubbles up here, we have a lot of extra space. to write and reflect at the end of our study today about where we are in this process, what we struggle with, etc. Today we're really entering into this conversation from Paul about being doers of the word, actually letting our faith take effect in our life. It should change us.
I've said this many times, so forgive me if you've heard me say this before, but you know, if your life was saved by somebody, if you were drowning, or if you were in the road and a car was coming or whatever, horrific situation comes to mind. If you were saved by somebody, somebody swooped in and saved your life in some sort of way, your life would be changed. You would know that you were living on purpose.
You would always feel the need to thank them or acknowledge them in some way for saving your life. It's similar or even more emphasized as believers. If we truly have been saved by Jesus Christ, our lives will look different.
And that's the problem. problem that James is addressing here. So he opens up saying that we need to be quick to hear, slow to speak, and slow to anger. Verse 21, put away all filthiness and rampant wickedness. And then we get to our verse today, which is being doers of the word and not hearers only.
And he gives us a picture of that, which we'll talk about later. And then picking up in verse 26, he talks a little bit more practically. So if anyone thinks he's religious and doesn't brittle his tongue, he deceives his heart.
And this person's religion is worthless. Religion that is pure and undefiled before God the Father exists to visit orphans and widows in their affliction and to keep oneself unstained from the world. I think many of us can remember where we were when we read a certain line in a book, maybe our favorite book series, or where we were when we heard that famous phrase, or I don't know, something that changed our lives and set us on a different trajectory. For me, it's James 1 27. It's this verse that I just read to us. Religion that is pure and undefiled before God the Father exists to visit orphans and widows in their affliction to keep oneself unstained from the world.
You see I was a not a new believer but a growing believer in my faith early high school and every day I'd come home from school and read through James. I remember this was like probably the tenth time I had read James. the month.
And finally, verse 27 was just jumping off the page to me one day. And I was sitting at the end of my bed. I was reading James, kind of like on my knees, hunched up over my bed and reading James. And this verse just like slapped me upside the face. Religion, a faith that is pure and undefiled before God the Father exists to visit orphans and widows in their affliction to keep oneself unstained from the world.
So living unto the Lord is going to look like loving other people and being... from the world is going to be different from the world. So James is establishing with us, if we're going to truly say that we believe in Jesus Christ and we're going to follow him, there's going to be some things that it looks like. And maybe we're not truly doing it or doing it right if it doesn't look certain ways.
And these are the pictures that he's given us. Things like slow to speak, slow to anger, quick to hear, putting away all filthiness and rampant wickedness, loving. the poor, the widow, and the orphan, and keeping oneself unstained from the world. Now, what do those things all look like practically in your day-to-day life and your various situations can, that can be very different for every single person. But what we do know is the heart of this passage that applies to everybody through all different situations is this idea of being doers of the word and not hearers only, which is what our verse is today.
So as I've already addressed, the context here, once again, is James, he's talking to believers. And you're going to want to write all of this down in the blue circle, refresh from last week, but also reflect on why does here, I believe this is the ESV translation right here, why does he start with but here in the ESV? What is it building off of? It's building off of everything that we looked at last week. And then of course, those first couple of verses we just read, verses 19 through 21. And then also think as we look at the context of this verse that we're verse mapping today.
what comes after this, because all of that should inform how we read verse 22. 19 informs 22 and 27 informs 22. So take a minute, pause this video and fill out this bubble here. But now let's look at the orange bubble here. The orange bubble reads, what are some differences you see in the various translations of this verse? Write them down here, because if y'all have been here for a while, y'all know step one is to look at context and step two is to look at translations.
So just pull up My Favorite Tool is Bible Hub and look at the different ways that different popular translations that you like have translated this verse. There's not a ton of variants or differences, but there are a couple. And it's always fun to write them down, notice the differences, and rereading the verse over and over again is going to help solidify it in your brain, but also new things are going to stick out to you.
So what sticks out to you in the various different translations? Why do you think they did things different ways? The NIV has a whole different like little ending phrase.
What do y'all think? Write it down in the orange bubble there. All right, now that we've done step one, which is context, step two, which is translations, now we're going to look word by word, phrase by phrase, the verse itself, which again is right here in the middle, but be doers of the word and not hearers only deceiving yourselves. All right, so be doers. This word here is Strong's Greek, 4163. We see this in the green bubble.
What does it truly mean to be a doer? Well, let's look at the Greek word. What is James actually right here? Poetess is a maker, a doer, a poet, even a carrier out, a performer. To be a doer of the word means to be a carrier outer of the word, a performer.
of the word. Write that here in the green circle. And there's a couple extra lines you could even reflect of, am I that?
Do we do that? Do we, does the church do that? Et cetera. But let's keep on moving to the word, word.
In yellow here, we see it's Strong's 3056 Lagu, or the core of the word is Lagos, which is the very, you'll probably recognize that word. That's the word used in John 1.1. In the beginning was the word and the word was with God and the word was God.
The Lagu part. is the of the word, but logos itself is the word, meaning a speech, a divine utterance. And then theologically, we also know that it refers to Jesus. We know creation was spoken into existence by the word of God. We know Jesus said, rise up and walk.
And men were healed instantly. Jesus called out demons. Jesus sends us out the power of God, the power of the word of God affects things, change things, creates things.
defeats evil, even his name is powerful and demons flee. To be doers of the word of God, the teaching of God, the teaching of Jesus is a really interesting thought, but I want to take it a little bit deeper and you'll see this in the second yellow bubble. I ask, what would the audience have understood the word to be? Because remember, they didn't have the New Testament. They had the Old Testament.
They had what Jesus taught, what the apostles were sharing that Jesus taught. They had like firsthand testimony experiences like the gospels in verbal form. They probably didn't super have much more than that other than circulatory letters, especially at this date.
There wasn't much there that they had other than the Old Testament and firsthand testimony experience of what Jesus taught. To be doers of that. That kind of word is so different than how I tend, with my 21st century eyes, to want to read into the text. So a fancy word that we use for this is anachronistic. When you take your 21st century idea of what it means to be a doer of the word and you read that into the text.
So me, 21st century, I read this and I'm like, okay, be doer of the word. I'm thinking I need to do, I don't know, Romans 8. You know, like random things that I know that I fail at. Or James 3 or whatever. Like that's what I'm thinking of when I think of being a doer of the word. New Testament passages oftentimes, but we have to remember they didn't even have that.
They had the Old Testament. They had the old covenantal law of that was still the same virtues, the same morals. They had the history of the character of God, and that was to inform their character and how they lived today.
They didn't have it quite as easy as we do today. And so I wanted to add that in here because it's not to say that we're wrong by necessarily thinking of the New Testament when we read this verse, but it is a little anachronistic. It is a little...
misunderstood because that's not what they were picturing. They were picturing the firsthand testimony experience of what Jesus taught and the Old Testament. And the Old Testament is so underrated.
We want to gloss over it. Like there isn't like a lot of applicable wisdom and instruction for today. And there just is.
And the same nature of God in the New Testament is the same nature of God in the Old Testament. So if anything, I just want you guys to walk away from this little bubble with a higher knowledge, a higher regard for the Old Testament, but let's move on. So be doers of the word. The speech, the utterance, Jesus, be doers of the commands of God. Do that, perform that, deliver that, be that, and not hearers only.
Now this word, you'll see another word study for hearers. It's Strong's Greek 202, Akrotai, how do I pronounce this? Yeah, acrotite.
Okay, cool. I'm not acrotase originally. Okay, cool. I'm not crazy.
A hearer, a listener too. It makes me think of every time I read this verse, hearers only, it makes me think of the lazy Sunday sitter. And I am the lazy Sunday sitter most Sundays, where you just sit down in the pew, you just sit down in the comfortable little chairs, and you're just like slightly zoned out. You're there. You've worshipped, but the pastor starts talking and going through his stories and going on his rabbit trails and you get lost and you're like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
This sermon just doesn't super apply to me today. And you're checked out. And that was me this past Sunday, if I got to be honest with you guys.
Like, I get it. I know. It's all of us, right?
It's so easy to take that mentality, though, from church and apply it to the rest of life. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I'll read my Bible tomorrow. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I'll read my Bible later. Yeah, yeah, yeah, this isn't super apply today. I can get right with God later.
I can handle this sin struggle later, next year, next decade, when I'm older, whatever. And James here is calling us to a faith that changes things. Hey, really live like you believe it's true. Really have your life changed.
If you're going to follow Jesus, let him change your life. And so he's calling us to be livers of what we say we believe, not just Sunday school sitter or lazy sitter, like, yeah, yeah, yeah, whatever. What's really cool about this as well is we don't just have a word study.
James also defines what he's talking about here as a hearer. in the following verses, verses 23 through 25. And so I actually ask you to reword those verses in your own words here. Hopefully y'all don't run out of too much space.
But verses 23 and 25 are so good and they're so rich. But I think it's easy just because it's Greek translated to modern day English to kind of miss it, to miss the craziness of it. So let me re-read it for you. And I want you to think like, how would you rephrase this to your teenage self, to your younger self?
For if anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he's like a man who looks intently at his natural face in the mirror. For he looks at himself and then he goes away and at once forgets what he was like. But the one who looks into the perfect law, the law of liberty, and perseveres, being no hearer who forgets, but a doer who acts, he will be blessed in his doing. Guys, this is the power of not just verse mapping only a verse.
but looking at the context as a whole, because it so informs our understanding of what he's saying here in verse 22. In particular, this last verse, verse 25, I'll read it one more time. But the one who looks into the perfect law, the law of liberty and perseveres being no hearer who forgets, but a doer who acts, he will be blessed in his doing. James is telling us here there's a blessing in doing and not just hearing, but doing and acting on that doing.
believing and acting on that belief. So rewrite that for your younger self. Rephrase it for it to kind of add that extra punch.
And I find that to be a very convicting exercise at times when there's these illustrations and kind of like confusing English. But now let's move on to our final word study here. And that is on the word deceiving yourselves.
Now this is probably where you saw most the variance in in translations, when you looked at the differences in translations. But this idea of in so doing, if you are just hearing and not doing, you're deceiving yourself. The Greek is weird. You can actually see it really good on the interleaved. So let me show it to you.
Do you see that here, how the otherwise is in brackets? The Greek literally reads like be doers of word and not hearers only, you are deceiving yourselves. And so you know, obviously translations have a hard time kind of wording that so that it can't be taken out of context. And then in doing that, it's kind of confusing.
But if you're just hearing it and you're not doing it, if you're saying, yeah, yeah, I just believe, I believe that. Yeah. And not living that out. You are deceiving yourself. You're not deceiving God.
You are deceiving yourself. You're not even deceiving the church. You're deceiving yourself.
This word here, deceiving is Strong's Greek 3884. It's a verb that means to miscalculate, to reason falsely, or to mislead. You are deceiving, you're misleading, you're falsely, you're lying to yourself. Fun fact, the only other time that it's used in the New Testament is in Colossians 2 verse 4 when it talks about false teachers who are misleading. Where it says, this I say to you so that no one may false teach, like mislead you by persuasive speech. So just as the early church is continuously warned against false teachers in the New Testament, epistles especially, we see here James is like, you can mislead yourself as well.
And that's really convicting. So reflect on that here today in these extra lines, in what ways you might feel like at times you tend to mislead yourself. Yeah, yeah, I'm working on that.
I'm working on it. Or yeah, I believe, I believe in whatever. It's so easy for me to be like, yeah, I'm working on that sin. I'm in the works.
I'm so, and it's like, but am I though? Am I really? Because I sound a little bit too apathetic when I talk about it. All right.
And then I want to close a little bit more on this idea because I think we can easily miss this verse. And even if you want to close looking at the notes for further study that are right here, we can easily miss the point of this because it can start to sound like you are earning your salvation by action. And I think if you come through Patreon, like even if you're just a member just this month and you come through my circles and you walk away thinking that I'm implying you need to do anything to earn your salvation, that I have done the ultimate failure.
There is nothing that you can add to the blood of Jesus Christ. Nothing. That satisfied the wrath of sin on your count. Jesus'death on the cross. paid for it all.
You can't add to what Jesus did. But fruit, what is fruit on like a plant? Fruit comes when there's a healthy plant. Fruit comes from a plant that is watered, that is thriving, that is got deep roots. Like, I don't know, I'm not a gardener, but you get the idea.
Think of a vine. And we get this picture in John 15 of the vine, right? And we're called to abide in the vine.
The vine produces grapes when it is healthy. In fact, a healthy vine. We used to have a grapevine in our backyard and we were supposed to trim it and we did it and it actually hurt the vine, but we didn't know what we were doing and it was a whole thing.
Anyway, a healthy vine is trimmed, it's disciplined, but it's also closely tied to the original vine. It's not going to thrive on its own. So I want to reuse this little imagery here. So if we have done this, this will happen. If this isn't happening, we need to come back to this and say, do I truly have this kind of heart?
And this is where it really leads to the application of our lesson today is, Lord, I don't feel like I'm a doer in this area. Lord, I feel like I'm not seeing this kind of fruit here. So Lord, help me to understand the cross.
Help me to better lay down my delight in sin and rather delight in you and your righteousness alone. Lord, help me to produce this fruit that can only come from the Holy Spirit. If we're not producing fruit, we need to just come back to the cross.
And that's really what James is saying. You are deceiving yourself saying, oh yeah, I'm good with God. I got it all down. If you're still walking in sin, if you don't have the heart of Jesus, you're deceiving yourself. Having a relationship with God changes your life.
It does. And if you don't have a changed life, do you truly have a relationship with God? It'd be like me saying, oh yeah, yeah, yeah.
I love my spouse, but I'm dating other people. You'd be like, no, you don't got a marriage. You don't have a happy marriage at least.
You're acting not married. Or saying, oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. We're friends.
But then when you walk away, I'm talking terrible about you or something like that. That's not a true friendship. And that's what James is trying to address here with us. By definition, having a relationship with Jesus is being completely changed by Jesus and by the Holy Spirit at work in our lives. And so James is calling us to a higher calling, a higher standard of living.
Now, does this mean that anybody perfectly lives this out on this side of heaven. Absolutely not. Nobody perfectly lives out being a doer of the word at all times.
But that means we constantly have the ability to be changed and grown by the Holy Spirit at all times on this side of heaven. And so we can all learn from this passage. We can all be equally convicted by this passage and all run to more fuller reliance on the Holy Spirit and the cross.
All right, guys, I pray this encourages you. This is going to be an idea that we come back to that we build off of. And it's all interwoven and interconnected in James. That's why I love James. The wisdom, the literature of the New Testament is because it's so applicable to our lives today.
So I pray that you're encouraged and I look forward to seeing you guys in next week's verse mapping study. Next week will be verse mapping chapter two, verse five. And I look forward to doing that with you guys. Bye guys.