CROSSROADS

James 1 19 – 27


19 Post this at all the intersections, dear friends: Lead with your ears, follow up with your tongue, and let anger straggle along in the rear.
20 God’s righteousness doesn’t grow from human anger.
21 So throw all spoiled virtue and cancerous evil in the garbage. In simple humility, let our gardener, God, landscape you with the Word, making a salvation-garden of your life.

I sort of like the thought of God being a gardener in my “salvation garden.” When I was a boy, my father planted a vegetable garden. I remember the lessons that this experience taught me, and I'm not just talking about digging holes and filling them with fertilizer. What I remember most was my Dad showing me that if we wanted to eat what we planted, we had to take care of the garden.
Everyday I had to weed the garden, keep the soil aerated, and water it. Not too much water now, and not too little, there is a balance that needs to be reached when tending to the veggies.
I had to do what my Dad said, not just listen to what he said. If all I did was hear and not do, then there would be no veggies to eat.

22 Don’t fool yourself into thinking that you are a listener when you are anything but, letting the Word go in one ear and out the other. Act on what you hear!
23 Those who hear and don’t act are like those who glance in the mirror,
24 walk away, and two minutes later have no idea who they are, what they look like.

That may be the hardest thing about the word of God, acting upon what we hear.
You know what I mean, walking the walk and all that.
I'm sure that we are all guilty of hearing what is taught on Sunday morning, swearing that we will apply the lesson to our lives on the way home, and by the time we get there we've forgotten what the message was all about, and don't really care. After all, we have to live in the real world.
Right?
Yet if we do what the word says, well then the reward is tremendous'

25 But whoever catches a glimpse of the revealed counsel of God—the free life!—even out of the corner of his eye, and sticks with it, is no distracted scatterbrain but a man or woman of action. That person will find delight and affirmation in the action.

Go. catch a glimpse, find that delight.
Work it baby. Work it.