Proverbs 27:19
“As in water face reflects face, so the heart of man reflects the man.”
James 1.22-25
“But be doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves. For if anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he is like a man who looks intently at his natural face in a mirror. For he looks at himself and 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.”
James warns that people who hear but don’t do the word are self-deceived. He says this because hearing without doing means that even though they have been exposed to the truth, there are people who refuse to live by the truth. They have deceived themselves into living by a standard different than what they heard in scripture.
Whenever we read the word of God, we must make a decision about what we are going to do in response to it. What we must not do is read the word, hear and acknowledge its truth, and then go about our life and work without implementing the truth of the word. And everyone has done it. We have all read scripture that speaks truth into our life, that convicts us of some attitude or behavior that we know we need to change, and then a few hours later we fall back into that very same behavior. That is the battle we fight.
James says, “Don’t do that. Don’t just hear the word, do the word.” He goes on to say that if we fail to do what scripture says, we are falling into self-deception. The reason he says we are deceiving ourselves is because we tend to make excuses for not obeying the word. We rationalize and try to justify our behavior. Again, James says, “Don’t do that. Don’t try to justify your disobedience. If you disobey the truth, don’t rationalize … repent!”
Repentance is the antidote for self-deception. Throughout our lives we will have to battle our old nature. We will not perfectly obey every truth we read in the word of God. But when we do fall, when we disobey, God calls us to confess and repent. And that simply means being honest about our behavior.
“Confess and repent” are old school words, and they are thoroughly biblical. The Greek word for confess means “say the same thing as.” When we confess our sin, God is calling us to “say the same thing” about our sin that God says about it. The Greek word for repent means “change your mind.” When we repent, we change our mind and turn away from our wrong behavior. We stop doing what we shouldn’t do, and we start doing what we should do.
Self-deception is an attempt to avoid the truth about our own behavior. But as James says, despite our excuses, the mirror of the word of God always gives us an accurate picture of ourselves. It is foolish in the extreme to think we can hide from God or avoid the truth of his word.
Jeremiah 16.17: “For my eyes are on all their ways. They are not hidden from me, nor is their iniquity concealed from my eyes.”
Jeremiah 23.23-24: “Am I a God at hand, declares the Lord, and not a God far away? Can a man hide himself in secret places so that I cannot see him? declares the Lord. Do I not fill heaven and earth? declares the Lord.”
Psalm 69.5: “O God, you know my folly; the wrongs I have done are not hidden from you.”
Deception is dangerous. Self-deception is disastrous. God calls us to himself and asks us to be real. No games. No excuses. No self-justifying stories. That is the wise choice, because God sees everything anyway. Nothing is hidden from him. Read the word and obey. If you disobey, don’t rationalize … repent.
We should regularly pray what David prayed in Psalm 139: “Search me, O God, and know my heart! Try me and know my thoughts! And see if there be any wicked way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting!”
