The Bible is a Mirror

Do not merely listen to the word, and so deceive yourselves. Do what it says. Anyone who listens to the word but does not do what it says is like someone who looks at his face in a mirror and, after looking at himself, goes away and immediately forgets what he looks like. But whoever looks intently into the perfect law that gives freedom, and continues in it—not forgetting what they have heard, but doing it—they will be blessed in what they do.

James 1:22-25

Doesn’t that capture perfectly what Scripture is like and what so many of us are like? Scripture is like a mirror that lets us see ourselves clearly. We read Scripture or we hear a sermon and we are pricked in our conscience. We see something about ourselves, some part of our life that is out of joint that is sinful and wrong- cause that’s what sin is like. It’s like a clump of hair sticking up on the back of your head. It’s out of place and it hurts your overall appearance and everyone else can see it better than you can. But then Scripture shows it to you. And for most of us our first instinct isn’t to look deeper into the mirror and fix the problem we are seeing for the first time but to look away from the mirror as quickly as possible and try to forget what we saw so we don’t have to deal with it.

If you aren’t careful that’s what you’ll do when you read the Bible. You’ll be reading along and you'll come to a verse that speaks to your situation, and the Spirit will convict you of some sin in your life but you’ll just shoot past it. You’ll just keep reading quickly on trying to get your mind to focus on the next verse instead of lingering on that conviction. “I’ll come back to that and think about it later” you tell yourself, but in reality you are running away from that verse as quickly as you can. I know because I've done this.  

Or the same thing happens when you hear a sermon. At times a sermon can bring Scripture to bear on the sin in your life and cause you to come under the conviction of the Spirit, but often we are masters at wriggling out of that conviction aren’t we? We ignore it and tell ourselves that “God will forgive me.” Yes, He will if you repent and stop sinning against Him, but not if you persist in rebelling against Him. Or the pastor will point out something in Scripture that we don’t like, that convicts us and we’ll say to ourselves “Well I just don’t believe that.” You don’t believe what the Bible says?! It doesn’t work that way. Or we’ll convince ourselves that we just aren’t strong enough or a good enough Christian to obey God in that way yet. "One day," we tell ourselves, "one day." 

Be careful that you don’t fall into this trap. Be careful that you don’t sit in church week after week hearing the Word preached to you and coming under the conviction of the Spirit but refusing to be changed by it, refusing to put God’s Word into practice. If you quench the Spirit long enough you may just succeed in hardening your heart against Him, you may just succeed in deafening your ears to His pleas and blinding your eyes to your own sin. Then what hope will you have?

So when you hear a sermon or read God’s Word, the question you should be asking yourself is this: What would God have me do about this?! Be doers of God’s Word, and not hearers only.