We get our ideas about who we are from lots of different people and events in our lives. But the kind of right thinking that gets us through the day comes from what God says about us. What God says about is us that he created us, he loves us, he values us and he has a job for us. It's vitally important to get our ideas about who we are directly from God and his word.
James is talking about looking into the word [1:22-25] in relation to living rightly. God expects us, as his valued children on a mission, to live rightly. James summarizes those expectations brilliantly in verse 27: "Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world." Internally pure and fautless. Externally loving our needy neighbors. [More on that later.]
And James is very clear about how we keep track of ourselves. Its the same method we use every morning to make sure we remembered to brush our hair, get any leftover mascara from under our eyes or make sure our slip isn't hanging. [That's an anachronism, isn't it!] He tells us to look in the mirror, this mirror being the Word. And just as you look in the mirror every morning and discover that your hair, though it feels fine, is actually standing up at that left back cowlick, the idea of looking is to fix it. Comb your hair! The idea of looking in to the word, look intently, James says, is to do whatever you see that needs done. Do is the main idea of this passage. Six times James says Do. We have plenty of scripture that tells us to read and to memorize and to meditate but James says all of that kind of misses the point if you aren't doing what you see in the word.
I specifically chose the words "live rightly" instead of "live morally" because we have our own definitions of living morally and they are generally small, doable things. They are things James would call religion and he decimates the idea religion is enough in verse 26. If you consider yourself religious, he says, and e.g., don't control your mouth, you're deceived. He raises the bar from the morally possible, religious action, to the morally impossible, controlling your mouth. Your religion, your morality, is worthless. Worthless! Living rightly, which is immensely important to God, involves looking intently into that perfect law that gives freedom [Christ himself] and then living your life out of Him. Clean on the inside and truly righteous not only on the inside but also in your relation to others.
He comes back to that perfect law that gives freedom but he next gives an example of failing to live rightly in relationship to others; favoritism. Partiality, King James called it. We would call it discrimination in our day and it would sound political. Here we discover it is not political at all but a test of the way we think about people. Are you keeping the Royal Law, love your neighbor as yourself? Well, I am a good neighbor, you might say. I water the plants when they're gone. I take meals to the church body when they need it. I'm generous in my gifts.
But James pulls an idea out of the Mosaic law, an idea the Jewish Christians he is writing to would clearly understand. If you don't keep the whole law, you're not keeping it at all. You commit adultery but not murder; can you claim to be keeping the law? Of course not. By that same logic, if you love white, middle class, protestant Americans but not Hispanics or Arabs or Muslims can you claim to be keeping Jesus' Royal Law?
Have I taken the idea of loving your neighbor too far? Read the story of the good Samaritan in Luke 10. Jesus tells that story to answer that smoke screen of a question, "Who is my neighbor?" Jesus is holding a mirror up to a "religious" man's face and forcing him to look at it. Are you living true religion, Jesus is asking this so called expert in the law, or are you just living by your own narrowly defined morality? And James is saying to his readers, if you aren't keeping this royal law universally, you aren't keeping it at all. Just like the illustration of murder and adultery. And in direct relation to James' illustration to the mirror, Jesus turns the question on it's head. The question is not who is your neighbor: the question is who are you.
Thank God for the last of these three laws mentioned in this short section of James: the law that gives freedom. 1:25 gives us a specific thing to look intently into in this mirror of God's word and that thing is the perfect law that gives freedom. That is the law we are to be judged by, James concludes in 1:12, the law that set us free both from judgment and from sin. We have received mercy. With that mercy we received the capacity for mercy.
Romans 8:1-4 bears meditation on this point. The whole of Romans 8 bears meditation on this point.
"Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, because through Christ Jesus the law of the Spirit of life set me free from the law of sin and death. For what the law was powerless to do in that it was weakened by the sinful nature, God did by sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful man to be a sin offering. And so he condemned sin in sinful man, in order that the righteous requirements of the law might be fully met in us, who do not live according to the sinful nature but according to the spirit......"
If we gaze intently into that perfect law of freedom for awhile, we will truly become new creatures.
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