Bible Study – 2D or 4D

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Well, Max Sinclair is a name that you may know. He was a— he is a Christian leader and evangelist and was working at Hildenborough Hall and his neck was broken in a car accident a few years ago. And his story is told in this fine autobiography called Halfway to Heaven. And in it you get all the details of the sadness and the fears and the pains And then all the gladness of his recovery and the ability to walk and the miracle of that. Now while he was in hospital, his wife came to visit him one day and asked him the question, are you reading your Bible, Max?

And he says in this very honest little snippet out of the book, her casual question surprised me. I had asked visitors to Hildenborough Hall the same thing many times, And it felt odd to be on the receiving end for once. I must have blushed as many of those others had blushed when I admitted that I hadn’t really got back into it yet. The sense of God’s nearness, says Max Sinclair, was still so strong it didn’t seem important to maintain the discipline of daily Bible reading. I didn’t realise what dangerous ground I was treading.

God might provide special support during a crisis, but he wouldn’t give it indefinitely. If I didn’t build up my own resources again, I would be a prime candidate for Satan’s deceptions.

Now I was very struck when I read that. And I realised at the time that I was a candidate for Satan’s deceptions because my Bible reading had deteriorated. And it is just possible that there are some here this evening who have been Christians for a long time whose Bible reading also has deteriorated. And it’s just possible that there are some here whose Bible reading has never really got started. And I hope that this will be a practical word this evening on the subject.

I have actually found it a great stirring up to look at the passage that we will look at this evening. Now it’s a good question to ask somebody occasionally, are you reading your Bible? But James chapter 1 asks 2 follow-on questions which go even deeper. So would you turn up again, I think it was page 213, James chapter 1.

And the 2 questions that go deeper are these: A, are you hearing the Word of God? Silly question, you say. B, are you doing the Word of God? Nasty question. You say.

Now I’ll be surprised, as I say, if this passage in James is not helpful to every Christian at every point. It may be right to ask sometimes, are you reading your Bible? It is always right to ask, are you hearing and are you doing?

Now the letter of James is addressed to Christians and of course it may be there are some here who are not Christians. If you are not a Christian this evening but you are willing to investigate the life and the death of Jesus, you can’t do better than to take up one of the 4 Gospels. They stand like 4 pillars and you can’t do better than to begin to read the Gospels which have answered the questions of millions over thousands of years. And let me say to you that if you are willing to investigate, and read a gospel, that in itself is a minor miracle. Because most people, in fact it is the natural inclination of our hearts to look for loopholes to get away from Jesus, not to look for footholds to get closer to Him.

So that if you are actually willing to investigate, that is a minor miracle. I would want to encourage you and say, press on, a chapter a day. Take off your glasses, which may be proud glasses, Take off your other glasses which may be prejudiced and just read humbly, prayerfully, asking for a clear understanding of Jesus. But James in his letter is speaking to Christians. Look at verse 18.

He says, God brought us forth by the word of truth, that we should be a kind of firstfruits of His creatures. So says James, the message of God is like a seed and God planted it in us and He has brought us to life. He is speaking to Christians. Now my plan this evening is to divide the next verses, 19 to 25, that Andy read for us into 2 sections exactly as the RSV does. 19 to 21, and that will be called hearing.

22 to 25, and that will be called doing. And if I picked a title for this evening, it would be 2D or 4D, 2-dimensional or 4-dimensional. And I hope that will come clear as we go on. First of all, hearing, verses 19 to 21. Now in those 3 verses there are 2 words which have to do with taking in God’s Word.

And they complement one another. The first is in verse 19. I wonder if you can see what it is. It’s the word hear. Then there’s one in verse 21.

Can you see what it is? It’s the word receive. And hear and receive are to be what we do with God’s Word. Now those of you who are bright and awake may ask the question, how can a Christian be told to receive the implanted Word? In other words, if it is implanted, how can it still be received?

Now the answer to that is that many Bible words have a double force about them. Take a word like seek. We would encourage a non-Christian to seek. Then we would encourage one another to seek. The first is to seek friendship with God.

Then the Christian goes on seeking closer. Friendship with God. Or take a word like know in the Bible. You come to know God, right relationship with God. Then the Christian gets to know God better.

Or take a word like trust. You come to trust God for the first time, but then the Christian goes on trusting God. And so it is with words like hear and receive. They are double-barreled words. They have an initial and a secondary meaning to them.

Now in these 3 verses, James is very practical and he gives 3 preliminaries to being a good hearer. Do you remember the parable of the sower where the seed is scattered and it lands on 4 different types of soil? Rock— hard people. Shallow soil— short-termers. Thorny soil, slightly longer-termers.

Good soil, full-timers.

Now James seems to take up this kind of picture and he seems to give 3 clues to making sure that we are good soil. You see, it’s one thing for the Word to take root, it’s another thing for us to bear fruit. And it is as if in verses 19 to 21 James gives 3 gardening tips on how to be a fruitful listener.

And the first one is in verse 19, and I would call it, be quiet.

Have you ever been in those conversations where the listener is just waiting for the talker to shut up so that the listener can then give the answer, solution, to the talker? But he’s so excited about his answer that he has missed the question and doesn’t realise that the answer has nothing to do with the question. Have you ever been involved in those conversations?

That is, in my opinion, what I would call the stretch and seal conversational mentality. It goes like this: I have an answer and whatever your question, it’s coming up in a minute. And if you read the book of Job, you will find that that’s just what his comforters were like. They had an answer. Never mind Job’s question, they had an answer.

And it was such a frustrating conversation that towards the end one of them says to Job, well, I actually don’t think you’re getting all you deserve anyway. And one of them gets into name-calling and ends up calling Job a maggot and a worm. Now as with conversations like that, so it is with Bible reading. We need to be quick to hear, slow to speak. Let me put that in a succinct sentence.

We need to give maximum attention to the Word. Now this is one of the desperate things in life is that I find that I give maximum attention to silly things and terrible attention to eternal things. And I suspect that you are the same. So that the person who is dropping off right now, tomorrow morning will be wide awake when something of far less importance is on.

James Packer, Jim Packer, says that the Bible is God preaching. So we need to listen in such a way that we ask ourselves, what is He saying? And to listen well, we must be quiet. Now that means we have got to be undistracted. And in simple terms, if you are going to be a Bible reader, that probably means you will need to get alone.

And you will need to get alone not just from people, but perhaps from the telephone. And perhaps also you will need to get away from the sort of things that would interest you if they were there, like letters. Or it may even be the television or your record player. But you will need to get to a place where you are undistracted.

And then you need to also get to a place where you can be awake. I think last year Doug Olson spoke on the subject of reading the Bible and he dropped the tip which I picked up and I have used. And that is, he said he makes himself a cup of coffee which wakes him up to read his Bible. Now I make myself a cup of tea that wakes me up to read my Bible. So you need to be alone, undistracted, and awake.

But the other thing about being quiet and being a good hearer is that we need to be uncluttered when it comes to the Bible. There are some people who are so keen to get to their Scripture Union notes that the Bible doesn’t really matter. And if you continue on like that, you will find soon that the Scripture Union notes are more valuable than the Bible in the short term.

Now we need to get uncluttered in this sense, that we must come to the Bible without our little grids. And by that I mean we come to the Bible, we look at an old passage, one that we’ve read before, because once you’ve been a Christian a few years you no longer come to passages which are brand new. You come to a passage you’ve read before, you’ve heard a sermon on it, you know exactly the 3 points, or you’ve spoken on it yourself, you know exactly the 3 points. So you trot it down, a hasty prayer and off you go. That sort of grid mentality will only produce the old trite patterns and will lead to old trite Christians.

So the important thing is to seek to draw out what is there rather than to read in what you would like to be there. Now of course this is very important for speakers. I think this is one of the greatest lessons I have learnt in my 2 and a half years from Dick. One of the great lessons for a speaker is to go to the Bible and not to say, what do I want to say? But, what does it say?

And to go on asking yourself as you read it, where does this cut me? And I am not going to stop thinking about this until I realise where this particular passage touches the rudder or the tiller of my life. And I am going to chew on this until it has actually had a steadying or a balancing or a changing effect. And so you will find yourself crying out often as you read your Bible, please change me. I don’t want to just read and forget.

Please change me. That’s the first, be quiet. I realise there is a lot more to say on that, but we are passing quickly over that first one. The second in hearing is also in verse 19, be calm.

Slow to anger. Now if you are an agitated, restless Christian, you won’t be able to sit still.

And if you are an angry Christian, you won’t be able to be calm before God. This is a very simple point, but it just amounts to this, that we cannot expect to have rich fellowship with God if we have got poor fellowship with others or broken fellowship with others. We cannot expect to have vertical blessing if we are rejecting horizontal blessing. So that if there are broken relationships and we are tolerating them, it’s very unlikely that we will be able to enjoy the riches of close fellowship with God. If you and I allow bitterness or resentment to stand, that automatically cancels Our prayer for blessing.

And then the third is in verse 21 where he says essentially that we are to be clean. Be quiet, be calm, and be clean. Verse 21: Therefore put away all filthiness and rank growth of wickedness, and receive. You notice the two go together: put away, receive. Drop what you have got, take up what there is.

Put away, receive. Now the point of this is this, and I find this searching. If we decide to set the terms of discipleship with God, we cannot expect to enjoy good fellowship.

Now I don’t mean that every Bible study, as some imply, ought to be a sensational experience. I fell into this trap when I was a young Christian, that my Bible reading for a while was very exciting. And I felt when it wasn’t an exciting day that something was very wrong. Some days you read the Bible and it’s just steady, sober truth. It’s not sensational.

And therefore, if we go to the Bible expecting, expecting that we will be always blown apart, then we will be disappointed.

Now the point also is this, that if you and I are sensitive to evil, putting it away, we’ll be sensitive to spiritual things, receiving. You see, it’s impossible to be a schizophrenic in sensitivity. You can’t be insensitive to evil and then sensitive to Scripture. And you can’t be sensitive to evil and insensitive to Scripture. We are either being sensitive to both or insensitive to both.

And if we’re going to be sensitive to evil and put it away, then we will find that we will be sensitive to Scripture.

Therefore, if there are some here this evening who are bemoaning their dryness, let me ask you whether you are also happy with compromise. That’s the point, you see. You can’t be moaning about dryness and happy with compromise. You will either be moaning about both. Or happy about both.

So the obedient Christian, or the clean Christian, is a teachable Christian. And often it is the clean Christian, even if suffering, who shares truths that the disobedient Christian misses. So 3 things very quickly there from those verses on hearing.

Be quiet. Be calm and be clean.

I want to then look at the next few verses, which are really the main verses that I want to spend time on. Verses 22 to 25. And I am going to read them again, although we read them before.

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 observes his natural face in a mirror, For he observes himself and goes away and at once forgets what he was like. But he who looks into the perfect law, the law of liberty, and perseveres, being no hearer that forgets but a doer that acts, he shall be blessed in his doing.

Now when we read that passage superficially, I believe that it leaves us untouched.

And I think it does for this reason. Please listen carefully. We read that the person who doesn’t do what he has been told to do is like a man who looks in the mirror and when he goes away he forgets what he looked like. So we read that or we hear that and we say, ho, ho, ho, what a silly man. He must be an idiot.

I am not like that. Isn’t that right?

So we escape the thrust of the passage. And when you read the commentators on this particular section, I thought it was a very simple passage. Until I came to study it. And when you read the commentators, they say things like this. They say, the mirror shows our natural face, the Bible shows our moral face.

I say, well, that’s great. So what? It doesn’t seem to have any application in this section. Then there are other commentators who say, ah, the mistake the man made was that he only glances at his face. In the mirror.

And if he looked longer, then he would really benefit. So they say that is the point, but it is not the point.

Well, I want you to look at this word forget with me.

If we read that little section quickly, we will latch onto the word forget and we will assume that it means to stupidly forget. You know, the way we forget an umbrella. Or we forget to pass on a message, or we forget an appointment.

Now I think the point is this: we may not have brilliant memories for numbers and names, and if you hang around me long enough, you will know that I do not have anything like a brilliant memory for numbers or names. Brilliant memories are few and far between. I heard a story recently of a young man who went to visit an Indian chief. Who had a phenomenal memory by reputation. And the young man went up to him and said, what did you have for breakfast 24 years ago today?

And the Indian chief thought for a while and said, 4 eggs. 15 years later, the young man was in the same area and he rushed up to the Indian to try another question. How? said the young man very respectfully, and before he could get his question out, the Indian replied, grilled with toast.

Now, we may not have brilliant memories for fine details or for trivia, but let me tell you, it is hard to forget your own face.

And if you don’t believe that, just look at the way people look at photographs. You notice this when the photographs come around. Have you noticed that— I don’t have this problem, but you’ll notice that most people will look quickly to see how they came out. They’ll just look for that particular face and they’ll see it straight away. And if it’s a good photo, they’ll order a poster copy.

Now let me tell you this. To forget does not always mean a mistake. Sometimes to forget is deliberate. Paul says in Philippians chapter 3, forgetting what lies behind, I press forward. And the word there for forget is the same as this one.

You see, to forget can be deliberate. It can be a decision and not just an accident. To forget like Paul is forgetting does not mean to forget completely what lies behind, but to neglect deliberately what lies behind. Now the forgetful man in James chapter 1 is not a simpleton who has no brains. He’s not a silly man who goes away and can’t remember what he looks like.

The forgetful man in James is the fool in the Bible sense because he’s got no understanding. You see, he’s not brainless. He hasn’t got a low IQ. He’s careless.

Now when you start to meditate on this particular meaning of the word forget, the passage begins to make sense. The illustration comes to life and so does the point. Let me ask you this question. What does it mean to you to have a mirror in your life? What does a mirror mean to you?

I remember when I was in my last church that we used to go down 50 yards to a training centre to try and get fit, myself and the 2 other clergy on the staff. It was only 50 yards down the road and so we tried to find 2 lunch hours a week. We were by far the weediest members in that training centre and all along the wall were these mirrors. And all the weightlifters were as close to the mirrors as they could be and all the weeds were as far away as they could possibly be. Because we really had nothing to be proud of up close to that mirror.

But there are mirrors that people have very strategically placed through their house just to catch an extra glimpse. There are vanity mirrors, aren’t there?

And it, I don’t know, it may be that you are happy in front of a mirror. I am just about always disappointed in front of a mirror. But what is a mirror for?

Well, again, the commentators had difficulty with this because James says that the man looks in the mirror. And some of them wanted to get over this very quickly and said, well, of course he really means a man and a woman. So that helped them and reinforced the idea that the man just looked very quickly. But he doesn’t. The word doesn’t mean to look quickly.

We’ll see in a minute what it means. What does it mean to have a mirror? Generally, a mirror is functional. You straighten your tie in front of it, you wipe your face, you tidy your hair, then you go. Why?

Well, because you’re finished with it.

So says James, the man who looks at the Word of God and then goes off to something else and leaves the Word behind is treating the Word of God like a 2-dimensional mirror.

It doesn’t matter at all how long you look. The word observe in the RSV is the word consider, as in consider the lilies of the field. Study them. So it’s not a quick glance, you see. But if you and I have a 2-dimensional Bible mentality, it will be— it will mean that we treat the Bible with passing interest.

Now friends, isn’t that exactly what we do?

We come to church and we listen and we leave.

And we go to our fellowship group or our Read, Mark, Learn group and we listen and we talk and we leave.

Or we have our own quiet time in the morning and we read and we leave.

And that is mirror mentality.

Look with me at the stages. These 3 words that James collects, they all have to do with detachment. Verse 23, he observes, face to mirror. There’s the distance.

Then he goes away and then he forgets. Out of sight, out of mind. Now this is exactly what short-term religion is all about, isn’t it? I watch a preacher, I watch TV. The preacher finishes, the programme finishes.

I go home from church, I go to bed. I forget both.

That’s mirror mentality. That’s to be the hearer only. Now what is the alternative to this? Are we meant to remember everything that we hear? Surely those of you who are involved in St. Helen’s must find it incredibly difficult, especially if you come to more than 2 or 3 meetings a week, to remember quarter.

Well, if the point of the passage was all about memory, then we might get a bit depressed.

But the opposite to a detached interest in the Word is an involved interest. And James makes this clear. Look at verse 25. The alternative to looking, leaving, and forgetting is to look into, and he chooses a new word there, and it is the word that is used of the women who went to the tomb, who looked into the tomb. It is a genuine interested, involvement.

The person who is involved looks into the perfect law and he perseveres. In other words, he stays with it. And he acts, verse 25. In other words, he puts it into practice. And that person, says James, is blessed.

So there are 3 words that have an increasing detachment One is to look as an observer, to leave and forget. And the other is to look with interest, to stay with it, and to put it into practice. And because the Word of God is alive like a seed, that is a 4-dimensional, for want of a better phrase, matter. It’s not 2-dimensional like a mirror. It’s not 3-dimensional like a book.

It’s 4-dimensional like growth.

Well, there are those 2 processes. And there is a verdict pronounced on each type of person. The second man, we read, is blessed by God.

Jesus says in Luke chapter 11, blessed are those who hear the Word of God and keep it.

The first man has a verdict and it’s a self-imposed verdict because he is deceived. He is the prime loser.

Let me just wake you up with this.

Do you realise that every time we come face to face with Scripture, we will treat it like a 2-dimensional mirror or it will have a 4-dimensional effect? That’s the point. And every time we treat the Bible with a 2-dimensional attitude, we deceive ourselves. We are the fool. Because we go away and we lose what we could have been involved with.

Now it seems to me that if you and I adopt a 2-dimensional and 4-dimensional terminology just for the moment, it seems to me that every Christian must choose whether they are going to have a 2-dimensional involvement with the Word or a 4-dimensional involvement. If a person has a 2-dimensional involvement with the Word, they look at it, they leave it, and they forget it, you can be absolutely sure that the world will have a 4-dimensional involvement with you.

But if you and I have a 4-dimensional involvement with the Word, then we will begin more and more to see the world in 2 dimensions.

That’s why I think Peter can say in his second letter that God has granted to us His precious and very great promises, that through these you may escape from the corruption that is in the world. And the reason? The Word is not 2-dimensional but 4-dimensional. It has a dynamic. It has a quality of life.

Therefore, when we are involved in a church like St. Helen’s, where it may be that we hear clearly Sunday by Sunday, and it may be that that is a greater advantage than thousands or millions who hear hardly anything, imagine how repugnant it is to God if we cut short the hearing and the doing. Imagine how repugnant it is to God to be proud about what we hear, to say, I am a St. Helensite, I know more than everybody, but then for it not to go into godliness.

Surely the blame and the responsibility and the culpability belongs very much with us. So James says in verse 22, be doers.

Look with interest, listen with interest, take up what is coming clear and home to you, persevere with it, put it into practice, and then you will be the blessed. But the one who is just a hearer and not a doer, deceives himself.

Well, let’s pray that in.

Our heavenly Father, there are many here this evening who would join with me in thanking you for bringing life.

We thank you for bringing us to life through the implanted Word.

And we also confess to you that there is much about us which is not quiet or calm or clean, and that so much of our own privileges have been wasted as we have read carelessly and listened carelessly and lost.

And so we ask that you will restore a heart that is receptive, quiet, calm and clean. And we pray that as we receive and hear that implanted Word, and persevere with it and act on it, so You will bless us and make us people who are marked by life.

And we pray this in the name of Jesus Christ, our Saviour and Lord. Amen.