Doers and Hearers

By Jerry D. Ousley

            Wouldn’t it be nice if we never had to worry about disobeying God?  Wouldn’t it be great if we could accept Christ as Savior and never sin again?  When God formed the plan of salvation, why didn’t He make it so?  Why leave us in our physically sinful state causing us to have to struggle with sinful desire, lust and failure?  Of course, God could make us perfect when we accepted His free gift of salvation.  He immediately reverse our sinful nature restore what we lost in Adam.  But then, we would learn nothing.

            But, wait a minute, Isn’t salvation free?  I thought all we had to do was to accept Christ as Savior and all would be forgiven.  We aren’t supposed to have to do anything to earn salvation.  And, yes, of course that is true.  We can’t do anything on our own except to accept Him.  However, there is a twofold event when we come to the Lord.  He saves us and gives us the tools to become consecrated to Him.

In Leviticus 8 we see a sacrificial scenario for Aaron and his sons.  In a nut shell, two rams (male sheep) were sacrificed.  The first was for their sin, the second to consecrate them to God.  It was an elaborate ceremony – a process God ordained to make them “worthy” to offer sacrifices on behalf of the people.  Of course, it was all merely symbolic because at the end of the day, they were still merely men, subject to temptation and given to sin.

            But then we have the book of James.  He wrote: “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 observing his natural face in a mirror; for he observes himself, goes away, and immediately forgets what kind of man he was.  But he who looks into the perfect law of liberty and continues in it, and is not a forgetful hearer but a doer of the work, this one will be blessed in what he does.” (James 1:22-25). 

            Okay, so where are we going with all this?  Simply this – We cannot earn salvation.  No matter how good we try to live, regardless our good intentions and attempts to help others we will always fall short of what it takes to be worthy of God.  This world and all of mankind are infected with sin.  It is an evil germ from which there is no cure, at least not in this world.  Regardless our attempts to be perfect, one simple error, mistake or slip – all of which are described in the word “sin” (which means missing the mark), negates all the good we have done.

            The example in Leviticus of the two rams, both represent the work of Christ.  He is the first ram that became the death-sacrifice to pay the penalty of our sin.  Just as the ram was innocent and sinless, so Christ (God in the flesh) perfectly fulfilled the law without sin and so His shed blood was what was needed to set things right with God.  The animal sacrifices since Adam were all just representative of what He did.  When we accept Him as our Savior, we are accepting that His shed blood is the only thing that can pay for our sin.

            The second ram was for their consecration.  Our change demands to be seen.  This is what James is saying about being a hearer and doer of the word.  Yes, we must be a hearer.  But if we hear and do not do, then have we really heard?  When we hear then we act.  We work but we don’t do it to earn salvation.  We do it because we have realized what a wonderful work Christ has done for us.

            When He rose from the dead, He made it possible for us to also be resurrected – resurrected from the death of our sin to reflect Christ and His love for mankind.  That is the works that we must do.  We do what Christ would do, not for selfish gain, but to show His love to all mankind. Our works aren’t to save us, not to show that we are perfect, or to earn “brownie points” with God, but to reflect Christ.

            Our obedience to what we have heard works to witness to others and bring them into salvation as well.  That is why He doesn’t immediately make us perfect or without temptation; so that others can see that we are human, not perfect, but saved by the blood of Jesus.  So, hear the word of God and then do what we hear.

Jerry D. Ousley is the author of ?Soul Challenge?, ?Soul Journey?, ?Ordeal?, ?The Spirit Bread Daily Devotional and his first novel ?The Shoe Tree.?  Visit our website at spiritbread.com to download these and more completely free of charge.