To Bring Him Joy

“ James, a slave of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ” James 1:1a HCSB I 've been reading the book of James in the Bible almost daily for several days now. It is so cool to take a book of the Bible and do this. It helps you to see so many things that you probably didn't notice before. I try to read the whole book at one sitting, after all, it was written like a letter. I know that we don't write or receive letters much any more, especially not long ones but I think if you were to receive one you would sit down and read the whole thing. I have done this with some other books of the Bible as our teaching pastor suggested it last year ; plus , some reading plans that I had seen also suggested it. Anyway, this year as those posts about reading the Bible through came up, I thought I needed to pick this up again and felt led to James. I was about to do this one day when God stopped me very short on this first half of the first verse. I was quite surprised beca...

"So when they had come together, they asked Him, "Lord, at this time are You restoring the kingdom to Israel?" He said to them, "It is not for you to know times or periods that the Father has set by His own authority. But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be My witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth." Acts 1:6-8 ESV When I was reading this earlier this month one of my first reactions to this verse was to feel sorry for Jesus that after all He had been through and taught them, the disciples were still not getting it.  Then I thought, Jesus, why didn't You just tell them no? Why didn't He take the time to explain to them again that His was not an earthly kingdom? Not now? It was not the time for explaining, He ascended in a cloud immediately after this statement. He had already explained numerous times. In fact if you read the previous verses, Luke tells us that Jesus appe...

"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 1:23-25 ESV " So whoever knows the right thing to do and fails to do it, for him it is sin." James 4:17 ESV I must confess that this is me way too often. I have been the beneficiary of hearing a lot. I have sat under gifted preachers and teachers most of my life. I have heard God's direction and followed and I have heard God's direction and skirted around it, done things to dull it, I have said with Moses, "but God I can't". Therefore, these verses hit me like a shot in the heart. I have known the ri...