Verse of the Day for May 14

James uses one of the most ordinary pictures in the Bible. A man beholding his natural face in a glass. Then, in the next verse, he walks away and forgets what he looked like.

Everyone has done this. You glance in the mirror on the way out, notice the collar is crooked, and arrive at work with it still crooked. You saw. You did nothing. The seeing did not help.

That, says James, is what hearing without doing is like. And the person most fooled is not the neighbour. It is you. deceiving your own selves.

The point of decision, then, is not usually between knowing and not knowing. Most of us know what the passage says. It is between knowing and doing, and that gap can be as short as the walk from the mirror to the door.

Verse twenty one offers the way in. receive with meekness the engrafted word. Engrafted, like a branch bound into a tree until it becomes part of it. So when you close your Bible this morning, pick one sentence and do it before lunch.

Knowing what to do is the beginning of the decision, not the end of it.

The mirror only helps the one who acts on what it shows.