Read: James 1:25 NRSV
But those who look into the perfect law, the law of liberty, and persevere, being not hearers who forget but doers who act—they will be blessed in their doing.
It’s easy to talk about all of the hardship in the world from a position of comfort. Hunger, poverty, human trafficking, murder…there is a great deal of pain all around us. Even if we did try to help, we wouldn’t really make a difference! That’s not what James tells us.
Perhaps it isn’t our jobs as individuals to ride in and save the world all at once. Even with our above-average salaries and quality of living as Americans, it’s unlikely that we could make an enormous, generation-saving act of charity. But we are expected to act. We might curl our lips with contempt at the few dozen billionaires who don’t seem interested in sharing their impossible wealth with the truly needy and forget that we have blessings of our own that God expects us to use for His good purpose: money, time, energy, wisdom, patience, space, strength, expertise. Very few have all, but everyone has some. James exhorts us to take what we have and become “doers who act–they will be blessed in their doing.”
