Sermon Discussion Questions:

1. What do you think it looks like for a church—or an individual Christian—to treat God’s Word as something interesting to hear but not something that demands a response? (Optional: read Ezekiel 33:30-32 or review the Annie Dillard quote).
2. The sermon’s central movement is “Be Quiet, Receive God’s Word, and Obey.” Which of those three comes most naturally to you? Which is most difficult?
3. The sermon suggested that our outward noise can reveal an inward restlessness. What kinds of things make it difficult for you to become inwardly quiet before God? The sermon argues that our media habits can train our capacity for attention. How do your habits of consuming entertainment, social media, podcasts, news, or other content affect your ability to read Scripture or listen attentively?
4. James says to “receive with meekness the implanted word.” What do you think meekness toward God's Word looks like in practice?
5. What does the illustration of the mirror teach us about the purpose of Scripture?

“Why do we people in churches seem like cheerful, brainless tourists on a packaged tour of the Absolute?” So writes Annie Dillard, the Pulitzer Prize winner who died this week. Dillard was not an orthodox Christian. She affirmed the idea of God as pure Absolute, Idea—a source of goodness, but rejected most of the core tenets of Christianity. Yet, she enjoyed attending a small Catholic parish because she longed for the transcendent, for an experience with holiness. But her lack of faith provided her with a unique perspective on what church was like. She writes:

“On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside of the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake someday and take offense, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return.”

If this is how nonbelievers evaluate our church services, then what are we to do? What keeps a church from devolving into a kind of spiritual preschool for grown ups? From treating the living God as if He were small and quaint, yawn-worthy, maybe entertaining, but by no means dangerous.

30 “As for you, son of man, your people who talk together about you by the walls and at the doors of the houses, say to one another, each to his brother, ‘Come, and hear what the word is that comes from the LORD.’ 31 And they come to you as people come, and they sit before you as my people, and they hear what you say but they will not do it; for with lustful talk in their mouths they act; their heart is set on their gain. 32 And behold, you are to them like one who sings lustful songs with a beautiful voice and plays well on an instrument, for they hear what you say, but they will not do it. - Ez 33:30-32

God’s people should be defined by their willingness to quiet their mouths, attentively hear God’s Word, and then obey it.

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19 Know this, my beloved brothers: let every person be quick to hear, slow to speak, slow to anger; 20 for the anger of man does not produce the righteousness of God. 21 Therefore put away all filthiness and rampant wickedness and receive with meekness the implanted word, which is able to save your souls.
22 But be doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves. 23 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. 24 For he looks at himself and goes away and at once forgets what he was like. 25 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 1:19-25

Be Quiet, Receive God’s Word, and Obey

Be Quiet

Know this, my beloved brothers: let every person be quick to hear, slow to speak, slow to anger; for the anger of man does not produce the righteousness of God. - James 1:19-20

I asked my four year old what he thought of when I read this passage, and he said: It’s like moving really slow with a big cup of hot chocolate.

That’s a pretty good image. Picture your words and your anger like a piping cup of hot chocolate, and you need to walk—down the street, down the stairs, with a baby in your arm, or an energetic dog on a leash—without burning yourself (or others). Your quick words (and the emotions behind them) want to gush forward, but you must go slow, be careful, listen first. Staying silent when we should speak is wrong. As is remaining passionless when we should be angry. James does not say never speak, never get angry—but be slow. The anger of man does not produce the righteousness of God, but there is an anger of God that is holy and righteous. But, the majority of our anger—the frustrations with our kids or coworkers—isn’t that.

Proverbs praises the man who restrains both his words and his anger:

• Whoever restrains his words has knowledge,
  and he who has a cool spirit is a man of understanding. - Prov 17:27
• A fool gives full vent to his spirit,
  but a wise man quietly holds it back. - Prov 29:11

A loose mouth and a hot head are a painful combo: they lead to harsh words, discouraging criticism, perverse speech, slander and gossip, cursing, rash vows, and the inability to know when you should just shut your mouth and stop talking so much.

But James’ perspective is wider and deeper than outbursts of anger and talking too much. Later, James warns:

“If anyone thinks he is religious and does not bridle his tongue but deceives his heart, this person’s religion is worthless,” (James 1:26). Apparently, our religion—that is, the form and pattern that emerges from our relationship with God; our worship, our devotion, our piety—our religion is supposed to be revealed in our ability to be quiet. Why? The literal sound and fury he is warning of is just the manifestation of a deeper sound and fury in the soul.

Why are we so quick to anger? Why are we plagued with such verbal incontinence? The early and medieval church believed that an overly talkative person was so talkative because they feared silence, because if they were quiet they would not only have to listen to others, they would also have to listen to their own conscience, and to God. And they longed to be distracted from that uncomfortable silence.

Jesus taught us: “Out of the overflow of the heart, the mouth speaks.” (Luke 6:45). And maybe, the overflow of our heart is just an addiction to noise and passions, to keep the surface of the pond of our soul so turbulent and choppy that it never becomes still, calm, lest it become translucent, and we see what lay at the bottom.

Immediately before James exhorted us to be quick to listen and slow to speak, one verse prior he explained how God “brought us forth by the word of truth.” (James 1:18), and immediately after he tells us to “receive with meekness the implanted word” (James 1:21). Apparently, the silence and calm has some bearing on our ability to receive God’s Word.

• The wise of heart will receive commandments,
  but a babbling fool will come to ruin. - Prov 10:8

Why does the “babbler” come to ruin? Because he does not, like the wise of heart, receive God’s commandments—he is too busy talking to listen. He is the guy who never listens to others, because the entire time they are talking, he is just thinking about what he is going to say because what he has to say is so much more interesting. And this practice carries into his behavior with God. The inner chatterbox of the babbler’s mind just runs while the God of universe is speaking to us, and so His Word lands on him lightly. We can get a sense that the Bible is kind of irrelevant, somewhat distant from real life—it is a theological wafer, pressed thin, that some people talk about like a seven course meal, but to the babbler, feels insubstantial.

Do you find it hard to read God’s Word? To listen to sermons? Do you find your mind easily gravitating to other things when discussing spiritual matters? Kids, when your parents open up the Bible and read it at home, are you ever tempted to roll your eyes and say, I know this already?

James’ teaching here is for you.

How does that happen to us?

We replace silence with Noise.

It is possible for you to be quiet as a mouse, but have a mind that whooshes and crashes with such a cacophony of noise, distractions, competing desires that you cannot hear when God speaks.

The demon, Screwtape, tells there are two things you will never find in Hell: music and silence. Hell is an empire of Noise. Constant, everlasting Noise. “Noise…alone defends us...We will make the whole universe a noise in the end. We have already made great strides in this direction on earth.” - Screwtape, Letter XXII

1. This is one reason why in our service we practice moments of intentional silence. Literal silence, helps create inner silence. In fact, the entirety of this service is a moment where you are silent. You are not scrolling on your phone. You are not making plans. You are sitting in the quiet and receiving God’s Word. God spoke to Elijah, not in the thunder or fire or earthquake, but in the silence.
2. The faculty of attention is what we are talking about. We now live in an attention economy, where your attention is the most valuable thing there is. And the most powerful companies in the world are using every bit of neurological design patterns to keep your attention. And you are in danger of losing attention when you get bored. So, there is an incentive structure in the digital media world to never be boring, and to be increasingly louder, wilder, more extreme, and more brief. It may be tempting to think that the only danger of the media you consume is its content, but the medium doesn’t matter. And provided that the content doesn’t contain anything inappropriate, it is fine. But friend, God has revealed Himself through a book, and this book requires you to be able to read it, to meditate on it, to listen to it preached and taught. But if the medium of entertainment you have discipled your attention by makes reading that book, listening to its message, virtually impossible…then the family-friendly content can be just as destructive.

The discipline of “diligence”—That a person resists the nearly inescapable temptation to indiscipline with all the power of selfless self-protection, that he radically close off the inner space of life against the pressingly unruly pseudoreality of empty sights and sounds—in order that, through and only through the asceticism of perception, he might safeguard or recoup that which truly constitutes man’s living existence: to perceive the reality of God and of creation and to shape himself and the world by the truth that discloses itself only in silence. - Josef Pieper, A Brief Reader

Receive God’s Word

Therefore put away all filthiness and rampant wickedness and receive with meekness the implanted word, which is able to save your souls. - James 1:21

The purpose of silence is to be able to hear God. How do we hear Him? Through His Word.

How do we hear it? And, what does it do?

How do we hear it?

We hear it with meekness. “Meekness toward God is that disposition of spirit in which we accept His dealings with us as good, and therefore without disputing or resisting.” (Strong’s Dictionary) The word can be translated as “gentleness, mildness.” It is usually connected with humility. The contrast with the previous verse is instructive. Rather than being angry and boasting in many words, we receive—we don’t tell God what we think, we are quick to listen with humility and a submissive heart. Our minds are flawed and our hearts are shot through with sin; our conceptions and ideas are squiggly lines. God’s Word is a straight edge that corrects us, forms us.

I wonder what you heart’s posture is towards God’s Word, friend?

O LORD, my heart is not lifted up;
my eyes are not raised too high;
I do not occupy myself with things
too great and too marvelous for me.
2 But I have calmed and quieted my soul,
like a weaned child with its mother;
like a weaned child is my soul within me.

• Ps 131:1-2

If you are not a Christian hear today, I understand why you would have reservations and questions. Explore those. But fix your attention on the pillars of Christianity—like who is Jesus, what did He do, and what does He require of you—before you get hung up on other things.

If you are a Christian, then remember that the Lord desires intelligent submission. We are commanded to Love God with our mind, so we must think. Perhaps you have questions that are more theoretical (”How does the Bible’s account of creation line up with science?”). Perhaps they are moral (”How could a loving God send people to Hell?”). Or perhaps they are deeply personal (”Why did God do this to me?”). Whether they are commands or teachings, stories or laws, we receive it with meekness, confident that God is wiser and better still than we can ever imagine. The pain or discomfort, the puzzlement reveals deficiencies, not in the Word, but in ourselves.

What does it do?

Receive with meekness the implanted word, which is able to save your souls.

God’s Word is able to save your souls…how?

• It tells us the truth. There is a God who is infinitely holy, and He has made us for Himself. We are to be holy as He is. Sin is the Biblical idea of what happens when we fail to reflect His holiness. And sin brings death. God in His righteous anger and judgment will punish sin.
• But God, who is rich in mercy, has made a way for you to be saved. For God so loved the world that He sent His son that whoever would believe in Him would not perish but have everlasting life. Jesus Christ, the Son of God, lived the perfect, moral life you did not, but then He died in the place of sinners, taking their physical and spiritual consequence. So that now, if you come to Him in humble faith, with meekness, and receive His work on your behalf, you will be saved.

Of his own will he brought us forth by the word of truth, that we should be a kind of firstfruits of his creatures. - James 1:18

The church is a creature of the Word. God creates His people by His Word.

• Genesis 1 - Man is formed by God’s Word
• Genesis 12 - Abraham is called by God’s Word
• Exodus 20 - Israel becomes God’s nation by His Word
• Ezekiel 37 - The Valley of Dry Bones created by God’s Word
• Acts 2 — Pentecost, the Church is born through the preaching of the Word
• Jesus is the Word of God
• We are charged to raise up pastors and missionaries who will go preach the Word because…
  • For “everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.”
    14 How then will they call on him in whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in him of whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear without someone preaching? 15 And how are they to preach unless they are sent? As it is written, “How beautiful are the feet of those who preach the good news!” 16 But they have not all obeyed the gospel. For Isaiah says, “Lord, who has believed what he has heard from us?” 17 So faith comes from hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ. - Rom 10:13-17

Faith comes from hearing, and hearing through the word. People cannot believe in a God they do not know. But this, of course, isn’t only for those who are not yet Christians and need to be—rather, we are those who day by day confess “Man does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.”

**All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, 17 that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work.

1 I charge you in the presence of God and of Christ Jesus, who is to judge the living and the dead, and by his appearing and his kingdom: 2 preach the word; be ready in season and out of season; reprove, rebuke, and exhort, with complete patience and teaching. - 2 Tim 3:16-4:2**

This is why we make our Church services filled with God’s Word. Why we are committed to expository preaching—where we take a book of the Bible and move through it verse by verse. Our aim as a church is not only to contextualize God’s Word to our life, but to textualize our lives to God’s Word. We focus on orienting our story within the framework of God’s story.

Let’s say you attend church, including our discipleship class, and attend a discipleship group, every week. Let’s also say you read your Bible every day for 20 minutes. If you do that, in a week, you will have about 7 hours.

But only 1 in 5 of Christians in America attend church every Sunday. Only 10% read their Bibles every day. So, if you are an average, about 1 hour a week.

Now, let’s do some more math. Let’s say that you are also a typical American in other content consumption patterns. That would mean that every week you consumes…

27 hours of [music](https://headphonesaddict.com/listening-to-music-statistics/#:~:text=People in the US spend,in a 30-day month.)

17.5 hours of television (either cable or streaming)

17.5 hours of social media

9 hours of listening to podcasts

5.3 hours of watching YouTube

4 hours of video games

2.3 hours of [reading](https://wordsrated.com/time-spent-reading/#:~:text=The average American male spends,typical day as of 2021.)

So, if you are getting about 7 hours of sleep a night, then for the remaining 119 waking hours you have in a week, you are spending 82.5 of those hours consuming content. Of course, these are all just averages and some may be overlapping, like scrolling social media while listening to a podcast. And not all should be weighted with the same significance—listening to background music while you work may seem fairly inconsequential compared to other media.

But when we stack that mountain of content up against the less-than-an-hour a week of Bible consumption you are getting—even if you are at the 7-hours-a-week high-mark—then we see clearly what has the most influence.

Obey

But be doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves. 23 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. 24 For he looks at himself and goes away and at once forgets what he was like. 25 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 1:22-25

God’s Word reveals who we really are.

How do we avoid becoming the clueless children playing around with dynamite that Annie Dillard warned of? Or those of Ezekiel’s day? They were those who listend to God’s word—enjoyed it—but their babbling mouths never stopped, and their appreciation of the Word ended as soon as church did. And they walked away with no intention of ever actually obeying it.

“There is a way to be whole, one person, inside and outside. And it is all to do with our attitude toward the Bible.

The solution is this: do God’s word. Do it. That book sitting there beside you on your desk or on your lap or on your phone: take note of what it says, do what it says, and you will be whole. You will find parts of your personality fusing together, parts of your divided heart coming together, your loves dissolving from two into one. A well-known sports clothing brand tells us to ‘just do it,’ and that works as a strikingly simple incentive to the get the life you always wanted. James puts it the same way. Just do the Bible.”

"If you love me, you will do what I say."

"If you hear my words and do them, you will be like the wise man who built his house on the rock."