Don’t Professionalize Your Faith

James 1:17-18, 21

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Our reading today is from James Chapter 1 verses 17, 18 and 21.

Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of the heavenly lights, who does not change like shifting shadows. 18 He chose to give us birth through the word of truth, that we might be a kind of firstfruits of all he created… …humbly accept the word planted in you, which can save you. (James 1:17-18, 21)

When I was a young pastor, I would spend a lot of time preparing for sermons and Bible studies and confirmation classes and things, and it suddenly dawned on me that I wasn’t really taking the time to care for my own spiritual life. My work was always so directed at helping others. And one day I was reading an article written by a pastor about this very thing, and he kept referring to what he called “professionalizing your faith,” professionalizing your faith. And that really hit me. That the time I would often spend studying God’s word was not so much to help strengthen my faith, but to make sure I was going to be able to teach it to someone else very well. Now there’s still a blessing that can come from that, but it showed me how easy it was even as a pastor, for me to not really let the Word of God go down into my heart and into my soul. And I started having to take a little more time with my own personal devotions in the morning.

My own soul needed to be nourished with that wonderful Word of God, which is exactly what James is writing about here. He speaks about the Word of God and says that the Holy Spirit, through that wonderful word about Jesus, our Savior gave us birth, he says. Spiritual birth, made us alive, giving us faith in Christ. He goes on to say that this has been planted in us, the idea of a plant that’s now growing. Jesus uses that quite a bit in parables, doesn’t he? To refer to faith inside of someone as a plant that then can produce fruit. And that plant is symbolic of life that God has created inside of our hearts. When we realize our sin and hold on to what Jesus Christ our Savior has done for us to forgive us of that sin.

I’ve got a lot of different bad habits I can fall into in my life, one of them is Oreo cookies. If you ever have a package of Oreo cookies in the house, I just have a hard time resisting eating them and sometimes I’ll just say, take them out of the house. I don’t even want them around me.

It’s also challenging for me to establish and keep up with good habits as well. Whenever we hear God’s Word and listen to that Word, God the Holy Spirit tries to create in our hearts a good habit of loving that Word and wanting to hear more about it. To apply God’s law and his wonderful gospel to ourselves every time we read those devotions. And yet we’re always tempted to in, even in very subtle ways, despise the Word of God. The third commandment warns about that, to be careful not to despise God’s Word. And sometimes even when we’re in church by just not paying attention or by letting our minds focus on other things, we can very subtly begin to despise that Word of God.

I was probably one of the worst hearers when I was 12 years old. When I was a little boy going to church there were so many other distractions and things that could take my mind off of a sermon. What a blessing it is that you and I have a Savior who we know in scripture as a 12 year old boy loved that Word of God for us. He kept the perfect record of being the perfect listener, the perfect believer that you and I could never be. And he’s given us that perfect record of righteousness as our own and forgives us even for the times when we might, even in a very subtle way, despise the Word of God.

It’s that wonderful word from our Savior that sustains us in that faith and will someday take us into heaven. Just think when you’re in heaven someday, how you’re going to look back on the time that you spent in God’s Word. Listening to it or reading it or discussing it. Think how, from heaven’s perspective, we’re going to have such a different appreciation than we maybe even do in this life right now. What a great gift it is that our Heavenly Father has given us the knowledge of our Savior through that precious Word. May we always treasure it. Amen.