James exhorts us,

"Keep on becoming doers of the Word and stop being hearers only, reasoning yourselves into a false premise and thus deceiving yourselves."

James 1:22 - Wuest's Expanded Translation

What a sad state we can fall into by failing to follow this exhortation! We can reason ourselves into a false premise and thereby deceive ourselves! It sounds like we come up with such a good excuse for just hearing, in place of doing, that we believe it ourselves!

It's easy to present to ourselves "good" excuses for not following through on God's Word. The devil will even come and help us. He'll get in there with us as we develop them. Of course, he's got a hidden agenda - he wants to be right there against us accusing us when we fall.

What possible protection do we have against this? The scripture above answers, "Keep on becoming doers of the Word!"

What's it going to take to keep on becoming doers of God's Word? As sincere believers the Holy Spirit is continually speaking the Word into our lives. We're going to need to respond to it. This means we're going to need to take that Word to heart.

Then we'll need to -

• as soon as possible meditate on it,
• start to grasp its implications for us personally,
• with a quality decision of will, begin implementing it.

This is very much as God exhorted Joshua as he considered the conquest of the Promised Land. He instructed him,

"This book of the law shall not depart from your mouth, but you shall meditate in it day and night, that you may observe to do according to all that is written in it. For then you will make your way prosperous, and then you will have good success."

Joshua 1:8 - NKJV

It's not just the freshly presented word you need to give your attention to in this way. You need to re-visit what God has said to you in the past. He has certainly spoken to you through scripture before. You'll have known God's Word shining a light on you and your path. You will need to often re-visit those scriptures.

As you reflect again on a familiar scripture, ask yourself, "Am I working out the implications of this in my life?" You also need to pray, "Lord, show me how I can be doing more to practically apply this."

A scripture I often re-visit is,

"Be anxious for nothing, but in everything by prayer and supplication, with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known to God."

Philippians 4:6 - NKJV

Each time I meditate on this scripture the implications of it for my life become clearer. I find almost every time I have to renew or strengthen my implementation of it.

There is so much to becoming a doer of this scripture. I might be getting on well with my prayer and supplication but then I realise I ought to be doing far more in the area of "with thanksgiving". On other occasions, I've found myself realising, as I attend to it, that things aren't as they should be in my life simply because I'm not "letting my requests be known to God"!

All this effort is worth it! There's an awesome blessing that comes to the one who is an active doer of God's Word - he is blessed in all that he does!

"But he who looks into the perfect law of liberty and continues in it, and is not a forgetful hearer but a doer of the work, this one will be blessed in what he does"

James 1:25 - NKJV