James 1:22-24

James 1:22

The Danger of mistaking Knowledge for Obedience.

I. Knowledge without obedience ends in nothing. It is, as St. James says, like a man who looks at his own face in a glass. For a time he has the clearest perception of his own countenance; every line and feature, even the lightest expression, is visible, and by the mysteriously retentive power of the mind he holds it for a while in what we call the mind's eye; but when he has gone his way, the whole image fades, and the vividness of other objects overpowers it, so that he becomes habitually more familiar with the aspect of all other things than with his own natural face. Nothing can better express the shallowness and fleetingness of knowledge without obedience. For the time it is vivid and exact, but it passes off in nothing no resolution recorded in the conscience, or if recorded, none maintained; no change of life, nothing done or left undone, for the sake of truth which is shadowed upon the understanding.

II. Knowing without obeying is worse than vain. It inflicts a deep and lasting injury upon the powers of our spiritual nature. Long familiarity with truth makes it all the harder to recognise, as the faces of those we most intimately know are often less distinct in our memory than those we have seen but seldom, and therefore noted all the more exactly.

III. But there is a yet further danger still; for knowledge without obedience is an arch-deceiver of mankind. The heart is a busy deceiver of the conscience; it borrows of the understanding and of the imagination visions and shadows of eternal truth, and it flatters the conscience into a pleasant belief that such are its own spontaneous dictates and intents: it cheats it into appropriating, as its own moral character, the mere shadows that lie on the surface of the intellect.

IV. This knowing and disobeying it is that make so heavy and awful the responsibilities of Christians. Steadily resolve, therefore, to live up to the light you possess. There is a unity, a sameness, and a strength about a consistent mind. The light you already have is great, and great therefore must be your obedience; and remember that to linger behind or to follow afar off is as if you should suffer your guide to outstrip you in the night season.

H. E. Manning, Sermons,vol. i., p. 117.

References: James 1:22. R. Duckworth, Christian World Pulpit,vol. xxxvi., p. 177. James 1:22. Spurgeon, Sermons,vol. xxv., No. 1467; vol. xxxi., No. 1848. James 1:24. J. Exell, Christian World Pulpit,vol. vi., p. 365; R. S. Storrs, Ibid.,vol. vii., p. 39.