[Week 29] The Ledger and the Windowsill (James 1:22)

This week, we are memorizing James 1:22.

• Check out my latest Scripture Memorization song here: James 1:22
• If you're new here, see my introduction to this series here.

"But be doers of the word and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves."
— James 1:22 (CSB)

Last week we discussed the source of desire wthin us and how evil desires that become sin are caused by a distrust in God,. This week, James turns from what happens inside us to what comes out of us when God saves us.

The Windowsill

When I was young, I went to a Christian school where we read the Bible every day, right in our school morning schedule. And somewhere along the way I picked up the belief that reading my Bible was the sign I was right with God. I used to pray that Jesus wouldn't come back during the summer, because I didn't have the habit and he would catch me "straying." While this was due to a misunderstanding of Jesus, the funny thing is: that fear is exactly what drove me to build the habit that changed my life. But this "keeping count" of my works was already there, years before I ever was old enough to serve in the church.

In 2011, my eldest daughter was about six weeks old and recovering from her second heart surgery. I was twenty years old, starting my second year of marriage, and back in college on top of all this. My wife and I had been living in that hospital room for weeks by then, and the bed wasn't big enough for both of us, so most nights I slept on the large hospital windowsill beside the bed.

I remember lying there one night and realizing that I had nothing to give. Not to the church, not to the worship team I'd been helping with, not to life groups or the group of guys who served and moved chairs after church service or any of the things that had always made me feel like I was doing okay with God. As I lay there, tired and unable to sleep due to the blaring and beeping medical equipment, I knew I couldn't get to the church building, let alone do anything else. And in that silence, a question I'd been outrunning for years finally caught me.

What makes me saved if I can't do works?

I grew up knowing the answer was grace and Jesus. Of course it was. But if I'm honest with you, I had measured salvation by how much I earned it through what I did in the church, how much I did for God. My output was the proof. And when the output stopped, I didn't know what was left.

The Counting Error

James has a word for what I recognized on that windowsill that I was doing, and it isn't "lukewarm", "backsliding", or even "unfaithful", it was an accounting term.

Deceiving yourselves in James 1:22 is παραλογίζομαι (paralogizomai, pronounced like it reads para-low-gih-zo-my). It is a compound word, that’s why it’s so long. Let’s pull it apart: para, is the first part, meaning "beside" or "amiss", and logizomai, the second part, is a bookkeeping verb, "to count", "to reckon", "to credit an account". This isn't generic "deception" like an intentional lie, it’s more precise and action-based than that. It means to be counting and to still reckon wrong, to miscount.¹

James is not saying the hearer-only is lying to himself. He is saying the hearer-only is making a math error. He is sitting at his books, balancing his accounts, and the ledger comes out clean. But the entries are written in a currency the account doesn't accept.

Sit with that for a moment. The danger James names is not laziness. It is accounting.

And it runs both directions. Some of us are counting our achievements, stacking up the good we've done and hoping the total is enough. Others are counting our failures, convinced that the pile is too high and the books are already ruined. What James is saying is: Both are using the same broken calculator. Both are written in a currency the account was never set up to receive.

I can tell you exactly what my ledger looked like, because it changed with every season but never changed its shape. Worship team. Life groups. Moving chairs before and after service. Signing up for the meal train. Being there when the doors were open. Sunday night, books balanced, entries made. Salvation: check.

And I need to say this plainly: those things are good. In fact, they are the very activities that hold a church body together, and if you do them, thank you.

But here is what I couldn't see until I couldn't do any of them. James never names a single one. Five chapters. Not one thing you could sign up for on a clipboard. Not one entry written in volunteer hours.

So what currency was he counting in?

The Royal Law

James tells us exactly where his ledger comes from, and he gives it a title:

"Indeed, if you fulfill the royal law prescribed in the Scripture, Love your neighbor as yourself, you are doing well."
— James 2:8 (CSB)

This is gold. Here, he is not quoting Jesus, he's actually quoting Leviticus 19:18. And this is where you need the book of Leviticus open in front of you, because Leviticus 19:18 is more than just a ground-breaking command of God. It is the last line of a walk on a guided path laid forth by God himself.

One reassurance before we continue, because I know where your mind might be going. We are not about to trade one checklist for a longer one. We are not shopping for a better ledger. Just stay with me. 😉

The Walk

Walk it with me. Leviticus 19 starts at the edge of your field.

When you harvest, God says, do not cut to the corners. Leave the edges standing and leave the fallen grapes on the ground, for the poor and the resident alien (Leviticus 19:9-10). This isn't just a random action, it cuts to the heart and James goes there as well: The religion God accepts as pure, he says, is "to look after orphans and widows in their distress" (James 1:27), and it does not tell a hungry brother to keep warm and eat well while sending him away with nothing (James 2:15-16).

From the field, the path moves to your payroll. Your hired worker's wages must not stay in your pocket overnight (Leviticus 19:13). James saw this one up close, and he is not gentle about it: the pay withheld from the workers who mowed is crying out, and the cry has reached the ears of the Lord of Armies (James 5:4).

Then into the room where you make decisions. Do not show partiality, not to the poor and not to the great (Leviticus 19:15). James spends nine full verses here: the man with the gold ring gets the good seat, the man in filthy clothes gets told to stand in the back, and James reams them hard on this (James 2:1-9).

And the road keeps going. Through your mouth (do not slander, Leviticus 19:16; James 4:11), your heart (do not hate your brother, go to him and say it to his face, Leviticus 19:17), your memory (no revenge, no grudge, Leviticus 19:18a), until it arrives at the line James lifted and called the royal law:

"...but love your neighbor as yourself; I am the LORD."
— Leviticus 19:18 (CSB)

Look at what's going on here. James did not grab a few good principles and build a letter around them. He opened Leviticus 19 and walked it, and his whole letter follows the path God had already laid out.²

Notice which direction the road runs. It starts at the far corner of your property and moves inward, through your business, your payroll, your decision room, your mouth, until it ends in your heart. That is why it will not fit on a ledger. A ledger needs entries that can be accomplished. This road is not headed toward completion. It is headed toward your heart.

And, because it is God's instruction, not man's, not one stop on that road requires a verse of the day. Not one requires a sign-up sheet. You can walk every one of them out, even from a hospital windowsill.

The Books Were Already Closed

So if the scorekeeping was never the point, what was?

Scroll down to the bottom of the ledger. Past the achievements, past the failures, past every entry you ever made or didn't make. There is one line item already there, and it was there before you picked up the pen. "Jesus, paid in full." Not your entry. His.

That is what James is pointing to four verses before our memory verse: "By his own choice, he gave us birth by the word of truth" (James 1:18). You did not open the account and you cannot close it. The bottom line was settled before you ever started counting.

That is why James can call this law, three verses after our memory verse, "the perfect law of freedom" (1:25).³ Not freedom from the law. Freedom from the scorekeeping.

But I can already hear the question, because it's the same one I was asking on that windowsill. How do I know, then? If the ledger isn't the proof, what is?

Here is where this gets personal in a way I didn't see coming. My daughter's heart couldn't do what it was made to do. It needed surgery, someone else's hands opening her up and repairing what she couldn't fix herself, before it could beat the way God designed it to. She didn't earn that surgery. She received it. And it changed everything her heart could do after.

God told us he would do the same thing. Through the prophet Ezekiel, he promised to take out the heart of stone and give us a heart of flesh, and then he said something remarkable: "I will cause you to walk in my statutes" (Ezekiel 36:26-27 (ESV)).⁴ Not "command you to walk." Cause you to walk. A heart of stone can't walk any more than my daughter's heart could beat properly before her surgery. But a heart of flesh can.

That is the answer to my question on the windowsill. I was lying there terrified that I'd lost something, when the ache itself was the proof that I hadn't. A heart of stone doesn't ache when it can't serve. Mine did. That wasn't failure. That was a repaired heart doing exactly what God made it to do.

Remember last week, when we looked at how desire works? James showed us that sin isn't a new desire, it's a God-given desire that gets hijacked when we stop trusting God to fulfill it. God doesn't just diagnose the problem. He fixes it at the root. He changes what the heart wants. And when the heart changes, the "have to" becomes "get to." That shift, not the ledger, is the fingerprint of the surgery.

And Moses, at the very end of his life, told us where this path ends up:

"But the message is very near you, in your mouth and in your heart, so that you may follow it."
— Deuteronomy 30:14 (CSB)

In your mouth. In your heart. The word "follow" there is the Hebrew word for "do," the same doing word we've been tracing all along.⁵ And now you know what "heart" means in that sentence, because eight verses earlier, Moses promised that God himself would circumcise it (Deuteronomy 30:6 (ESV)). The word is near you because God put it there. Not on a tablet. Not on a clipboard. In the new heart he gave you.

Here is my challenge for us this week. Go read through Leviticus 19. Read it slowly. And as you read, ask yourself one honest question: Do I desire these things, or do they feel like a bother?

When you read "leave the edges of the field for the poor," does something in you say "yes"?
When you read "do not hold back the worker's wages overnight," does it stir something?
When you get to "love your neighbor as yourself," does it feel like a weight or does it feel like breathing?

If you feel that pull, pay attention. That is not you performing. That is your new heart, beating the way God repaired it to beat. And if it feels like a bother, if it feels like stone, bring that to God honestly and ask him to align your desires with his. He promised to do that surgery. He is faithful to finish it.

"But be doers of the word and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves."
— James 1:22 (CSB)

Stop counting. The books are already closed for you. Now come, enter the freedom.

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References

Photo by Mick Haupt on Unsplash