James 1:19-24(NLT)
“19 Understand this, my dear brothers and sisters: You must all be quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to get angry. 20 Human anger does not produce the righteousness God desires. 21 So get rid of all the filth and evil in your lives, and humbly accept the word God has planted in your hearts, for it has the power to save your souls.22 But don’t just listen to God’s word. You must do what it says. Otherwise, you are only fooling yourselves. 23 For if you listen to the word and don’t obey, it is like glancing at your face in a mirror. 24 You see yourself, walk away, and forget what you look like.”
It doesn’t matter how good we think we have it or even how bad things may seem to be in our lives, God tells us what He requires in this passage. We must get rid of the filth and evil in our lives! This is plain and simple instruction, and if God has told us to do it, we must acknowledge that we have everything we need to get the job done. All of us have some housekeeping to do. We must be humble and attentive to listen to God’s instruction, so that we can accept the Word that is implanted in our hearts through the Holy Spirit.
Believe it or not, the interior weight—the weight we can’t see, is the heaviest. Hebrews 12:1 tells us to strip off every weight that slows us down, especially sin, because sin trips us up. We’re to strip this stuff off because God has set a race before each of us, and we’ve got to run it with endurance. So, we need to know that when it comes to our spiritual growth and desires, one of the things that slows our momentum to a crawl is focusing on the exterior instead of the interior. For example, after having lunch with a friend one day, we ran into someone she knew on the way back to the car. Later, she remarked how awkward she felt about seeing the gentleman because she didn’t feel she looked her best. Many of us have experienced situations like this. It’s natural for us to want to look our best, but sometimes this stems from deep insecurities about our appearance.
We can become so consumed with ourselves that we subtract from the time and energy we should be investing into our relationship with God. The world today is more obsessed with the exterior than ever before. If we don’t meet its standard for physical attractiveness and beauty, society doesn’t give us a pass, and many of us internalize society’s disapproval. We begin to think we’re not good enough. We let the world dictate how we feel about ourselves, and God tells us that we shouldn’t do this. In Romans 12:2, He tells us not to copy the behaviors and customs of the world, because He wants to transform us into the new person that He wants us to be.
This transformation that God wants to perform is an internal one. He lives on the inside of us through His precious Holy Spirit. We must understand that we should live from the inside out, not the outside in. We must love God and ourselves through the Lord Jesus Christ, and this must come from deep within. There are many other important things that a person could change, and most of them have nothing to do with how someone looks. They are the things that burden our souls and keep us from doing the Will of God. For many of us, these are the personal insecurities that leads us down a path where we become blind to the person God wants us to be. Then, we don’t realize that filth and evil has slipped into our lives right under our noses. And it’s all because we’re trying to fit into the world’s mold.
It’s never okay to disobey what God’s Words says—to hear it, walk away, and continue business as usual. The grunt work that we all must do is to unload the extra weight internally, so that we can live the victorious life our Lord and Savior has made available. This is the lesson God is teaching us. Ephesians 2:10(NLT) tells us, “For we are God’s masterpiece. He has created us anew in Christ Jesus, so we can do the good things he planned for us long ago.” He wants us to get it in our cores that we are powerful individuals through the Lord Jesus Christ. We’re God’s masterpiece—His finest work! If we pray and humbly ask Him, He’ll help us get rid of the filth and evil in our souls, so we can live blameless before Him, and the insecurities we’ve carried will no longer weigh us down.■
Scripture quotations marked (NLT) are taken from the Holy Bible, New Living Translation, copyright © 1996. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., Wheaton, Illinois 60189. All rights reserved.
“Unload the Extra Weight” written by Kim Times, edited by Reverend Fran Mack for Sundie Morning Sistas ©2020. All rights reserved. All done to the glory of God through Jesus Christ, our Lord! SMS is dedicated to inspiring and encouraging Christian Women through the Word of God.